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.   

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

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.

October 2024

 

 

Saving Monticello: The Newsletter

The latest about the book, author events, and more

Newsletter Editor - Marc Leepson

Volume XXI, Number 10                          October 2024

A SUMMER RESORT: The story of how Jefferson Monroe Levy gained control of Monticello in 1879 after more than two decades of legal wrangling among himself and his Uncle Uriah Levy’s other heirs is a long and winding one. And one with a surprising conclusion.

It began shortly after Uriah Levy’s death on March 22, 1862, when his heirs—more than 60 of them—discovered that the Commodore unexpectedly bequeathed Monticello to the people of the United States to be used as an agricultural school for the orphans of Navy warrant officers. 

That didn’t happen because Congress, which would have had to approve the idea, had little time to deal with a real estate matter during the darkest days of the Civil War. 

The will stipulated that if Congress did not green light that plan, Monticello should go to the state of Virginia for the same purpose. Virginia, by then no longer in the Union, took no action—even though the South had confiscated Monticello in 1861 since it was owned by a northerner. 

The will had a third contingency; if Virginia said no, then Jefferson’s Charlottesville property would go to the Portuguese Hebrew congregations of New York, Philadelphia, and Richmond to be used as an agricultural school for orphans, both Jewish and non. 

With no action on the synagogue front, family members in 1868 filed partition lawsuits in Virginia and New York (where UPL lived most of the year)—the kind often used in contested divorce proceedings—to try to clear up Monticello’s fate. That year, courts in Richmond and New York ruled that Levy’s stipulation that Monticello would become a school for orphans was invalid. The courts then ordered that Monticello should be auctioned on the premises. The proceeds would be divided among Uriah Levy’s many heirs, who were allocated shares in the ownership of the property. 

At the time of the court decision, Jefferson Monroe Levy was sixteen-and-a-half years old. 

What followed was more than a decade of more legal wrangling over Monticello’s fate. Things were not settled, as I noted in Saving Monticello, until 1879. And it wasn’t a court ruling that did it.

Jefferson Monroe Levy had in the intervening years made a fortune as a big-time real estate and stock speculator. And he decided to take the fate of Monticello into his own hands beginning in the mid-1870s, and started buying out other family members’ inheritance shares.

 In June 1875, Jefferson Levy bought the Monticello inheritance shares of Virginia Lopez Levy Ree—Uriah Levy’s remarried widow—along with those of her husband, William J. Ree. In March 1876, JML purchased his parents Fanny and Jonas Phillips Levy’s Monticello shares.

Then, in October 1876, Levy bought the shares of Virginia Ree’s brother George Washington Lopez of Spanish Town, Jamaica. By April the following year, Jefferson Levy (below) had accumulated about half of Monticello’s shares. 

It is not a matter of record exactly how much Jefferson Levy paid the other heirs for their shares. The best guess is that it was approximately $10,000—a not insignificant sum in the late 1870s. 

On February 5, 1879, Levy family lawyer George Carr, an executor of Uriah Levy’s estate, placed an ad in a Charlottesville newspaper. It announced that Monticello and its surrounding acreage would be offered for sale “at public auction, to the highest bidder on the premises between 11 o’clock A.M., and 2 o’clock P.M., on Thursday, March 20th.” 

It appears that Jefferson Monroe Levy, a month shy of his 27^th birthday, was the only bidder at the March 20 auction. His winning bid was $10,050. That money was distributed to the other heirs.

But since Levy had bought out large portions from some of the other heirs, he received a good percentage of the purchase price. Jefferson Levy, in other words, had more or less bought Monticello from himself. 

CORRECTION: In last month’s newsletter I mentioned in passing that a full-length portrait of Uriah Levy in his Navy uniform (right) that had hung in Monticello was on display at the U.S. Naval Academy’s Museum in Annapolis. Jefferson Monroe Levy’s sister Amelia Mayhoff, who inherited the painting after his death in 1924, had donated the portrait to the Naval Academy in 1928. She did so after the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which  bought the house from Levy in 1923, turned down her offer to keep it on display in the house.

I had forgotten that Levy descendant Rob Hoffman had told me last summer after he and his mother Nancy—a grandniece of Jefferson Levy, and the oldest surviving Levy Family descendant—visited the Naval Academy and learned that the large oil portrait was in storage, not on view. Here’s hoping it goes back on display sometime soon. 

