November 2021

 

Saving Monticello: The Newsletter

The latest about the book, author events, and more

Newsletter Editor - Marc Leepson

 

Volume XVIII, Number 11                                                 November 1, 2021

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

 

THE STATUE: On Monday, October 19, Thomas Jefferson and Uriah Levy made national headlines when New York City decided to remove a larger-than-life statue of Thomas Jefferson from its City Council chambers in Manhattan. Said statue was donated to the city in 1833 by then U.S. Navy Lt. Uriah Phillips Levy, a NYC resident who commissioned it from the noted French sculptor Pierre-Jean David d’Angers in Paris. 

The unanimous vote to remove the imposing statue by the eleven-member New York City Public Design Commission came after the City Council’s Black, Latino and Asian Caucus formally requested it mainly because Thomas Jefferson enslaved more than 600 people during his lifetime. The imposing, larger-than-life statue, the caucus said, is a “constant reminder of the injustices that have plagued communities of color since the inception of our country.” 

As I have written in this newsletter and in Saving Monticello, Uriah Levy greatly admired Thomas Jefferson for his dedication to religious freedom. That admiration moved Levy to commission the bronze statue, which depicts Jefferson holding a quill pen in his right hand and an etched copy of the Declaration of Independence in his left. And it was the impetus behind the 42-year-old Navy lieutenant’s decision to buy Monticello in 1834. 

Uriah Levy presented the black-painted plaster model of the Jefferson statue to the City of New York on February 6, 1833. The city gave him a gold snuff box in appreciation. That statue was placed on the second floor of the Rotunda at City Hall in Manhattan, and moved into the ornate City Council Chamber in the 1950s. 

A month after he gave the model to New York City, Uriah Levy presented the original bronze to the United States government. It stands today in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol. A small plaque at the statue’s bases contains these words: “Presented by Uriah Phillips Levy of the United States Navy to his fellow citizens, 1833.”  

New York City’s statue-removal action on October 19 drew negative reactions, with political conservatives leading the way. Republican NYC Councilman Joe Borelli of Staten Island, for example, called it part of “the progressive war on history.” Seventeen historians signed a petition recommending that the Design Commission keep the statue in City Hall, but not in the City Council Chambers. 

After the resolution passed, a debate continued about where the statue should go. It appeared to be destined for the New-York Historical Society’s headquarters building uptown on Central Park West. The Historical Society announced that if it received the statue, it would be prominently displayed with signage that explained Jefferson’s many accomplishments, including serving as Ambassador to France, the nation’s first Secretary of State, the Governor of Virginia, and as Vice President and President of the United States, as well as being the primary author of the Declaration of Independence and the 1786 Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (below) and a strong proponent of the Bill of Rights—along with the fact that he enslaved 607 people during his lifetime. 

Louise Mirrer, the Historical Society president and CEO, told The New York Times that if the David d’Angers Jefferson statue wound up in its building, it would be displayed on the first floor. And it would contain interpretation explaining the “principal contradiction of our founding ideals,” as well as the “lived experience of many founding Americans, including Jefferson.” The Society doesn’t “bury history,” she said, “We tell history, and history is tough and it’s filled with contradictions.” 

In Jefferson’s case that tough history centers on the fact that he was—at the same time—a passionate advocate for freedom of religion (and freedom of the press and speech) and an enslaver of human beings. The Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which owns and operates Monticello, ascribes to the philosophy of telling the complex and difficult story of Jefferson’s sometimes contradictory work and life. As Monticello’s website puts it, visitors “learn about Jefferson and his vision for America, the realities of slavery on the Monticello plantation, and the mountaintop’s iconic architecture.” 

A visitor to Monticello will learn of Jefferson’s many and varied accomplishments as well as the fact that he was a slaveholder. The Foundation tells the story of how President Jefferson oversaw the purchase of the 530-million-acre Louisiana Territory in 1803 from France, more than doubling the size of the young nation, on the one hand, and also offers a trail-blazing permanent multimedia exhibit on the slavery situation at Monticello. 

