My family and I left Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia home, on an unseasonably cool day in late August. On the way out, my father bought Christopher Hitchens’ book, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America, at the admittedly charming gift shop. As the car pulled away from the birthplace of the Declaration of Independence, my father said in amused frustration, “I have read more positive things about Jefferson in five pages of Hitchens than I heard all day.”

Earlier that day, he had attempted to engage one of our guides in a discussion over the substance of the Declaration, suggesting that the Civil War was really a battle between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. True to form, our guide responded with smiling platitudes and a patient “that’s interesting”. After all, she seemed to imply, Monticello is not the place to talk about the Declaration. There are so many more interesting things to talk about.

The guides at Monticello were so nice, and uniformly predictable. They were nearly carbon copies of many of my college and graduate school teachers. I have no doubt that they listen to NPR, read the New York Times, and recycle. They were nice people. Educated and polite people, too. I sympathized with them in their attempts to fairly represent a man they clearly viewed with contempt.      

If I had left Monticello with no previous knowledge of Jefferson, I would have thought him eccentric at best, twisted and perverse at worst. I felt cheated as I took my last look at the homestead of one of America’s great men. Their convoluted descriptions of Jefferson were laden with code words and phrases: Complicated. A man of his time. Conflicted. Many jokes were made about Sally Hemmings.

As Hitchens puts it, “it would be lazy or obvious to say that he contained contradictions or paradoxes. This is true of everybody, and of everything. It would be infinitely more surprising to strike upon a historic figure, or indeed a nation, that was not subject to this law.”

Jefferson clearly did not reach the standard of integrity set by the moral umpires of Monticello, but only one of our guides veered into the overtly political. The Slavery Tour was led by a woman who had clearly been instructed in the ways of sensitivity training. She asked us all to repeat the phrase, “Martha owned Priscilla”, or “Priscilla belonged to Martha”. Noting that I did not participate in this exercise, she kindly explained that it was difficult for some people to say such things out loud.

Shortly thereafter, she asked us to think about Ferguson, and the deep racial divide that still haunts our country. She then backtracked, sarcastically saying she loves this country. I bristled, and several people on the tour walked off. Others shook their heads or muttered. She had introduced a divide in our small group- between those who were angry at Jefferson and his legacy, and those who were angry because his legacy was being distorted.

Abraham Lincoln, the man best suited to defend Jefferson, said in 1859:

“All honor to Jefferson: to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that today, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.”

Truly, Jefferson was a man who contained contradictions. It is sad that only one side of what made him paradoxical was presented at Monticello.

I wanted philosophy and received an in-depth description of Jefferson’s Great Clock (which, as the Monticello website explains, “evinces Jefferson's desire for order, which he exerted in equal but different ways over his family and his slaves.”). I wanted a discussion of what freedom meant to Jefferson, and received a complicated genealogy exhibit of the slaves purportedly related to Jefferson.

Not once was I allowed to forget that Jefferson owned slaves -- every mention of his butler, cook, and fieldhand was prefaced by the word “enslaved”. Nor do I want to forget. But I refuse to be ashamed of the man who introduced freedom to the world.     

The next day, we journeyed to Colonial Williamsburg, and attended the reading of the Declaration of Independence, which contains a long list of specific grievances against the king. I tried to envision what it must have been like then -- the rioting in the streets, disruption of civil order, the will to fight until death. Jefferson’s words were behind the revolution and disorder of that time. Are his actions behind the disorder in Ferguson today?

That is what our guide at Monticello wanted us to believe. But I believe that it is people like our guides, people who claim to be presenting objective accounts of men they clearly dislike, who are really to blame for the anger that led to a disaster like Ferguson. If Jefferson’s own home could be taken over by academics bent on perpetuating racial animus, where are messages of freedom and equality being taught? Where is the Freedom Tour at Monticello?