 Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Trevor Burrus. And I'm Aaron Powell. Joining us today is Robert McDonald, a professor of history at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and the author of the forthcoming Confounding Father, Thomas Jefferson's Image in His Own Time. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Rob. Yeah, thank you, Trevor. So this is where we're talking mostly about Jefferson today and sort of the founding era, but that's your big passion is for Jefferson. I think your son is named Jefferson, correct? Yeah, that is true. So he's not lying. He, you know, he put his money where it's about. My wife and I met at Monticello. I got my job teaching at West Point. Oh, and I'm supposed to say, by the way, my views don't necessarily represent those. The U.S. military. But yeah, I got my job teaching at West Point. It was fantastic, but I was single. And there isn't a great dating scene at the United States Military Academy for professors, and I met my wife, who was a researcher at Monticello the following summer. I got a research fellowship. And my joke is she's the first and last person upon whom my, I study Thomas Jefferson pickup line actually worked. And yeah. I guess. Yeah. That's probably good. Monticello is a good place to meet women like that. That's right. That's right. Excellent. So why are we so fascinated with Thomas Jefferson, do you think? I think there are a lot of different reasons why a person might be fascinated by Thomas Jefferson. I mean, Thomas Jefferson was a true polymath. He was a person who was interested in a lot of different things. And he was able to develop specialized knowledge and expertise in a lot of different fields. Jefferson, of course, was a statesman, but he was an architect. He was a musician. He was... What did he play? He played the violin or the fiddle. I'm picturing like a Sherlock Holmes kind of playing the violin. But he and his family, they'd have jam sessions and that's how he courted his wife. I mean, I think she was very impressed by his ability to string instruments. Well, this is why I think this is the case. It's always been the case he pick up the guitar or the string. Right. He's the other guy who the Jefferson pickup line worked for. I guess so. I guess so. Yeah. Or he could just play that violin really, really well. So, you know, he's in many ways somebody who thought deeply, but also broadly. And I admire that. I also admire, you know, Jefferson's statements about liberty. And that is the source of my initial fascination. But it doesn't take long once you start reading about Thomas Jefferson to realize that his deeds didn't always measure up to his words. And he lived as we do in a complicated time. Oftentimes where the principles will compete with one another. You know, on one side of an equation, a certain set of principles might be in the balance. But there are other principles that are competing with those. And seeing him deal with those conflicts I think is really fascinating. Another thing that's fascinating about Jefferson is that he was in an era where the rules of political engagement were very much in flux. And the way politics were practiced in 1776, they weren't practiced the same way 50 years later. And he's in the middle of that transition and how he grapples with those, you know, changing rules as sort of a political athlete, I think, is fascinating as well. What does that change look like? So what were we transitioning from and towards? Sure. Yeah, so in many respects, during the colonial era, America is still an aristocratic society. And we have politics that emphasize things like the deference of the public toward the people they entrust with positions of power. People who stand for office. I almost said run for office, but no one does that in the 18th century. You don't campaign, right? Now it's kind of, can I, I'll forego the dentistry and the antibiotics. Just go back to a time where no one's running for office. So people might realize that they are candidates for office, that they are being put forth for office. But by no means will they campaign and say, if you vote for me, I will do this for you. I mean, that was considered to be the definition of corruption. Voters in the 18th century largely were interested to assess the characters of the people who stood for office. And to judge the wisdom of someone, the impartiality of someone, the ability of someone to make a sound decision based on what was the just thing to do, what was the right thing to do. And once you entrusted that person with power, the ethic was that you were going to preserve that trust and allow them to make the decisions that they wish to make. Things get much more democratic with a small D during the course of Jefferson's lifetime. Politics become much more competitive as a result of the fact that we have this new government under the Constitution. We have people like Alexander Hamilton who are arguing for essentially an expansion of federal power during the Washington administration. And people like Jefferson and his chief ally, James Madison, arguing for a more strict interpretation of the Constitution. Hamilton and his party, if you want to call it that, the Federalists are going to increasingly do battle with Jefferson and Madison and their party, the Republicans. And a lot is at stake. I mean, the future of America is at stake. And Jefferson and Madison in some respects view Hamilton and Adams and other Federalists as counter-revolutionaries who are going against the spirit of 76 and want to roll back all the progress that has been made and fought for at great cost to people's lives and fortunes. And yet Hamilton, I think he views his project as consolidating this new nation that he and Washington have helped to establish and secure. And the fear of the Federalists is that Jefferson and Madison might in fact be more like French revolutionaries than American revolutionaries. And they were kind of fans of the French Revolution. At least Jefferson was a pretty big fan of that. He was there right when it started to happen. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and who wouldn't be a fan? I mean, you know, in this world where the new United States has the geopolitical significance of a fairly minor country, you know, France and Britain are the world's two great superpowers. And to see one of them turn away from absolutism and apparently embrace liberty and fraternity and equality, I mean, that's quite a wonderful development. And it makes the American revolutionaries feel as if their ideas are spreading. So how does someone like Jefferson get to revolution? Because I mean, so we at the Cato Institute gripe about the state of government all the time. But I haven't taken up arms yet. We're pretty down on it. And a lot of our complaints, I mean, in a lot of ways we think it's worse today than it was when the colonies decided to rebel. But no one seems, no matter how mad people seem to get about politics, it doesn't ever jump to, okay, let's take up arms or let's strike out on our own. So it's a big jump. So how do you get there? Or even let's take up arms against the most powerful military on the planet, which at the time was the British and would be the American government. So that seems also crazy. Well, you know, in a way, it was crazy. But in another way, they thought that it would be crazy not to. And I'll make the problem even more complicated. Sure, Britain was the most powerful nation on the planet, especially after the Seven Years War. That was pretty clear. It was also the richest. And what's more, it was also the freest. I mean, Britain, and I don't think that those two things are unrelated, by the way. Freedom and prosperity and power, I think you could argue, go hand in hand. And to decide to divorce America from Great Britain was not an easy decision to make. And it wasn't one that was made at the spur of the moment. I mean, there is a long extended imperial crisis that really begins in the aftermath of the French and Indian War. This war that the British win and yet it causes the British to double their deficit. I'm sorry, their debt doubles during the course of the French and Indian War, known globally as the Seven Years War. The British would like to avoid a future expense of war. And so they draw the proclamation line of 1763 telling the colonists that they can't settle west of the Appalachian Mountains. They also looked for... What was that? That was to keep them out of conflict? Yeah, exactly. It was to keep them out of conflict with the Native Americans. I mean, the French militaries vanquished from North America after the French and Indian War as the Seven Years War is known. But the Native Americans, who were the allies largely of the French, they're still here. And the British wanting to avoid a future expense of war realize that colonists, if they move west, are going to come into conflict with those Indian nations. And good fences make good neighbors. That's essentially their thought. They also think that maybe it's time to start raising some revenue from the colonists. So the Stamp Act has passed, followed by the Townsend duties. These taxes were not all that burdensome upon the colonists. And yet the colonists, they weren't represented in Parliament. They had their own legislatures. They had in Virginia the House of Burgesses or the Massachusetts Assembly or what have you. They understood that they could be taxed by those local assemblies. But to be... What do we call it when someone takes your money without asking? Theft. Yeah, it's stealing, right? So Parliament can't ask them. There's no one to ask in Parliament. They haven't consented to the election of members of Parliament. So they view that as theft. And the whole point of government, you know, as good British people believe in the 18th century, as John Locke says, when he explains the glorious Revolution of 1688, that's legitimate because government's function is to protect life and liberty and property. And if government is not protecting their property, but instead stealing their property, it's not doing the job of government. And if government is sending troops to live among them, as the British government does when they arrive in Boston, if those troops are leaving Boston and going out to Lexington on their way to Concord to take their weapons away, it's imposing tyranny upon them. When the British government, in response to the Boston Tea Party in 1773 and a couple months later, it passes what the British government calls the coercive acts, what the colonists call the intolerable acts, shutting down Boston Harbor, banning their local town meetings, preventing the Massachusetts Assembly from meeting. You know, what Patrick Henry down in Virginia said is, we're in a state of nature. It's like there isn't a government. It's as if the British have declared independence from us because they're not performing those essential functions, the protection of life and liberty and property that government is supposed to protect. So how did Jefferson himself experience those, where was he at those times? How did he get revolutionized and radicalized, I guess would be the term now. At some point he decided it was time to break away, but what was his thought process like? Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I think in some respects, Jefferson is born at just the right time to be a revolutionary. You know, he comes of age as a young man in Williamsburg, as a student at the College of William and Mary. He is mentored by George Wyth, who's a noted Virginia jurist and a professor of law at William and Mary. He's fully immersed in the principles of British liberty and law and constitutionalism. And so it's very clear to Jefferson, as it's clear to other political thinkers in America, as it's clear, I think to many Americans, regular Americans, that what we thought the British government stood for, the British government no longer stands for. And the liberties that we thought were guaranteed to us as Englishmen are now in jeopardy. And if we really value these liberties, if we really want to preserve our rights, it's not going to be under the authority of the British government. It's only going to be if we seize authority for ourselves and declare independence. And of course, Jefferson writes the Declaration of Independence, which is... Right. Why was he chosen for that of all the people at the Continental Congress? Yeah, right. So, I mean, it seems an unlikely choice. Jefferson is 33 years old. He's one of the youngest members. He's fairly obscure. He's not among the more well-known. The committee that is selected by the Congress to draft a declaration includes him probably because he's a Virginian. They were looking for some geographical diversity. You have Ben Franklin, you know, the most famous member of the Continental Congress from Pennsylvania. There's John Adams from Massachusetts. Roger Sherman from Connecticut. Robert Livingston from New York. Jefferson thinks John Adams should write the Declaration. And Adams has been a strong advocate for independence for months. But according to Adams, when Jefferson makes that suggestion, Adams responds that there are three reasons why Jefferson should do it. He said, number one, you're a Virginian and a Virginian ought to be at the head of this business. In other words, the blood of people from Massachusetts