 This is Mises Weekends with your host, Jeff Deist. You do have a new book, Thomas Jefferson Revolutionary, A Radical Struggle to Remake America. There's libertarians who go either way on Jefferson. Some think he's a heroic, you know, decentralizer, as opposed to the Hamiltonian forces. Other people say, well, you know, he created, he helped create this constitution that we currently labor under now that seems so ill-libertarian. So tell us about the premise of your book and what you think about him. Well, first, Jefferson, every semester I teach introductory classes in American history at my university, and I always tell the students, okay, I know that you think Thomas Jefferson wrote the Constitution, and he wrote the Bill of Rights, but he didn't, he didn't have anything to do with it. He was in France. However, you're going to tell me on the final that he wrote the Constitution, and then every semester, he wrote the Constitution. Thomas Jefferson did not write the Constitution or have anything to do with writing the Constitution. In fact, we don't even know that he had anything to do with writing the 12th Amendment, which was actually authored by Republicans in Congress while he was president. But my previous book, the one immediately before this one, this is actually my fifth book, the one immediately before this one was a biography of Jefferson's best friend in the world and closest political ally, James Madison. And I've had several people tell me that after reading that book, they didn't know whether I liked Madison, which I take as a compliment. The setting temptation of people who write about particular individuals is either to attack them or to lob them, and I try to do neither. So my book about Jefferson is not about why you should lob him or why you should hate him. It's about his career as a radical, he was a truly radical constitutional political reformer, the side in which he also was responsible for several other initiatives that still affect us every day. So for example, those decimal coins in your pocket, the idea that we should have a decimal coinage system was Jefferson's idea. In fact, America was the first country in the world that ever had a decimal coinage system. Now virtually every country has, maybe actually every country has a decimal coinage system, Jefferson's idea. Another idea that he had was that American public government buildings ought to be based on Greek and Roman examples. This had not been true during the colonial period. Jefferson designed the capital of Virginia, which he patterned on a Greek temple that he found in the South of France. And when he was present, when he was, I'm sorry, when he was Secretary of State, he was involved in laying out the, and ultimately when he was president, he was involved in laying out the design for the federal capital. So there's, he also was the fellow who had the idea of moving the capital of Virginia from Williamsburg to Richmond. But there are various other slight, kind of one-off reforms like that that he was responsible for. Maybe the most important achievement that he had at a stroke was that he was the one who had the idea that immediately after the revolution began of abolishing Virginia's feudal land tenures. So neither glazing over as I say that, but under English law at the time the revolution began, if a man died and had a son, his oldest, or if he had more than one child, his oldest son inherited his entire estate. That was called bright primogeniture. There also was a principle called entail, which was that an estate could not be divided by its current owner. So if you're the oldest son and you inherit 3,000 acres and they're entailed, you cannot during your lifetime sell them. And then if you have 12 sons, you can't decide, you know, the first one's a drunk, the second one's a waste roll. I'm going to give this stuff to the third one, no. We had to go to the first one. So one effect of this was that the whole body of your land holding would remain in that one pair of hands generation after generation. A historian named Holly Brewer calculated about two decades ago now that at the time the revolution began, about two-thirds of today's state of Virginia was owned by about 85 families. So in other words, about two-thirds of today's state of Virginia only being owned by 85 families means that those 85 families owned on average 300 square miles each of Virginia. So Jefferson's abolition of primal geniture and entail was absolutely essential to having a Republican society. Once that happened in 1776 and 7, these states began to break up and by the time Jefferson died, there were very few of these largest states left. And actually, maybe I should give you a little more of an idea, 300 square miles. My state of Connecticut has eight counties. 300 square miles is about half of the Connecticut county. So that means that 16 of these families would have owned an area of the entire state of today's Connecticut. These people were just fabulously wealthy. And the main part of the book is about the long-running efforts that Jefferson made. So for example, an effort on behalf of freedom of conscience, which after the two Washingtonian principles that the generals are subordinate to the civilians and the chief executive is going to retire, freedom of conscience is perhaps our most important constitutional principle. And Jefferson was the chief person who was responsible for making it one of our most important constitutional principles. So I tell the story of his doing that in one chapter of the book. Another chapter of the book, the main chapter of the book, the longest one, is about federalism. For Jefferson, federalism was the principle that should be understood to underlie the British imperial constitution. And he based his argument against the king's intervention, the parliament's intervention in North America in the 1760s and the 1770s on a claim that Virginia and other colonies each had a right to local self-government and their only legitimate tie to Britain was through the king. They had a common king. They didn't have a common parliament. They had only a common king after independence, which by the way, the Declaration of Independence is based on this idea, the federalism too. You see the operative section says these colonies that aren't of right ought to be free and independent states. That is not one nation separate states than a federal relationship. During the confederation period, Jefferson continued to insist on this principle of only limited allocation of authority to a center. And when the federal constitution was created, Jefferson repeatedly found himself in a position of having to concoct ways that the states could resist encroachments by the federal government into state reserve authority. In other words, his attitude about this general question didn't change from the imperial situation to the confederation to the U.S. Constitution. He always thought of Virginia as, and this is what he called it, my country, right? Even when he was president at one point, he wrote a document in which he referred to the federal government as, quote, our foreign government. Just think about that. So he became famous in 1774 by arguing for this principle, and he still was arguing for it in 1825 right before he died. There are a couple of chapters in the book about demographic issues, what to do about slavery, what to do about the place of American Indians in American society. He had the idea that these people, like whites, were entitled to self-government. And so he had long, long careers kind of on parallel tracks of trying to resolve these issues of what to do about slavery and what to do about the place of Indians in North American society. And finally, last chapter of the book is about his idea that, well, if we have abolished these feudal land tenures, if we've broken up these lands as states, if