March 2025

 

Saving Monticello: The Newsletter

The latest about the book, author events, and more

Newsletter Editor - Marc Leepson

Volume XXII, Number 3                                                        March 2025

 

ALIEN ENEMIES: The bizarre, out-of-the-blue invoking of 1798 Alien Enemies Act during peacetime by the current U.S. president to deport undesirable Venezuelan “aliens” brought to mind something I discovered while doing the research for Saving Monticello twenty-five years ago: another North American Alien Enemies Act, this one a Civil War law enacted in the Confederate States of America’s Congress in August 1861, less than five months after the conflict began.

The “alien enemies” in question in this case were citizens of non-rebelling states who owned property in the eleven Confederate states. The law mandated the removal of said residents from those southern states. It also authorized the seizing of property in the South owned by the ousted non-southerners. 

That included Monticello since the property’s then-owner, U.S. Navy Captain Uriah P. Levy, lived most of the year in New York City when the War of 1812 veteran wasn’t sailing the seven seas. 

Proceedings began on October 10, 1861, to “sequestrate ‘Monticello’ as the property of an alien enemy,” the Richmond Examiner reported, since “the present owner, Levy, [was] abroad… in charge of a United States ship of war.” Actually, Levy was in Washington, D.C., at that time, preparing to take over the Navy’s Court-Martial Board.

The Examiner felt the need to out point out that the “people of Charlottesville” called “the late owner of Monticello ‘Commodore Levee.’ He is a first Captain in the United States Navy, and of Jewish parentage.”*

Monticello “has been confiscated,” Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper reported four months later, “with all its lands, negroes, cattle, farming utensils, furniture, paintings, wines, etc., together with two other farms belonging to the same owner, and valued at from $70,000 to $80,000.” That New York newspaper went on to expound on Uriah Levy’s patriotism and military service, and concluded: “Certainly no officer in the army or navy has been so victimized by the rebels.” 

Uriah Levy fought the confiscation in the Confederate courts. After he died on March 22, 1862, his estate’s lawyer, George Carr, continued pressing the case. The CSA finally prevailed legally on September 27, 1864, at a time when the South’s treasury was in dire need of cash.

On November 17, an auction took place on the mountaintop. Monticello, its grounds and its contents, and hundreds of acres of land Levy had purchased around Charlottesville were put on the block. So were Levy’s enslaved people.

What a New York Times correspondent on the scene termed “a large number of people” showed up for the sale. That included Uriah Levy’s brother Jonas, then living in Wilmington, North Carolina, who had his eye on buying the house.

The crowd also included Lieutenant Col. Benjamin Franklin Ficklin, Jr., of the 50th Virginia Regiment, who outbid Levy and everyone else and plunked down $80,500 in Confederate money for Monticello and its adjoining acreage. Levy’s estate, under terms of the act, was not compensated.

As I wrote in the book, Ficklin (below) also bought a bust of Jefferson for $50. Other Levy items sold that day included a pianoforte, a marble-topped sideboard, a washstand, cattle, oxen, a threshing machine, and 19 enslaved people. Jonas Levy paid $5,400 for an enslaved man named John, and took home a model of one of his brother’s ship’s, the Vandalia, for $100. The CSA’s total take was $350,000.'

Ficklin—a colorful and adventurous character, had been wounded in the Mexican War and later went on to be one of the founders of the legendary Pony Express. He returned to his regiment after the auction, and most likely never spent a night in the house that Jefferson built,  

Although the sale took place in November 1864, Ficklin did not receive title from the District Court until March 17, 1865, three weeks before Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox ending the war. According to Ficklin family lore, Benjamin Ficklin, a bachelor, brought his aging father, Rev. Ficklin, to live at Monticello, where he died.

Other reports indicate that several other members of the family moved into Monticello, including Capt. Ficklin's youngest sister Susan and her husband Joseph Hardesty, and a brother known as “Dissolute Willie.” A family story has it that Willie sold some of the Jefferson furniture left in the house to pay gambling debts, and that their father died in Jefferson’s bed.

For his part, B.F. Ficklin, Jr., who is buried in Maplewood Cemetery in Charlottesville, died at age 44 while dining at the Willard Hotel in Washington when a fishbone lodged in his throat and the doctor who tried to remove it severed an artery.

