 Good afternoon, and welcome to the National Archives in Washington, D.C. I'm Colleen Shogan, the Archivist of the United States, and I'm pleased you could join us for today's talk from John Bowles, the author of Seven Virginians, The Men Who Shaped Our Republic. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two programs coming up in the next month on our YouTube channel. On Wednesday, July 12th, at 1 p.m., author Farley Grubb will discuss his new book, The Continental Dollar, how the American Revolution was financed with paper money. Grubb draws on decades of exhaustive mining of 18th century records to reveal how the fledgling United States paid for its first war. And on Tuesday, July 18th, at 1 p.m., Cassandra A. Good will present the story of George Washington's step-grandchildren and their role in the development of American society and politics. Her new book is First Family, George Washington's Heirs and the Making of America. When, as students, we learned about the American Revolution and the formation of the United States, we may have been struck by the number of Virginians who played prominent roles in these events. John Bowles' book, Seven Virginians, examines the influence of these men. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, George Mason, Patrick Henry, and John Marshall on the origins of our nation and the formation of the federal government. As they helped shape our political institutions, they themselves were shaped by the society in which they lived. Professor Bowles examines their actions and offers necessary context, acknowledging that these seven Virginians were among the elite, reliant upon an agricultural economy based on enslaved labor. In his introduction, Bowles expresses the hope that by examining the careers of these seven political leaders, we can develop a clearer knowledge of the past and offer a civic primer as well. Bowles and others seeking to understand the beliefs and behaviors of our nation's founders rely on the copious writings they left behind. Founders online, a searchable website hosted by the National Archives through the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, provides free access to more than 185,000 documents from the authoritative founding fathers papers projects. Anyone may visit founders online at founders.archives.gov and search through and read the writings of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and many more. I invite you to explore founders online and the many documents to be found in the National Archives catalog and meet history firsthand. John B. Bowles is the William P. Hobby Emeritus Professor of History at Rice University and former editor of the Journal of Southern History. He is a former president of the Southern Historical Association and the author of Jefferson, Architect of American Liberty. Now let's hear from Professor Bowles. Thank you for joining us today. Good afternoon. My name is John Rogasta. I'm the interim director at the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello. And it's my pleasure to be here this afternoon to have a conversation with John Bowles about his new book, Seven Virginian, The Men Who Shaped Our Republic. And it's a wonderful book at this time of year. We were just talking beforehand. We have July 4th coming up. We're talking about the founding of the nation. And these are figures that we are familiar with. But perhaps after reading John's book, we're not quite as familiar with them as we might have thought we were. So let me start, John, it's a pleasure to be here. And I want to ask you a question that some of our viewers may not fully appreciate. I know it takes years to write this kind of a book and hours and hours of doing research and writing. And one, academics rarely get rich from writing these kinds of books, as you well know. So I always tell my students, when you get a book like this, the author had a reason for writing it. They wanted to say something. So just very broadly, what did you want to tell us with this book? What did you want to say? Well, this book really has its origins and a comment my son made to me 10 years ago. So he lives in London. And right after Obama's election, he took a cab in London. And the cab driver said to him, recognizing he was an American, he said, this could never happen in England. And David told me that. And that puzzle me, I wondered about that. I thought, is that true? Or could it be true? Or why was it true? And I began thinking then that was like, I guess, 2009. I began thinking about the founding fathers. And I mean, I'm from Texas, but I went, I did my graduate work in University of Virginia. So I was, I knew about all these Virginians. And I began thinking about those people. I was already beginning to do a biography of Jefferson. And I realized that, you know, an incredibly disproportionate number of the really important founders were all from Virginia, not just from Virginia, but from just a really a small section of Virginia. And they all knew each other. They all communicated. And I began to wonder, what would the lives of these people, if we could kind of imagine them sort of all together, interacting and could read their correspondence and see how they responded to their times and the issues of their time as they understood it, how could we come to terms with how this nation was created? And I realized, obviously, all these people were slave owners. They were all white slave owners. And here we were, you know, two centuries later, with a black man elected president. How did that come about? Are there any