EVENTS: Two scheduled for this month: 

On Wednesday, October 16, I’ll be doing a talk on Saving Monticello for the McLean (Virginia) Newcomers and Neighbors Club. 

On Sunday, October 20, I have talk and book signing at the Thomas Balch Library in Leesburg, Virginia, on my second house-history book, Huntland. It begins at 2:00 in the afternoon, and is free and open to the public. Registration is required, though. To do so, call 703-737-7195, email balchlib@leesburgva.gov or go to https://tinyurl.com/TBLEvents

I will be doing more events in the fall and winter, and in 2025, including talks on Saving Monticello. I also will be do talks and media interviews starting in early December 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. More info on that book 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 five of my other books: Flag: An American Biography; Desperate Engagement; What So Proudly We Hailed; and Ballad of the Green Beret, and Huntland.

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

 

September 2024

 

Saving Monticello: The Newsletter

The latest about the book, author events, and more

Newsletter Editor - Marc Leepson

 

Volume XXI, Number 9                                                         September 2024

 

A ‘Heroic Man’ and ‘Noble Officer’: Uriah Levy’s death in his 70^th year on March 22, 1862,* at his New York City East Village residence, 105 St. Mark’s Place, spawned headlines and accolades in newspapers in New York and Virginia, where he lived. 

The Richmond, Virginia. Daily Dispatch, in reporting Levy’s demise, for example, described him as “a man of good personal appearance” and “refined education” (although UPL had little formal schooling), and opined that he was “distinguished for many acts of personal bravery.” 

The article also noted that Uriah Levy “was the owner of Monticello, Jefferson’s residence in Virginia.” He was the owner in that newspaper’s view, because the Confederate States of America had confiscated Monticello after the Civil War began a year earlier as it was owned by a northerner. When Levy died, his lawyers had been contesting that seizure in the Confederate courts for about a year, a lawsuit that they would lose in the fall of 1864. 

Back in March of 1862, The New York Times and The New York Herald ran laudatory obits. The Herald described Uriah Levy as “a sterling American patriot” and “a heroic man and noble officer,” and didn’t stop there. A “faithful naval officer,” the paper said, he was known for his bravery and “the honesty of his character and motives.” 

Both newspapers provided details of his funeral, which started in the parlor of his house on St. Mark’s Place in New York, and which I briefly described, based on those articles, in Saving Monticello.

I wrote in the book that Levy had a Jewish funeral with patriotic flourishes and that Rabbi Jacques Judah Lyons, of New York’s Sephardic Congregation Shearith Israel (which the Herald described as “the West Nineteenth street synagogue congregation”), presided at the funeral. 

I didn’t report that Levy was laid out in a plain rosewood coffin. Nor that on its lid, the Herald noted, “were placed the sword, hat and coat of the deceased, while a solitary candle burned at the head and feet of the same. The parlor where the body reposed, and the bedchambers leading thereto were crowded with sympathizing friends and naval officers.” 

A large, full-length portrait of the Commodore hung on one of the walls of his house. Said portrait (in photo below) later was shipped to Monticello, and today resides in the U.S. Naval Academy Museum in Annapolis. 

Uriah Levy’s niece, Amelia Mayhoff, donated the portrait to the Academy following the death of her brother, Jefferson Levy, a few months after he sold Monticello to the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation in December 1923. 

The Rev. Mr. Lyons, as he was referred to in the newspapers, led the assembled in prayer at the house. Then, at around 2:00 in the afternoon, six U.S. Navy pallbearers caried the casket to a hearse outside with funereal music provided by a 20-piece Navy Brass Band from the U.S.S. North Carolina, a 74-gun ship of the line docked in New York that had been in service since 1820. 

A “large crowd of persons” stood outside the house to pay their respects. Three companies of Marines and a detachment of eighty sailors from the North Carolina accompanied the funeral hearse and carriages filled with family and friends as they moved slowly to the old dock at Grand Street, and then onto a ferry boat that took them across the East River to the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. The procession then made its way to Uriah Levy’s final resting place, Beth Olam Cemetery (below), then known as Cypress Hill Cemetery, which straddles the border between Brooklyn and Queens.

Arriving at the cemetery, The Times reported, “the deceased was placed in the receiving-house, when the mourners, in accordance with Jewish custom, made the circuit of it seven times, chanting verses illustrative of the mercy of God and the mortality of man.” 

