CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — He’s an award-winning presidential historian who has written a full biography of Thomas Jefferson. Yet even Jon Meacham pauses when asked to define what it truly means to be a “Jeffersonian.”
“Well for a long time, before the civil rights movement, it meant to be more inclined toward states’ rights and limited government,” says Meacham, who serves as the National Constitution Center’s Semiquincentennial Scholar. He then stops himself, asking to begin again — recalling how President Franklin Delano Roosevelt once described Jefferson as an “apostle of liberty” who would have backed the United States entering World War II to fight the Nazis.
The term could be interpreted in countless ways. While historians may debate the relative “greatness” of America’s founding figures, as the nation’s 250th birthday draws near, many scholars agree that no founder’s life and ideas continue to echo quite like Jefferson’s. Meacham puts it plainly: Jefferson embodied “the very best and the very worst” of the United States.
And much of everything in between.
At the heart of America’s founding lies Jefferson’s most glaring contradiction — the man who wrote that “all men are created equal” remained a slaveholder until his dying day. Yet Jefferson explored and advanced both sides of so many defining debates: self-sufficient farming life versus worldly progress, pluralism versus separatism, small government versus the grand vision of an “empire of liberty.”
“There is no more malleable figure in early America than Jefferson,” says Andrew Burstein, a history professor at Louisiana State University who captured that very idea in a book he published a decade ago titled “Democracy’s Muse: How Thomas Jefferson became an FDR Liberal, a Reagan Republican, and a Tea Party Fanatic, All the While Being Dead.”
Historian Peter S. Onuf, who has authored numerous works on Jefferson, puts it this way: “There have been times in American history when just about everyone would have considered themselves ‘Jeffersonian.’ Yet even at those moments, he was a controversial figure.”
The debate over Jefferson’s legacy plays out even in places that exist because of him.
At the University of Virginia — the school he founded and considered one of his greatest personal accomplishments — a memorial now stands honoring the thousands of enslaved people who lived and labored on its grounds.
At Monticello, the hilltop plantation and estate near Charlottesville where Jefferson lived when not serving in public office, a banner near the front entrance references the Declaration of Independence with the words, “After all, our guy wrote it.” But deeper into the property, the history of enslavement is impossible to ignore — from a burial ground containing dozens of graves of enslaved people to a dedicated exhibit honoring Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman widely believed to have had six children with Jefferson.
Brandon Dillard, Monticello’s director of historic interpretation and audience engagement, describes the staff’s purpose as a mission “to tell unflinching stories of America’s complex origins and fitful progress toward the ideals Jefferson articulated in the Declaration of Independence.”
Jefferson viewed Monticello as a retreat from the pressures of his era, but modern concerns still find their way onto the grounds. A guide on the gardens tour points out that a folding plant Jefferson once tried but failed to cultivate — the “Mimosa Pudica,” or “sensitive plant” — now flourishes there, a result of climate change. The visitors’ center has earned LEED Gold certification for energy efficiency, Dillard notes, and geothermal systems have been added to other structures for climate control.
Questions of race also continue to shape the Monticello experience. Nearly all of the site’s guides are white — an issue Dillard acknowledges is widespread across the country. A recent survey from the American Association for State and Local History found that only about 10% of workers at museums, historic sites, and historical societies were nonwhite, and that many Latino, Latina, Latinx, and multiracial respondents reported facing discrimination and harassment on the job. Dillard declined to speak in detail about the experiences of guides of color at Monticello specifically.
Jefferson’s contradictions stretch back through centuries of American history. Both sides of the Civil War claimed him. Both sides of the civil rights movement did the same.
Confederate sympathizers in the 19th century and segregationists in the 20th pointed to his belief in states’ rights, while Abraham Lincoln and civil rights leaders emphasized his authorship of the Declaration of Independence. In 1963 alone, Jefferson was invoked in the inaugural address of Alabama Gov. George Wallace as he pledged to resist federal school integration efforts — and just months later by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during his landmark “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington.
President Franklin Roosevelt used Jefferson as an ideological partner for the New Deal — the Thomas Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., was itself a New Deal project. Years later, President Ronald Reagan, a former New Deal supporter turned conservative, held Jefferson up as a symbol of opposition to wasteful government spending. Free speech advocates have frequently cited Jefferson’s pivotal role in supporting the Bill of Rights, while President Donald Trump has quoted Jefferson’s 1807 complaint that “Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper” as an apparent nod to his ongoing battle against what he calls “fake news.”
Jefferson has also been positioned on opposing sides of today’s immigration debate. Ibram X. Kendi, author of “How to Be an Anti-Racist,” points to Jefferson’s documented support for colonization of Black people as a precursor to modern scapegoating and xenophobia. At the same time, even as the Trump administration pushes aggressively to limit immigration and in some cases strip citizenship, Monticello has continued its longstanding tradition of hosting July 4th naturalization ceremonies. Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger is scheduled to serve as this year’s keynote speaker.
“As new citizens share their personal stories every Fourth of July,” Dillard says, “we are reminded that the values uplifted in that Declaration are values toward which people from all backgrounds aspire.”
Monticello draws hundreds of thousands of visitors every year, each arriving for their own reasons.
Erin Porter, a Virginia native in her 40s, had never visited Monticello until recently and wanted to check it off her personal bucket list. Nathan Jaycox of Connecticut, a former nuclear engineer, came to soak up history for a course he hopes to teach. And Duane Cromwell, a longtime Vancouver resident, arrived with something more personal on her mind.
Cromwell, 70, grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, where she was taught that slavery was “an economic necessity” and never learned about Jefferson’s history as an enslaver. She was in town last month for a family reunion and came to Monticello eager to move past what she called the “whitewashed Southern version” of history — one filled with myths of villainous “yankees” and victimized rebels who stood against them.
“Did you (ever) notice kudzu growing up over trees and buildings while in the South? It is an invasive plant brought to the region to control erosion. Well, it is like racism. It is pervasive, part of the horizon, always there but soon you don’t notice it,” she says.
“Having said that, I do think that people do go along better, there is more interactions, relationships than when I was growing up. Everyone needs each other and in the South, there is a great sense of humor and friendliness that help people navigate the awkward moments.”
For Cromwell, a visit to Monticello was an opportunity to learn, to grow — and, like so many Americans before her, to use Thomas Jefferson as a lens through which to examine her country.
“Isn’t that what it’s all about?”