* Uriah Levy was given the command of the U.S. Navy’s entire American Mediterranean Squadron on January 7, 1860, a position that entitled him to the honorary rank of Commodore. Although he never was commissioned a commodore, the Navy officially recognized him as one and referred to him as a Commodore in all official communications.

 

THE AI STATUE: In the January issue I mentioned that I’d recently learned that in 1881, two years after he acquired Monticello from his uncle’s estate, Jefferson Monroe Levy (a son of Jonas Levy) had written an article in which he said he would donate $500 toward “the erection of a statue of Jefferson in Central park [sic]” in New York City.

I confirmed that no such statue ever was erected, but that new information got me thinking about what an 1880s statue in Central Park would look like. I decided, for the first time, to ask an AI website to create an image. I was singularly unsuccessful.

When I mentioned that to Hunt Lyman, an old friend who has studied and written about AI for several years, he said he’d take a look. In less than a New York minute—or so it seemed—Hunt came up with the image below.

I think it looks convincing, though I’m not sure why the statue would be in the middle of a walkway. Plus, I had to laugh at the “Central Park” sign on the lamppost.

 

EVENTS AND COMMERCE:  I have a growing number of events scheduled starting this spring and summer, most of them for my new book, The Unlikely War Hero, a slice-of-life biography of the extraordinary Vietnam War story of Doug Hegdahl, the youngest and lowest ranking American prisoner held in Hanoi during the war. Many are speaking engagements for historic preservation and other groups. Some are open to the public. For details, go to this page on my website: marcleepson.com/events

If you’d like to arrange a talk on The Unlikely War Hero, Saving Monticello, or any of my other books, please email me at marcleepson@gmail.com  The book is now in its fourth printing, with a fifth on the way. 

To order a signed copy, go to https://bit.ly/BookOrdering I also have new paperback copies of Saving Monticello, as well as paperback copies of Flag: An American Biography; Desperate Engagement; and Ballad of the Green Beret 

February 2025

 

Saving Monticello: The Newsletter

The latest about the book, author events, and more

Newsletter Editor - Marc Leepson

Volume XXII, Number 2                                                        February 2025

 

THE BACHELORS: Coincidence or not, both Uriah Levy and his nephew Jefferson Monroe Levy were long-time bachelors. Uriah married late in life (more on that below), and, like his life-long, never-married nephew, he did not have any children.

Valentine’s Day month 2025 seems like an appropriate time to look at the love lives of the two men who owned (and repaired, preserved, and restored) Monticello from 1836 when Uriah Levy took ownership of the estate, to 1923 when Jefferson Levy sold it to the just-formed Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation.

Uriah Levy led a bachelor’s life until his 61st year in 1853 when he courted and married Virginia Lopez, who was born on September 25, 1835, less than a year before Uriah Levy took possession of Monticello. She was 18 years old.

That may seem a tad scandalous, but consider, too, that Virginia Lopez was Uriah Levy’s niece, the youngest of the three children of Uriah’s sister Frances (known as Fanny) and Abraham Lopez, who lived in Kingston, Jamaica. 

The only known photograph of Uriah Levy, taken just prior to his death in 1862

In taking Virginia’s hand in marriage, as I noted in Saving Monticello, Uriah was following an ancient, if obscure, Jewish tradition that obligated the closest unmarried male relative of a recently orphaned or widowed woman in financial difficulties to marry her. Said financial troubles all but certainly stemmed from the fact that Abraham Lopez—sometimes referred to as Judge Lopez—had fallen on hard financial times by the time he died in 1849 when Virgina was 14 years old. Before that, however, he had prospered and provided well for his family. The well-off Lopezes had the wherewithal, for one thing, to send Virginia to boarding school in England. 

In the absence of the discovery of a marriage license or any other primary sources to prove it, it appears that the May-December couple wed in the fall of 1853. And that the nuptials took place in New York City where Uriah lived and where Virginia and her mother Fanny moved from Jamaica sometime after Judge Lopez’s death four years earlier. We also know that sometime after the wedding, Uriah moved Virginia and Fanny into his large townhouse at 107 St. Mark's Place in the East Village in Manhattan. 

