Monticello is Burning: Thomas Jefferson on Trial?! |
Enslaved people have revolted. Smoke rolls across the Virginia hills while the author of the Declaration of Independence is dragged from the estate that once symbolized Enlightenment liberty and American possibility. The man who wrote “all men are created equal” now finds himself imprisoned by those excluded from his definition of equality.
Monticello is burning.
During a dinner party, a woman long believed lost at sea returns. She is Theodosia Burr Alston, the presumed-dead daughter of former vice president of the United States Aaron Burr. Years earlier, she vanished into the Atlantic and was mourned as dead. Now she reappears transformed, having lived among pirates, fugitives, and revolutions moving through the violent underside of the Enlightenment.
Her second husband, one of the pirates who returned with her, is James Hubbard, a man who escaped enslavement from Monticello itself. Together they helped organize the revolt long before this night arrived.
The Atlantic world Jefferson helped imagine politically has returned home as a........