clues in what they said? What were their achievements? What were their failures? How do we come to terms with these people? Obviously, they're amourable men in many ways, but also there is this terrible cut of sin in our founding of these men are all slave holders, and they never completely figure out a way to respond to that. So it was that first question that could never happen in England that made me think about what was there in the water or the air or the land or the economy, or what was there about these men in Virginia that led them to move toward creating a nation? And as they said, you know, they were in search for a more perfect union. They didn't achieve it. And we haven't achieved it yet. But I like to think that when we're at our best, we're still struggling to do what they hope to do. We're still working on it, absolutely. You know, I should say I should pause for a moment, because we're immediately jumping into the issue of slaveholding. And I want to get to that. I was thrilled, by the way, with Colleen's introduction that she mentioned Founders Online, which is provided to us by the National Archives. I think people are still not familiar with that as a resource that the public has access for free to basically all of the correspondents, the founders, and enormously helpful walking or resource. But let's go ahead. She raised the issue. Now you're raising the issue of slaveholding. These seven Virginians are looking at these are white men. They're property owners. They're all relatively wealthy, some more so than others. But they're all slaveholders. And it's interesting that the book is precipitated for you with Barack Obama's being elected president in a question then in England. And it's so easy for us to forget that the historic things that are happening in our time, it is truly historic to have an African American elected president of the United States. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Did it give you pause to launch into a book titled Seven Virginians when they're all white men slave owners? It did. But I think I was given lifts pause by the fact that Obama had just been elected. I mean, I think, you know, somehow we got some things right. I had to say that when I first began this book, the title I had in mind was nation makers, because I saw these these being not primarily as Virginians. I mean, they were born in Virginia, but I thought that they were living in some sense in a larger world in just Virginia. And I thought what they did and what they said and what they thought and what they accomplished was a larger story than just a Virginia story. Also, most of my work before this time had been either on religious history or sort of social history. I did a history of slavery. So this move toward political history was somewhat different for me. And that pose on me, how could I deal with this? I mean, does the world need another story of seven white Virginians? But these people, what they said and what they did had implications that they could hardly imagine. I mean, I don't think any of them could really imagine a world that is the world we live in today. I mean, you walk around the campus of the University of Virginia, for example, and you see every conceivable race and ethnicity and men and women. I mean, when I was a graduate student at the University of Virginia in the 60s, it was all white male. I mean, so just in those 50 years, what an amazing change. I don't know that any of the founding founders could have imagined a university that had as much diversity in every way as even elite State University of Virginia has. And so how do we get from a society in which only about half white males can vote to a society that is this? And it's also posting because people like Jefferson in so many ways seem so in advance of their times, but it's only in certain areas they're in advance of the time. And other ways are absolutely regular 18th century men with 18th century values and 18th century expectations. And that frustrates us and puzzles us because we're kind of aggravated to how could Jefferson be advanced in this place, but not in this aspect of life. And that's true for all of them. And then it's also kind of puzzling that they, their careers changed. You said they're all more or less wealthy. Well, of course, some of them ended up bankrupt. And so it's a kind of, and they, and at times they're all friends and at times they're at each other's strokes. And so it's a complicated story. These are not, this is not the story of seven people, all of whom are bosom buddies their entire lives. I mean, they reflect many of the conflicting attitudes and values of that time. So I thought that they, if I could look at these seven, a small sample of seven men who were slaveholders, but who were more than slaveholders and look at their evolving ideas and so forth. I thought that I could sort of reveal or tell a lot of the complicated story of the kind of origins of political America. Well, your answer is raising so many thoughts in my mind. I want to come back to Jefferson. As you know, I'm at Monticello and it always comes back to Jefferson. It's all about Jefferson. So I'll come back to Jefferson. But it's interesting, you know, you mentioned that in your answer that only 50% of the white males could vote at the time in America. But of course, that's an extraordinary percentage compared to the rest of the world compared to the rest of the world. So does that, what does that tell us about this issue, a problem, issue, concern of these are white slave owning individuals who are forming