Fanny Levy died in 1857 and sometime after that Uriah’s unmarried sister, Amelia, moved into the house on St. Mark’s with her brother and young sister-in-law, Virginia. We know that because in 1860 the U.S. Census (above) listed Commodore and Virginia Levy, age 60 and 25, living in Manhattan, along with Amelia Levy, 50, and an Irish servant named Nora McGrath, 22. Uriah and Amelia’s places of birth were listed as Philadelphia and Virginia’s as “West Indies.”

Uriah Levy died at age 70 in that house on March 22, 1862. Virginia Lopez Levy later remarried and died on May 5, 1925 in New York at age 90—63 years after Uriah Levy’s death.

 

****************

As for the lifelong bachelor Jefferson Levy, who was born in New York in 1852—the year before UPL and Virginia Lopez married—his name regularly popped up in the society pages of the (many) New York City newspapers and those in Washington, D.C., and Virginia, as he led an extravagant Gilded Age lifestyle after making a fortune in real estate and stock speculation in the 1870s and ‘80s.

 Jefferson Levy traveled widely and often, typically in the company of other upper-crust late nineteenth and early twentieth century globetrotters. 

Jefferson M. Levy

On one of his many social sojourns, Jefferson Levy crossed the Atlantic to spend some leisure time in England in the summer of 1902. The man the Washington Post described as “one of the most conspicuous bachelor hosts of the London season,” among other things, gave a dinner at a fancy London hotel in August in the early days of the reign of King Edward VII and its Edwardian Era upper class excesses.

Jefferson Levy, who, like his uncle, lived in New York City, repaired to Monticello early in September that year, where he threw a big party for the artist George Burroughs Torrey (1863-1942), who had painted a portrait of Levy that he had placed in Monticello. 

The conspicuous bachelor sometimes was linked to eligible woman of his social strata, but no evidence has surfaced that he came close to marrying. Levy, it appears, was very comfortable in his bachelorhood. For example, in the summer of 1912, when rumors circulated in Washington that he was engaged to be married to Flora Wilson, the socially prominent daughter of Secretary of Agriculture James Wilson*, Levy—a Democratic congressman from New York at the time—picked up his phone and called The New York Times to set the record straight. 

In a short article in the September 3, 1912 Times, oddly headlined “L.M. Levy Is Not to Wed,” the paper noted that Levy called the Times’ Washington office from Monticello to let the paper know there was no truth to the rumor. 

That was the summer in which Levy faced a nationwide effort by Maude Littleton to induce Congress to take Monticello from him and turn it into a government-run presidential house museum—an effort he vigorously opposed in congressional hearings and in the court of public opinion. 

The rumors that he was engaged to Flora Lewis—a suffragist and trained coloratura operatic soprano—had “no other basis than the possible desire of somebody to make capital out of the fact that Miss Wilson recently came to his rescue by publicly declaring against the federal acquisition of Monticello over his protest,” The Times reported.

“Mr. Levy said he regretted the report of an engagement and there was no foundation for it.”

Flora Wilson, 1912

*A former Congressman from Iowa, James Wilson had served as the Secretary of Agriculture since 1897. He stepped down early in 1913, and has the distinction of being the longest-serving Cabinet secretary in U.S. history.

EVENTS AND COMMERCE:  I have a growing number of events scheduled starting in March, most of them for my new book, The Unlikely War Hero, a slice-of-life biography of the extraordinary Vietnam War story of Doug Hegdahl, the youngest and lowest ranking American prisoner held in Hanoi during the war. For details on upcoming events, check the Events page on my website: marcleepson.com/events 

If you’d like to arrange a talk on The Unlikely War Hero, Saving Monticello, or any of my other books, please email me at marcleepson@gmail.com  

The Unlikely War Hero’s first printing sold out before the official December 17 publication date and it became the Number 1 bestselling Vietnam War History book on Amazon. The second printing sold out not long after it came out in mid-January, and the book is now in its third printing.   

I have a few copies of the first printing. To order one, go to https://bit.ly/BookOrdering  I also have brand-new paperback copies of Saving Monticello and a few as-new hardcovers, as well as paperback copies of Flag: An American Biography; Desperate Engagement; and Ballad of the Green Beret.

