September 2021

 

 

 

Saving Monticello: The Newsletter

The latest about the book, author events, and more

Newsletter Editor - Marc Leepson

 

Volume XVIII, Number 9                                                       September 1, 2021

“The study of the past is a constantly evolving, never-ending journey of discovery.” – Eric Foner 

 

A LOYAL CITIZEN: Uriah Phillips Levy, who was born in Philadelphia in 1792, was one of ten children. Jonas Phillips Levy, his youngest brother—and the youngest of the ten siblings—came along fifteen years later, in 1807.

Jonas followed in Uriah’s footsteps in two significant ways. First, he made a career as a sea captain—not in the U.S. Navy as his brother did, but in the American merchant marines. Second, he took a strong interest in Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, which Uriah purchased in 1834 when he was a 45-year-old U.S. Navy Lieutenant. 

Jonas Levy—“an extraordinary and strange character,” in the words of the late historian Samuel Rezneck—grew up in Philadelphia. At 16, he ran away to sea, which is what—according to family lore—Uriah did at age 13. Jonas, who had left his family home in Philadelphia and was staying with his cousins in New York City, signed on as a cabin boy for four dollars a month on a schooner called Sygnet heading to New Orleans. 

For the next four decades Jonas Levy (above) “journeyed literally over the seven seas,” as Rezneck put it, as a crewman and later as a ship captain, primarily plying the waters of Central and South America. That included taking part in putting a down rebellion in Peru in 183, and aiding the American cause in Mexico during the U.S. war there in 1848. He sailed to and from nearly all of the seaports on the East Coast, crossed the Atlantic regularly, and spent time in the Caribbean, in England, France, and elsewhere on the Continent. 

Jonas married Frances (Fanny) Mitchell in 1848. When he wasn’t sailing those seas, Jonas, Fanny, and their young children (including Jefferson Monroe Levy, who was born in 1852) lived in New York City. The family moved to Washington, D.C., in 1854, where Jonas was one of the founders of Washington Hebrew Congregation, serving a term as the synagogue’s president. He moved the family to Baltimore in April 1861, shortly after the Civil War broke out. 

All of which is to say that the peripatetic Jonas Levy, as I noted in Saving Monticello, was a born-and-bred northerner. Which puts what he did during the Civil War squarely in Samuel Rezneck’s “strange” category. What he did was move (without his family) to Wilmington, North Carolina, not long after the move to Baltimore. In his memoir, Jonas described that sudden move in his memoir in just one sentence: He left Baltimore, he wrote, “with the intention of going to Mexico; got as far as Wilmington.” 

He stayed in Wilmington for four years until the end of the war. He opened a chandlery there (selling candles and other ship supplies) and a hardware business—and soon offered his services to the Confederate military. 

He did so in letters to the Confederate Congress in Richmond and to several leading officials, including President Jefferson Davis and then Secretary of War Judah P. Benjamin (below). Among other things, Jonas offered to build a 20-gun ironclad ship in Europe and use it to break the Union Navy’s blockade of Confederate seaports. That scheme never came to fruition. 

On April 16, 1862, Jonas presented a petition to the Confederate Congress asking for a “modification” of the South’s sequestration law to allow him, a resident of the Confederacy, to inherit Monticello. The CSA had seized Thomas Jefferson’s house a year earlier by the CSA as it was owned by a northerner—his brother Uriah. 

In that letter he wrote that he was “a loyal citizen of this Confederacy,” and his brother’s only heir who lived in in the Confederate States. The Congress rejected Jonas’ request. 

Uriah Levy had fought the sequestration of Monticello in the Confederate courts; the legal battle continued after his death in 1862. His Charlottesville lawyer lost the case in the fall of 1864. On November 17 the CSA auctioned off the house and Uriah’s property, including 19 enslaved people. 

Jonas Levy—who in another letter to Judah Benjamin spoke of the Confederate rebellion as “the holy cause”—showed up at the auction on the mountaintop. He bid on the house, but it went for a larger sum that he was willing to pay, $80,500 in CSA money, to Benjamin F. Ficklin, a Confederate Army officer. Jonas did come away with a model of his brother’s ship, the Vandalia, and also purchased one of Uriah Levy’s enslaved men, John, who was sold, as a newspaper article put it, “to Capt. Jonas P. Levy for $5,400.” 

In his memoir Jonas Levy did not mention his adventures during the Civil War, and he never explained why he went offered himself to the Southern cause. Not writing about that in the memoir led me to believe that Jonas Levy was not exactly proud of his flirtations with the Confederacy during the war. And I believe that he most likely did so, as I said in Saving Monticello, to gain control of Monticello. He didn’t, but his son Jefferson Levy did—with his father’s strong encouragement—in 1879. 

Jonas Phillips Levy died in 1883. 

EVENTS: None scheduled in September, although I am scheduled to be record an interview in Washington, D.C., on the history of the American flag—based on my book Flag: An American Biography—for a new show airing on PBS stations later this year. Details to follow. 

If other events get scheduled, they’ll be listed, along with all future talks, on the Author Events page on my website, https://marcleepson.com 

GIFT IDEA:  Want a personally autographed, brand-new paperback copy of Saving Monticello? Please e-mail me. I also have a few as-new, unopened hardcover copies, along with a good selection of new copies of my other books.

The SM Newsletter on Line: You can read back issues of this newsletter at http://bit.ly/SMNewsLtr