At Home

by Bill Bryson

  Monticello became famous for its novelties—a dumbwaiter built into a fireplace, indoor privies, a device called a polygraph that used two pens to make a copy of any letter written on it. One feature, a pair of doors in which both opened when only one—either one—was pushed, charmed and mystified experts for a century and a half. It wasn’t until the inner mechanisms were exposed during remodeling in the 1950s that renovators discovered that the doors were invisibly linked by a rod and pulleys under the floor—a fairly straightforward arrangement, as it turned out, but astounding because it represented a lot of cost and enterprise for very little effort saved.

  Jefferson, amazingly energetic, scarcely wasted a moment of his eighty-three years. His boast was that in fifty years the sun had never caught him in bed. He was an obsessive record keeper. He had seven notebooks on the go at any one time, and into each of these he recorded the most microscopic details of daily life. He fully noted each day’s weather, the migratory patterns of birds, the dates on which flowers blossomed. He not only kept copies of eighteen thousand letters he wrote, and saved the five thousand he was sent, but also diligently logged them all in an “Epistolary Record” that itself ran to more than 650 pages. He kept a record of every cent earned and spent. He recorded how many peas it took to fill a pint pot. He kept full, individual inventories for his slaves, giving an unusually complete record of how they were treated and what they owned.

  Yet, strangely, he didn’t keep a diary or an inventory of Monticello itself. “We know more about Jefferson’s house in Paris than this one, oddly enough,” Susan Stein, the senior curator, told me when I visited Monticello. “We don’t know what kind of floor coverings he had in most rooms and can’t always be sure about a lot of the furnishings. We know the house had two indoor privies, but we don’t know who got to use them or what they used for toilet paper. These things don’t get recorded.” So we are in the strange position with Jefferson that we know everything about the 250 types of edible plants he grew (he organized them by whether they were eaten for their roots, fruits, or leaves) but surprisingly little about many aspects of his life indoors.

  The house was always terribly self-indulgent. When Jefferson brought his young bride, Martha, to Monticello in 1772, it was already three years into its building and clear at a glance that this was his house. His private study, for instance, was almost twice the size of both the dining room and marital bedroom. The things that featured in the house were designed to meet his needs and whims. He could, for instance, check the wind direction and speed from any of five locations in the house—not something that Mrs. Jefferson was crying out for.

  After Martha’s early death, just ten years into their marriage, Monticello became even more decidedly his. Guests were not permitted into any of the private parts of the house—which is to say most of it—except under escort. Those who wished to browse in the library had to wait for Mr. Jefferson to take them in personally.

  Of all the puzzling lapses in Jefferson’s record keeping, the most surprising perhaps is that he didn’t keep a record of his books and had no idea how many he actually had. Jefferson loved books and was very lucky to live in a generation when books were becoming commonplace. Until comparatively recently books had been really quite rare. When Jefferson’s father died in 1757, he left a library of forty-two books, and that was regarded as pretty impressive. A library of four hundred books—the number that John Harvard left at his death—was considered so colossal that they named Harvard College after him. Over the course of his life, Harvard had acquired books at the rate of about twelve a year. Jefferson, over the course of his life, bought books at the rate of about twelve a month, accumulating a thousand every decade on average.

  Without his books, Thomas Jefferson could not have been Thomas Jefferson. For someone like him living on a frontier, remote from actual experience, books were vital guides to how life might be lived, and none gave him greater inspiration, satisfaction, and useful instruction than I quattro libri.

  Because of financial constraints and Jefferson’s endless tinkering, Monticello never looked its best or even close to it. In 1802, when a Mrs. Anna Maria Thornton came to visit, she was shocked to find she still had to enter across wobbly planks. By this time Jefferson had been working on the house for over thirty years. “Tho’ I had been prepared to see an unfinished house, still I could not help being struck with … the general gloom,” Mrs. Thornton marveled in her diary. Jefferson himself never much minded the inconvenience. “We are now living in a brick kiln,” he wrote happily at one point to a friend. Jefferson was not a great caretaker either. In Virginia’s muggy climate, exterior wood needs repainting at least once every five years. As far as can be determined, Jefferson never repainted at all. Termites began chewing up structural timbers almost as soon as they went up, and dry rot swiftly set in, too.