To order personalized, autographed book, go to bit.ly/BookOrdering or email me directly at marcleepson@gmail.com 

January 2025

 

Saving Monticello: The Newsletter

The latest about the book, author events, and more

Newsletter Editor - Marc Leepson

Volume XXII, Number 1                                                        January 2025

 

 

MEMORIALS & MONUMENTS: The founders of the foundation that formed to buy Monticello in 1923 from Jefferson Levy incorporated under the name, The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation. That’s presumably because the foundation’s goal, in the parlance of the times, was to own and operate Monticello as a “memorial” to Thomas Jefferson. The organization dropped “Memorial” from its name in 2000.

This mini rumination on the word “memorial” was spurred by my continuing search for information about the Levy Family and Monticello. That quest recently led me to an 1881 newspaper article I hadn’t seen (Thank you, Library of Congress’ Chronicling America historical newspaper database) with an intriguing tidbit about Jefferson Levy that I hadn’t come across.  

Said article was penned by Lyon Gardiner Tyler (1853-1935), a son of President John Tyler, and published in The Memphis Daily Appeal on January 2, 1881. J.G. Tyler, an 1875 graduate of the University of Virginia, was the principal of a private school in Memphis at the time. He went on to serve as President of the College of William and Mary—Thomas Jefferson’s alma mater—from 1888-1919.

While expounding on the greatness of the Sage of Monticello, J.G. Tyler mentioned that he had learned that Jefferson Levy—who had owned Monticello for less than two years at that point—had written an article in which he said he would donate $500 toward “the erection of a statue of Jefferson in Central park [sic]” in New York City. As that was news to me, I tried to confirm it, or at least find more information about the proposed statue. Searching through the best primary sources, though, I couldn’t find anything more on it.

I therefore can only speculate that Jefferson Levy’s reverence for Thomas Jefferson and his desire to help build a monumental statue was influenced by his uncle Uriah Levy’s decision to buy Monticello in 1834 out of admiration for Jefferson, especially his strong support for freedom of religion.

A year earlier, when then U.S. Navy Lt. Uriah Levy was in France, he expressed that reverence by commissioning a full-length statue of Thomas Jefferson by the top sculptor of the day, David d’Angers, which today is prominently displayed in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda. I wrote about UPL and the statue in Saving Monticello and in several issues of this newsletter.

There are a slew of statues in Central Park—from Hans Christiaan Anderson to Daniel Webster—but, alas, none of Thomas Jefferson. There are plenty of Jefferson statues throughout the nation, however. Most of them were commissioned starting early in the twentieth century.

The Memorial

The most monumental Jefferson statue is Rudulf Evans’ towering, 19-foot-tall sculpture that is the centerpiece of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C. Not surprisingly, Jefferson Monroe Levy was an early proponent of a memorial to Jefferson in the nation’s capital.

In February 1903—a year after it was decided that the Tidal Basin would be the site of a future unspecified memorial and two years after Jefferson Levy had completed his first term in the House of Representatives—he was appointed as one of several dozen vice presidents (see the shortened list above) of the recently formed Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association of the United States.

That Washington, D.C. group soon began to raise funds and lobby for a memorial to the “author of the Declaration of Independence,” as the above membership card puts it, to be located in the Nation’s Capital.

It appears that the TJMAUS ceased functioning in 1907 without making any traction in its mission. But in 1926, two years after Jefferson Monroe Levy’s death, Congress took up the cause and considered a resolution to authorize the erection of a memorial to Thomas Jefferson for the first time.

It took eight years for the idea to gain traction on the Hill, but on June 26, 1934, the Senate and House approved a Joint Resolution establishing the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Commission (TJMC) with a mandate to build a memorial to its namesake at the intersection of Constitution and Pennsylvania Avenues in downtown D.C. Congress appropriated $3 million for construction. The following year, the commission commissioned the architect John Russell Pope, who designed the National Archives building four years earlier, to draw up the plans for the Jefferson Memorial.

In 1936, President Franklin Roosevelt asked the commission to chose a larger site for the memorial. They decided on the south bank of the Tidal Basin and construction began in late 1937

FDR laid the cornerstone two years later. Evans received the commission to sculpt the statue in 1941 and the memorial was dedicated before 5,000 spectators—including three dozen Jefferson descendants—on Thomas Jefferson’s birthday, April 13, during the World War II year of 1943.

