To visit the homes of many famous people is usually not to really know them. A conspicuous exception is Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, the third president’s self-designed masterpiece of Palladian architecture where he lived for 56 historic years — from 1770 before he wrote the Declaration of Independence until his death on July 4, 1826.
Monticello, Italian for “little mountain,” sits atop an 850-foot peak in the Southwest Mountains above Charlottesville, Virginia and the world famous university that he founded. What was so striking for this first-time visitor was how small the house depicted on the flip side of the American nickel and countless other places actually is.
Befitting the life of the great man himself, Monticello seems much larger on the inside. It also is full of hidden passageways, secret chambers and other surprises.
Indeed, if you like your dead presidents simple, then Jefferson is not your man, and that overriding fact rings out from Alan Pell Crawford’s recently published Twilight At Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson.
This 322-page exposition on the outer actions and inner thoughts of the most complex and contradictory Founding Father focuses on the 17 turbulent years after Jefferson handed the reins of state to James Madison in March 1809, ducked out of his successor’s inaugural ball through a back door and without fanfare rode into a retirement during which he never stopped fretting about the future of a republic at whose birth he had played such a huge role.
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