the nation? I mean, is there, is there, is there opportunity in all of that? Well, this sort of begins, where do you begin writing a book? I mean, I thought I had this idea, I saw the revolutionary generation. Of course, it doesn't just begin in 1776. And how far back do you go? I mean, do you go back to 1740 or do you go back to the creation of county governments in Virginia or go back to England? That's a problem every author has to figure out where you begin. But it seems, I mean, these, these seven Virginians, particularly Jefferson, hope to increase the percentage of white men who can vote. I mean, Jefferson throughout his life kind of tried to find ways to give more land and property to sort of increase the size of the, of the voting public. But again, it never occurs to them to allow women to vote or blacks to vote or, you know, so it's, I mean, we had this kind of puzzle on the one hand, it seems such a limited democracy to us. But if we had been alive in 1770, it would have been a remarkably democratic, so we have to in some sense kind of balance the recognition that these people are not people living in 2023. And that we have to, we, we, while we need to, in some sense judge them by our standards, we have to also judge them by the standards of the world in which they're living. And these people are surprisingly modern and progressive from a perspective of 1740 or 1750, not necessarily from our time. So we have to kind of balance this viewpoint. Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking, you know, do we focus on the progress that had already been made in America and the progress that they made, or do we focus on the problems? And as you just said, we have to focus on both. Yes. You know, we have to talk about both. That's history. It's not, you know, I tell people in Monticello, those are not two different histories. That's one American history. You mentioned also that, you know, these, you focus on seven Virginians. They're obviously, and someone might look at the title of this book and think, oh, this is a Virginia book. Yes. There are obviously other founders. We talk about John Adams, Alexander Hamilton is suddenly popular. Yeah. Why the Virginians in particular? Well, in part because I knew a lot about Jefferson to start with. And I did my graduate work at the University of Virginia. So I had heard a lot of Virginia talk. But it was just, I was just struck by the idea. At this time, I was kind of in the midst of doing my, in 2009, 2010, I was in the beginning work on my biography of Jefferson. So the Virginia contact was in my mind. But I began to, I realized that, you know, this is a kind of a odd story. It's true, there are important founders from Massachusetts and from New York and so forth. But in no other colony is there such a concentration of people who are so important. So I realized, I mean, I could, I could have done, I could have had 15 Americans. But if that gets sort of out of control, and I thought, here's just sort of a little sample of kind of an oddity. It's an oddity that's from this small section of one colony come so many people who are going to play such an important role. They're all literate. Most of their papers are available. And that what you said earlier about the National Archives and the papers, it was an incredible contribution just to scholarship that most of these people have their, their complete correspondence and modern letterpress editions. I mean, starting with Julian Boyd's Jefferson. I mean, just look at the, you think of the papers of Washington and Madison and it's astonishing. And these people wrote a lot and they were kept a lot and it's all available. I mean, you can sit in your office, my office happens to be in the library, but even if it weren't, where you have online, you have online, nearly every word in these people wrote. And so it gives you the sense to sort of get inside them in a way that you couldn't have done 80 or 100 years ago. I have to think about Do Mom Alone. Do Mom Alone spent, you know, most of his life writing this multi volume biography of Jefferson. And at the time, when he started doing this, Julian Boyd was just beginning. And so he had to read the manuscripts and microfilm and so forth. And I can remember my mind years ago seeing Meryl Peterson been over his desk at six o'clock in the night, reading microfilm. And I just think, you know, gosh, what a luxury we have today, either to have the letterpress edition on our shelves or to have the computer that just brings you right in your screen. You can blow it up and you can, so you, you can, you can get inside these people's minds. You can see their values. You can see their, you can see them sharing ideas and learning from each other. And I think that's so exciting. I just found, for example, the Constitutional Convention. Jefferson, of course, is in, is in Paris. But I mean, he's, he's getting letters from Madison. He's getting letters from George Washington. He's writing to John Adams. And you can sort of see through this slow, everything is so slow, but you sort of see their ideas changed and evolve as they're learning from each other. And you just think, wouldn't it have been amazing if Jefferson and Adams and Hamilton and Madison could have had a Zoom conversation like this? Can you just imagine, you can see that Jefferson has a complaint and he writes to Washington and Washington writes back to him or Madison explains something, but months and months take occurring. And anyway, so I just, it seemed to me, you have to get a sample. I didn't want to do every