America’s third president was much given to “speculative doctrines on imaginary perfection” that did not always comport with reality.

From the excellent Perilous Fight by Stephen Budiansky, an account of the naval aspects of the War of 1812. Page 32.

Like all caricatures, the picture of America painted by British travelers and opinion writers captured some truths. On a visit to Monticello during the summer of 1805, Augustus Foster observed with more perception and nuance, and less of the automatic disdain that had animated his earlier impressions of America, the contradictions of American democracy, and of the leader who was supposed to embody its values. The president who made a show of democratic simplicity, riding his horse unaccompanied about Washington in his worn coat, spent freely on his own comforts at home atop his mountain retreat in Virginia. There were all the gadgets Jefferson’s guests were expected to admire: the cart equipped with an odometer, the spiral rotating clothes rack. And then Foster, the English aristocrat, found that his own views on human equality and liberty were far more broad-minded than Jefferson’s, at least when it came to extending the American notion of liberty to the black race. Foster thought it self-evident that blacks were “as capable to the full of profiting by the advantages of Education as any other of any Shade whatever,” but the Republican president told him that “the Mental Qualities of the Negro Race” fitted them only “to carry Burthens” and that freedom would only render them more miserable; the American champion of democratic equality dismissed emancipation of the slaves as “an English Hobby,” much as the tea tax had been. And Jefferson the extoller of agrarian virtue was “considered a very bad Farmer,” Foster found in conversation with others nearby; a whole hillside of Monticello had been so negligently cultivated as to have eroded away into gullies so deep that “Houses afterwards might be buried” in them. “They have been obliged to scatter Scotch Broom Seed over it, which at least succeeded in at least hiding the Cavities.” Like the country itself, America’s third president was much given to “speculative doctrines on imaginary perfection” that did not always comport with reality.