As I wrote in Saving Monticello, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation took a leading role in the movement to build the national memorial to Thomas Jefferson beginning in 1926, when Congress first proposed it. That included Stuart Gibboney, the first head of the Foundation, being named chair of the Memorial Commission in 1938.

Gibboney (1876-1944), a Virginia-born New York City lawyer who specialized in banking litigation and was a mover and shaker in the national Democratic Party, opened the dedication ceremonies in 1943. Following the invocation by the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church in America, came the singing of the National Anthem during which the giant statue, which had been covered with American flags, was unveiled.

President Roosevelt spoke next in an address that was broadcast live on national radio. He called the memorial a “shrine to freedom,” and went on to talk about Jefferson’s challenges and those facing the nation during the dark days of World War II.

Jefferson, FDR said, “faced the fact that men who will not fight for liberty can lose it. We, too, have faced that fact. He lived in a world in which freedom of conscience and freedom of mind were battles still to be fought through—not principles already accepted of all men. We, too, have lived in such a world. He believed, as we believe, that men are capable of their own government, and that no king, no tyrant, no dictator can govern for them as well as they can govern for themselves…. 

“The words which we have chosen for this Memorial speak Jefferson’s noblest and most urgent meaning; and we are proud indeed to understand it and share it: ‘I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.’”

EVENTS:  I will be doing more events in 2025, including talks on Saving Monticello, as well as for my new book, The Unlikely War Hero. It’s a slice-of-life biography of the extraordinary Vietnam War story of Doug Hegdahl, the youngest and lowest ranking American prisoner held in Hanoi during the war. More info at https://bit.ly/Hegdahl 

The book had a strong start. Not long after The Unlikely War Hero arrived in bookstores and at online booksellers in early December, it became the bestselling Vietnam War History book on Amazon 

The first printing then sold out within a week. The second printing, on January 17, sold out immediately due to the huge number of backorders after the first printing was gone. The third printing is scheduled for the first week of February.  I have some copies of the first printing. To order a signed copy, go to my website, https://www.marcleepson.com/ 

If you’d like to arrange a talk on The Unlikely War Hero, Saving Monticello, or any of my other books, please email me at marcleepson@gmail.com  

For details on upcoming events, check the Events page on my website: marcleepson.com/events 

COMMERCE: I have brand-new paperback copies of Saving Monticello and a few as-new hardcovers. To order personalized, autographed copies, go to https://bit.ly/BookOrdering or email me directly at marcleepson@gmail.com 

I also have copies of Flag: An American Biography; Desperate Engagement; What So Proudly We Hailed; Ballad of the Green Beret; and Huntland.

You can read back issues of this newsletter at http://bit.ly/SMOnline

December 2024

 

Saving Monticello: The Newsletter

The latest about the book, author events, and more

Newsletter Editor - Marc Leepson

 

Volume XXI, Number 12                                                       December 2024

 

 

JANE KAMENSKY: THE INTERVIEW: In October last year, nearly 100 years after its founding, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation announced the appointment of Dr. Jane Komensky, Ph.D., as its new president and CEO.

Dr. Kamensky, who officially took over on January 15 this year, is just the second historian to head the Foundation. The late Dr. Daniel P. Jordan, Ph.D., who served as the Foundation’s director from 1985 until his retirement in 2008 was the first. Dan Jordan came to the Mountaintop from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond where he chaired the History Department.

Dr. Kamensky took the job at Monticello after a thirty-year academic career, most recently at Harvard University where she was a Professor of American History and the Foundation Director of the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

She has written or co-written seven books of American history, including A Revolution in Color, the award-winning biography of the colonial artist John Singleton Copley, and co-edited The Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution.

I recently spoke to Dr. Kamensky about her first year as head of the Foundation and her perspective on the Levy Family’s role in saving Monticello. What follows is our conversation, edited for length.

What did you know about the post Jefferson history of Monticello before you took the job?

I can admit to considerable ignorance about the post-Jefferson, pre-Foundation history of Monticello before we came here. After the recruitment started, I was informed about the documentary [“The Levys of Monticello”], which was the way I first learned about the remarkable history of the Levy Family preserving this treasure for the nation.