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

I received several emails before and after the City Council’s action from people who told me they thought the statue’s removal was a slap in Uriah Levy’s face. I do not see it that way. For one thing, Uriah Levy’s name did not come up during the Design Commission debate (or if did, it was not mentioned in the extensive media coverage). The debate centered on Thomas Jefferson’s enslavement of hundreds of human beings, although nearly every media account mentioned that Uriah Levy commissioned the statue and generously donated the plaster model to the city.                           

On October 24 The New York Times published an excellent opinion piece by Jonathan Sarna, headlined “What Jefferson’s Statue Meant to the Jewish Naval Hero Who Donated It.” Dr. Sarna, one of the nation’s top American Jewish history scholars (and a subscriber to this newsletter), did not base his well-reasoned, fact-filled essay on whether or not the statue should have been removed. Rather, he focused on—as he put it—the fact that “amid the debate over race, history, and the statue,” it is of vital importance to understand “the reason Jefferson was placed there in the first place.” 

That reason, in essence, was Uriah Phillip Levy’s profound admiration for Thomas Jefferson’s dedication to religious freedom, including the fact that he “championed the rights of Jews.” 

I mention that fact in Saving Monticello, and also point out that one sterling example of Jefferson’s enlightened attitude about Judaism involved Uriah Levy’s second cousin, Mordecai Manuel Noah (1785-1851), a well-known American diplomat and journalist. In 1818, Noah (below) received what would become a famous letter from Thomas Jefferson expressing his views on freedom of religion and Judaism. 

Mordecai Noah had given a speech at Shearith Israel, the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue in New York earlier that year, a copy of which made its way to Monticello. Jefferson wrote to Noah on May 28, 1818, saying he had read the speech “with pleasure and instruction, having learnt from it some valuable facts about Jewish history which I did not know before. Your sect by its sufferings has furnished a remarkable proof of the universal spirit of religious intolerance, inherent in every sect, disclaimed by all while feeble, and practised by all when in power. 

“Our laws have applied the only antidote to this vice, protecting our religious as they do our civil rights by putting all on an equal footing, but more remains to be done.” (Emphasis added.) 

I agree completely with Dr. Sarna’s conclusion. Noting that “for all of his noble intentions, Mr. Levy also kept enslaved persons at Monticello,” he wrote that statues “can convey multiple messages, as can historical memory. Rather than choosing between the memory of racial injustice and the embrace of religious liberty, let the d’Angers statue serve as a reminder that Jefferson embodied both at once."

One last thought. I was happy to see that Saving Monticello was mentioned in one of the NYT articles on the statue’s removal. Take a look at  https://bit.ly/SavingM

EVENTS: I’ll be doing my first in-person talk on Saving Monticello since before the pandemic started on Saturday, November 13, at the monthly meeting of the Providence DAR Chapter in Fairfax Station, Virginia.  

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.

 

October 2021

 

Saving Monticello: The Newsletter

The latest about the book, author events, and more

Newsletter Editor - Marc Leepson

 

Volume XVIII, Number 10             October 1, 2021

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

 

 ‘ALL IS IN DILAPIDATION AND RUIN’: The cover image of Saving Monticello contains the oldest known photograph of Thomas Jefferson’s “Essay in Architecture.” Taken in the early 1870s, it paints a stark picture of a seriously neglected house in serious disrepair. As readers of the book know, that was the second time Monticello had come close to ruin. The first happened four decades earlier, not long after the July 4, 1826, death of Thomas Jefferson in the early 1830s after James Turner Barclay bought the place from Jefferson’s heirs, Martha Jefferson Randolph and her son Thomas Jefferson Randolph. 

“The first thing that strikes you is the utter ruin and desolation of everything,” John H. B. Latrobe, a prominent Baltimore lawyer, philanthropist, and a founder of the Maryland Historical Society (and the son of the famed architect Benjamin Latrobe), wrote after visiting Monticello in August 1832. That was just eight months after Barclay, a pharmacist who lived in Charlottesville, purchased the property and moved into the house with his wife Julia. (The Barclays in photo below with daughter Sarah in 1856)

Another visitor to the mountaintop that month, William T. Barry, then the Postmaster General of the United States, painted a similarly bleak picture of Monticello. “All is dilapidation and ruin,” Barry said in a letter to his daughter, “and I fear the present owner, Dr. Barclay, is not able, if he were inclined, to restore it to its former condition.” 

