The Levys at Monticello
Reprinted from Preservation Magazine
When Jefferson was finally forced to sell his beloved Monticello,
the mansion that had been in his family for nearly ninety years,
he did so, it is reported, with tears in his eyes. Financial reverses
were to blame for his loss of the historic estate perched on a
low mountain in the middle of the fabled Virginia Piedmont.
The year was 1923. The Jefferson in question was Jefferson Monroe Levy, a New York City lawyer and former member of Congress who had owned Thomas Jefferson's Monticello since 1879. Levy's uncle, U.S. Navy officer Uriah Phillips Levy, had bought the third president's house in 1836, soon after first laying eyes on it.
Uriah Levy and Jefferson Levy took control of Monticello at critical periods in the life of that significant house; in each case it was on the verge of physical ruin. Both Levys spent large sums of money restoring it and its extensive grounds, and both opened the house to the visitors who flocked there because of their admiration for Thomas Jefferson, who began to build Monticello in 1768 and constantly re-created it until his death in 1826.
Uriah Levy may well have been the first American to act upon the idea of preserving a historic dwelling, predating by two decades the first efforts to preserve George Washington's Mount Vernon. Although Jefferson Levy never lived at Monticello full time, he saved it from the effects of seventeen years of neglect while his uncle's will was being contested. "Both Uriah and Jefferson Monroe Levy were extraordinary for their commitment to a historical ideal," says Susan Stein, Monticello's present curator. "They devoted their resources and their vision and their commitment to this ideal."
The role of the Levy family in saving and restoring Monticello is one of the best-kept secrets of American preservation, even though Charles B. Hosmer Jr. devoted an extensive chapter to it in Presence of the Past, his 1965 history of the movement. It wasn't until 1985, for example, that the Thomas Jefferson Foundation -- which incorporated seventy-five years ago to buy Monticello and has owned and operated it since -- officially recognized the Levy family.
Not only is their stewardship little known to the public, but the Levy family's long possession of the estate has also been fraught with mystery and controversy. Why did Uriah Levy buy Monticello in the first place? Why did he leave a will so convoluted that it put ownership of the property into legal limbo for those seventeen years? What were Jefferson Levy's intentions in restoring Monticello, and after steadfastly refusing to sell it, why did he suddenly change his mind? The answers have been obscured by the vilification and anti-Semitism that Uriah Levy and Jefferson Monroe Levy faced during their lifetimes.
On May 20, 1836, Uriah Levy, a forty-four-year-old bachelor and naval lieutenant, took title to Monticello and 218 acres around it for $2,700. The third of fourteen children of Michael Levy and Rachel Phillips Levy of Philadelphia, Uriah was a fifth-generation American. His maternal great-great grandfather, Dr. Diogo Nunez Ribiero, had been the personal physician to the king of Portugal. In 1726, during the Inquisition, he fled to London and from there in 1733 immigrated to the American colonies and helped found Savannah.
George Washington was a guest at the wedding of Uriah Levy's maternal grandparents. His father was a prosperous Philadelphia merchant engaged in the maritime trades. Uriah was born on April 22, 1792, and from an early age was fascinated by the sea. He was a devout patriot whose three heroes were John Paul Jones, the Marquis de Lafayette, and Thomas Jefferson.
When he was ten years old he ran away from home, shipping out as a cabin boy on a trading ship. Before he turned twenty, he had become part owner of a merchant ship. He joined the U.S. Navy in 1812 and, during the War of 1812, served brilliantly as a sailing master on the U.S.S. Argus, which sank twenty-one British merchant ships. Later he was promoted one rank to lieutenant.
Levy was known to be prickly. Although he was court-martialed
six times during his naval career, the charges seem to have arisen
from his impassioned responses to perceived insults -- usually
involving his religion. Despite the courts-martial, Levy stayed
in the Navy and became the first Jewish American to serve an entire
career as a commissioned Navy officer. 