Can you explain how the post-Jefferson history of Monticello—specifically the Levy Family’s ownership—informs your work as the head of the Foundation?

We always need to be telling the story of what the investment is across generations that allows a fragile thing to continue to exist.

I have a friend in the museum world who says the first thing we should be prompting anybody to ask when they’re looking at a historic object in a museum or visiting an historic site is: “How is it that this is still here?”

That’s because, ultimately, that is the question that activates the visitor or the viewer. To ask that question is to enter that work of preservation and transmission—to enter the work of making a building and a landscape like Monticello a kind of living text.

A place that does that really successfully in its interpretation is the Museum of the American Revolution [in Philadelphia], whose “wow” object is Washington’s war headquarters, which is a tent. They do a wonderful orientation program with his field Oval Office—this fragile canvas tent. The sort of meta story—the story that really hits the viewer in the gut—is that the work of preserving the tent is like the work of preserving and renewing democracy.

And there’s a parallel with the Levys?

The Levys have done a more herculean thing by preserving an immense, fragile, and demanding site by not tearing it down and re-making it in their own image, by making a building live values that were vitally important to Commodore Levy’s ascent through prejudice in the United States.

So, by telling that story, we are inviting our guests—as you have invited readers of the book and the documentarians have invited viewers of the movie—into the work of preserving this fragile fabric of self-government.

How would you characterize what Uriah and Jefferson Levy did at Monticello during the 89 years they owned it?

We have to remember that the common condition for all human history—and it’s written in artifactual records—is loss and destruction. The default is not preservation; the default is loss. Entropy alone—forget about Jefferson’s debt and the inability of his heirs to reasonably sustain the plantation and house—entropy alone would have destroyed the thing long since.

And it’s remarkable [that the Levys stepped] into that role as preservationists and not wildly re-made the place in their own image. I think that in the preservation community it’s a relatively modern sensibility that says we should start by doing no harm. And I think the Levys brought that approach to Monticello.

I’m thinking of a counter example: the former townhouse, now the Old State House in Boston [above], which was nearly destroyed fifty times over. One of the first big gestures those who saved it accomplished was to tear out its guts and put in a grand Victorian staircase. You can certainly imagine a Victorian sensibility, wanting to do that at Monticello in an extremely inconvenient house in a whole set of ways.

But [the Levys' allegiance to Jeffersonian ideals was such that they lived as lightly in the thing as they could. It's truly remarkable.

So, it’s not only the stepping in to save it, but then the living with, and in, it in a way that didn’t radically remake it in their own image.

I wrote in Saving Monticello that you can make a case that Uriah Levy was the first American house preservationist. Do you think that’s true?

I think he was early by a generation. [It wasn’t until] around the time of the U.S. Centennial in 1876 when the first major American museums were founded with period rooms as centerpieces when a kind of preservationist ethic around the colonial period—even though it was often wrong; they often put things together that wouldn’t have gone together—begins to have some public traction.

So, Uriah Levy is early by a long generation from that at a time when the spirit was toward the new. I’m not enough of an architectural historian to say, yes, you’re right, theirs is the first such example, but he’s certainly swimming against the tide in the second and third quarter of the nineteenth century.

Anything else about that Levys and Monticello that you’d like to add?

I’m eager to embrace the spirit of pluralism that brought the Levys to save Monticello. I think we need it badly in America in 2024. I think Jefferson knew how valuable it was during his lifetime.

And the last thing I’ll offer, sort of invoking your book title, is we all need to do the equivalent of saving Monticello every day. [I’m] thinking about ourselves as preservationists, not only of houses and landscapes, but also of our form of self-government, that allowed Uriah Levy and his descendants to have the trajectory that they did.

 

THE HARLEY LEWIS PAPERS: Richard Lewis, a great grandnephew of Jefferson Levy, recently emailed to say that the family has donated the papers that his mother, Harley Lewis, had gathered over many years dealing with her great uncle Jefferson Levy and other family Monticello matters to the American Jewish Historical Society in New York City.

His mother, Richard Lewis told me, “was the keeper of family papers handed down to her from her mother, Frances Wolff Levy. When Harley died in 2020 at the age of 94, we decided to donate all of the papers to the American Jewish Historical Society in 2024 where they have now been archived and added to their collections to preserve them for future generations.”

