Of course, generals also need an army. It is essential to remember William Lee, an enslaved teenager purchased by George Washington in 1768 for 61 pounds and 15 shillings, who served alongside the Continental Army’s commander in chief throughout the bloody war. Doing so not only insists upon Lee’s humanity; it also reflects the world as Washington knew it. Even so, it is impossible to sustain the case that Lee was as important to the future of the country as the guy who led the fight.
A self-governing republic needn’t choose between Washington and Lee, the generals and the infantry, the few and the many. Indeed, we can’t. Our history, our present and our future as a self-governing people needs the whole cast: the stars, the character actors, the extras, the crew and especially their progeny. Our founders, ourselves: Unless we can see not only our heroes, warts and all, but also our own imperfect likenesses in the cloudy mirror of the past, it will be impossible for us to discover the honest, reflective patriotism that carries our founding forward. If the search for that habit of mind and heart becomes the signal achievement of the semiquincentennial, this year’s anniversary will have done more and better work than any other.
Restoring our founders to their lives and worlds is the work my colleagues and I do every day at Monticello, the “little mountain” that was Thomas Jefferson’s home and plantation, where I serve as president and chief executive. With his granite likeness carved 60 feet high into Mount Rushmore, his portrait gracing the $2 bill, his profile on the front of the nickel and his iconic home on the back, Jefferson lives in our mind’s eye. Schoolchildren know — or jolly well should — that he was the primary author of the Declaration of Independence that we celebrate every July 4. “Our Guy Wrote It,” as the T-shirt in our gift shop says. It’s selling well.
We want our guests to understand the man in full — the lawyer, the scientist, the politician, the architect, the thinker, the farmer, the husband, the father, the sybarite, the debtor. And the man who held property in men: Jefferson was a philosopher of liberty who despised the institution of slavery and yet held more than 610 people in bondage over his lifetime, six of them his own children. His beloved Monticello was an expression of its architect’s mind, built by people of African descent, people he owned. Its very bricks bear the fingerprints of the enslaved children who formed them from Virginia’s red clay. You can fit your hand to theirs and imagine their lives. To do so does not diminish Jefferson. It restores him to the world he inherited and partially transformed.
When we think of the man who held the quill that drafted the Declaration, we need also to picture Robert Hemmings, Jefferson’s literate, teenage, enslaved valet, who would have fetched the paper and mixed the ink. No image of Hemmings survives, and certainly no statue. Yet he, too, was a founder, who worked to make the Declaration’s promises tangible and true. In 1812, Hemmings witnessed, with his meticulous, oversize, cursive signature, the marriage of his daughter, Elizabeth, to William Scott: a legal, state-sanctioned union, unlike his own. If Elizabeth and William had children — our researchers haven’t found them yet — they would have been born into a freedom longed for, and fought for, by generations of Hemmingses in North America before them and since. Their yearning for liberty, evoked but unrealized by the Declaration, carried the nation forward, slowly building the constitutional democracy that so badly needs our shared love today.