Being
a naval officer was not a full-time job in the early nineteenth
century. During his frequent off-duty periods Uriah Levy made
his fortune in real estate in New York City, where he lived.
After Thomas Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, Uriah Levy decided that he would commission a statue of his boyhood hero for the U.S. Capitol. "I consider Thomas Jefferson to be one of the greatest men in history -- author of the Declaration and an absolute democrat," Levy said in an 1833 letter. "He serves as an inspiration to millions of Americans. He did much to mold our Republic in a form in which a man's religion does not make him ineligible for political or governmental life."
In 1832, Levy took steps that would lead to his buying Monticello. While on a trip to Paris, he met the noted French sculptor Pierre-Jean David d'Angers and gave him a commission to create the full-scale bronze of Jefferson that stands today in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda. David d'Angers was inspired by a portrait of Jefferson by American painter Thomas Sully, which Lafayette owned. When Levy borrowed the painting from Lafayette, the French hero of the American Revolution inquired about the fate of Monticello. Levy said he would find out when he returned to the United States.
Levy would learn that Jefferson's family had sold Monticello only the year before. "[They] had simply inherited a white elephant," the historian William Howard Adams noted. Left with debts of more than $100,000 and unable to afford the estate's upkeep, the family -- headed by Jefferson's daughter, Martha Randolph, and grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph -- had sold Monticello's 130 slaves, household furnishings, supplies, grain, and farm equipment at public auction in January 1827.
The family donated Jefferson's library to the University of Virginia and kept only a few pieces of furniture. His large art collection, including paintings by old masters and sculptures by Jean-Antoine Houdon and others, were shipped to Boston for sale. The heirs left the mansion in the summer of 1828 and put it, too, up for sale. There were no takers until James T. Barclay, an eccentric Charlottesville druggist, bought the house and 552 acres for $7,000 on November 1, 1831.
Barclay had his own vision for the property: to turn it into a silkworm farm. He cut down Jefferson's carefully cultivated groves of poplar, linden, and beech trees and dug up his manicured lawns and flower gardens, replacing them with a massive planting of mulberry bushes. But Barclay's silk business, like so many ventures Jefferson himself had conceived at Monticello, never materialized. Also like Jefferson's, his debts mounted. He could not afford to make even minimal repairs to Monticello, and in 1833 he put it on the market.
"Both the manner in which Levy came to own Monticello and his reasons for buying it are shrouded in mystery," Hosmer writes in Presence of the Past. It's not even clear when Uriah Levy acquired Monticello. Some accounts say that he agreed to buy the property in April 1834 but that the sale was delayed because of a dispute over acreage. What is known is that the deed recording the conveyance of the property from Barclay to Levy is dated May 20, 1836.
Levy's biographers, Donovan Fitzpatrick and Saul Saphire, say that Levy came to Charlottesville for the first time in the spring of 1836. His mission, they say, was "less a journey to seek information [for Lafayette] than a pilgrimage to the home of the man he considered to have been the greatest in the world." Levy rode a hired buckboard up Jefferson's mountain. There he found a deserted, dilapidated Monticello surrounded by overgrown lawns and ruined gardens.
When Levy returned to town, he learned that Monticello was for sale and decided on the spot to buy it. "Appalled by the wretched condition of the house, he determined to restore it as soon as possible," the biographers write. Levy hired a local man named Joel Wheeler to oversee the restoration but did not move in. In the spring of 1837 he moved his widowed mother, Rachel, from Philadelphia to live there. Rachel Levy presided over Monticello until her death in 1839 and is buried on the grounds.
Few in Charlottesville welcomed the new owner. Fueled either by anti-Semitism or a distaste for Yankees, wild rumors soon circulated about how Uriah Levy had acquired Monticello. One story claimed that Levy rushed to buy the property just as a group of patriotic Americans were about to purchase it. Another had it that President Andrew Jackson ordered Levy to buy Monticello, but there is no evidence that the two ever met. People also whispered that the wealthy northerner was buying Monticello purely as a speculative real-estate venture.
