Clifford Dowdey describes all of this well in his book in The Great Plantation: “Washington’s Mount Vernon suffered similarly, and Jefferson at Monticello became so poor in his old age that public subscriptions provided for his subsistence. To repeat, running a plantation was a full-time job, and in the struggle for the democracy which Americans accept so casually as heritage many aristocrats impoverished themselves. “In the traditional revolution, the aristocrat was destroyed by the people; in the American Revolution the Virginia aristocrat destroyed himself, and the people, with little of the liberty-love attributed to them later, profited by it. Yet, in the current timidity about admitting any flaws in the leveling of democracy, the “people” have to be made the heroes of everything. This has resulted in confusions regarding the case history of the composite American--especially in regard to America’s original colony, and the Southern states that derived from or were influenced by it.” Overall, In it, he notes that the founding father generation of Virginians that grew out of the Virginia Golden age focused less upon planting than they probably should have, but also that they did so largely because of a concern with public service