  Jefferson was constantly in financial difficulties, but they were difficulties of his own making. He was a breathtaking spender. When he returned from five years in France in 1790, he brought back a shipload of furniture and household goods—five stoves; fifty-seven chairs; assorted mirrors, sofas, and candlesticks; a coffee urn that he had designed himself; clocks; linens; crockery of every description; 145 rolls of wallpaper; a supply of Argand lamps; four waffle irons; and much more—enough to fill eighty-six large crates. In addition he brought home a horse-drawn carriage. All of this he had delivered to his residence in Philadelphia, then the nation’s capital, and went straight out to buy more.

  Although personally ascetic—Jefferson dressed less showily than his own household servants—he spent colossal sums on food and drink. During his first term as president he spent $7,500—equivalent to about $120,000 in today’s money—on wine alone. During one eight-year period, he purchased no fewer than twenty thousand bottles of wine. Even at the age of eighty-two and hopelessly saddled with debts, he was “still ordering Muscat de Rivesaltes in 150-bottle lots,” as one biographer notes with undisguised wonder.

  Many of Monticello’s quirks spring from the limitations of Jefferson’s workmen. He had to stick to a simple Doric style for the exterior columns because he could find no one with the skills to handle anything more complex. But the greatest problem of all, in terms of both expense and frustration, was a lack of homegrown materials. It is worth taking a minute to consider what the American colonists were up against in trying to build a civilization in a land without infrastructure.

  Britain’s philosophy of empire was that America should provide it with raw materials at a fair price and take finished products in return. The system was enshrined in a series of laws known as the Navigation Acts, which stipulated that any product bound for the New World had either to originate in Britain or pass through it on the way there, even if it had been created in, say, the West Indies, and ended up making a pointless double crossing of the Atlantic. The arrangement was insanely inefficient, but gratifyingly lucrative to British merchants and manufacturers, who essentially had a fast-growing continent at their commercial mercy. By the eve of the revolution America effectively was Britain’s export market. It took 80 percent of British linen exports, 76 percent of exported nails, 60 percent of wrought iron, nearly half of all the glass sold abroad. In bulk terms, America annually imported 30,000 pounds of silk, 11,000 pounds of salt, and over 130,000 beaver hats, among much else. Many of these things—not least the beaver hats—were made from materials that originated in America in the first place and could easily have been manufactured in American factories—a point that did not escape the Americans.

  America’s small internal market and problems of distribution over such a large area meant that Americans couldn’t compete even when they dared to try. Several fairly substantial glass-making operations were set up in the 1700s, and some even prospered briefly, but by the time of the American Revolution no glass was being made in the colonies. In most households a broken window stayed broken. Glass was so rare everywhere that immigrants were advised to bring their own window glass with the
m. Iron, likewise, was in chronic short supply. Paper was often so scarce as to be effectively nonexistent. Only the most basic pottery was made in America—jugs, crocks, and the like; anything of quality, like porcelain and bone china, had to come from (or, even more expensively, through) Britain. For Jefferson and other Virginia planters the problem was compounded by the absence of towns. It was easier to communicate with London than with other colonies.

  The consequence of this was that practically everything had to be ordered through a distant agent. Every wish had to be made known in exhaustive detail, but ultimately one had to trust to a stranger’s judgment and honest devotion. The scope for disappointment was vast. A typical order from George Washington (this one in 1757) gives some sense of the innumerable things Americans were unable to produce for themselves. Washington asked for six pounds of snuff, two dozen sponge toothbrushes, twenty sacks of salt, fifty pounds of raisins and almonds, a dozen mahogany chairs, two tables (“4 ½ feet square when spread, and to join occasionally”), a large Cheshire cheese, some marble for a chimney, a quantity of papier-mâché and wallpaper, one cask of cider, fifty pounds of candles, twenty loaves of sugar, and 250 panes of glass, among much else.

