Benjamin Wallace - The Billionaire's Vinegar

IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE FORBES PURCHASE, LUCIA Goodwin appeared on TV for the first time in her life, driving from Charlottesville, Virginia, to the National Agricultural Library in Maryland to tape an interview. Goodwin was, in 1985, the closest thing to a full-time generalist scholar at Monticello. A research associate whom everyone called Cinder, she had a wry and studious nature. She had been at Monticello off and on since 1968, shortly after she graduated from Harvard with a degree in American history and literature. For the last five years she had been consumed with editing the Memorandum Books, Jefferson’s financial diary, a project begun by her coeditor thirty years earlier. She and the coeditor had finally finished the manuscript the year before. Now she had time on her hands.

When news of Rodenstock’s discovery had broken two months earlier, the staff at Monticello was instinctively skeptical. Some poor widow or other attic-rummaging type was always showing up there bearing an “original” copy of the Declaration of Independence, found in a shoebox in a closet, that turned out to be a 1944 reproduction. The percentage that proved legitimate was infinitesimal. It seemed strange, too, that Christie’s had not heeded Monticello’s input before deeming the bottles authentic.

As media calls began coming in, Monticello’s curator decided that the seat of all things Jefferson should have an informed position on the bottles. The task of formulating it fell to Cinder Goodwin, who began her research even before the auction took place. Her interest in wine extended as far as most people’s: She liked to drink it. Her obsession was Jefferson. As it happened, Monticello had compiled a comprehensive list of all the Jefferson relics known to exist. And Goodwin was very confident that she could prove, or disprove, Michael Broadbent’s attribution of the Jefferson bottles.

THE PRIVATE NONPROFIT foundation set up in 1923 to administer Monticello was itself in the collecting business. In the course of his life, Jefferson assembled a substantial amount of art, furniture, and other valuables. He sold some furniture during his lifetime, when his term as secretary of state was ending and he was getting ready to move from Philadelphia to Monticello. In 1815 he sold his personal library to the Library of Congress, which had lost its collection to fire in the War of 1812. Early American artifacts were in demand even during his lifetime, and he gave a draft of the Declaration of Independence to the Philosophical Society in Philadelphia; another society in Philadelphia, dedicated to celebrating William Penn’s arrival, owned one chair sat in by Penn and two made from the elm tree beneath which Penn first signed a treaty with the Indians.

Jefferson anticipated the historic value of his possessions when he gave his granddaughter’s new husband the custom-made “writing box,” or lap-desk, on which he had written the Declaration. “If these things acquire a superstitious value, because of their connection with particular persons,” Jefferson wrote to the granddaughter in late 1825, “surely a connection with the greater Charter of our Independence may give a value to what has been associated with that…. Its imaginary value will increase with years, and if he lives to my age, or another half-century, he may see it carried in the procession of our nation’s birthday, as the relics of the Saints are in those of the Church.” Recognizing that the object’s value hinged on the certainty of its connection to the Declaration, Jefferson scratched out an affidavit attesting to its origin.

When Jefferson died, in July of 1826, his will specified the disposition of only a handful of items. He bequeathed his walking stick to James Madison and watches to each of his grandchildren. At least ten clippings of his hair were taken posthumously. His farm and account books, as well as his collection of 40,000 letters—every one that he received, plus a duplicate of every letter he sent—went to his grandson and executor, Thomas Jefferson Randolph. Most of the silver went to his daughter Martha. A number of valuables were distributed among family members.

At a five-day executor’s sale at Monticello the following January, the remainder of Jefferson’s personal property was auctioned. This included paintings, sculptures, Jefferson’s copying machine, “130 valuable negroes,” and “various other articles curious and useful to men of business and private families.” Jefferson’s grandchildren bought a lot of the furniture. Other items were bought by friends, neighbors, and strangers. Monticello was overrun by ghoulish tourists who walked away with whatever they fancied, including fig bushes and grapevines; Jefferson’s family resorted to placing a notice in the local newspaper beseeching memento seekers to “desist from such trespasses.”

Certain categories of items were handled separately. Most of Jefferson’s books (he had reassembled a large library) were sold, in 1829, to a bookseller in Washington, D.C. His art collection was shipped to Boston for auction. On the journey, the paintings were severely damaged by seawater; when they went on the block in July 1828, only one sold.

In short, Jefferson’s worldly possessions scattered, often without a trace. Over the years, they would briefly surface. On July 4, 1876, at a Boston celebration of the country’s Centennial, the lap-desk Jefferson had given to his grandson-in-law was displayed. Robert Winthrop, a former senator who had become head of the Massachusetts Historical Society, scoffed at Jefferson’s self-deprecating affidavit.

“Superstitions! Imaginary value! Not for an instant can we admit such ideas,” Winthrop said. “The modesty of the writer has betrayed even ‘the masterly pen. ’There is no imaginary value to this relic, and no superstition is required to render it as precious and priceless a piece of wood as the secular cabinets of the world have ever possessed, or ever claimed to possess…. Even the table at Runnymede on which the Magna Carta was sealed,” Winthrop went on, getting a bit carried away, “could hardly exceed, could hardly equal, in interest and value, this little mahogany desk. What momentous issues for our country, and for mankind, were locked up in this narrow drawer, as night after night the rough notes of preparation for the Great Paper were laid aside for the revision of the morning!” Ultimately, the desk went to the Smithsonian.

Sometimes Jefferson relics turned up in the collectibles market or came to light in an academic context. In 1904 a newspaper reported that a brass coal scuttle “said to have been at one time the property of Thomas Jefferson” was stolen from a Manhattan antique store by “a negro.” Around the same time, William Jennings Bryan purchased a marble punch bowl, with original oak pestle, that had belonged to Jefferson. In 1930, Jefferson descendants consigned several items for auction in New York, including a 1776 letter relating Revolutionary news and an 1819 schematic for the buildings of the University of Virginia. In the 1940s a New York antiques dealer named Israel Sack tried selling a Jefferson clock, which had been purchased at the 1827 sale, to the White House and the Jefferson Foundation. In 1947 a scholar combing the libraries and museums of Paris on behalf of Princeton University’s epic project to publish all of Jefferson’s letters happened upon the original wooden models of a new and better plow Jefferson had invented.

Over the years, Monticello enjoyed considerable success in recovering Jefferson relics, or at least locating them. The provenances were often straightforward. The Jefferson table lent by the Maryland Historical Society for the Forbes exhibit had passed down through five generations of Jefferson’s descendants before being purchased by a woman who willed it to the society. Many of the pieces that descended through Jefferson’s heirs found their way back to Monticello either as gifts or purchases. By 1958, more than fifteen pieces of the original silver owned by Jefferson had been reclaimed; when Monticello could not get the original, it sometimes had reproductions made.