Dell Upton is a professor of architectural history at the University of California, Berkeley. He has served as an advisor to Monticello and is the author of many books and articles, including The Architecture of the United States and America’s Architectural Roots: Ethnic Groups That Built America.
Why are you drawn to Monticello? What's it telling us?
I'm drawn to Monticello because it tells me about elite life in 18th-century Virginia, because, as a person who's interested in, among other things, slave culture and the slave society, I'm drawn to it because I think a lot about how one could actually live in a slave society. And I think a lot particularly about how people who think of themselves as decent people could actually be slaveholders. And there's much about Monticello and the relationships between the whites and the blacks in Monticello that I find really fascinating in trying to understand how people like Jefferson imagined himself and imagined himself in relation to his slaves.
Is Monticello a lie because it hides the slaves?
I wouldn't call it a lie but I'd certainly say that it's ambivalent. Jefferson certainly did try to hide the existence of slavery from his own eyes by suppressing the working quarters below the surface of the ground, by his dumbwaiters and his spinning doors and things like that. Part of that was his fantasy at Monticello that he was living there alone, the fantasy of the hermitage, even those he's surrounded by both black and white people in large numbers. But part of it clearly was this notion that there was something embarrassing about slavery, or there's something that he wasn't comfortable about working in that way. And that's certainly absolutely untrue for any of the other 18th century plantation houses. Mount Vernon and others say, "Slavery is here, we like it" and they incorporate it very visually into the architecture. And that's not true at Monticello.
What does that tell us about the man who made it?
He was certainly a man who was living a model of republican citizenship in which he couldn't reconcile or find a place for slavery, even though slavery permitted him to live this life.
Monticello has grown to be a metaphor for this country. Is this so?
I suppose that it's reasonable to say that now. I think that it's important to understand that that's not how it would have been seen then. I think Monticello has no progeny at the time precisely because that ambivalence is not something that other people of his class felt. Or that it's not an ambivalence that other people of his class wanted to build into their architecture. People who were uncomfortable about slavery tended to simply get out of the slavery business. People who weren't, built these great houses like Mount Vernon. Monticello is interesting in that it became a famous American house and elevated the canon of American architecture during the late 19th century at a time when these racial issues were being thought out and worked out in the aftermath of the Civil War. And I think that's the time when Jefferson came to seem this great [?] figure, as somebody caught in this dilemma, which is a fairly generous way to view his relationship with slavery.
Is it a great building?
I see Monticello as a building that, like Jefferson, has tremendous amounts in it to puzzle out and tremendous numbers of threads to pull out and to understand.
What do you like about it?
I like the sighting of it. I like to see it as someone playing with ideas that he's derived from English popular culture, from the gardening literature, ideas about how you arrange the interior of a great man's house. It has something called a double circuit plan: as you walk into Monticello, you can go one way and go through the private spaces and go another way and go through the public spaces. This allows you, as was very common in the 18th century, to have visitors come to your house, essentially tourists. They could be shown to the public spaces and shown out, never encountering the man himself. Mount Vernon was laid out in the same way. I find this really a fascinating thing. I find it fascinating as well as an example of a very characteristic late-18th-century attitude that you can essentially reconstruct the world—that you can take everything apart and put it back together focused on yourself. You can put it back together in the way that you want it. And the house itself, sitting up on the hill like that, looking out toward the great mountain where he wanted to have a tower looking out over the valley. Essentially, he's the center of the world and everything points to him, sitting there under that dome whose only purpose is to kind of mark him sitting there in the center of that world. And then all of the gadgets that are in the house are all an example of that notion— that anything, anything can be reassembled to suit me personally. Franklin, as I say, did the same kind of thing—and any number of English people.
Why was it never finished?
The very mundane explanation is that architecture for Jefferson was really a sideline. It's a mistake to think of him as someone who thought about architecture all of the time. He was someone who turned to architecture at times when everything else was a little slack, which wasn't a lot of the time. When he got bored, then he began to play with his house.
Was he a dilettante, though, with his interest in architecture?
"Dilettante" is kind of a pejorative term. He's certainly an enthusiastic amateur, there's no doubt. He's one of the few examples of a much over-played genre in colonial America, the gentlemen architect. Since the 30s there has been this idea of 18th-century society and particularly 18th century Virginia society as being this very genteel society. Within this was created the notion of the gentleman architect, essentially a Renaissance man who's dabbled in many things and designed his own house. In fact, there was almost no one like that. Jefferson was one of the few who was really like that.
What's your favorite place in Monticello?
Oddly enough, my favorite place is the dome room because when you go to the dome room you can realize what the dome is all about—that is has no spatial function, that it is that kind of marking place, that it becomes a kind of hinge or a pivot around which the entire rest of the landscape focuses. And there's a nice aerial photograph of the house where you really get that sense, of the little hinge and then the arms of the house reach out and then the whole rest of the landscape kind of spirals out from that.
I'm interested in the contradictions of the man, the fact of the public area of the house and then the private suites....what is this saying about Thomas Jefferson?
Well, on one level, it's simply saying that he fits a model which is not uncommon among wealthy Anglo-Americans in the late 18th century—that is, that you're a public figure and you're expected to receive people publicly. There's also the element of his personal fantasy of being a hermit. Monticello gives you a lot of food for thought for seeing Jefferson trying to live as a republican citizen. He's someone who spoke about communal responsibility and yet created this landscape in which he pretended to be a hermit. He's someone who talked about freedom and inherent rights and then surrounded himself with slaves. He's someone who constructed a house whose conceit—in the literary sense—is that here is the lone thinker living by himself and yet surrounded by slaves, surrounded by his family, surrounded by visitors constantly making pilgrimages to meet him.