had been spilled, right? New Englanders were very much involved in the war for independence that began in 1775. New England had lots of skin in the game. But a Virginian perhaps could cause other delegates to the Congress to see this truly as a continental struggle. In addition, Adams said you could write ten times better than I can. Just kind of interesting because Adams was not a humble person. He wasn't a humble person and he wasn't a bad writer. He was a great writer. So that's a great compliment. The other one he paid was sort of, he was being quite humble when he said, I, John Adams, am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular. And you are very much otherwise. And I think he meant that he was obnoxious in pursuing independence, that maybe people were tired of hearing his arguments within the Continental Congress and that Jefferson would bring sort of a freshness to this process that might be beneficial. On the declaration, I mean, one of the things we recently had episodes with our colleague Roger Pallon and just yesterday we recorded an episode with legal scholar Randy Barnett and both of them made the argument that the declaration, the opening of the declaration contains kind of the core founding political philosophy of the United States and that there's a very coherent argument about the origins of legitimacy of governments and how that legitimacy operates. Is that representative, so was that conscious? Was Jefferson setting out to articulate a coherent political philosophy from which to then derive the need for a new system of government? And if he was, how shared was that? Is there such a thing as like, this is the core founding idea or principles of America or was this more his thing and everyone else was like, okay, we're really concerned about is the litany of abuses and why we should rebel? Yeah, Jefferson later wrote that he wrote the declaration to be an expression of the American mind and when you think about it, this is a corporate document, right? This is a statement made in behalf of the Continental Congress and when finally New York would receive instructions to vote for independence and the declaration was inscribed on parchment, it was described as the unanimous declaration of the United States of America. So it's not Jefferson's opinion. This is a shared opinion and he's trying to in some ways ventriloquialize the American people. We know that not all Americans supported independence. Adams guessed that about a third were still loyalists, maybe a third sat on the fence but this was designed to try to cause Americans to rally around that proposition and when you think about it, Jefferson has essentially two tests of legitimacy. Everyone knows the famous sentence about how all men are created equal. They're endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. What follows is the statement that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. So there are two tests of legitimacy. To be legitimate, a government has to secure these rights and it also has to derive its powers, its just powers from the consent of the governed. So a government that protects people's individual rights and is based upon their consent. If those two things are present, it's legitimate. What Jefferson is arguing is that for the colonists, soon to be free independent Americans, their rights are not being secured and their consent is not being sought. They don't have the representation that would render government in America legitimate. Do we know or do you know, I actually have never encountered this in all my historical reading, how the declaration was delivered to the king? I think there's something about what the king said when he read it but did they make a copy and put it on a ship and say take this to the king or anything or did they just let him find out himself or do you know? Yeah, well, I mean, the declaration says that a decent respect for the opinions of mankind is one of the things that brings about the need to make this declaration. George III is, you know, a member of mankind. I'm sure he is one of the people who reads it. He has a compelling interest in it but he rejects it of course. He's been rejecting all of their petitions. All the branches. Yeah, the olive branch petition from a year earlier is something that he essentially didn't even think it was necessary to issue a response because he didn't recognize the legitimacy of the Continental Congress. Oh, interesting. Now, during the war, Jefferson, does he pick up a gun at all or is he doing other things during the war? So, Jefferson like John Adams is someone who's going to leave Philadelphia after the declaration is passed, you know, not immediately but shortly thereafter and Adams goes back to Massachusetts and he helps to write the Constitution. Jefferson goes back to Virginia. The Massachusetts Constitution. Right, that's right. Yeah, which in fact our Constitution is in some ways modeled but Jefferson goes back to Virginia. He reforms the laws of Virginia. I mean, this is an amazing moment of creativity. I mean, this is an opportunity for people in all of the 13 state capitals to make things right, to throw off the yoke of British government under which they had been forced to labor and to republicanize, you know, with a small r to republicanize their laws and their constitutions. Jefferson is going to serve as the wartime governor of Virginia. So, for two years, including when Virginia is invaded by the British, Jefferson will be the governor. He will relocate the capital to Richmond in part because he thinks it's a more defensible location than Williamsburg. That's probably true, but it wasn't defensible enough. The British take Richmond. The Virginia assembly retreats inland. They meet for a while in Charlottesville, Jefferson's hometown. As the British march west, Jefferson sends the legislature to Stanton, Virginia, further to the west. He can see through his handheld telescope, the British coming. From Monticello. Yeah. I mean, he's standing on top of Monticello. Virginia has its own Paul Revere, a guy named Jack Jewett, who alerts people that the British are on their way. Jefferson doesn't waste too much time as the British are at the foot of his little mountain. He mounts his horse and rides away. He's not going to be captured. He's nobody's fool. So, that's sort of the closest he ever comes to combat. But yeah, I mean, he's very much in the thick of things. Now, Monticello, he was born close but not on Monticello, correct? That's right. Yeah. So, his father's plantation is called Shadwell, and it's on property that Jefferson inherited that's essentially at the base of the mountain. You know, Jefferson increases his land