What is known for sure is that as soon as Levy purchased the place he began repairing and renovating it. He assembled a small army of workers -- including some newly purchased slaves -- to clean up the interior of the house, make much-needed repairs to the exterior, and reclaim the gardens. By some accounts Levy acquired pieces of Jefferson's furniture; other sources say there is no evidence that he did so. It is certain, though, that Levy went to great lengths to restore the mansion's interior, especially the ceilings and floors. He put in working order the pulley-operated, seven-day Great Clock that was made to Jefferson's specifications in 1793 and that still fascinates visitors in the entrance hall today. Levy also restored the body of the two-wheeled carriage in which Jefferson had ridden to Philadelphia in 1775 for the Continental Congress.
Uriah Levy only lived at Monticello for brief periods, mainly in the warm months. In 1853, at age sixty-one, he married his eighteen-year-old niece, Virginia Lopez, with whom he spent several summers at Monticello. It is reported that Levy enjoyed working in the garden and his young wife particularly liked riding horses.
Most accounts agree that Uriah Levy and Wheeler kept the house and grounds in good condition, and according to James A. Bear Jr., Monticello's former curator, the Levy restorations made the mansion and grounds stable by the time its owner died in 1862.
A year before Levy's death the Confederacy seized Monticello as property of "an alien enemy" and sold the slaves. In November 1864 Benjamin F. Ficklin of Albemarle County, Virginia, bought the estate at auction for $80,500 and held title until the war ended, when confiscated property was returned to previous owners. Monticello had "gone to ruin" during the Civil War, one visitor said. There were unconfirmed reports of looting by Confederate soldiers; whether true or not, many furnishings belonging to Levy disappeared during the war.
The second big mystery involving Uriah Levy's ownership of Monticello concerns the quirky will that he wrote in 1858. In it Levy directed that Monticello be given "to the people of the United States" for "the sole and only purpose of establishing and maintaining" there "an Agricultural School for the purpose of educating as practical farmers children of the warrant office of the United States Navy whose Fathers are dead."
Why Levy wanted Monticello to be a farm school for Navy warrant officers' orphans is a conundrum, as are his directions that failing Congress's approval of the plan, Monticello should go to the state of Virginia. If Virginia refused, Jefferson's mansion was to go to the Portuguese Hebrew congregations of New York, Philadelphia, and Richmond to be used as an agricultural school for orphans.
Congress refused Levy's bequest. His wife and other family members -- to whom the will came as "an unpleasant shock," Levy's biographers write -- then mounted a legal challenge to the will. Years of wrangling ensued, much of it among the family members themselves. Finally, in 1879, Jefferson Monroe Levy, the son of Uriah's youngest brother, Jonas, made an agreement with the other heirs to buy Monticello for $10,500. The new owner was twenty-seven years old.
When Jefferson Levy took possession on March 20, 1879, Monticello and its grounds were in even worse shape than in 1836, when his uncle had bought it. The main culprit was Wheeler, whose unsupervised control of the estate lasted all the years the will was being disputed and whose neglect left the house and grounds "in a dreadful state of disrepair," according to Bear. The orchards, terraced gardens, flower borders, walkways, and roads had "all but disappeared," he said. Monticello's outbuildings had fallen; the lawns were uprooted by pigs. Its front steps were decayed and broken, and the west steps were covered with mud and muck that had accumulated for years. The gutters and downspouts were falling away, the roof and skylights were rotting, windows were broken, and the basement was filled with water. Wheeler had stabled cattle in the basement during the winter and stored grain in Jefferson's once-elegant drawing rooms. Souvenir hunters had chipped away most of the stone marker on Jefferson's grave.
After evicting Wheeler, Levy set about repairing the house and restoring the gardens. In 1889 he hired Thomas L. Rhodes, an engineer, as superintendent. The competent, dedicated Rhodes would remain in the position for thirty-four years and earn widespread admiration for his work in restoring the estate.
