A History of the American People

estates, he actually bought more slaves. When one of his slaves ran away he offered a reward for
his capture. When he was about to return from his embassy to Paris, and his black slave-cook
wished to remain there as a freeman, Jefferson persuaded him to come back to Monticello as a
slave-he could not afford to lose the cook's artistry.' He wrote:The whole commerce between
master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the more boisterous passions, the most unremitting
despotism on the one part, and degrading submission on the other ... indeed I tremble for my
country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep for ever.' But if Jefferson's
principles were strong, his appetites were stronger. And his debts were stronger still. Jefferson
borrowed money all his life and, however much he hated the English, his indebtedness to two
large London banking houses steadily increased. It is a curious and not entirely explicable fact
that Southern slave-holding and indebtedness went together. The fact that a ship, from Boston or
London itself-or France-could easily call at the plantation wharf and deposit on credit the latest
European delicacies and luxuries was a standing temptation few Southern gentlemen could resist.
Jefferson's temptations were more complex than most of his peers, for in addition to French
wines, brandies, liqueurs and cheeses, hams and pates, vintage port from Bristol, coats and shirts
from Savile Row, and porcelain from Wedgewood and Doulton, there were endless books, some
of them very expensive, accumulating to form the finest library, 15,000 volumes, on the western
side of the Atlantic. All these, and the growing interest on the debts, had to be paid for by the
sweat of his slaves.
Jefferson's expensive tastes might not have proved so fatal to his principles had he not also
been an amateur architect of astonishing persistence and eccentricity. Architecture always tells
us a great deal about the political state of a nation. This maxim has never been better illustrated
than in America during the last quarter of the 18th century and the first of the 19th. And, in this
general illustration, Jefferson and his Monticello provide a vivid particular example. Even more
than its growing wealth, the new self-confidence felt in America just before, during, and still
more after the Revolution and the securing of Independence, expressed itself in ambitious
building-programs by its planter aristocracy (and their city associates) who now saw themselves
as a ruling class. As befits their Roman republican principles, their taste was overwhelmingly
classical. They went back for models both to antiquity and to Renaissance reinterpretations of
classical forms. In particular they looked to Palladio. His Four Books of Architecture, published
(1738) in English translation, lavishly illustrated by his designs, must have been in more
American gentlemen's libraries than any other book of its kind. Palladio popularized a two-story
pedimented portico, with ionic columns on the lower level and doric columns above. He also
favored the so-called colossal portico' where vast columns arise without interruption from the floor of the porch to the pediment and roof. Classical villas were going up steadily in America in the years just before the break with England-the Longfellow House in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1759) for instance or Mount Pleasant (1763), on the Schuylkill, described by John Adams asthe most elegant country seat in
the Northern colonies.' Also on the Schuylkill was Landsdowne, erected by Governor Penn of
Pennsylvania, the first to introduce Palladio's two-storied pedimented portico. It was widely
imitated and, when Independence came, this flamboyant architectural device, and the still more
impressive colossal portico, became, and remain, symbols of America's triumphant discovery of
itself. Some of these swagger-houses were built from scratch. Others, like Washington's own
Mount Vernon, had a huge portico added (1777-84). An even bigger swagger-portico was added
to Woodlands, the magnificent mansion built by the politician William Hamilton in 1787-90.
With the end of the war, the creation of the Constitution, and, still more, the establishment of an