holdings. Building Monticello on top of a mountain, building a house on top of a mountain is a somewhat impractical thing to do. You know, there are a lot of practical considerations that would mitigate against that or militate against that, the idea that, you know, bringing up water or supplies. But it's a very practical location for Jefferson at the moment that the British are coming because, you know, he has the high ground and he could see them. On Monticello, how did he get involved into, he was the architect of it? Yes. So, I just earlier this year visited Monticello for the first time and had shortly before that been to Mount Vernon with my daughter on a field trip and it's striking how different the two homes are and how much Jefferson's home feels modern and feels, it feels much more like the kind of place you'd want to live than Washington's home. And it's just so radically different from what was common at the time but at the same time, like most people, if you're like, I'm going to design my own home. I'm going to be an amateur architect. We'd say that's probably not a good idea. Right. So, how does he get just involved in doing that and where does that sense of, I mean, just feels very contemporary to us come from? So, yes, Jefferson described Monticello as his essay in architecture and I think it is an essay in that the rooms work together, they fit together almost like the paragraphs and a finely crafted essay and the house has a flow to it and an energy to it and you're right, it has sort of a modern sensibility to it. It has skylights. Yes, it feels very spacious and light. It's fantastic and you know it's an interesting house and Jefferson wrote a lot about it but there's a lot that's left unsaid. It's interesting because when you took the tour and entered, you entered through the side that most people would enter Monticello when Jefferson lived there, the east front and if you stand on the steps of the portico there and you look to the east, you have what Jefferson called his sea view because you look into the land, the flat land that goes out toward Richmond and Williamsburg and it kind of disappears in this bluish haze and almost looks like you're looking at the ocean and you're looking back at civilization because Monticello was built essentially on the edge of the wilderness and when you walk into that eastern side of the house you're confronted with a bunch of artifacts from the American west. Lewis and Clark brought back the mounted antlers of various animals and Indian artifacts. Native American objects that were put on display. The room that is opposite that on the western side of the house, this is the front of the house that's on the nickel, is a room that in some ways very much brings the east to the west. It brings western civilization to the American frontier and Jefferson has hanging on the walls of his parlor a number of portraits of great Enlightenment thinkers including the three he called his Trinity of Mortals. There was Bacon and Newton and Locke. There were portraits of Washington and Benjamin Franklin and others and yet from that side of the house when you look out you take in the vista of the Blue Ridge Mountains and all that is beyond which I think for Jefferson was really the future. During, after the Congress, a lot of people don't realize I often when I teach I have to correct people and say that Jefferson was not at the Constitutional Convention. He had no direct hand in writing the Constitution. Where was he during that time and then also do we have an idea of what he thought of the Constitution at least immediately after when he heard about it and read it and what his idea of whether that was a good Constitution. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, so Jefferson of course had, he was the person who succeeded Benjamin Franklin as our Ambassador to France. People in France sometimes said to Jefferson, oh, you are Franklin's replacement. They loved Franklin by the way and Jefferson really ingratiated himself to them by saying, no one can replace Franklin. I am merely his successor. Well, Franklin loved being in France. Yes, he did. Bon Vivant is a good word for what he did when he was there. And Jefferson did too. I mean, interestingly, I mean, he is a man very much of Virginia and in some ways his sensibilities are very provincial. He thinks very highly of Virginia, but he's thrilled to be in France and to be exposed to the culture and the knowledge of Enlightenment Europe. Sure. He's in correspondence with James Madison throughout his time in France. And, you know, Madison of course, you know, the father of the Constitution is decisively engaged in the process of shaping that document. And ultimately he's going to send a copy of it to Thomas Jefferson and Jefferson reads it and, you know, he writes back to Madison that he thinks it's fantastic. He's done an excellent job and he's very pleased with this and he hopes that it will be ratified. He has two principal objections to it. One is that the President originally was perpetually reelectable and Jefferson really feared that we would develop a tradition where our presidents were presidents for life. So he called for some sort of amendment that would limit the President's time in office. The other thing that Jefferson objected to was initially the Constitution lacked a bill of rights and he hoped that a bill of rights would be added. So both of Jefferson's objections, frankly, have been answered. You know, we now do limit the President's time in office and we do have a bill of rights, you know, that was added in 1791. So I think you could say, you could make the claim at least, that through his association with Madison and because of his influence upon Madison, he helped to shape the Constitution as well. You mentioned this earlier. We're talking about the politics that emerged after the Constitution was ratified. Right. What is Jefferson's role in the new government when it takes over? And then if you could elaborate a little bit on that debate that starts emerging between, would it be safe to say that Jefferson hated Alexander Hamilton by the end? I mean, I'd like to put up that. I've always wondered that. And then how did that develop? Hates a strong word. But maybe in this case it would apply. I think you could certainly say that Alexander Hamilton hated Thomas Jefferson. You know, the book that I've finished that is just coming out, called Confounding Father, one of the reasons that Jefferson is a confounding father in the eyes of Americans is that opinions of him are so divided. The book is really about this dual image of Thomas Jefferson that begins to emerge in the 1790s when Jefferson becomes a member