  “N.B. Let it be carefully pack’d,” he added just a touch plaintively, but futilely, for nearly every shipment came with goods broken, spoiled, or missing. When you have waited the better part of a year for, say, twenty panes of glass, only to find half of them broken and the others of the wrong size, even the most stoic temperaments tended to unravel.

  From the merchants’ and agents’ point of view, the orders were sometimes mystifyingly ambiguous. One from Washington instructed his London agent to acquire for him “two Lyons after the Antique Lyon’s in Italy.” The agent correctly surmised that Washington meant statuary, but could only guess the types and sizes. Since Washington had never been within an ocean’s breadth of Italy, it is likely that he wasn’t entirely sure himself. Washington’s letters to his London agency, Robert Cary & Co., constantly asked for items that were “fashionable” and “in the latest taste” or “uniformly handsome and genteel,” but his follow-up letters indicate that he only seldom felt that he had got what he’d asked for.

  Even the most carefully drawn instructions were dangerously susceptible to misinterpretation. Edwin Tunis, in Colonial Living, relates the story of a man who enclosed with his order a drawing of the family crest that he wanted on his dinner service. To make sure his directions were fully understood, he appended a bold arrow to emphasize some detail. When the plates arrived the man discovered to his horror that the arrow had been faithfully copied onto every piece.

  It was easy—and for many agents irresistibly tempting—to offload onto Americans clothes and furnishings that were unsold because they were no longer fashionable in England. “You cannot really form an idea of the trash that is to be found in the best shops,” an English visitor named Margaret Hall wrote home to a friend. A cheerful catchphrase of English factories became: “It’s good enough for America.” Being overcharged was a constant suspicion. Washington wrote furiously to Cary after one consignment that many of the products supplied were “mean in quality but not in price, for in this they excel indeed far above any I have ever had.”

  The carelessness of agents and merchants drove Americans half mad with exasperation. Colonel John Tayloe, while building the famous Octagon House in Washington, ordered a fireplace from the Coade factory in London, waited a year or so for its delivery, and was reduced to helpless sputters when he opened the crate and found that they had forgotten to pack the mantelshelf. Rather than waiting for the shelf to arrive, he had a new one made from wood by a trustworthy American carpenter. The fireplace—still with a wooden top—remains one of the few Coade pieces in America.

  Because of the difficulties of supply, plantation owners often had little choice but to make their own bricks. Jefferson fired his own—altogether some 650,000 of them—but this was a difficult business, as only about half from any load were usable because the heating was so uneven in his home-built kilns. He also began manufacturing his own nails. As tensions with Britain increased, matters grew more difficult still. In 1774, the Continental Congress passed a nonimportation agreement. Jefferson discovered to his dismay that fourteen pairs of very expensive sash windows he had ordered from England, and really quite earnestly needed, could not now reach him.

  This suppression of free trade greatly angered the Scottish economist Adam Smith (whose Wealth of Nations, not coincidentally, came out the same year that America declared its independence) but not nearly as much as it did the Americans, who naturally resented the idea of being kept eternally as a captive market. It would be overstating matters to suggest that the exasperations of commerce were the cause of the American Revolution, but they were certainly a powerful component.

  III

  While Thomas Jefferson was endlessly tinkering with Monticello, 120 miles to the northeast his colleague and fellow Virginian George Washington was facing similar obstacles and setbacks, and responding with the same kind of adaptive genius, with the rebuilding of Mount Vernon, his plantation home on the banks of the Potomac River near the modern District of Columbia. (The proximity is not coincidental. Given the job of choosing the site of a new national capital, Washington selected one that was an easy ride from his plantation.)

