Jefferson's Laboratory: Charlottesville and the Ideal That Haunts It

Charlottesville, Virginia, is one of those American places where the distance between the founding ideals and the founding reality is impossible to ignore, because the man who wrote those ideals lived just up the mountain.

Thomas Jefferson built his home, Monticello, on a ridge above Charlottesville beginning in seventeen sixty-eight. He spent decades refining it while also serving as governor of Virginia, minister to France, Secretary of State, and President of the United States. After he left the presidency in eighteen oh nine he devoted his final years to one last project: the University of Virginia, which he founded in eighteen nineteen as the first nonsectarian university in the United States. Jefferson designed its Academical Village himself, a UNESCO World Heritage site today, and considered it one of his three greatest achievements alongside the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom.

Monticello and the university have both grappled seriously in recent decades with the enslaved people whose labor built them. Jefferson enslaved more than six hundred people over his lifetime. The Academical Village was constructed largely by enslaved workers. Both institutions now interpret this history directly, and Monticello's memorial to the enslaved community opened in twenty eighteen.

Charlottesville's twentieth century tells its own chapter of that tension. In September of nineteen fifty-eight, Virginia's governor shut down two city schools rather than comply with federal desegregation orders, part of the state's Massive Resistance campaign. The schools stayed closed for five months before federal courts struck the policy down, and twelve Black students integrated the system in September nineteen fifty-nine.

The city's name carries a more recent wound as well. But Jefferson's mountaintop and his village remain, monuments to what he imagined America could be.