The casket then “was lowered into the grave where the nearest relatives offered a prayer, threw dust upon the coffin and the obsequies were finished.” 

As I noted in the November 2020 Newsletter, Uriah Levy left specific instructions for the monument he wanted over his grave. He envisioned a full-length, life-sized statue of himself, either in iron or bronze, standing on a single block of granite sunk three feet in the ground. 

He specificized that the stature depicted him in the full uniform of a U.S. Navy captain, holding a scroll in his hand. The scroll was to be inscribed: “Uriah P. Levy, Captain in the United States Navy, Father of the law for the abolition of the barbarous practice of corporal punishment in the Navy of the United States.” 

But that was not to be because Shearith Israel decided that statues of the deceased are not appropriate in Jewish cemeteries. The request for a life-sized statue, “caused the congregation some discomfort,” according to the Shearith Israel website’s Beth Olam Cemetery page, which notes that while  it is important to honor the wishes of the deceased, it is also prohibited by halakha [Jewish law based on the Talmud] to erect a statue in human form.”  

Instead, the marble monument (below) features a flag-draped column adorned with a bas relief of a sailing ship and other naval and patriotic imagery. 

The epitaph, however, is nearly the same as what Uriah Levy envisioned. It reads: “In memory of Uriah P. Levy, Father of the Law for the abolition of the barbarous practice of corporal punishment in the Navy of the United States.”

*As I was fact-checking this, I saw that the Uriah Levy Wikipedia page listed his date of death as March 26, 1862. I knew that was incorrect because I had read a short death notice in the March 24, 1862, New York Herald—plus, 25 years ago when I was researching Saving Monticello, I found other solid evidence that Levy died on March 22 and said so in the book.  

But to triple check, I went to Find-a-Grave hoping there’d be an image of his giant gravestone. There was. And that confirmed the date of his death as March 22. Then I did what any historian would do: I changed the date to the correct one on Wikipedia. 

EVENTS: None scheduled for September, but I will be doing more events in the fall and winter, 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, 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. 

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; Flag: An American Biography; Ballad of the Green Beret, and Huntland.

August 2024

 Saving Monticello: The Newsletter

The latest about the book, author events, and more

Newsletter Editor - Marc Leepson

 

Volume XXI, Number 8                                                       August 2024

A VALIANT OFFICER; AN ACCOMPLISHED GENTLEMAN:  I included a detailed account in Saving Monticello and in this newsletter over the years of how Uriah Levy, while on an extended leave in Paris in the early 1830s during his U.S. Navy career, sought out the famed French sculptor 

 and commissioned a larger-than-life statue of Thomas Jefferson. 

And how Levy brought the statue home to the U.S. early in 1834, presented a plaster model to the City of New York, and donated the seven-and-a-half-foot bronze original to the people of the United States. 

And how the House and Senate accepted the gift and displayed the statue in the Capitol, then later in front of the White House, and ultimately brought it back to the Capitol, where it stands today in the Rotunda, the only statue in the building donated by a private citizen. 

In the book I also covered in detail how in the fall of 1833 or early in 1834 Uriah Levy spotted a newspaper advertisement by Monticello’s then owner, James Turner Barclay, saying that the “celebrated… former residence of Mr. Jefferson is offered for sale.” 

And that Levy made his way to Charlottesville, sought out Barclay, and on April 1, 1834, signed a contract to purchase Monticello and its surrounding acreage. 

I based the account of his time in Paris and the commissioning of the statue—from the fall of 1832 to early 1834—and what immediately came after on varied sources, including legal documents, newspaper articles, and congressional records. But I found some new information (to me) about the statue and about Uriah Levy recently after coming upon an article that I had not seen before in the April 4, 1834, Alexandria Gazette on the Library of Virginia’s online Virginia Chronicle state historical newspaper database. 

Under the above headline, the article, written by the unidentified (as was the journalistic custom of the day) Boston Post Washington correspondent, came out just three days after Levy and Barclay signed the paperwork for the sale of Monticello. Although that historic fact was not mentioned, I was fascinated to read, for the first time, an article written during that important week in Monticello’s history—and in Uriah Levy’s life. 

I’m happy to report that virtually all the facts in the article were accurate. The “new” information included the correspondent mentioning that the big bronze Jefferson statue came in at “52 cwt." That’s 52 hundredweight, or about 5,200 pounds. And that it probably cost Uriah Levy $14,000-$15,000. 