of Washington's administration as Secretary of State. Hamilton, of course, is Secretary of the Treasury and initially Hamilton will start to propose measures that Jefferson is hesitant about. Soon he's going to become outright hostile to him. He thinks that Hamilton is hatching a plan that is counter-revolutionary in nature, that is going to make the United States government unlike the way that it was set out to be in the Constitution that will cause it to become more like the British government. Hamilton, for example, proposes a national bank that's not explicitly authorized in the Constitution. Jefferson and Madison, too, are going to, you know, take up the charge against Hamilton's measures, and that leads to a bunch of fights in the newspapers. Hamilton will try to describe Thomas Jefferson as un-American, as more of a French revolutionary than an American revolutionary. The fact that Hamilton embraces for himself and his allies the term federalist is interesting because the federalists, of course, in the 1780s had been people who were in support of the ratification of the Constitution. Chief among them James Madison, as Hamilton well knew, and Thomas Jefferson as well. Now he's implying, Hamilton is, that Jefferson and Madison were somehow against the Constitution, opposed to the Constitution. The charge of Jefferson being somehow un-American is answered by the Jeffersonian Republicans in, I think, a pretty convincing way, although it certainly didn't convince all the federalists. This is when it became revealed that this corporate document, this document that Jefferson wrote for the Continental Congress, the Declaration of Independence, you know, was in fact drafted by Thomas Jefferson. Oh, they didn't know that. They didn't know. And when you think about... I've never heard that. So when it was issued, they never said who actually wrote it. Right. And they brought it up in the 1790s as to counter these un-American... Yeah, especially in the election of 1796. I think you could say that that's when many Americans first heard that Thomas Jefferson's hand drew the Declaration of Independence. You know, Hamilton and others were trying to charge that Jefferson was really a French revolutionary, a dangerous, radical French revolutionary. What better response to that and what better way to establish his sort of American revolutionary chops than to take note that he, in fact, was the author of the Declaration of Independence. Increasingly, that word and that claim is going to be made. On this fight in the newspapers between Hamilton and Jefferson, we hear a lot today about how dirty and ugly politics is and how people are fighting with each other and we long for this return to win. Things were better. And so, is politics... Are these fights at the time like the charges of un-Americanism? Is it better, more civil, more elevated back then? I think it would be difficult to sustain that view. One of the reasons that politics back then were so dirty. I mean, they were really dirty and they were really personal is that so much seemed to be at stake. I mean, these were a number of people who... And I think, Trevor, you're the one who used the word crazy. I mean, was it crazy to declare independence from Great Britain? On one level maybe it was and yet they had done it and at great risk to their lives and their fortunes. They had secured independence and yet now this experiment seemed to be in danger of unraveling. If you were a Federalist, you feared that the Jeffersonian Republicans were going to take us in a radical new direction along the lines of the French Revolution. If you were a Jeffersonian Republican, you feared that the Federalists were really crypto-monarchists, counter-revolutionaries who wanted to roll back the clock before 1776 and model this new government under the Constitution after that of Great Britain. So a lot was at stake and this two-party system that has existed in America for so long was then a very new thing. The Constitution did not anticipate partisanship. The legitimacy of partisanship was something that was very much up in the air. I think that Jefferson didn't even consider himself to be a partisan. He thought that the Federalists were a party or a faction. I think the Federalists considered the Jeffersonian Republicans to be a party or a faction but every person considered himself to be a representative of America as a whole and the good of America as a whole. You mentioned at the beginning that the people didn't run for office. They stood for office and then the public judged them not on, I've got a set of policies I'm going to lay out but on their character. And so did that, if we're going to judge people on their candidates, on their character, then how does that play into the dirtiness of it? Because if I'm going to attack your character, if I don't win as opposed to saying as we might now ideally that the specific policies you'd like aren't going to be as effective. Absolutely. I mean, it personalizes politics. It personalizes the charges against people who are put forth as candidates for office. One of the charges that was frequently made against Thomas Jefferson was that he was hostile to Christianity, that he was an atheist. And the evidence that Federalists had for this charge were some of Jefferson's own writings. He published a book called Notes on the State of Virginia. And in that book, he makes arguments for religious toleration. He argues, for example, that it does me no injury if my neighbor believes that there is no God or that there are 20 gods. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. So we could read that as a classic statement of, you know, live and let live as long as someone else doesn't violate my rights, they have the right to do what they wish to do and believe whatever they wish to believe. But for Federalists, that's a radical statement. To have such disregard for the souls of your countrymen, they said, was itself a very dangerous thing. And of course, the French Revolution, which began as in many respects an anti-Catholic movement because the Catholic Church had been in league with the French monarchy, spiraled into an anti-religious movement. And so Jefferson's association with that, fairly or unfairly, seemed to bolster their claim that he was hostile to religion in America. Was he an atheist or at least a non-Christian? He, I think, can best be described as a deist in that he did believe in God. He did not seem to believe that God intervened in the affairs of man. You know, he questioned things like, here's another thing that got him in trouble. And his notes on the state of Virginia, he wrote about the story of Noah's Ark. And he calculated that if, you