Uriah Levy willed Monticello to the United States, the Confederacy auctioned it, and New York's highest court voided the gift

Thomas Jefferson died in debt in 1826. His executor sold Monticello in 1831 to James Turner Barclay, a Charlottesville druggist, for about $7,500. In 1834 Barclay sold it to Uriah Phillips Levy, a Jewish Navy officer who was court-martialed six times. Levy died in New York on 22 March 1862. His will left Monticello to the people of the United States for a farm school for orphans of Navy warrant officers, with Virginia and three Hebrew congregations as fallbacks. The Confederacy treated Levy's estate as enemy property. In November 1864 a Confederate marshal auctioned Monticello. Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin Franklin Ficklin bid $80,500 in Confederate money. At the same sale a woman and her seven children were sold for $23,100. After the war the land went back to Levy's estate. His widow Virginia and other heirs sued. In 1865 the New York Court of Appeals, in Levy v. Levy, held that the federal government could not take a private charitable trust and that the fallback gifts broke the rule against perpetuities. Two judges dissented. The suits had 47 parties. In 1879 Levy's nephew Jefferson Monroe Levy bought out the other heirs for $10,050. From about 1909 Maud Littleton campaigned for the government to take the house from him. He sold it in 1923 to the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation for $500,000 and died on 6 March 1924. In 2026 the Thomas Jefferson Foundation owns and runs Monticello.