Jefferson's White House: Monticello on the Potomac

by James B. Conroy

Overview

As the first president to occupy the White House for an entire term, Thomas Jefferson shaped the president’s residence, literally and figuratively, more than any of its other occupants. Remarkably enough, however, though many books have immortalized Jefferson’s Monticello, none has been devoted to the vibrant look, feel, and energy of his still more famous and consequential home from 1801 to 1809. In Monticello on the Potomac, James B. Conroy, author of the award-winning Lincoln’s White House offers a vivid, highly readable account of how life was lived in Jefferson’s White House and the young nation’s rustic capital.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781538108468
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	10/23/2019
Pages:	328
Sales rank:	1,130,762
Product dimensions:	1.60(w) x 4.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

James Conroy is the author of Our One Common Country: Abraham Lincoln and the Hampton Roads Peace Conference of 1865 (Lyons Press, 2014) and Lincoln’s White House: The People’s House in Wartime (R&L, 2016), co-winner of the 2017 Gilder Lerhman Lincoln Prize and winner of the 2017 Abraham Lincoln Institute Book Prize. He resides on Boston’s South Shore. Conroy speaks extensively and has been featured on C-Span Book TV.

Table of Contents

Prologue 1. It Was More Than I Expected 2. With Very Decent Respect 3. True Republicanism 4. Men of 1776 5. Notions of Equality 6. Grumble Who Will 7. Chiefly of the Sneering Kind 8. A French Way of Cooking Them 9. Unfinished Persons 10. I Found It Detestable 11. By No Means Dangerous 12. This Will Be the Cause of War 13. Madame Eve 14. Highly Embellished With Indian Finery 15. Oriental Luxury and Taste 16. Age Has Some Effect Upon Him 17. Chained to a Writing Table 18. The Hermit of Monticello Epilogue Selected Bibliography Notes

Editorial Reviews

Jefferson’s White House opens the door to an amazing world.  One can feel from the first pages the force of Jefferson’s determination to create a truly democratic space in that elegant, unfinished house, making dinner guests fresh from the wilderness the equal of the British ambassador.  The reader meets the fascinating collection of people who crowded his presidency, while Jefferson is discovered as he wished to present himself, leading the emerging American democracy but, consistent with his hallmark of equality, also revealing his flaws.  Mr. Conroy gives us a true and unvarnished portrait of this controversial man, totally at home in the lovely Irish-Palladian white palace set in the mud and muck of the bucolic capital.

Patrick Phillips-Schrock

James Conroy is a gifted writer and historian. There is something almost magical about the way he transports us back into the world of Thomas Jefferson, by recreating, through telling detail, the President’s House as it was in the beginning, new and raw but elegant and worldly, as contradictory as its brilliant occupant.

Evan Thomas

In his engaging narrative, Conroy surrounds his pivotal figure, Thomas Jefferson, with the vivid characters that formed the presidential sphere from political friends, foes and family members to the free and enslaved staff that insured the President’s House functioned properly. A strength of the book is the ample number of direct quotations from this wide array of characters, evincing the research that supports this compelling story of Jefferson and his use of the presidential mansion to promote his ideas of true republicanism.

G.S. Wilson

Jefferson’s White House is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of a controversial figure at a critical time in the new American nation’s history.  By focusing on the third president’s ongoing efforts to transform an unfinished house into a home, James B. Conroy brings the place and the people who lived, worked, and visited there to fascinating life.  His portrait of Jefferson as genial host, partisan politician, family man and friend, employer and slave-owner is sympathetic yet unsparing, making a complex character comprehensible to contemporary readers. An ambitious, enlightening, and brilliantly realized project.  

Peter S. Onuf

Those familiar with his previous book, Lincoln’s White House: The People’s House in Wartime (2017), will welcome Conroy’s present foray into an earlier “civil war”—a war between the dominant Jeffersonian Republicans and the minority political party at the time, the Federalists.

Washington History

Jefferson’s White House vividly captures the third president’s time in America’s most iconic home. James Conroy goes into incredible architectural and aesthetic detail, highlighting not only how Jefferson understood and used these spaces to project his political and ideological beliefs, but also how visitors, dignitaries, peers, and enslaved persons experienced them firsthand. For anyone interested in Jefferson’s presidency and the relationship between politics and place, this is a must read.

Matthew Costello

This well-researched and colorfully written book deftly humanizes Jefferson and reveals the traits that endeared him to family and friends and disarmed potential political enemies. It is a significant contribution to Jefferson scholarship.   John B. Boles, author of Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty.

John Boles

Impressively informative, detailed and documented, "Jefferson's White House: Monticello on the Potomac" is an extraordinary and deftly scripted study that is especially and unreservedly recommended for both community and academic library collections.

Midwest Book Review

Donald Corren ably employs his soft delivery and clear enunciation in narrating Conroy’s history of Thomas Jefferson’s administration as president of the United States (1801-1809). Assuming the office after a bitterly contested election, Jefferson was the first president to occupy the White House, which was still an unfinished building in the rustic District of Columbia. Corren presents the narrative sections of Jefferson’s time in office at a pace that is easy to follow. Quotes are read with no change in intonation and are easy to understand. M.T.F. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

MARCH 2020 - AudioFile