As the JHS description of the material notes: Harley Lewis (above)—who graciously shared the material with me when I was doing the research for Saving Monticello 25 years ago—“served as the family’s historian and primary connection to Monticello in the mid- to late-20th century, the home of … Thomas Jefferson, and the legacy of Commodore Levy, the first Jewish person to rise to the top of the U.S. Navy and owner of Jefferson’s Monticello purchased in 1834,  and held by the family until it was sold to the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation in 1923 by Uriah’s nephew, Congressman Jefferson Monroe Levy (1852-1924).

“The collection contains correspondence, articles, and news clippings relating to Commodore Levy, and family correspondence, genealogy, photographs, articles, memorabilia, indentures, wills and last testaments, and some ephemera regarding families related to Uriah Levy in Virginia and New York City.” The book had a strong start. Not long after The Unlikely War Hero arrived in bookstores and at online booksellers early this month, it became the bestselling Vietnam War History book on Amazon.com And the first printing sold out within a week.  

EVENTS:  I will be doing more events in 2025, including talks on Saving Monticello, as well as for my new book, The Unlikely War Hero. It’s a slice-of-life biography of the extraordinary Vietnam War story of Doug Hegdahl, the youngest and lowest ranking American prisoner held in Hanoi during the war. More info at https://bit.ly/Hegdahl

If you’d like to arrange a talk on that book, or on Saving Monticello or any of my other books, please email me at marcleepson@gmail.com  

For details on upcoming events, check the Events page on my website: marcleepson.com/events 

COMMERCE: I have brand-new paperback copies of Saving Monticello and a few as-new hardcovers. To order personalized, autographed copies, go to https://bit.ly/BookOrdering or email me directly at marcleepson@gmail.com 

I also have copies of five of my other books: Flag: An American Biography; Desperate Engagement; What So Proudly We Hailed; Ballad of the Green Beret, and Huntland.

Due to high demand, I’m temporarily out of copies of The Unlikely War Hero but will be restocking very soon.

November 2024

 

Volume XXI, Number 11                                                       November 2024

 

 

BOUNTEOUS HOSPITALITY:  By the early 1890s, as I wrote in Saving Monticello, Jefferson Monroe Levy, a self-made millionaire real estate and stock speculator, was enjoying a lavish lifestyle. The owner of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello since 1879, he also had an opulent townhouse in New York City, owned a good number of commercial properties in Manhattan and in and around Charlottesville, and regularly traveled to England, France, and Italy. I’ve likened the life-long bachelor to being a late 19th century equivalent of a mid-twentieth century jetsetter, as he regularly hobnobbed on the Continent with royalty and others in his exalted income bracket.

Between his globetrotting, J. M. Levy spent many summer weekends and most Thanksgivings at Monticello, oftentimes in the company of members of his family. A staff of domestic servants catered to their needs on the mountaintop. Some worked year-round at Monticello; others were Levy’s New York employees, including his valet, butler, and laundress. His sister Amelia Mayhoff took over as Jefferson Levy’s Monticello co-host following their mother’s death in January 1893.

During the 40-plus years Jefferson Levy (below) owned Monticello, he also hosted countless out-of-town visitors Many of them were nationally prominent political figures, mostly Democratic Party higher-ups. The long list included members of Congress, governors and two sitting presidents—Grover Cleveland and Theodore Roosevelt.

A fiscally conservative Democrat, Jefferson Levy began taking an active interest in politics in the last decade of the 19^th century. He had become an influential voice in the Virginia Democratic Party and made strong connections with party leaders in New York. That networking culminated in him being the Democrats’ nominee to represent New York City’s thirteenth congressional district in a special election in 1899, which he won. Levy served for two years in the House, and did not choose to run for re-election in 1900. But ten years later, he re-launched his political career and served two more terms in Congress, from 1911-15, before deciding not to run again in 1914, after the U.S. entered World War I.

One reason Levy bowed out of politics in 1914 was his pending decision—which he announced that October—to sell Monticello after two years of fending off a campaign in Congress that  would have the government take over Monticello and turn it into a house museum.   

