Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello is one of the most beloved sites in America, drawing more than 300,000 visitors a year up a steep mountain road to enjoy majestic views of the Virginia Piedmont and house tours that can feel like stepping into its creator’s complicated mind.
But in 1775, it was a muddy construction site — and, as a guide told a tour group gathered on its front portico on a recent morning, a pretty good metaphor for the not-quite-born United States itself.
“Things were just getting started, and they weren’t going great,” the guide said. After a decade of escalating tensions between Britain and the colonists, a shooting war had broken out in Massachusetts. The Continental Congress formed an army, appointing an upstanding Virginian, George Washington, to lead it.
“Which, by the way,” the guide noted wryly, “was John Adams’s idea.”
Virginia may be a purple state these days, but the area around Monticello is still rock-ribbed Jefferson country. Heading south, you can follow Thomas Jefferson Parkway to Jefferson Vineyards. Go a few miles north, to downtown Charlottesville, and you hit “Mr. Jefferson’s university,” as some still reverentially call it.
But as the 250th anniversary of American independence approaches, his fellow founder and sometime nemesis is getting prominent billing up at Monticello, thanks to “Founding Friends, Founding Foes,” a new tour built around the fraught 50-year relationship between Jefferson and Adams.
The tour uses spaces in the magnificent house Jefferson designed, and items he kept close to him, to unpack their lifelong frenemyship. That often-fractious relationship stretched from their collaboration on the Declaration of Independence to Jefferson’s defeat of Adams in the 1800 presidential election to their deaths, hours apart, on July 4, 1826.
The tour explores the vicious partisan politics of the 1790s, and the rise of the two-party system we know (and may love or hate) today. And it invites guests to reflect on parallels with today’s toxic politics and hyperpolarization, whether on the drive home or during special dinner table civic conversations — or as Jefferson would have put it, “feasts of reason” — held on the grounds after some tours.
These days, the Mountaintop, as Jefferson called the upper reaches of his 5,000-acre estate, is in exquisite condition, thanks to a multiyear effort to restore its buildings, gardens and fields to the way they looked in his retirement years. But down below, in the country he helped create, many fear that the grand edifice of American democracy is teetering.
And Monticello is asking a question: Can leaning into the messy, complicated, nasty, origins of our partisan political system save us?
A Complicated Legacy
Monticello, which is owned and operated by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, a private nonprofit group, has dealt with difficult questions before, if not always willingly.
For decades, it presented a hagiographic image of Jefferson, saying little about the nearly 400 people enslaved there over his lifetime. That started to shift in the early 1990s, when the foundation created its first tour focused on slavery, even as some accused it of continuing to downplay the darker side of Jefferson’s story.
But things changed drastically after 2000, when the foundation announced, in the wake of DNA research and scholarship by historians led by Annette Gordon-Reed, that it had accepted longstanding claims that Jefferson had fathered six children with Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman.
Today, Monticello is seen as a leader among historical houses grappling with slavery. It runs a continuing oral history project about the enslaved community there and its descendants, who have gathered here for reunions. And it offers various in-depth tours and exhibits dedicated to slavery, a subject that is also woven into every tour, including “Founding Friends, Founding Foes.”
At Monticello, the new tour is described not as a pivot, but a continuation of its commitment to difficult conversations — and to meeting its diverse stakeholders where they are.
Jane Kamensky, a historian of the American Revolution who left Harvard last year to become president of Monticello, said the new tour grew out of research showing that many visitors wanted more political history, and more about Jefferson’s career. It also reflects her conviction that Monticello can be a “civic engine” for thinking about our current divides — and modeling how, as she puts it, to disagree better.
“On the tour, you hopefully feel a sense of inspiration around the possibility of this political friendship recovering itself, this civic friendship recovering itself,” Kamensky said. “And then maybe you’re inspired to call your uncle who you fell out with over Thanksgiving because you supported Trump and he supported Harris.”