know, all the water vapor that was in the atmosphere somehow was converted into liquid, that it would raise sea levels, you know, maybe a few dozen feet, but it wouldn't cover all of the mountains. It wouldn't cover the entire surface of the planet. And again, I mean, this was viewed as sort of heretical stuff. Jefferson described himself as a Christian, but he did it in a very idiosyncratic way. Jefferson said that he thought that Jesus was the greatest philosopher who ever lived. And later in his life, he wrote to his friend Benjamin Rush that he subscribed to Jesus every human excellence believing that he never claimed any other. So Jefferson calls himself a Christian, but he seems to reject a pretty basic tenet of what most people would describe as the foundational philosophy of Christianity, that Jesus is divine. As we're getting into the 1790s area where we were discussing and attacks and how politics was pretty vicious. That seems like the right time to get into, especially in the 1790s and getting into the election of 1800 right after that when the Sally Hemings allegations really start coming out. And I'm not sure if it's actually true that James Callender is a pamphleteer. You can talk a little bit about the guy, but was the first person who publicly raised these allegations that Jefferson had been sleeping with his young slave, Sally Hemings. And I guess another sort of factor in this is, I mean, Jefferson's wife had died in, what year did she die? I think it was 1780. He was about 40 years old when his wife died. You know, Jefferson and his wife, Martha, had a very, you know, so far as we can tell, she had intense, very loving marriage. In 10 years of marriage, she was pregnant six times. And, you know, we know that he was very much grief-stricken when she died. He soon thereafter accepted the appointment as our ambassador to France. I mean, he left for France. He first worked as Benjamin Franklin's understudy and then eventually he was elevated to that post. And he brought Sally Hemings to France, correct? Yeah, basically that's correct. He first brought his eldest daughter and he left his younger two daughters behind in Virginia. I said that his wife was pregnant six times, not all those pregnancies were successful. And, you know, it was basically complications of childbirth that caused his wife to die so far as we can tell. But back in Virginia, his youngest daughter then died. And so Jefferson sees his family just falling apart and he wants to reunite what's left of it. So he writes home to the relatives in Virginia who are watching after his surviving daughter in Virginia and he asks that she be sent to France. And by name he requests an elderly enslaved woman to accompany her on the ocean voyage. But she's not available. She's ill. And so the family in Virginia decides that as a babysitter they're going to send along Sally Hemings. Now, Sally Hemings has even before Thomas Jefferson introduced into this story, she has an interesting connection to the Jefferson family. Sally Hemings is Jefferson's late wife's half sister. So relationships between black people and white people, between white people and especially enslaved black people they owned are not uncommon. They're not uncommon in Virginia, they're not uncommon wherever slavery exists. And so Jefferson's father-in-law, his late father-in-law is... Correct. The family for Martha's is Randolph, is that her main name? Well, they're all Randolphs, yeah. Yeah, that's a big Virginia name, so... His wife's father is John Wales. John Wales, okay. And John Wales has a relationship it seems with Elizabeth Hemings who is the mother of Sally Hemings. And Elizabeth Hemings herself is, according to the Hemings family and their knowledge of their lineage, she is half white, half black. So Sally Hemings is three quarters white, one quarter black. She's Jefferson's late wife's half sister. By some account, she resembles Jefferson's late wife. His wife, according to Jefferson's family, on her deathbed asked Jefferson that he would never remarry. In part because John Wales did remarry after his first wife died, Martha's mother, and it seems as if she was not treated as well as the daughters that that woman had through a previous marriage. Is that apocryphal? That she asked him not to marry, or is that pretty well known? Well, I mean, it's a long-standing tradition, you know, that's documented within Jefferson's white family, his descendants. So, you know, if we accept that as a given, Jefferson's never going to remarry. Here comes along Sally Hemings with whom it seems at some point he begins a relationship. He cannot legally marry Sally Hemings because she is legally black. But maybe she resembles his wife. And certainly, you know, when we think about what interests Thomas Jefferson and what interests Thomas Jefferson about women, he seems to like women who have an uncommon degree of sophistication. And I think a lot of people fairly discount the degree of sophistication that Sally Hemings is able to gain while she's in France. You know, most Virginia women white or black, slave or free probably never go more than 20 miles from the place where they're born. Here is Sally Hemings who's with Thomas Jefferson in Paris. She is legally free while she's in France. The relationship probably begins while she is with Thomas Jefferson in France. There's a little bit of uncertainty about when their first child is born because if they have a first child who's conceived in France that child doesn't survive. But the children that they do appear to have together are born over the span of years and it appears as if this is an ongoing monogamous relationship. Thomas Jefferson, you know, was a very eligible bachelor. You know, he could have married lots of different women had he chosen to break that pledge he had made to his wife. The fact that he stuck with Sally Hemings you know, I think that that says something about the nature of their relationship. When does this become an item that was discussed by people of the day? Well, you brought up James Callender and Callender's an interesting character. So he's born in Scotland. He comes over to America and is initially a Jeffersonian Republican and he writes some very critical pieces against the administrations of both George Washington and John Adams. He is jailed under the Adams Administration Sedition Act. When Jefferson becomes president he's released he believes that Jefferson owes him something more than just his freedom. He asks for a job as postmaster in Richmond, Virginia. Jefferson denies him that job. That's when he seems to turn his back on Thomas Jefferson and he starts writing half of the Federalist. So it's in September of 1802 