At Home - Bill Bryson [161]
Without his books, Thomas Jefferson could not have been Thomas Jefferson. For someone like him living on a frontier, remote from actual experience, books were vital guides to how life might be lived, and none gave him greater inspiration, satisfaction, and useful instruction than I quattro libri.
Because of financial constraints and Jefferson’s endless tinkering, Monticello never looked its best or even close to it. In 1802, when a Mrs. Anna Maria Thornton came to visit, she was shocked to find she still had to enter across wobbly planks. By this time Jefferson had been working on the house for over thirty years. “Tho’ I had been prepared to see an unfinished house, still I could not help being struck with … the general gloom,” Mrs. Thornton marveled in her diary. Jefferson himself never much minded the inconvenience. “We are now living in a brick kiln,” he wrote happily at one point to a friend. Jefferson was not a great caretaker either. In Virginia’s muggy climate, exterior wood needs repainting at least once every five years. As far as can be determined, Jefferson never repainted at all. Termites began chewing up structural timbers almost as soon as they went up, and dry rot swiftly set in, too.
Jefferson was constantly in financial difficulties, but they were difficulties of his own making. He was a breathtaking spender. When he returned from five years in France in 1790, he brought back a shipload of furniture and household goods—five stoves; fifty-seven chairs; assorted mirrors, sofas, and candlesticks; a coffee urn that he had designed himself; clocks; linens; crockery of every description; 145 rolls of wallpaper; a supply of Argand lamps; four waffle irons; and much more—enough to fill eighty-six large crates. In addition he brought home a horse-drawn carriage. All of this he had delivered to his residence in Philadelphia, then the nation’s capital, and went straight out to buy more.
Although personally ascetic—Jefferson dressed less showily than his own household servants—he spent colossal sums on food and drink. During his first term as president he spent $7,500—equivalent to about $120,000 in today’s money—on wine alone. During one eight-year period, he purchased no fewer than twenty thousand bottles of wine. Even at the age of eighty-two and hopelessly saddled with debts, he was “still ordering Muscat de Rivesaltes in 150-bottle lots,” as one biographer notes with undisguised wonder.
Many of Monticello’s quirks spring from the limitations of Jefferson’s workmen. He had to stick to a simple Doric style for the exterior columns because he could find no one with the skills to handle anything more complex. But the greatest problem of all, in terms of both expense and frustration, was a lack of homegrown materials. It is worth taking a minute to consider what the American colonists were up against in trying to build a civilization in a land without infrastructure.
Britain’s philosophy of empire was that America should provide it with raw materials at a fair price and take finished products in return. The system was enshrined in a series of laws known as the Navigation Acts, which stipulated that any product bound for the New World had either to originate in Britain or pass through it on the way there, even if it had been created in, say, the West Indies, and ended up making a pointless double crossing of the Atlantic. The arrangement was insanely inefficient, but gratifyingly lucrative to British merchants and manufacturers, who essentially had a fast-growing continent at their commercial mercy. By the eve of the revolution America effectively was Britain’s export market. It took 80 percent of British linen exports, 76 percent of exported nails, 60 percent of wrought iron, nearly half of all the glass sold abroad. In bulk terms, America annually imported 30,000 pounds of silk,