Noting that bronze is a “costly material,” the correspondent wrote that he gleaned the likely price from “those who profess to be acquainted with the value of this kind of statuary, Checking several online inflation calculators, $15,000 in 1834 would be the equivalent of at least $500,000 today.  

Levy, the article went on to say, “refuses to tell what it cost. He has the honor, whatever it may cost, of bestowing upon his fellow citizens the first statue of bronze that has ever been possessed in this country; and one too, of one of the first and greatest men of which this country can boast.”

The writer then described Levy’s heritage without mentioning the word “Jewish.” Saying Levy was a native of Philadelphia, which he was, and “a resident of Virginia,” which he wasn’t, the correspondent elaborated: “He is a descendant of the Maccabees, and a countryman of Isaiah. 

"He belongs to a race to whom, in Europe, Napoleon first extended the rights of citizenship; and whose example England has lately attempted to follow; on whom the constitution of this country has bestowed all the privileges of its trusts and honors; whose example every State in the Union, except Maryland, has followed.”* 

Then the writer lavished praise on Levy’s naval service, saying, “he is known as a valiant officer and an accomplished gentleman.” And he provided a physical description, that UPL was “about the middling height, say 5 feet 9, fine proportioned, dark complexion, with nothing very peculiar in his countenance, but a dark and piercing eye.” (Below: a photograph of UPL circa 1860 and a portrait of him circa 1815 as a young U.S. Navy Sailing Master) 

Levy was “apparently from thirty-seven to forty years of age,” the correspondent wrote. He was close; UPL was in his 42nd year. “He has spent considerable time in France and Germany on leave of absence, and acquired so much of a foreign accent, that, together with his mustache, he would not be taken for an American.”

In more than 25 years of studying the Levys, I have not found a whit of evidence that the Philadelphia-born Uriah P., a fifth-generation American, had any kind of “foreign accent.” Except, that is, in a discredited 1897 newspaper article that later became a pamphlet written by a New York journalist, Amos Cummings. Said article was little more than a vile, thinly veiled anti-Semitic attack on Jefferson M. Levy, who then owned Monticello, and his uncle, and contains made-up dialogue with Uriah speaking in some sort of Yiddish-German accent. 

As for the Boston Post correspondent, he ended his article with effusive praise for  Uriah Phillips Levy. To wit: His “munificence, and patriotism and valor are plenary evidence of his undisputed claim to American birth and citizenship.” 

* Maryland’s 1649 An Act Concerning Religion allowed only people who “believe[d] in Jesus Christ” to practice their religion in the colony. The state’s Constitution adopted in 1776 provided only that “persons professing the Christian religion are equally entitled to protection in their religious liberty.” That stricture remained in effect until the Maryland House of Delegates passed a law in 1826 that extended “the sect of people professing the Jewish religion the same rights and privileges that are enjoyed by Christians.”

EVENTS: None scheduled for August or September, but I will be doing more book talks and other events in the fall and winter. If you’d like me to do a talk on Saving Monticello or any of my other books, feel free to email me at marcleepson@gmail.com For details on events starting in October, go to marcleepson.com/events 

COMMERCE: To order a new, personally inscribed paperback of Saving Monticello, go to my website at https://bit.ly/BookOrdering or email me at marcleepson@gmail.com  I also have a few lightly used Saving Monticello hardcovers, and a stack of six of my other books: Flag: An American Biography; Desperate Engagement; What So Proudly We Hailed; Flag: An American Biography; Ballad of the Green Beret, and Huntland. 

July 2024

 

 

Saving Monticello: The Newsletter

The latest about the book, author events, and more

Newsletter Editor - Marc Leepson

 

Volume XXI, Number 7                                                         July 2024 

 

EARLY IMAGES: Twenty-five years ago, I was immersed in doing the research for the book that would become Saving Monticello. That research included searching for historical images of the house and grounds, along with images of the notable people who lived, worked, and visited there. I came across more than two dozen photographs and other images, 19 of which are in the book.

That includes the image on the cover of the hardcover and paperback—the oldest known photograph of Monticello, which dates from around 1870. Taken by William Roads, a Charlottesville photographer, the original photograph is archived in the Special Collections of the University of Virginia Alderman Library, which is where I found it, along with another of Roads’ images of Monticello taken at the same time. Since then, no older photographs of Monticello have surfaced. 