that Callender in a newspaper called the Richmond Recorder launches these charges. He says that people and the vicinity of Charlottesville have long known that the man whom it delighted the people to honor for many years you know, has kept as his concubine one of his slaves. Her name is Sally. And those charges reverberated throughout the Federalist press. Jefferson never really issued a response. You know, silence was a pretty strong response. He responded also by returning to Washington, DC from Monticello. His two surviving daughters soon joined him. Jefferson sometimes would miss church services before. He seemed never to miss them after always with his daughters in tow. The presence of his daughters within you know, the small society of the small fledgling capital of Washington, DC I think put a damper on some of the gossip and you know, in the election of 1804 it wasn't really a big issue. It was one that had passed. What should we today looking back and judging Jefferson's legacy and his historical significance and knowing the words that he wrote in the declaration make of both the Sally Hemmings relationship but then more broadly his ownership of slaves. It's worth saying that it's difficult to know what to make of the Sally Hemmings relationship because we don't know definitively what that relationship entailed. I mean, you know, master slave relationships could quite easily be and oftentimes were rape. A slave did not have the ability to refuse her master. On the other hand She was very young too when they started. Well, when she arrived in Paris she was 14. We don't know exactly when their relationship began but she was, you know, in her late teens and there was a disparity in age although again you know, we shouldn't be too confused by our own modern sensibilities. When Madison was 31 years old he was engaged to a 15 year old. So and Madison married was 17 years younger than him I believe. That may be the case. Yeah, the 15 year old he was engaged to essentially dumped him and then, you know, later on he became engaged to Dolly Payne Madison. So, yeah, I mean to whatever degree this relationship was consensual, the more consensual it was the more loving it was I think that might reflect well upon Thomas Jefferson. I mean, we know for a fact that Thomas Jefferson was a slave holder. I don't think it gets much worse than that if Thomas Jefferson actually had a capacity or developed a capacity to see very fully the humanity of someone like Sally Hemmings maybe even to fuel some real affection for Sally Hemmings. I think that would reflect well on him, not negatively. The fact that he was a slave holder is for me the thing that is maybe most troubling and it's troubling for me in part because I have the good fortune to live in the 21st century and Jefferson is a literal product of the 18th century. His first memory as a three year old is being carried on a pillow and looking up into the face of an enslaved man who was carrying him. I mean, it was a part of his life. It was a part of his family it was a part of his world I wish that Jefferson did more to prioritize ending slavery but he at least did something he did some things to try to diminish the influence of slavery in Virginia and within the United States I mean as president he signed the law that ended the legal importation of new slaves from Africa as a member of Congress under the Articles of Confederation he proposed in his ordinance of 1784 a provision that would ban slavery in all of the western territory all the territory west of the Appalachian mountains east of the Mississippi River from the Great Lakes all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico if Jefferson had his way in 1784 slavery would not be allowed to take root there. When he was in Virginia he proposed a bill for gradual emancipation that was defeated. His first public act you know as a freshman member the House of Burgesses in 1769 was to co-sponsor a bill that would have made it legal to emancipate your own slaves that wasn't allowed in Virginia until much later so he did do some things but did he do enough and did he prioritize slavery as highly as he should I think that people of Jefferson's generation oftentimes compromise on slavery because they think it's more important first to secure independence from Great Britain then they'll compromise on slavery because they think it's more important to sustain the Union they'll think it's more important to hold together their partisan alliance as they do battle against the Federalists they think it's more important to pursue other goals and slavery is always this can that they seem to kick down the road. And a big thing looming over them that's very hard to just address in a very simple way but by the end of his life though do we know by the last decade or so around the Missouri compromise and things like this did he see bad things coming? Did he write anything about slavery in the 1820s or anything about what was going to happen? The Missouri crisis when the many Northerners did not want to admit to the Union Missouri which was applying for admission as a slave state that he saw that it was like a fire bell in the night and think about you know in the 18th or early 19th century how terrifying a fire bell, a fire alarm in the night would be. I mean you know this is a world made of wood and we don't have modern fire departments that are going to rush to the scene you know this he thought was the nail of the Union, the death nail of the Union there's some question about the degree to which Jefferson was sincere in statements like that at the same time that the Missouri crisis is unfolding Jefferson is trying to establish in Virginia a university you know what would become the University of Virginia and Jefferson often times writes to Virginians letters that make panicked pronouncements about the dangers of sectionalism one of the arguments that he makes for the University of Virginia is that we're sending our sons to these northern seminaries to Harvard and Yale and you know our children are developing these Yankee principles when he writes to people who aren't Virginians when he writes to people in other states and especially when he writes to foreigners he tends to minimize these sectional differences and describe them as you know ripples on the sea of liberty so there's there's some question about exactly what Jefferson thought and how panicked he truly was but certainly sectionalism was a rising problem and it was one that troubled him. After his presidency which is interesting presidency it's he has the Louisiana purchase which of course is quite a huge deal to say the least he also I think strangely embargoes most of New England