single founding father. I thought, here's a case that they're kind of bound together by their shared Virginia in this, the fact that they knew each other their entire lives, they corresponded the entire lives. So it seemed to me here was sort of a ready made set of people to work with. So that was that. Let's stick with the sources for a moment because you mentioned the microfilm and I don't know if you've had the experience, you probably have, having to explain to students what microfilm is. I know, I know. They're working on the computer. And I must confess how rarely I end up in an archive anymore because much is available. I know. So the sources and you've been talking about the letters and I want to come back to some of our less known Virginians, some of the, you know, George Mason, Patrick Henry, John Marshall, maybe not quite as well known as the former presidents. Before coming back to that, do you have any more thoughts on your sources for these books? Is it primarily the letters or, you know, how does one go about pulling together this kind of material? Well, I say in my introduction that I began, I went to Virginia to start to do graduate work in 1965 and do mom alone was there writing his Jefferson biography. And Meryl Peterson was there and Bernard Mayo was there. So I was caught up in this sort of Jefferson menu and I took their seminars and but it took me 50 years down to get back to writing about that. But anyway, I began a career of writing and reading this in this era and editing a journal. I read hundreds, thousands of articles that were submitted and at the time, like in 1980 or 1990 or 2000, I had no idea I was going to be writing this book. So I wasn't taking notes. I was just basically as an acting scholar teaching, writing, just reading everything I could about the early national period. So I didn't, I wasn't just reading the papers. I was reading documents and laws and secondary sources and I was just trying to get inside this world. And I became increasingly aware that people's letters to really understand, you have to understand the culture and the context. You know, I saw this in telling students, you have students read joke books say from the 1830s and 1840s and the jokes make no sense at all because humor has to be fit into the context and the same with letters. I mean, you read a person's letter and you have to put it in a larger context. And so luckily, since I was not narrowly involved in this topic, I was trying to, I was reading about everything. I was reading religious history and political history and cultural history and social history, just because I was teaching and writing and editing. And then about when I finally, you know, in 29 or 2010 or something, I began to think about topics like this. I realized a lot of stuff I knew or thought I knew. That's because I had read it 20 or 30 or 40 years before in a totally different context. I hadn't taken notes. So in some sense, this is a kind of setting down of what 50 years of writing and thinking and teaching and sort of blending it together and realizing that people have to put things in context and a temporal context and a geographical context. They have to understand why people are writing and who they're writing to. And, you know, it's just, you cannot just take, I mean, you see so often people writing about Washington or Adams or Madison or something and they'll take a one line or one sentence to use it to mean something, not having any idea what Jefferson or Madison or Washington meant at that time because they haven't put it in a larger context. So I thought this is the historian's task is to look at the evidence, put it in context, look at it holistically, and then try to see if you can make the story make sense. And that's what I've tried to do. And I mean, in some ways, some people have told me this, this always puzzles me. People say, when I read your book, it sounds like you're talking to me. Well, maybe so. But I think when I'm writing, what I often have in mind that I have a class in front of me. And when you have a class, you try to explain things. You try to say why this led to this and this led to this. And sometimes you think you have to say something several different ways to get the point across. So I think that in some sense, writing and teaching go together so well. Because when I'm writing, I think in my some sense, I have a class out there. I don't know who the class members are. I don't see them. But I imagine I'm doing the same thing. I'm kind of explaining to this class of unknown readers what I would like to do personally. So, you know, people need to go back to the sources, what the sources had to be put into a context that I think one advantage that I had say, I think I can remember a new mom, you know, Meryl Peterson, a new mom alone writing 50, 60 years ago, I am the beneficiary of 40 or 50 years of incredibly valuable, sophisticated, creative scholarship over the last 50, 60 years. On top of all these wonderfully edited versions of writing The Founding Fathers. And what a godsend it is to read this wonderful world of what I call secondary scholarship. Other people explaining things and putting it in a, and then being able at your fingertip to read The Founding Fathers letters and writers. And I found that not a task, but just such fun, such, I mean, I felt like I was, you're able almost to have a conversation with people because you've got all their letters and you've, you know, it's just, I just, I did fun, not work. Well, and as you say, the historian's job of providing context, and you