Amid writings about Jefferson and Bush, a friend alerted me to a compelling essay in our local “The Hook” weekly paper — about another irony on the very portico where President Bush spoke. The essay’s author is David Ronka, a gifted guide at Monticello.
In his tours, “Professor” Ronka provides brilliant, well chosen phrases to describe the reasons why we still celebrate Jefferson. Yet David also helps us contemplate his unfinished work, the perplexing paradoxes of the human named Jefferson:
“For as this year’s honored guests are called one by one to the mansion’s West Portico to be welcomed into a future bright with America’s promise, I’ll be reminded of a starkly different event 181 years ago at that same portico.”
While “the sage” of Monticello was profoundly wise in many realms, personal finance was not one of his better suits. After he retired from public life, various schemes to make his estate prosperous, to train and emancipate his own enslaved community, foundered amid repeated economic downturns. Former Presidents then received no pensions, did no speaking tours, had no Presidential libraries. Jefferson knew before his death that he had become insolvent.
“Thus on a frigid January day in 1827, six months after his death, crowds of people flocked to the mountaintop from near and far, drawn by the prospect of purchasing something that had belonged to America’s third president and author of the Declaration of Independence.
On the auction block that day, and highlighted in large boldface on the bill of sale published in the local newspaper: 130 VALUABLE NEGROES, Thomas Jefferson’s slaves.”
Oh ironic wretched fate indeed, that the most valuable “asset” in Jefferson’s failed estate was human flesh. (See actual reproduction of the bill of sale)
“This Fourth of July, from Monticello’s parlor…. I’ll see the ghosts of those 130 men, women, and children huddled against the bitter cold of that distant January day, waiting for their names to be called, not to the promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” as Jefferson famously declared, but into an uncertain and foreboding future.”
Thank you David for the sobering reminders:
“The Fourth of July celebrates America’s birthday, but it also reminds us that there’s still work to be done in perfecting our Union. And that work demands nothing less than our persistent willingness to open our arms– and our hearts– to each other.
We owe that much to the men, women, and children who answered the auctioneer’s call at Monticello 181 years ago. We owe that much to the people we’ll welcome there as new American citizens this Fourth of July. And we owe that much to America’s Founding Fathers, who pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor in the cause of the freedoms we enjoy today.”