which is probably a bad idea thinking that he can hurt the British by making it illegal for New England to trade with the British which is but it's interesting but he does he just go home then after in 1808 and just kind of retire from public does he ever do a public life thing again after 1808. So he retires under the truly the best of circumstances because James Madison who has been his you know key ally his best political friend you know their relationship begins in 1776 you know he is able to pass the baton to James Madison his successor Madison is inaugurated on March 4th 1809 there's a reception afterwards that Jefferson attends and Jefferson was friends with a woman named Margaret Baird Smith who was the wife of Samuel Harrison Smith who was the editor of the Jeffersonian Republican National Intelligencer the big newspaper in DC at the time and you know according to Margaret Baird Smith Jefferson had a big smile on his face and she said to Jefferson you know you look like a man much relieved and his response was yes I am and at this moment I am much much happier than my friend so you know Madison was the one who got to assume this burden and I think Jefferson really tried to respect Madison's independence and he had a lot of trust in James Madison as well he should have. Did Jefferson have a sense of his historical significance? I think he did I think you know one of the things that you perhaps noticed when you visited Monticello and when you stood in the suite of rooms that Jefferson called his sanctum sanctorum you know it's his library and his office and his bed chamber you see on his desk this really neat contrivance this machine that he called a polygraph and essentially it allows him to make copies of his letters you write with one pen and then another pen through a series of pulleys and it makes an exact duplication of the letter that Jefferson would write and he did that because you know if you didn't have a copy when you sent your correspondence out you'd lose it forever but he was able to keep his correspondence not only the letters that he received but also copies of the letters that he sent and I think he did that in part because he understood his place in history he understood that he was central to this American experiment that he was a central figure in the revolutionary project and I think he hoped at least that future generations would take great interest in the revolutionary generation and the nation that they established What kind of lessons I mean for you having studied Jefferson so much and admired him so much what kind of lessons do you think we can learn individually and even maybe as a nation from him so yeah I think it's fair to say that I do admire Thomas Jefferson on many levels but I'll say this the more you study Thomas Jefferson the more you study anyone the more you realize that they are flawed people and Thomas Jefferson wasn't perfect I'm not sure that Thomas Jefferson always made the right decision but I do believe that Thomas Jefferson carefully weighed his decisions he tried to do what was right he tried to do his best and you know he lived in an imperfect world and he dealt with a number of different challenges and a lot of times he found that his principles were in conflict I mean you mentioned Louisiana and the embargo the Louisiana purchase is a fantastic opportunity for America to double the size of the country without firing a shot and yet the Constitution doesn't contain a provision that allows the national government to add new territory if that's the case how do you do this the right way I mean Jefferson thought about it he drafted a constitutional amendment that would explicitly authorize the purchase of Louisiana Albert Gallatin his Treasury Secretary James Madison his Secretary of State ultimately talked him out of it his constitutional scruples we share them but if we delay this if France reneges on this deal if it's not authorized by three quarters of the states this opportunity will be lost forever and this is an opportunity not only to double American territory this is an opportunity to keep they thought they hoped America at peace just as the Atlantic Ocean was a moat for the peoples of Europe this would be a land moat in the west that would insulate us from invasion and international strife and this land would allow our nation which was doubling in population every twenty years to continue on as a nation of virtuous farmers who were their own bosses who were self-sufficient self-reliant so there was a lot of good arguing for Louisiana but then there was the Constitution and Jefferson I think ultimately would make the best decision that he could so I appreciate the fact that he truly grapples with those decisions again maybe he made the right choice maybe he made the wrong one but he was very thoughtful about how he made it and Jefferson's last years too something we had brought up actually was that Jefferson Adams correspondence which is an interesting I assume you read most of those letters there are a lot of letters to read I'll tell you that but they're fun to read because Jefferson and Adams write about all the things that we're not supposed to discuss right we're not supposed to talk about politics or religion or what have you and they talked about all of it and they talked about history and they talked about the future and you know these guys are classic sort of frenemies they were close allies in the continental congress they were friends as understudies to Benjamin Franklin in France as diplomats their relationship came under great strain you know during the partisanship of the 1790s they were opponents in the elections of 1796 and 1800 when Jefferson was inaugurated Adams left town the night before wasn't even present for Jefferson's inauguration but they patched up their relationship and resumed their correspondence after Jefferson retired from office and I think they saw their their attempt to reunite and reconcile not only as a way to validate their friendship but also to validate the American Union to validate the fact that people from the north and people from the south could rally around a shared cause of liberty and I think it's fair to say too that you know they were writing to each other but they knew that they were preserving their letters I think you know it's fair to say that they knew that they were going to be writing to us as well so yeah I recommend that people read their letters they're really great thanks for listening if you enjoy free thoughts please take a moment to rate us on iTunes free thoughts is produced by Mark McDaniel and Evan Banks to learn more about libertarianism visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org