had mentioned at the beginning that you're early working religious history. And as you know, I've done work in religious history as well, so critical, because it's so easy to take a snippet out of context when you're dealing with that topic. Yes. Let me draw a little deeper. As you may know, my current interest happens to be Patrick Henry. I'm spending a lot of time with Henry. And we've been talking about these paper projects. And as, and you mentioned this at several points in the book, we don't have those kinds of resources for Henry. There's never a major paper, papers project in this century of the 20th century. I would like the National Archives to take that up, by the way, if they're listening. But is Henry more difficult and why do we not have those kinds of resources? You know, I really don't know. I don't know, do his papers exist? Well, the last edition was 1890, and it was done by his grandson. And so it's, it's not a modern, yeah, good edition. Yeah. I don't know that that puzzle of me, the kind of, you know, he stands out among these groups with the shortage of papers. Well, Mason has, George Mason's collected works to only three volumes. And so I feel like we can, we know less about the people fundamentally than the others because of the absence of even, even Patrick Henry's famous speeches. We don't really have good versions. We just kind of have hearsay put together versions of them, you know, and then you compare that with Washington or Jefferson or Madison. You seem like you have almost every thought they ever had written on paper somewhere, you know. No, that's it. Let's come back to Jefferson. I said I'd come back to Jefferson. Yeah. And as you say, we have 19,000 letters from Thomas Jefferson, tens of thousands of letters written to Jefferson. So he of course is an interesting character. And I want to say before I forget that I know those listening on YouTube, you can send a question if you would like, we certainly would welcome that. But we've got a lot of things to talk about. But let's let me ask a more, more pointed question about Jefferson, because I think this is important. You take on directly, and I was on page 40, in declaring that all men are created equal, he meant by the word men, not the male gender only, but human kind. Why do you say that? What, what brings you to that conclusion? I think, you know, when you read, when you read that section of the declaration in which he talks about the Afghans being stolen from Africa, he talks specifically about men and women. So I don't know if I can really say that. I just sense, I guess, that, that in a way that 50 or 60 years ago, any of us, you or me, when talked about people, we would talk about, we'd say, men kind. Sure. And nowadays, we're so much more sensitive to the specificity of pronouns and so forth. That way, we see that differently. He did not, I don't think he believed it that it didn't mean that in a narrowly political sense. I don't think he meant that every person had a right to vote. You had to be a citizen to be a right to vote. But I do think that he believed that men and women and children and all races had basic inherent value. And, you know, even when he, when he spoke about 1768, when he was talking about the rights of an indentured servant, he talked about all men are born with certain, all people are born with certain rights. So it seems to me nothing he said or did would suggest he thought that women never didn't have basic human right to liberty or happiness or whatever. No, I think in some ways it's interesting your distinction between the racial issue for Jefferson and the gender issue. One could argue he's actually more problematic on gender. Because he does say, you know, that I don't think a woman should be a officer of the government should not be an official. So it's a complicated problem. You know, I wanted to understand, you know, he says that mainly when he's in France. That's fairly early in his career. And Jefferson is a person who on many, many different aspects of his life changes his opinion and evolves and so forth. So, you know, I wonder if we, if he had occasion to talk to talk about women and politics more in 1815 or say when he had more experience, say with Dolly Madison or whatever, or with Abigail, what he has spoken differently than he did in 1786. Well, it's a critical point and you bring this up throughout the book, which is we've got to stop thinking of these founders as marble statues. They do change over time. They're human. Again, on gender, I mean, I think Jefferson's difficult on gender in the 80s, but he also in his presidency, but he's difficult on gender. But as you say, as he gets to know Dolly Madison, as life develops in the 18 teens, maybe we have a different Jefferson. But that may lead to an interesting question. Now, you've taught history for 50 years. What most surprised you as you were doing this research and writing this book, were there things that you said, gee, hadn't thought about that, hadn't been aware of that? Well, there are things that I had, I guess, never really read really carefully, that I had to read more carefully now, and I was kind of surprised. And part is because I'm writing about things now in which in the context of contemporary events. And for example, when I was writing about the Constitution, I was more taken with what they said about impeachment now than I would have if I'd written that in 1970 or 1985. And I kept thinking, and I was reading that and reading the debates and reading the papers. It's amazing how prescient these people are. I