That might sound like 18th-century pie in the sky thinking, even without the ratcheting tensions of the second Trump administration. In a much-noted 2019 paper on partisanship, two political scientists reported survey data showing that 16 percent of Republicans and 20 percent of Democrats had sometimes thought the country would be better off if large numbers of people from the other side “just died.”
But for Kamensky, the fact that Jefferson himself is a lightning rod, who draws defenders, haters and everything in between, gives Monticello an advantage.
“I don’t envy the president of the Lincoln presidential library,” she said. “Everyone knows how they feel about Lincoln and feels affirmed in their admiration of him. But Jefferson is a nonconsensus figure.”
Monticello’s research shows it draws a broad mix of visitors from across the political spectrum, including more conservatives than other historic houses and museums, whose visitors skew more liberal than American adults as a whole.
For some here, that reality was driven home on Jan. 7, 2021, when people stopped by for tours on their way home from Washington, wearing shirts and hats from the “Stop the Steal” rally the day before.
Sam Saunders, a retired civil engineer who has been a guide for nine years, said that was a challenging day at Monticello, though there were no incidents, and it was impossible to know if any of those visitors were among those who had gone on to storm the Capitol after the rally.
“Maybe some of the fuss was in our own emotions,” he said. And even on normal days, he added, it was important not to pass judgment on visitors based on hats, clothing or other cues. “You can’t assume people feel a certain way,” he said.
Holly Haliniewski, a guide here for nearly seven years, said that in the intense months since President Trump returned to office, Monticello had been a tonic.
“It’s been so good to come to work here, rather than sitting at home in my silo,” she said. “This is one of the last places where people do come together, which makes me hopeful.”
Bridging the Divide
Guides at Monticello are familiar with emotional, and sometimes hostile, visitor reactions, particular around slavery. Still, at a recent all-day training session, some guides expressed nervousness about inviting a conversation about 2025 politics, even on a tour whose overt content stays firmly in the past.
Brandon Dillard, Monticello’s director of historic interpretation and audience engagement, offered reassurance. “All of you are excellent at talking about racism and the legacy of slavery in America,” he said. “I think you can handle a conversation about partisanship.”
Each of the roughly four dozen guides at Monticello writes their own tour, within set parameters. Earlier this year, as part of the training for “Founding Friends, Founding Foes,” Monticello organized daylong sessions with historians and political scientists. On this day in late February, the speakers were leaders from BridgeUSA and Living Room Conversations, two of the hundreds of “bridging” organizations that have sprung up in recent years on campuses and in communities, with the mission of promoting civil disagreement and dialogue.
Becca Kearl, the executive director of Living Room Conversations, which was founded in 2010, began by asking everyone to pull out their smartphones and, using a QR code, contribute to a word cloud, using the prompt “America is….”
The screen at the front of the room started to fill with responses like “under attack,” “not a democracy,” “complicated” “an oligarchy,” “Trump,” and “a mess.” But there was also “an inspiration” and “my home.”
Kearl ran through some discouraging statistics about polarization. But like many in the “bridging” world, she prefers to emphasize recent research showing that a large majority of people across the political spectrum want honest, fact-based history that honors shared American values without glossing over hard things.
“We feel divided, but a lot of that is coming from the top down,” she said. “I’m not saying things aren’t happening now that are really divisive. But research shows we really want to be united.”
What that means on the ground is complicated. One guide asked whether the civic dialogue approach downplays the degree to which people from minority groups may feel less empowered to speak, if they are present at all. (Monticello’s visitors, according to its data, skew heavily white, as they do at museum sites as a whole.)
Another noted the challenge of navigating the political gap between, say, Charlottesville, which voted 84 percent Democratic in the 2024 presidential election, and Greene County, a heavily rural Republican stronghold only about 20 miles away.
Kearl, describing herself as a registered Republican who feels conservative in a national context but “super-liberal in Utah,” where she lives, said that political identity can be complicated. And for some who are right of center, even well-intentioned efforts by progressive-dominated institutions to reach across the political divide can come off as condescending.
“With conservatives, there’s often a sense you are being drawn in to be re-educated, and you are just going to be told how you are wrong,” she said.