  When Washington moved to Mount Vernon in 1754 after the death of his half brother Lawrence, it was a modest farmhouse of eight rooms. He spent the next thirty years rebuilding and expanding it into a mansion of twenty rooms—all elegantly proportioned and beautifully finished (and with many nods to Palladio). Washington enjoyed one brief youthful trip to Barbados but otherwise never left his “Infant Woody Country,” as he once called it. Yet a visitor to Mount Vernon was struck by its sophistication, as if Washington had toured the great houses and gardens of Europe and carefully selected the finest aspects of each.

  He fussed over every detail. For eight years during the Revolutionary War, through all the hardships and distractions of battle, he wrote home weekly to inquire how things were going and to issue new or modified instructions for some element of design. Washington’s foreman wondered, understandably, whether this was a good time to be investing money and energy in a house that the enemy might at any moment capture and destroy. Washington spent most of the war bogged down in fighting in the north, leaving his own part of the country chronically exposed to attack. Luckily the British never reached Mount Vernon. Had they got there, they almost certainly would have spirited off Mrs. Washington and put the house and estate to the torch.

  Despite the risks, Washington pressed on. Indeed, it was at the very lowest point of the war, in 1777, that Mount Vernon acquired its two most daring architectural features: its cupola and the open-air front porch, known as the piazza, with its distinctive rectangular pillars running the length of the east front of the house. The piazza was Washington’s own design and it was his masterstroke. “To this day,” writes Stewart Brand, “… it is one of the nicest places in America to just sit.” The cupola was Washington’s idea, too. It not only added a jaunty cap to the roofline but also served as a very effective air conditioner, catching passing breezes and directing them into the body of the house.

  “The piazza is a really ingenious way of keeping the house shaded and cool and keeping the frontage attractive,” Dennis Pogue, associate director for preservation at Mount Vernon, told me when I was there. “He was a much, much better architect than he is nearly always given credit for.”

  Because he was continually adding to an existing structure, Washington had to make constant compromises. For structural reasons, he had to choose between redoing much of the interior or abandoning symmetry on the back end of the house—which is to say the side of the house that arriving visitors first saw. He chose to abandon symmetry. “That was quite a brave and unusual thing to do in that age, but Washington was always pragmatic,” says Pogue. “He preferred a sensible interior layout to an imposed symmet
ry without. He hoped people wouldn’t notice.” In Pogue’s experience about half the visitors don’t. It has to be said that the absence of symmetry is not particularly jarring, though for anyone who values balance it is hard not to notice that the cupola and pediment are a good foot and a half out of alignment.

  Lacking building stone of any kind, Washington faced his house with planks of wood, carefully chamfered at the edges to look like blocks of cut stone and painted to disguise knots and grain. While the paint was still drying, sand was gently blown onto the planks to give them a gritty, stonelike texture. The deception was so successful that even now guides point out the real nature of the building to visitors by rapping on it with their knuckles.

  Washington didn’t get to spend a lot of time enjoying Mount Vernon; even when he was at home, he didn’t get much peace. One of the conventions of the age was to feed and put up any respectable-looking person who presented himself at the door. Washington was plagued with guests—he had 677 of them in one year—and many of those stayed for more than one night.

  Washington died in 1799, just two years after retiring, and Mount Vernon began a long decline. By the middle of the following century, it was virtually derelict. Washington’s heirs offered it to the nation at a reasonable price, but Congress didn’t believe that its role included managing the homes of ex-presidents and declined to provide funds. In 1853, a woman named Louisa Dalton Bird Cunningham, while cruising up the Potomac on a passenger steamer, was so appalled by its condition that she started a foundation, the Mount Vernon Ladies Association, which bought the place and began its long and heroic restoration. The association still looks after the house with intelligence and affection. Even more miraculous in its way is the survival of the peerless view across the Potomac. In the 1950s, a plan was unveiled to build a massive oil refinery on the opposite shore. A congresswoman from Ohio, Frances Payne Bolton, successfully intervened and managed to save eighty square miles of Maryland foreshore for posterity, so that today the view remains as agreeable and satisfying as it was in Washington’s day.