At his death, Robert Carter, who had been Rector of the College, Speaker of the Burgesses, President of the Council, Acting Governor of Virginia, and Proprietor of the Northern Neck, was described in the Gentleman’s Magazine of 1732 as the possessor of an estate of 300,000 acres of land, about 1,000 slaves, and ten thousand pounds. Pliny the Younger might well have been proud of such an estate. On a substantial basis like this, a Palladian mansion was possible; and up and down the land, wherever the means justified the end, Palladian mansions were built.
The really striking thing about the architecture of Manorial America with its great dignity and its sometimes striking beauty of detail or originality of design--as in the staircase at Berry Hill which creates a flaring pattern like butterfly’s wings--the striking thing is the fact that the work is not the product of a specialized education; it is rather the outcome of a warm, loving, and above all intelligent commerce with the past, in the days before Horseback Hall had become as aimless and empty as Heartbreak House. Mr. Arthur T. Bolton, the biographer of the brothers Adam, has exhibited letters from Robert Adam’s patrons in England which mark their avid and precise interest in classical forms; and without doubt a little digging would uncover similar examples in America.
These educated eighteenth-century gentlemen, these contemporaries of “Junius” and Gibbon, who had read Horace and Livy and Plutarch, had one foot in their own age, and the other in the grave of Rome. In America, Thomas Jefferson exemplified this whole culture at its best and gave it a definite stamp: he combined in almost equal degrees the statesman, the student, and the artist. Not merely did Jefferson design his own Monticello; he executed a number of other houses for the surrounding gentry--Shadwell, Edgehill, Farrington--to say nothing of the Virginia State Capitol and the church and university at Charlottesville. It was Jefferson who in America first gave a strict interpretation to classicism; for he had nothing but contempt for the free, Georgian vernacular which was making its way among those who regarded the classical past as little more than a useful embellishment.