The Great Emancipator's home being out of automobile range, we settled for the Great Non-Emancipator (b. April 13). The very first thing you get, on going inside Monticello, is kind of a perfect metaphor for Thomas Jefferson. He had a complicated clock built through the wall over the front door, with an hour hand showing on the porch side, then a full clock face on the inner hall. From that inner clock, a set of weights and cables spans the room, slowly descending to mark the progress of the days of the week, down a wall marked SUNDAY MONDAY TUESDAY WEDNESDAY THURSDAY FRIDAY--
And then the weights pass through a hole in the floor, down into one of the provisioning cellars, where he had to put SATURDAY because the rig ran out of room.
So paint ABOLITION on the cellar wall, too, and your American Sphinx seems more familiar than mysterious. He meant to do something about slavery, but he was broke, and the farm wasn't covering his debts, and there was always a silk bedspread or a simultaneous-writing machine to buy from the Continent, and he never got around to being able to follow through. Write the Declaration of Independence, but let other people take up arms against the Crown, then try to spare Virginia from paying an equal share of the war debt. Run for president on the principle of a limited central government, then spend $15 million on the Louisiana Purchase. Denounce the despotism of slave ownership while light-skinned children with familiar features run around the plantation. What would America be, or what would it have been, without good intentions?