we're not going to have this landed aristocracy to rely on to govern Virginia, if we're not going to have generation after generation of George Mason and Patrick Henry and George Washington and so on, then what are we going to have instead? And his solution was, well, the government, the state government, ought to establish a system in which each community had a local, what we would now call an elementary school, so that every free child, and that included in his language, he didn't say girl, but he said every child, so that included girls. In fact, he didn't say that doesn't include blacks, apparently it included blacks, and at one point he got a letter from a Quaker with former who was working on the idea of educating the slaves, and Jefferson said, well, there's no reason why that couldn't be inferred from the language of my bill for this purpose. But anyway, he thought that each community ought to have a three-year public primary school, and then at the end of those three years, the best students from each community ought to be selected to be sent at public expense to a regional intermediate-level school for three years. And finally, the best of those students ought to be selected each year to go on to William & Mary. So if you're wealthy, you can still send your kids to the middle school and to William & Mary if you wanted to, but this was going to enable people beyond the few rich to send their kids to William & Mary, and actually in Colonial Virginia there was no public education, there were no primary and secondary schools, and we think about half of Virginia men were literate when the revolution began. So Jefferson had this idea of taking advantage of what he thought was probably a kind of random distribution of intellectual gifts across the population by calling out the few most promising people and sending them on to William & Mary. Eventually, of course, he kind of found himself at loggerheads with people at William & Mary because William & Mary was dominated by Episcopalians and they had a classic curriculum based on the classical languages, and Jefferson thought, well, this is outmoded, and so he wanted to have thorough curricular reforms at William & Mary, but even as governor, when he was a member of the Board of Regents, he didn't get the kind of changes he wanted, so ultimately he persuaded the legislature to create the University of Virginia. Virginia now, of course, is the best public university in the country, but Jefferson's university had a far more effect than that. That is, today we think, well, of course, Virginia has UVA and Arkansas has the University of Arkansas and Hawaii has the University of Hawaii, but really what's happened is that all the other universities in the country are based today on UVA as Jefferson conceived of it. So, for example, when UVA opened in 1821, I think it was instruction there was not and the interaction between professors and students was not on the model of other colleges in the United States. If you were a student at Harvard in 1821, you would be given reading assignments, you would be expected to memorize extensive passages when you went for class meetings, if the professor called on you, you would be expected to stand up and recite what you had memorized. This is the way that grading was done, they would see how well you did in your recitation. Jefferson thought this was mindless and what should happen instead was that people should be given essay examinations. Besides that, he didn't want the curriculum to be based on classical languages, which he thought were kind of luxury, although he did love Greek and Latin, and when he was an old man he'd ride around his horse for three miles a day, he always carried his, he always carried his Plutarch in the original Greek in his pocket, but he didn't think that this was useful. So, Virginia was the first place where you could go and you could major in essentially anything you wanted. You could study any curriculum you liked and in fact, if you thought after a couple of years that you'd have enough school and you could leave if five years later you thought you needed a little more, you could come back to UVA so it was going to be kind of an open thing. And besides that the living arrangements at UVA were different from the way they worked in say English colleges or at Harvard at the time where you, or at William & Mary where you have a big building where all the students slept and then the professors would live somewhere else. Instead at UVA you had small houses for professors arranged around the central lawn and interspersed among the houses were living quarters for the students. Jefferson's idea was that the class meetings would be on the ground floor of a professor's house and so you'd have constant interaction among the students and professors, it would be he called it an academic village. It wouldn't be a hierarchical situation like what you'd have in Europe I could go on. This is the thing is it was just radically different from the old stilted, hierarchical completely impractical, really mindless kind of instruction that went on in every other college in the world at the time. In fact at Harvard, Jefferson was in correspondence in the 1820s with the professor at Harvard who decided he wanted to use UVA's instructional methods but they weren't actually adopted at Harvard until the 1850s. Besides that UVA was according to the president of Yale at the time was the only actual university in the country. UVA had the first medical professor in the country, they had a law school they had the whole suite of areas of instruction long before any other post-secondary institution in America could be called a university. There are many ways in which it was different and as I've been saying these things I'm sure you thought well I went to college and that's how we did of course and again Virginia was revolutionary in all these ways and Jefferson had a freakish role in creating UVA too not only did he conceive of it he chose the professors he was a fabulous architect he drew all the buildings he oversaw the construction and his friend James Madison chose the books for the library and I don't mean in general we need to get 300 books on French history no they chose actual titles Jefferson had his finger in every pie and it really was his baby in a way that no other college has ever anywhere been anyone's baby it's an amazing story why did he do this? well because again he thought if you're going to have a republic you wanted the most able child to be able to have the advantage of a good education so that even if his father were a poor illiterate backwoods person the society would have the advantage of that young man's talents and this was just radically egalitarian so I think people who say well Jefferson he's not worthy of our consideration or just mistaken I don't want to be understood as saying that I think he was without flaws but that's not what this book is about it's not a biography instead it's again it's a study of his radical statesmanship which in the book I call the most significant career radical statesmanship in American history it's got its effect on us every day and we're not going to have gays thrown off buildings we're not going to have honor killings we're not going to have people punished for their religion or have you know barrel bombs dropped on us for having a long political position and it's not solely Jefferson's legacy that that's true but again I think it's more his doing than anyone else's well ladies and gentlemen we'd be talking with professor Kevin Goodman his new book is called Thomas Jefferson revolutionary a radical struggle to remake America thanks so much for a fascinating discussion of all things constitutional ladies and gentlemen you have a great weekend subscribe to Mises weekends via iTunes U Stitcher and SoundCloud or listen on Mises.org and YouTube