Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 11, 1993 TAG: 9304110234
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: C1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Tony Germanotta Landmark News Service
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
LIMITLESS SCOPE AWESOME PRACTICALITY UNWAVERING IDEALISM HE SET ON A JOURNEY
FOR a decade, Mary Roy Edwards has taken people on tours through Monticello, the mansion designed and built by Thomas Jefferson on a ridge overlooking Charlottesville.And in the endless rounds, the Larchmont native has developed a deep appreciation for America's third president.
It wasn't so much the dumbwaiter he installed inside his fireplace to bring wines from the cellar or the ingenious way he mounted a wind vane so he wouldn't have to go outside to make meteorological observations.
It wasn't the clock he designed that used marks on the wall to keep track of the day of the week, or the bookshelves built to quickly come apart as boxes so his impressive library could accompany him on his many trips.
It wasn't the way he turned windows into extra doorways or hid all the workers' areas by carving them into the hill beneath wooden promenades - thereby preserving the home's glorious views.
For Edwards, Jefferson's greatest invention was liberty itself.
"He was the one that crystallized the ideas of his day into the Declaration of Independence," she explained. "You can call him the architect of a country."
Edwards is in good company.
"We have constructed our political culture around the ideas that Jefferson articulated in the Declaration of Independence," said Peter S. Onuf, author of several books on Jefferson and the current Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation professor of history at the University of Virginia. "Like him or loathe him, his ideas are the common currency of the day."
Merrill D. Peterson, a prominent Jefferson biographer and professor emeritus at the University of Virginia, describes the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence as "the most important paragraph Jefferson wrote in his lifetime, it might be the most important paragraph in human history."
That "clear, concise, eloquent" description of how government and human rights should interact, Peterson said, has "gone around the world and is still going around the world."
Although Jefferson declared that his ideas were "self evident" few of his contemporaries would have agreed, Onuf said. It was Jefferson's genius that made the leap from throwing off tyranny to trusting democracy.
"He said he thought that the rules of honesty that were expected to apply in the activities of individuals should also apply in the activities of nations," said Alf J. Mapp Jr., an Old Dominion University professor who has written two biographies of Jefferson.
Scientist, statesman and sage;
Architect, agriculturalist and anthropologist;
Politician, philosopher and patriot.
There seems no limit to the scope of Thomas Jefferson.
A man who blended an awesome practicality with unwavering idealism, Jefferson was a beacon even among the luminaries of his time.
He has rightfully been called America's Renaissance Man, and also may have been the nation's first connoisseur. Fine wines were a passion, as were French and Italian foods. He is said to have brought the first vanilla bean to the United States, had ice cream in the White House long before Dolly Madison, and - to introduce America to the delights of pasta - he imported the first macaroni machine from Italy. His favorite food, he wrote, was English peas, and he was attacked as unpatriotic for ignoring the meat and potatoes of his region for a diet that relied heavily on vegetables.
Jefferson inherited his plantation at the age of 14, and could have settled easily into the comfortable life of a wealthy landowner.
Instead, he set on a journey of self-education, determined not to waste a second.
Over his lifetime, he amassed several large libraries. The first was destroyed in a fire at Shadwell, his birthplace. The second became the foundation of the Library of Congress. The third gave the one at his University of Virginia its start.
Jefferson could read in seven languages and indexed his books much in the way of a modern library, by subject, so he could quickly find the information inside. He loved mathematics and astronomy, classics and history. But religion was something he believed should