mean, parts of the parts of the debate at the Constitution Convention could have been taken place now. I was kind of struck by that. Also, even though I knew about the ratification debates, I had never spent a lot of time reading the ratification debates. And I know there's a huge, multi-volume set of papers on the ratification of the American Constitution that's kind of boggling, mind boggling to look at it, you know, and you start reading those debates. What an incredibly rich field that is. And we spent so much time talking about the Constitutional Convention those three months. But there's 1,700 delegates around the various states who are debating for days and days on end the merits of the Constitution. And that body of evidence and thought and so forth is hardly touched on, I think, by most historians. So I was struck by that, particularly by some of the comments of the people at the Virginia Convention. I guess one thing that I was surprised by is that how often and their regular correspondence, these people are incredibly insightful, incredibly thoughtful. And the fact that they have the time to write the letters, I mean, Washington or John Adams or Madison or Hamilton or write letters that are in some sense like term papers, you know, they were a lot of, some of these letters you typed them out will be 15 or 20 pages long. And they're, it's just sort of astonishing to me. Nowadays, when you realize that when a politician makes a speech, it's probably been gone over all kinds of focus groups and five or six writers and so forth. And when Congressional government publications have gone over by whole groups of people writing it, when you realize that Madison and Hamilton and Jefferson and so forth, they're doing this on their own, they're writing it out on their own is sort of astonishing. I was also kind of interested to see how the, we think so much about the cabinet. The cabinet, of course, is not even not even provided for in the Constitution. It just happened sort of accidentally because Washington remembered when he's president, how useful it been to have his other officers around him to discuss things. And so slowly sort of almost accidentally, something like the institution's a cabinet arises. And not all presidents knew how to use it. I mean, obviously, John Adams didn't, his people were basically Hamiltonians. I mean, they were at odds with him. And so that it wasn't a very successful cabinet. And Jefferson, I think it's creates a cabinet of young men whose viewpoints he appreciates and trust. And so he will, he's willing to send his little stuff to them and have them ask questions and respond to it. But I was just surprised with that. I have to say that, I mean, I learned this writing about Jefferson, but the role of Jefferson, the role of conversation around his dinner table was an interesting thing to me in this, in the context that you would have people with all different viewpoints sitting at the table sharing ideas because Jefferson thought politicians could rule better if they knew each other, if they knew the kind of issues are animating people that in some sense that was the kind of a secret to making a democracy work. And today we live in an age of such poisonous partisanship and sort of thinking the worst of other people. I was sort of struck by, gosh, you know, it could, it could work differently. And it did work differently. It worked differently. Recently is 20 years ago. So the kind of ranked partisanship and almost hate that you see in Congress today is not doesn't have to always be that way. It's, you know, we once again, you're back to sources, by the way, and the volume you mentioned about the Constitution, the documentary history, the ratification to constantly that's on my shelf. I mean, I use the it's an astonishing set, you know, but let's come back to your final point because you know that the and historians always need to be careful about this history applied to today. And yeah, but it has lessons as my advisor, Peter Onif, who you know, Peter used to say, if it's not relevant, why are we wasting our time? This is related maybe to the question about what did you find interesting. But your discussion leads me to what do you want your readers to take from this book? What do you want them to learn about not just these Virginians, but maybe our history? I guess I wanted to see that governance is something that needs to be taken seriously. People need to be thoughtful about governments governance. They really need to see government as a policy of the process of solving problems of meeting people's needs of making society work together more harmoniously. That it's not just you know, fighting and feuding and it's not settling scores that government has a higher purpose. And these people, I thought they realized that they realize that the American Revolution, they had to realize that you had to come together and join together to raise money and sacrifice in order. Then they realized after revolution that there were still a lot of problems left. And the Constitution is a kind of a fairly lean document. And we think a government being so complex with departments and agencies and so forth, none of that existed. And I sort of like this idea of when Washington and particularly Madison are there to very begin the Continental Congress trying to in some sense put flesh on this very lean Constitution. I mean, there's nothing there. They have to create it themselves. They have to think about it and work about it. And they know that the decisions they make are going to be extraordinarily