The third US president has been back under the microscope in the wake of neo-Nazi violence, and his Virginia home reflects the moral ambiguity of his legacy

Steve Light looked at the tourists gathered on the east portico and asked what words come to mind when they think of Thomas Jefferson. “Declaration of Independence,” ventured one. “President,” said another. “Library,” offered a third. No one mentioned slave owner.

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But the tour guide, describing Monticello’s grand house on a hill and 5,000-acre plantation that grew mainly tobacco and wheat, did not mince words. “It’s important to remember this house is not possible without enslaved labour that supported Jefferson’s lifestyle. So Jefferson’s a complicated guy. If you want to understand the United States, you probably have to understand Thomas Jefferson.”

Not every country in the world embraces such a self-critique or subtle understanding of founders and heroes. Jefferson has been back under the microscope this week in the wake of neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan violence in nearby Charlottesville, Virginia. Donald Trump, decrying the removal of Confederate statues, tweeted: “Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson – who’s next, Washington, Jefferson? So foolish!”

It is true that both Jefferson and Lee owned slave plantations in Virginia. But most historians find the comparison absurd: Jefferson (1743-1826) helped create the United States, whereas Lee was a traitor who took up arms to destroy it. Nevertheless, the third US president’s reputation has risen and fallen over time, and Monticello – the only former home of an American president to be granted UN world heritage status – is a beautiful, living museum that strives to reflect the moral ambiguity of his legacy.

Tour manager Light led the group into what Jefferson called his “essay in architecture”, drawing on ancient Rome, and an entrance hall decorated with Native American tools, weapons and clothing as well as antique maps, mineral samples, antlers, horns and bones of extinct animals. A cannonball-sized weights-and-pulley system worked as a seven day calendar clock over two floors. Busts included Jefferson’s political nemesis Alexander Hamilton, “now a Broadway star,” Light said.

Next, in the south square room, a copy of the Declaration of Independence, authored by Jefferson, hangs in a frame. It includes the words, “all men are created equal”. Light explained to the tour group that Jefferson opposed slavery, calling it a “moral depravity” and a “hideous blot” that presented the greatest threat to the survival of the new nation. Yet for all his unquenchable curiosity and exquisite reasoning, he owned 607 enslaved men, women and children during his lifetime and freed only five in his will.

His writings also suggested that black people were inferior in “body and mind”. Light told the group: “Jefferson’s ideas have been used by generations to support the institution of slavery, the Jim Crow laws and, very plainly, racial ideas today.”

Next are the library and cabinet room, like stepping into the mind of this Enlightenment polymath who believed reason and knowledge could improve human condition. There are books, an octagonal filing table with drawers labeled for alphabetical filing, an astronomical case clock, telescope, orrery (model of the solar system), a revolving book stand that allowed Jefferson to read and reference five books at a time and a copying machine he used to duplicate his numerous letters as he wrote them.

But for visitors to Monticello, about 120 miles from Washington DC, there is also recognition of the brutal, unpaid labour that made this personal laboratory and genteel life of the mind possible. In this it is a metaphor for America itself and the glittering cities, soaring skyscrapers and industrial might inextricably bound with centuries of exploitation.

Last year Monticello, with the National Endowment for the Humanities and University of Virginia (founded by Jefferson), hosted a public summit on the legacies of race and slavery. It has also launched an app, “Slavery at Monticello”, and is restoring Mulberry Row, the principal plantation street that was the center of life for free white and black people, indentured servants and slaves. Work is under way to preserve or reconstruct its dwellings, workshops and storehouses.

In one of the rebuilt cabins, which includes a bed, an information panel is entitled provocatively: “Not so bad?” It says: “John and Priscilla Hemmings lived in a cabin similar to – or even better than – the dwelling of many poorer free whites. Yet the material comfort suggested here did not lessen the enslavement of the Hemmingses. All enslaved people, as property, endured the constant threat of sale and separation from their families subject to the needs and wishes of their owners, a reality that no poor free person had to endure. Physical violence and force were hallmarks of bondage but the threat of separation to enslaved families was an equally powerful and devastating aspect of the American slave system.”

Descendants of the Hemmings have slept in this reconstructed dwelling, part of an ongoing project at Monticello to engage the families of Jefferson’s slaves. Niya Bates, public historian of slavery and African American life at Monticello, recalled: “There were 10 people in this cabin, it was the hottest night of the summer and they could hear animals outside. There was a sense of ‘Wow, these spaces are uncomfortable.’”

Next year, Monticello will open the restored quarters of Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman, to the public. Hemings had at least six children, now believed to have been fathered by Jefferson many years after the death of his wife. Hemings’s name became publicly linked to Jefferson’s in 1802, when a newspaper alleged that she was Jefferson’s “concubine” and had borne him a number of children. A 1998 DNA study genetically linked Hemings’s male descendants with male descendants of the Jefferson family.

Bates said: “I was eight when Sally Hemings’s DNA came out and I remember people fighting tooth and nail in the grocery store. A lot of people just denied her relationship with Jefferson ever existed there were his descendants and people who have this in their oral history. The DNA just backed it up.”

Bates, 27, who is African American and grew up in Charlottesville, added: “Charlottesville has always had a complex racial history. People are unwilling to deal with racism in an intimate way with their friends and family. But we’ve had the Monticello descendants uniting with Jefferson’s white descendants and trying to reconcile. What we can do is have communities come together.”

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Monticello worked closely with the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History in Washington on a Jefferson exhibit that captures his moral complexity. It places a statue of the former president against the backdrop of a wall bearing the names of enslaved people he owned and, laced with irony, a quotation from the Declaration of Independence in giant gold letters. A caption notes that “slavery was woven into his daily life, as were its contradictions”. Trump stood before the exhibit during a tour of the museum earlier this year but was talking to officials and gave little sign that he had digested its message.

The museum’s juxtaposition offers an intriguing contribution to the current debate about statues and context. Jefferson’s decree that “all men are created equal” invites a charge of hypocrisy but was cited by civil rights leader Martin Luther King in his “I have a dream speech” speech as an ideal worth striving for.

In short, it’s always more complicated than heroes and villains. Gary Sandling, vice-president of visitor programmes and services at Monticello, said: “Jefferson’s fortunes have waxed and waned throughout US history. Telling a more nuanced story has forced people to grapple with those elements that were not emphasised. From 1619 to 1865, slavery was legal in the United States: the legacy of that is important for us to understand what follows.”