Jefferson Levy, like most members of his family, was wealthy. A lifelong bachelor, he was elected to three terms as a U.S. representative from New York, from 1899-1901 and 1911-1915. He "spent large sums of money in improvements upon Monticello and refurnishing it," Rhodes wrote in his memoirs, and "maintained an agent in Europe for the purpose of purchasing furniture and works of art which he installed at Monticello." In 1892 Levy bought a Jefferson-designed silver coffee urn from Thomas Randolph. Levy replaced the dining room mantels' Wedgwood inserts -- which had been stolen by vandals -- with replicas he had commissioned from the original designs in England.
Like his uncle, Jefferson Levy did not live at Monticello but used the mansion as his "bachelor's hall and summer estate," as Jefferson scholar Merrill D. Peterson put it. Levy did make a point of appearing there each Fourth of July. On the lawn, accompanied by martial music and fireworks, he would declaim the Declaration of Independence from Jefferson's music stand.
Levy introduced modern conveniences to Monticello, installing running water, toilets, and a coal-burning furnace. And he added some decidedly non-Jeffersonian touches. In front of the mansion he placed two stone lions, each holding a shield with the letter L.1 On the third floor, he replaced eight of Thomas Jefferson's original skylights with dormers. He adorned the downstairs rooms with portraits of esteemed family members, including his uncle, Uriah P. Levy.
Although only a part-time resident, Levy took an active role in Charlottesville life. In 1880, he restored Town Hall, which was built in 1852 as a theater, and renamed it the Levy Opera House. That structure still stands today, as an office building on the corner of Park and High streets.
In 1897, the first shot was fired in what would become a twenty-six-year battle for control of Monticello. The salvo came at a time when the ranks of Jefferson-admiring tourists were swelling. In 1880, Levy had begun to welcome the many visitors who wanted to see the estate, charging a small fee that he donated to charities in Charlottesville. Peterson noted that by the first decade of the twentieth century, "as Monticello became better known and more accessible, the number of visitors doubled to forty or fifty thousand annually." Among them was President Theodore Roosevelt, who in 1906 made a highly publicized trip up Jefferson's mountain on horseback. Jefferson's reputation was beginning to undergo a national revival, and interest in the Sage of Monticello ran high. "Conditions were ripe," Peterson noted, "for the first concerted campaign to make Monticello a national shrine."
William Jennings Bryan, the populist politician who sought the presidency several times, wrote to Jefferson Levy in April 1897 suggesting that he sell Monticello to the federal government, which would turn it into a national memorial. Levy replied that he wouldn't sell Monticello for all the money in the United States treasury.
The 1890s witnessed a rise of nativism and jingoism in the United States, a reaction to the growing number of immigrants from Europe, including Jews. The anti-Semitism of the era wasn't aimed only at Eastern European Jews, as Jefferson Levy found out. The first public attack against him with anti-Semitic overtones came on August 24, 1902, in a New York Sun article entitled "A National Humiliation." The writer, Amos J. Cummings, railed against the twenty-five-cent admission charge leveled on "patriotic Americans" to see Monticello and complained that Levy valued the house at $100,000. "Possibly," Cummings said, Levy "imagines that he can eventually sell it to either the State or Federal Government for this sum."
The themes of greed, selfishness, and lack of patriotism were also part of later attacks on Levy, including an article in the April 1914 issue of Good Housekeeping by Dorothy Dix, "Monticello: Shrine or Bachelor's Hall?" Dix referred to Uriah Levy as "an alien," retold the rumor that he had acquired Monticello through trickery, and used dialogue in which Uriah Levy -- a fifth-generation American -- spoke in a thick, new-immigrant accent.
