Word: jefferson
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...Jefferson, a lifelong Francophile, desperately wanted to like Napoleon. Three years before he would double the size of the U.S. by purchasing the Louisiana Territory from the French ruler, Jefferson was struggling from afar to understand Napoleon's increasingly power-hungry motives. At first, Jefferson held out hope that France was in the hands of an enlightened statesman. By April 1800, when he addressed Everard Meade, a Virginia state legislator, Jefferson was growing disillusioned. He was worried that the French example of a republic lost to a despot would shake faith in the U.S.'s fledgling government. But thanks...
Championing liberty is all well and good--until you need someone to bottle the cider. As he writes to his son-in-law about the death of Jupiter, his slave and personal attendant for three decades, Jefferson seems as sorry for the loss of the labor as the loss of the man. For all his contradictions, it is Jefferson's views on slavery that are the most difficult to reconcile with his role as the author of the words "all men are created equal." At the time of his death, Jefferson owned about 200 slaves. Five from the Hemings family...
Much like the election of 2000, the contentious race of 1800 would be a gradually unfolding drama. As the campaign was just getting under way, Jefferson wrote to a Virginian in France, William Short, that Americans would acquiesce to the will of the majority. Jefferson probably exaggerated his confidence in that fact, in hopes that Short would show the letter around Europe and bolster the perception of the U.S. as a smoothly running republic. By February 1801, when he wrote to his son-in-law, the race had taken an unexpected twist. He had bested John Adams, but now Jefferson...
...placed his mind, like his house, on a lofty height, whence he might contemplate the whole universe," an admiring French aristocrat wrote of Thomas Jefferson. Today, Monticello is a restored testament to Jefferson's exacting vision. But in 1768 that lofty height outside Charlottesville, Va., was a wildly impractical place for a compulsively practical man to start building a home. After a lifetime of "putting up and pulling down," as he called it, Jefferson completed his personal universe, but he died still enslaving dozens who had built...
...Jefferson was captivated by the view from his mountain and didn't want it cluttered with outbuildings. His elegant solution was to use the slope of the hilltop to conceal the structures- kitchen, smokehouse, stables, icehouse, brewery, laundry-in a pair of wings extending from each side of the main house. From above, these dependencies form wide, L-shaped terraces. From below, the rooms open to the hillside and connect to the house by a covered passage that continues under the main house...