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Flash back to the summer of 1894 and a visit to the mountaintop that likely influenced Jefferson Levy to run for Congress five years later—a visit that I only recently learned about and is not mentioned in Saving Monticello. In August of that year, the Cleveland Administration’s Vice President, Adlai Ewing Stevenson, spent a few days on the mountaintop, along with David Bennett Hill (1843-1910, in photo below), a powerful Democratic Senator from New York

A prominent lawyer in Elmira, N.Y., Hill had steadily made his way up the ranks of the Empire State’s Democratic Party. He was elected to the State Assembly in 1870, where he became a close associate of Democratic Governor Samuel J. Tilden, who later became the Democratic nominee against Rutherford B. Hayes in the infamous disputed presidential election of 1876.

Hill was elected mayor of Elmira in 1882. Later that year, he ran for Lieutenant Governor and won, getting more votes than the Governor, Grover Cleveland. When Cleveland was elected to the presidency two years later, Hill filled out the rest of Cleveland’s gubernatorial term.

David Hill won the 1890 election to the U.S. Senate while he still was New York’s Governor, but chose to stay in that office for more than a year, not taking his seat in the U.S. Senate until January of 1892.

Vice President Stevenson (1835-1914)—the grandfather of Adlai Ewing Stevenson II, the governor of Illinois and the Democratic presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956—also was a national Democratic Party bigwig.

An Illinois congressman in the 1870s and 80s, he went on to serve as Assistant Postmaster General (a politically powerful job in those days) during the first Cleveland Administration after which the party chose Stevenson to be Grover Cleveland’s running mate in 1892.

It's very likely that the visit to Monticello by those two Democratic Party heavy hitters in 1894 played a role in Jefferson Levy’s decision five years later to jump into national politics and run for Congress. At the very least, Hill and Stevenson definitely were impressed by the fact that Levy owned Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and that he was among the wealthiest men in the country—and someone who had the wherewithal to entertain guests lavishly.

After returning to Washington, Hill told an Alexandria (Va.) Gazette reporter that the trip to Monticello “was a delightful one” and that Levy’s hospitality “is not only bounteous but magnificent and that he entertains elegantly.”

During the last night of their short stay, Hill told the reporter that “a large number of the people of Charlottesville and vicinage [very likely Democratic Party supporters] rode out to the Monticello to call” on him and Stevenson and that both of them “addressed” the group.

The only fly in the ointment, the newspaper said, was that Hill said he “didn’t sleep well” upstairs in the small, octagonal guest bedroom known as “Mr. Madison’s Room,” in honor of the fact that James and Dolly Madison often spent the night there in days gone by.

EVENTS:  On Thursday, November 14, I’ll be doing a talk on the life of the Marquis de Lafayette, based on my 2011 concise biography, Lafayette: Idealist General, in a fund-raising event for the Virginia Piedmont Heritage Area, a nonprofit historic preservation organization, in Upperville, Va. To register, go to https://bit.ly/VPHALafayetteTalk

On Tuesday, November 19, I’ll be joining Susan Stein, Monticello’s Senior Curator for Special Projects, at the Metropolitan Club in Washington, D.C., for a showing of Steven Pressman’s great documentary, “The Levys of Monticello,” followed by a discussion of the film, which was inspired by Saving Monticello.  

I will be doing more events in December and in 2025, including talks on Saving Monticello. I also will be doing talks and media interviews starting in early December for my new book, The Unlikely War Hero. It’s a slice-of-life biography of the extraordinary Vietnam War story of Doug Hegdahl, the youngest and lowest ranking American prisoner held in Hanoi during the war. More info at https://bit.ly/Hegdahl 

If you’d like to arrange a talk on that book, on Saving Monticello, or any of my other books, feel free to email me at marcleepson@gmail.com  For details on upcoming events, check the Events page on my website: marcleepson.com/events

COMMERCE: I have brand-new paperback copies of Saving Monticello and a few as-new hardcovers. To order personalized, autographed copies, go to https://bit.ly/BookOrdering or email me directly at marcleepson@gmail.com 

I also have a stack of six of my other books: Flag: An American Biography; Desperate Engagement; What So Proudly We Hailed; and Ballad of the Green Beret, and Huntland.