What's going on at the University of Virginia?
The University of Virginia is a good example of that habit of taking the world apart and putting it back together in an idealized way, because what Jefferson is really doing is imagining a kind of universal classification in which all knowledge can be put. So the ten pavilions represent the ten subcategories into which knowledge can be broken down and then the Rotunda, the library, is where they're all coming together so all the individual parts kind of focus on the library itself as the culmination of all of that knowledge. The idea of systematizing and classifying the world in these universal classifications was one that many late-18th and early-19th-century people were fascinated with, including many of Jefferson's associates. All of the scientists that he dealt with were essentially trying to do the same kinds of things: list everything that there is and then classify it all. And so the University makes that listing and classification visually accessible.
These guys are trying to nail everything down, but they themselves seem to elude us. The building seems to disguise him in a way.
I'm not sure in what way you mean disguise him.
In the same way that you were speaking about, reflecting the dichotomies in all sorts of areas in public and private life.
And particularly when you look at the University of Virginia and describe the set up, as I have, as a kind of benign thing, and in fact it's much more than benign because there's much more to it than this kind of genial learning. One of the purposes of this kind of institution is to then enforce that view of the world. Many people don't realize that Jefferson wanted students at the University of Virginia to wear uniforms and to work to a kind of fixed schedule. And so there are many respects in which that University is very close to the prisons, the insane asylums, the hospitals, the reform schools of the early 19th century. There's a kind of social vision that wants to separate and classify the whole world, put everyone into his or her box and that's what will make a republic, if everybody's in a fixed box and everyone acts in a certain way. It's much less libertarian than the way Jefferson is often presented as being. And yet he went for that kind of thing. And the University, not just in its classification of knowledge as all broken down in that way into dichotomies, the house and the garden, the students and the professors, and each of them has their space within the university, so it's a giant kind of cellular system. My analogy to prisons and so on is not at all far-fetched. There was a famous prison built in Philadelphia at the same time, called Eastern State Penitentiary, whose plan is very much like the plan at the University of Virginia and ends up with boxes for everybody just like UVA has boxes for learning and for professors and students, and students and their slaves, and so on.
Poplar Forest.
Poplar Forest is a building that, I think, is very hard to get a grip on, in part because we're only beginning to learn much about it. A house like Poplar Forest is probably the closest to the traditional image that Jefferson admired—that is, Palladian architecture, which he tried to emulate in its forms in American buildings. It's really much closer to a kind of fairly straightforward architectural exercise—with a garden component to it—than any of his more famous buildings which are more complex than that traditional image.
What did he want it to be?
He wanted it to be, I suppose, what Monticello ended up not being. And that is a villa. In classical tradition, a villa is a retreat which is typically on the edge of a city, which is often within walking distance of your main house but a place where you go and recuperate from the strains of the city. The problem was that at Monticello, even though it's formal model is that of a villa, its social model ended up not being a villa. It was a magnet for people from outside, so Poplar Forest became that villa.
Stand on that hill across from Monticello and describe that building for us. What is it saying?
Monticello is telling us of a man living out a fantasy or a dream of cultivated life in the New World—kind of along a model of European cultivation. That is, a man surrounding himself with certain architectural imagery, a man interested in gardening both for ornamental purposes and as a form of knowledge. But a man—just by virtue of the sighting—a man with a very problematic relationship to his fellow citizens. A man who is much more pulled back from the society at large than his public pronouncements and his public imagery.
What are the slaves doing? Mulberry Row is hidden. What's happening here?
Well, I wonder how hidden Mulberry Row would be. It's hidden now because it drops off the edge of that garden, but remember you're not seeing three-dimensional buildings. And so that's one of the things that I've always puzzled about: whether when these buildings were standing, when it was an active village and people are working there—with the blacksmith's shop there, and the kind of noises and smells and so on of an agricultural village—what did that do to that imagery of isolation that he strove so hard for in the house itself? I wonder what it did to look just beyond your garden and see the tops of these buildings and to hear those noises and smell those smells that are coming over.... It's another issue that many people in the early 19th century worried about. They had created these very elaborately ordered visual landscapes and then there were smells and sounds and things that cut through that and that didn't allow you to remain within the visual realm that you'd created so carefully.
It's interesting that Jefferson could not free his slaves during his lifetime.
Well, they say he could not. But I think the real answer is he would not. This myth of Jefferson the anguished person, Jefferson trapped within an institution that he really didn't want, is a myth because you can name any number of his peers—Robert Carter on the northern neck of Virginia, who first allowed his slaves to work and to rent themselves from him and then when he realized that even was inadequate, he sold all his slaves and he entered a Catholic monastery at the end of his life. Or there's a man from Albemarle County who took all of his slaves to Illinois in order to free them. There's a mural of him and his slaves crossing the Ohio River on a raft into Illinois to freedom. So that option was there. What Jefferson really said was, "I can't free these slaves and live this life that I want to live." So there is a self-serving element to the anguish that Jefferson proposed and there's an element of special pleading on the side of the people who argue that here was a good man trapped in a bad institution. Other people found a way out.
Sounds very American. Jefferson seems utterly American; Monticello seems utterly American.
Yes, American in a sense of these grand pronouncements of universal liberties and so on. But the acceptance of a very hierarchical society, particularly when it pays benefits to oneself, is certainly my view of what constitutes much of American society.
We have advertised ourselves as a bastion of liberty and in our own personal lives say "not in my backyard."
Not in my backyard and not in your backyard if we're making money from it. The debates about human rights in other countries are a good kind of Jeffersonian thing. We don't like how you're treating your citizens, but business is business.
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