26 Jun A monumental man with monumental flaws

New York artist Mairia Kalman gets a jump on American Independence Day with a visit to Monticello, home of Thomas Jefferson, a Founding Father whose brilliant contributions to democracy are honored mostly in the breech. The New York Times published her multimedia account today.  Hat tip: Sarah Cooper-Ellis.

If you want to understand this country and its people and what it means to be optimistic and complex and tragic and wrong and courageous you need to go to his home in Virginia. Monticello…

Thomas Jefferson was a scientist, philosopher, statesman, architect, misician, naturalist, zoologist, botanist, farmer, bibliophile, inventor, wine connisseur, mathematician…

He vehemently believed in separation of church and state. He founded the University of Virginia, one fo the first non-religious colleges in the country.

There are a few more little things. He wrote the Declaration of Independence. He was 33. And on July 4, 1776, the Founding Fathers adopted it. A revolution was under way.

He studied Hessian flies and Voltaire and maps of Africa and the Kiran and Shakerpeare. In the study were his telescopes and polygraph copying machine and revolving biookstand and books. He knew Greek, Latin, French, Spanis, and Italian. When he read Spinoza, he read him in Latin. When he read Euripides, he read him in Greek.

The many who wrote the Declaration of Independence and said of slavery, “This abomination must have an end,” was the owner of several hundred slaves. The monumental man had monumental flaws.