Monticello

The Smoky Mountains smoked, the Blue Ridge Mountains have blue ridges: it's all very satisfying.

Monticello was very satisfying too. Thomas Jefferson's house was delightful to visit - and not just in a National Trust sort of way (the yellow walls in his dining room will live with me for a long time). It was very well presented, brilliantly explained and utterly beautiful. Most importantly, it brought the man to life. Unlike most stately homes, Monticello is not the product of a line of innumerable Dukes or Viscounts. Jefferson designed it himself and later inhabitants preserved it as best they could until a Trust took over the upkeep in 1923. We saw his books, his bed, his boots, his gadgets and clocks; we learnt his quirks and his habits. As a day out, it was brilliant and we all enjoyed ourselves.

Jefferson himself, however, although likeable does not quite satisfy. Unlike the mountains that do exactly what they say on the tin, the man contains an impossible contradiction. On one hand, he is the scribe of the Declaration of Independence, a champion of liberty. On the other, outside the mansion, on Mulberry Row, sit the remains of the houses of some of the slaves who worked his vast estates.

Their stories were just as fascinating as his. They seem to have been well looked after, for the time, but it was made clear to us that there was always an economic advantage for Jefferson to do so. He deplored slavery in his writings and tried to denounce it in the Declaration of Independence but had no hesitation in owning slaves if it was profitable to do so. Neither did he free slaves if he could help it; in his will he arranged manumission for five, but two of those were almost certainly his own children by Sally Hemmings, a mixed-race slave in his possession.

It's these contradictions which niggled as we got back in the car and came north, through West Virginia and Maryland to Pennsylvania. Jefferson's personal failure meant that his own slaves would suffer terribly after his death. Politically, his concept of liberty and fear of tyranny led him to support the powers of individual states against the nascent federal authority. By default, such policies supported the business interests of slave owners and prevented the issue of slavery from being resolved by the Founding Fathers - the task would fall to a later generation.

Just like our journey today, the road from Monticello would eventually lead to Gettysburg and the Civil War.