Jefferson was one of the richest men in the new United States. He had a 5,000-acre plantation worked by hundreds of slaves, a splendid mansion in Virginia that he had designed himself, one of the biggest wine collections in America, and one of the greatest private libraries in the world — it became the foundation of the Library of Congress. But despite his wealth and status his home was so cold in winter that the ink in his pen sometimes froze, making it difficult for him to write to complain about the chill.
Jefferson was rich and sophisticated, but his life was closer to the lives of people in the Iron Age than it was to ours. This is true literally, in that modern forms of steel and other metal alloys hadn’t been invented. But it is most true in the staggering fact that everyone at the rehearsal dinner was born and raised in luxury unimaginable in Jefferson’s time.
The young people at my table were anxious about money: starter-job salaries, high rents, student loans. But they never worried about freezing in their home. They could go to the sink and get a glass of clean water without fear of getting sick. Most of all, they were alive. In 1800, when Jefferson was elected president, more than one out of four children died before the age of five. Today, it is a shocking tragedy if a child dies. To Jefferson, these circumstances would have represented wealth and power beyond the dreams of avarice. The young people at my table had debts, but they were the debts of kings.
Jefferson lived in a world of horse-drawn carriages, blazing fireplaces, and yellow fever. But what most separates our day from his is not our automobiles, airplanes, and high-rise apartments — it is that today vast systems provide abundant food, water, energy, and health to most people, including everyone at the rehearsal dinner. In Jefferson’s time, not even the president of the United States had what we have. But few of us are aware of that, or of what it means.
The privilege of ignorance was not available to Jefferson. Monticello’s water supply was a well, which frequently ran dry. The ex-president had to solve the problem on his own. Even if he had had a telephone, there was nobody to call — water utilities did not exist. To make his water supply more reliable, he decided to create a backup system: four cisterns, each eight feet long, wide, and deep, that would store rainwater. His original designs leaked and were vulnerable to contamination. Jefferson, aided by hired architects and slave labor, spent a decade working out how to improve them. He was immersed in his own infrastructure.