Martha Randolph, writing to her daughter Ellen in October 1833, offered more first-person evidence about Monticello’s declining condition during the Barclay years. Mr. Barclay had “cut down the grove”—Jefferson’s 18-acre "ornamental forest" near the house—and “ploughed up the yard to the very edge of the lawn and planted it in corn,” she wrote, and the house’s terrace was “a complete wreck.”

I reported that primary-source evidence, among other things, in Saving Monticello, to make the case that James Turner Barclay had done little or nothing during the four years he lived at Monticello to reverse the physical decline that had begun in Thomas Jefferson’s later years—and that, in fact, that Barclay had made things worse. 

I also cited a campaign beginning in the early 1880s by Barclay descendants to rehabilitate his Monticello reputation with a series of newspaper and magazine articles promoting the idea that he was a devoted steward of Monticello. 

I quoted from a few of those articles in the book, and recently came across one I hadn’t seen in the August 10, 1882, Valley Virginian newspaper of Staunton, Virginia. 

That article reprinted a letter to the editor that appeared in the New York Sun from John Judson Barclay, a son of James Barclay who was born at Monticello in 1834, and who staunchly defended his father’s time there—using, he said, his “personal knowledge.” 

The younger Barclay (in photo, below) wrote that his father—far from letting the place go into ruin—actually “made extensive repairs to the terraces and beautified the grounds, as well as the interior of the mansion….” During his father’s three years at Monticello, his son said, he dispensed “a liberal hospitality, extending a warm Virginia welcome to all visitors.”

Similar thoughts were in an August 10, 1908, article in The Wheeling [West Virginia] Intelligencer, on the occasion of the death of Julia Barclay. That includes the statement that James T. Barclay “took great pride in restoring the serpentine walks, terraces and in planting new trees in the yard, and Mrs. Barclay was a model housekeeper." The article went on to say that it "was often said by ‘Jeff’ Randolph, who was a frequent visitor to Monticello during their stay in his grandfather’s old home, that Mrs. Barclay kept the floors in a far more beautiful condition than they were kept during the lifetime of his grandfather.”  

John Judson Barclay’s wife Decima also took part in the Barclay rehabilitation campaign. “Dr. Barclay never cut down a tree at Monticello that Mr. Jefferson had planted, or that was rare, or of any value whatever,” she wrote around 1900. “He himself planted many trees on the ‘little mountain’ which he loved, as he had always loved and admired the memory of its former owner; and it was his greatest pleasure to embellish and beautify the grounds….” 

A longer version of that scenario is contained in a privately published 1939 book, Sketches of The Moon and Barclay Families, by Barclay descendant Anna Mary Moon. Before “the Barclays took possession,” she wrote, Monticello “fell into neglect.” She went on to say that James T. Barclay “kept gardeners constantly employed renewing the serpentine walks and improving the premises in every way in his power.” He even “built new terraces to the house, which he found in a very dilapidated condition.” 

Historians know that the least reliable form of historical evidence is the family story, and these Barclay Family remembrances certainly fall into that category. Plus, they were written decades after the fact, and seemingly in an effort to refute point by point what the visitors to Monticello and Martha Randolph wrote in 1832 and 1833. Which leads me to think that the family doth protest too much. 

So, did the Barclays wreck Monticello? Or did they take great care of it? It seems likely that the answer lies somewhere between those extremes. But the facts remains that when Barclay sold the place to Uriah Levy in 1834 (the sale didn’t go through till 1836), it was certainly in dilapidation and ruin, and  the Barclay family left there after only four years, sometime in 1835. 

Soon thereafter, James Turner Barclay began a new life as a missionary in the Holy Land. But that's another story.

EVENTS: None schedule October, though it looks like I’ll be getting back to doing in-person talks on Saving Monticello and my other books in November. 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