Dillard reminded the guides that the point wasn’t to win a debate or change anyone’s mind, but to foster civic connection.
“Do you want to prove a point?” he said. “Or do you want to make a difference?”
Dreams of the Future
The following morning, about three dozen students from the University of Virginia and Washington and Lee, a nearby school with a more conservative reputation, arrived for an early test-run of the new tour.
“You’re all probably very familiar with Thomas Jefferson,” the guide, Wyatt Falcone, said, kicking things off. But what comes to mind when you think about John Adams?
“Curmudgeon,” one student offered.
“Actually,” Falcone said, “he had a pretty good sense of humor!”
The group, which included some students from campus bridging groups, was primed for dialogue. But there wasn’t much time for questions, as Falcone raced to keep the complex story under the tour’s one-hour limit. (It clocked in at an hour and 20 minutes.)
Stepping into Monticello, with its eccentrically shaped spaces, rich colors and cutting-edge 18th-century gadgets, can feel like entering an Enlightenment version of Willie Wonka’s factory. And in the entrance hall, Falcone noted mainstays of every house tour, including a museum-like display of Native American artifacts brought back by the Lewis and Clark expedition and, over the door, the elaborate “Great Clock” designed by Jefferson, which has been running for more than 200 years.
But by the time the group moved into the library, Falcone was deep into the history of the debates of the 1780s over the newly proposed Constitution, and the rifts that began opening over the nature and practice of American democracy.
Adams, Falcone explained, believed that the new nation needed a strong executive to contain the class of people who, in every society, would rise above the rest, and seek to accumulate power for themselves. Jefferson, he said, was “more of an optimist.”
“He believed the American Revolution was the first step in a global revolution that would wipe away the systems and tyrannies of the past and create a new world of freedom and equality,” he said. (Though not for everybody — Jefferson, Falcone noted, was “horrified” when enslaved Haitians overthrew their masters and established a democratic republic in 1804.)
So far, so Jeffersonian. But moving into the bedchamber — where a bust of Adams was tucked into a corner, near the foot of the bed — Falcone described how this civic friendship, and the new democracy’s fragile consensus, started to seriously fray.
It started with the election to succeed George Washington in 1796, when Adams narrowly defeated Jefferson. And by their 1800 rematch, the brutal politics of the “factions” that many of the founders had warned against produced what is still seen as one of the nastiest, most bitterly partisan elections in American history.
Adams’s Federalists accused Jefferson of being an anarchist, an atheist, a traitor and a French spy. Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans, meanwhile, denounced Adams as a warmonger, a monarchist and a tyrant. And then — as fans of “Hamilton” will remember — the election was thrown into the House of Representatives, where it took more than 30 ballots for Jefferson to prevail.
Adams left office in 1801, in the first peaceful transfer of power to a political opponent in American history. But the two men did not exchange a single word for more than a decade.
Then, in January 1812, three years after Jefferson had retired to Monticello, a courier — “probably an enslaved person,” Falcone said — arrived with something unexpected: a letter from Adams.
The brief letter included New Year’s wishes, and a book written by his son John Quincy Adams, who Jefferson had known as a child. The missives started flying back and forth, and didn’t stop.
“You and I ought not to die before we have explained ourselves to each other,” Adams wrote to Jefferson in July 1813. But explaining themselves, Falcone noted, did not mean changing the other’s mind.
The tour — with its discussions of the partisan press, the deportation of “enemy aliens,” debates over executive power and racist rumor campaigns — offered plenty of rhymes with our political present, without overtly spelling them out, or telling anyone what to think. Visitors are left to decide what message, if any, they will carry back down from the mountaintop to the messy country below.
But Falcone ended the tour with a hopeful line from Jefferson: “I like the dreams of the future rather than the history of the past.”
Jennifer Schuessler is a reporter for the Culture section of The Times who covers intellectual life and the world of ideas.
The post These Founding Fathers Were Frenemies. Maybe We Can Learn Something. appeared first on New York Times.