These and other slurs portrayed the Levys "as greedy, as if they didn't care about Monticello, [and] as if all they wanted was money," said Patricia West, the author of Domesticating Clio: The Political Origins of the Historic House Museum Movement in America, which is scheduled for publication in 1999 by Smithsonian Institution Press. "What they were trying to do was paint a picture of this greedy Jewish guy, this alien, who didn't have a right to our American treasure."
Those same tones infused the campaign launched in 1911 by Maud Littleton, the wife of a prominent New York congressman, to have Monticello taken from the Levy family and made into a public shrine. In 1911, two years after visiting Monticello as Levy's guest, Littleton wrote a widely circulated booklet, "One Wish," in which she argued that Monticello, "the most beautiful house in the whole world," should not "suffer the fate of private ownership."
The next year a resolution she helped draw up was introduced in Congress that would have forced Levy to sell Monticello to the federal government. What followed -- dubbed "the war of 1912" -- was a series of contentious hearings and impassioned debates in the House and Senate in which Rep. Jefferson Monroe Levy and Mrs. Littleton and their respective supporters verbally sparred over the fate of Monticello. "My answer to any proposition seeking the property of Monticello is: When the White House is for sale, then I will consider an offer for Monticello," Levy said at one point during the debate.
As the battle continued Littleton and her allies claimed that Monticello was falling back into ruin and that Jefferson Levy had turned it into a memorial to Uriah Levy. Levy's opponents repeated the myth that Uriah Levy had gotten Monticello through deception. The anti-Levy forces tried to have the property condemned by the federal government, but Levy fought off this and all other attempts to take Monticello.
In 1913, Littleton expanded her national campaign. Hundreds of thousands of people wrote to their congressmen asking that Monticello be turned into a Thomas Jefferson memorial. The straw that broke Levy's resolve was a second plea, in September 1914, from Bryan, who was then secretary of state. Bryan wrote to Levy, saying that turning Monticello into a government-owned shrine to Jefferson would commemorate the "great Democratic administration of President Wilson, which is being conducted on Jeffersonian principles."
"I must put aside my feelings and yield to the national demand," Levy said, in announcing that he would sell Monticello for $500,000 -- a price he deemed to be about half what he had spent to buy, restore, and maintain Jefferson's home. Levy agreed with Bryan's proposal to turn Monticello into a summer home for American presidents.
Congress did not come up with the money, however, and during World War I the issue died. After the war, Levy, who had suffered financial reverses, put Monticello up for sale. The buyer was the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which was incorporated as a nonprofit in Albany, New York, on April 13, 1923, Thomas Jefferson's 180th birthday. In December of that year the foundation purchased the property for Levy's half-million-dollar asking price.
Theodore Fred Kuper, the foundation's first director, told Hosmer what happened when Jefferson Levy signed the deed conveying Monticello and its belongings to the foundation. "This was a very emotional scene and he burst out crying," Kuper said. "He said that he never dreamt that he would ever part with the property." Levy died less than three months later.
Hosmer noted in Presence of the Past that when the foundation took over Monticello, "everything having to do with the Levys was removed."
Marc Leepson is a free-lance writer in Middleburg, Virginia, whose book, Saving Monticello, was recently published by Simon & Schuster. This article originally appeared in Preservation Magazine and is published on the Monticello Web site with the gracious permission of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
1The lions described in this article were actually placed before steps leading up to Monticello's East Front from the direction of Mulberry Row and the vegetable garden terrace. Two larger stone lions without shields flanked the entrance to West Front during the Levy period. The latter are now located at the Cheekwood Museum of Art in Memphis, Tennessee.
Images: Monticello Dining Room in the Levy era (TJF/Holsinger) and today (photo by Robert Lautman); Uriah Phillips Levy (1792-1862), courtesy of the U.S. Naval Academy Museum; photograph of Monticello by William Rhodes (ca 1870), courtesy of Prints File, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library; Jefferson Monroe Levy (1852-1924), courtesy of the American Jewish Historical Society, Waltham, Massachusetts.