I included old photos of Monticello’s post-Jefferson owners—Benjamin Franklin Ficklin, James Turner Barclay, Uriah Phillips Levy, and Jefferson Monroe Levy—in the book. And since its publications in 2001, while putting together this newsletter, I’ve discovered additional images of the Levys, as well as their families and other visitors to the mountaintop, a good number of which have been digitized since the book came out. 

Which brings us to the news of a recently discovered vintage photo of a prominent and frequent Monticello late eighteenth and early nineteenth century visitor, the famed First Lady, Dolley Madison. Earlier this year, a family found the photograph—a daguerreotype—which was taken in 1847, making it the oldest photo of a U.S. First Lady. It’s at least 30 years older than the one on the book’s cover 

According to newspaper reports, the anonymous family discovered the image earlier this year when cleaning a “dead relative’s basement,” sent it to Sotheby’s, and the big auction house’s experts determined that the image was taken by a Virginia photographer named John Plumbe, Jr. in 1847, when Dolley Madison was in her seventy-ninth year. Plumbe sold his photography business the next year. 

The image went to auction earlier this summer, and the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery snapped it up for $456,000. The photo will go on view at the Portrait Gallery in 2026, as the nation commemorates the semiquincenntenial (250th) anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, after which it will become part of the museum’s permanent collection. 

“This artifact will provide the Smithsonian another opportunity to tell a more robust American story,” Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III, said, “and illuminate the vital role women like Madison have played in the nation’s progress.” 

The Portrait Gallery also has in its collection the oldest known photograph of a U.S. president. It’s another daguerreotype, this one of John Quincy Adams in Washington, D.C., taken in March 1843 by the photographer Philip Haas, just four years after that photography process which uses copper plates lined with a thin sliver of silver to create images was invented. It has been on display at the D.C. museum since 2018. J.Q. Adams, who served as the sixth President from 1825-29, was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Massachusetts at the time. 

Both Dolley Madison and her husband James, who lived in Montpelier about 30 miles north of Monticello, had strong ties to Thomas Jefferson and Monticello. 

Before James Madison succeeded Jefferson as the nation’s fourth president in 1809, his wife helped the widowed Jefferson host social events at the White House (then known as the President’s House) while her husband was serving in the House of Representatives on the other side of Pennsylvania Avenue. 

Dolley Madison soon became famous for her lively, weekly receptions at the White House for the political and social movers and shakers in the Nation’s Capital. 

The Madisons also were frequent visitors and guests at Monticello, before and after Jefferson’s presidency. So frequent that Jefferson’s grandchildren—his daughter Martha Randolph’s offspring—who lived at Monticello named one of the upstairs bedrooms “Mr. Madison’s Room” even though both Mrs. and Mr. Madison stayed there often, sometimes as long as several weeks at a time. 

There is no record of John Q. Adams visiting the Mountaintop. However, he did attend dinners and other social events at the White House when Jefferson was in office from 1801-09. 

And, as I wrote in Saving Monticello, when he heard the news that his father and Jefferson both died on July 4, 1826, the 50^th anniversary of the founding of the nation, J.Q. Adams memorably wrote in his diary that both founding fathers dying on that notably day was a “visible and palpable” manifestation of “Divine favor.” 

EVENTS: Just one scheduled this month. On Saturday, July 13, I’ll be speaking about the Civil War Battle of Monocacy and Confederate General Jubal Early’s subsequent attack on Washington, D.C., at the Fort Stevens Day event in Northwest D.C. near Silver Spring, Maryland. It’s a commemoration of the 160th anniversary of the fighting that went on there on July 11-12, 1864. It’s free and open to the public. For more info, go to https://theparksdc.com/event/fort-stevens-day-160-anniversary 

I will have more events in the fall and winter. For details, check the Events page on marcleepson.com/events 

COMMERCE: If you would like a new paperback of Saving Monticello, I have a few on hand. To order that book, or the just-published hardcover of Huntland, go to this page on my website https://bit.ly/BookOrdering or email me at marcleepson@gmail.com 

I also have a few used Saving Monticello hardcovers, and a stack of five of my other books: Flag: An American Biography; Desperate Engagement; What So Proudly We Hailed; Flag: An American Biography; and Ballad of the Green Beret.