important because they're setting precedence. So I guess I'll say the thoughtfulness, the kind of purposefulness, the fact that these people are on a journey to do something important and right, and they want to do the right thing. And they are conscious of the fact that, you know, they can make mistakes, but they can be corrected. Well, and it's so critical for us to remember. You earlier mentioned the cabinet that comes up in Washington's administration. There wasn't a roadmap. Yes. And so much of what was happening, especially in the 1780s and the 1790s and into the 19th century, they're trying to figure out what does it mean to be a loyal opposition? How do you run a government? Yes, we are getting some questions from some of our viewers. And so I want to get to that a little bit. But the first question relates to geography. And the fact that, you know, they're these seven Virginians, they're in Virginia, it's a very geographically different place than England or Europe. And it strikes me, I had also noticed in reading this about Jefferson that you mentioned for him, the goal was the spread of a small free farmers across the state. The question they were asked by the viewers, did their isolation, does the geography of Virginia encourage their forward thinking? I think it by geography, the person means the separation from the old world, rather than the topography of Georgia of Virginia. Yes, I think in some ways they did believe that they had an opportunity there. There was a new country. There was the West was, you know, like this kind of image, I don't know who actually first said it of Monticello. You know, in some sense, it reflects the architecture of the Palladian values that represents in some sense the best architecturally of the old world. But it faces the West, it faces the unlimited possibility of the West. And I think a lot of these people, they have the sense we've got this new continent, we have the opportunity to start things anew, to start things afresh. We should learn from the past. We should learn from our experience. But we shouldn't be tied down by mistakes and so forth that this is an evolving, growing country. And we have the ability here to make choices that we hope can improve mankind. Thomas Payne, we have the opportunity to meet the world new. They say this over and over again, and you read their letters, you read Thomas Payne, Washington, they all have this sense of possibility of change that we think about they're creating a new nation. But they realized they had the opportunity to do something that few people in human history had ever had a chance to do. And people say, how was it that these politicians were so talented that kind of make this contrast between politicians today and politicians then? But you realize, I mean, here's a time in which there weren't really careers in sort of medical science and scientific research and so forth. The most exciting thing happening in the world in 1776 for the people of this generation was the chance to create a new nation, to do it, in some sense, to learn from the enlightenment, to learn from new ideas, to learn from travel and experience, to do something really fresh and earth-shattering. And that is what pulled these people from their libraries and their families and their money-making careers. This is where all the intellectual excitement was, was state-making. And so it attracted the best talent in the nation. And we should pause on that for a moment, and you'll be familiar with this. There is a significant shift that occurs in the middle of the 18th century into the 19th century. In the 17th century, at the beginning of the 18th century, some of the 1600s, that if you were a bright, up-and-coming young man, you went into the ministry. Yes. Because that's what you did. Yes. In the 18th century, we see a shift. Politicians and lawyers become the source. Yes. And the folks we're dealing with here. Now, most of them, you know, Washington, Madison, aren't lawyers. Although I always point out that Madison is not trained as a lawyer, but he's actually a much better lawyer than Jefferson is in many respects. But the law and politics mattered to them because of the opportunity you're discussing. Yes. Yes, that's true. I mean, I think people like Jefferson, so forth, in Madison, they didn't have the career of being, let's say, research scientist or university professor doing research. The ministry was not attracted to them. The thing that attracted them, all the excitement was government and statecraft and thank goodness for that. Yeah, it's an opportunity. Well, we have another question from one of our viewers and about abolitionism. But I want to make it a little more pointed for you because, and I think they're referring to Jefferson. They said, do you think he would have been an abolition sympathizer? Jefferson is criticized, and I'll let you comment on it, when he's forming the University of Virginia in the 18 teens and 1819, and he writes a letter to Brockenball, is it Arthur Brockenball, I believe, in which he makes the argument, and he's been heavily criticized for this, of saying we don't have a Southern University and if we don't have a Southern University, our young men are going to go up to Harvard and Yale and they're going to be infected with all of those New England ideas. And that's always read as abolitionism. He's trying to keep them away from abolitionism. What do you think? The end, let's not limit it to Jefferson. You grapple with this in the book. How would they deal with abolitionism? Well, I think in some sense, he may