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Tuesday 18th May.

Monticello ('little mountain' in Italian) was the Virginia home of Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States and author of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson designed the house himself, building, remodeling and extending it over the course of his lifetime with the help of local craftsmen and a workforce of slaves. The site plans of the house look like the blueprints for a mechanism, a vice or clamp of some kind, with two long arms that project into the hill alongside the giant oval lawn before the main house. The house itself is a humourous muddle of neoclassical aesthetics and prescient, mad-professorish functional innovation. The tour guide points out the pottier adaptations as we do a lap of the interconnected interior: the holes cut in the floor to accommodate the long hanging weights of the 'date machine' in the reception hall; the portholes designed to let light into the raised closet (accessed by ladder) above Jefferson's alcove bed; the 'copying machine' he used to duplicate everything he wrote. Below the house a long tunnel runs east-west, providing access to storage and connecting it with two long 'dependencies' - rows of brick built work shops housing kitchen, laundry, stables, icehouse, wine cellar and other essential services. Above the dependencies Jefferson installed wooden terraces leading to attractive brick pavilions. In his old age, the guide tells us, Jefferson would take walks along these terraces for exercise. From the great oval lawn, from atop the terraces, from inside the house or upon its front steps, the dependencies and basement networks are invisible. They exist on a level subordinate to the house and are cleverly disguised. One could watch Jefferson as an old man, taking in the view from the North terrace, and be quite unaware of the activity taking place beneath his feet. Inside the house, the arrangement is repeated. At meal times, we are told, Jefferson preferred not to see his serving staff, allowing only his butler to be present. To achieve this, Jefferson installed further innovations. Kitchen slaves would prepare the components of a meal and place them on the rotating shelves of a specially designed cabinet, built into the dining room wall, on the other side of which the butler would open a door and retrieve the food. Wine was delivered by dumbwaiter from the cellars. Slaves moving between the floors would use narrow staircases, discrete from the main spaces of the house. It is not made clear on the tour how the lower promontories of the house gained their name. It is also not explained whether the name refers to the 'dependency' of the house upon them, or their 'dependency' upon the house.

Over 600 slaves lived and worked at Monticello across the lifetime of their owner. On the question of slavery, he is known to have written extensively. In the original draft of his Declaration of Independence, he called for its abolition, famously writing that "all men are created equal". But he freed only ten of his slaves - five during his life and five more in his will. In a letter to a friend, written towards the end of his life, he wrote the following: "We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other".