have met New England, he may have met the kind of remnant of federalist viewpoints. I mean, he's still kind of stuck with this idea of federalism and monarchism and so forth. And I think he might also have been using that fear as a kind of a boogeyman to kind of try to force Virginians to come up with money. So I think you just can't take that sentence. This is just simply trying to create a pro-Southern, pro-slavery institution. I think he's still had in his mind that somehow if you educated the young men the way he thought they should have been educated, they may have been able to develop more progressive attitudes. Of course, that turns out not to be true at University of Virginia or maybe any university. You know, it's one of these kind of if questions. Jefferson changed his mind on a lot of things over a long period of time. If he had lived into, if he had been a younger and alert and alive in the 1830s and 1840s, how would he have evolved and how would he have changed? I really don't know. I mean, I think he's still as puzzle with this idea of this commonplace idea of the 18th century that African-American people are in some sense a different kind of people. We see Jefferson so often in a lot of ways, we'll see a comment that Jefferson makes in 1783 and we'll believe, we'll hold that, I will say he thinks that idea all the way to the end of his life or it will find the changes in his mind and then he'll be criticized for being inconsistent. Well, he is inconsistent, I guess the way any able person would be. I mean, you'd hate to know a person who at 80 believed exactly what they did when they were 17. But he, I just don't know if his, if it's from his worldview, if he would have been able to imagine the kind of multicultural world or a multiracial political world that we wished he could have. I doubt that he could. I mean, I think he certainly, for complicated reasons, he and a lot of people thought that abolitionism would have to be combined with colonialism, with colonization, because I think he thought that the racial attitudes of whites and the legitimate anger and so forth, the Blacks meant that whites and Blacks would have a hard time living together and it would be better in some sense for the Black people to sort of have their own country and be developed in their own culture and so forth. So I don't, I think his imagined world would have been essentially a Europeanized America and then an Africanized series, maybe of islands in the Caribbean. That's the reason I said you walk on UVA campus today and you see the multiplicity of race, this and gender. You just, how could Jefferson possibly have conceived of this? Probably not. But I don't know that not many people could imagine that in 1810 or 1815. Right at the time. Well, and as you say, we do have to be aware of the change in thought process. I, Jefferson's presidency, Jefferson has been accused of hypocrisy in his presidency since his presidency and his story to join that. I'm actually increasingly making the argument that, no, he really changed his mind from what he was thinking in the 1790s. But because he was a politician, he couldn't say, I was wrong, I'm going to redo this, but he does change his mind. That leads to another question and I want to get off Jefferson, but I want to ask Jefferson a question. You write, in a real sense, Jefferson reshaped the presidency. Not only was he the head of a party, but he actively initiated and promoted a program. Can you tell us a little bit more about that and how you think that shapes the modern presidency? Well, I think we imagined today that the president is obviously the head of a party and we imagine the president having an agenda. Presidents run for the presidency and most times they have things that they want to do. They want to accomplish. They intend to promote legislation. And I think that to a large degree, Washington and Adams didn't have that sense. So there were more figureheads and they didn't see them. Of course, they certainly didn't imagine themselves head of a party. Even George Washington like to say he was not a party man, even when he became obviously partisan. And so I think that Jefferson is a person who, by taking up the opposing, the A in sedition action and so forth, becomes clearly the head of a political party and takes that as a willing to do that. But when he becomes president, he has ideas. He has things he wants to accomplish. And so he has either he writes legislation or he has friends if he has introduced legislation and he plays a very active role in sort of trying to shape the opinion of members of Congress. So I think that in some sense he expands the role of the presidency, not to just a figurehead who exemplifies the American nation, but a person who creates and molds together energy and political ideas and ambitions and has things specific things he wants to achieve. So I think that he does. I think that's one of the things a lot of things are evolving. For example, obviously, John Marshall amazingly evolves and creates the modern Supreme Court. And I think maybe to a lesser degree, that Jefferson modernizes and evolves the role of the presidency. And that's again one of the things that I was interested in to see how these Madison and Washington and the first Congress, Jefferson and Madison and the rise of political parties, the kind of evolution of the presidency, the evolution of the Supreme Court, that everything didn't just begin with the Constitution or began with 1776, but there's a process of struggle and evolving and creation and backtracking and what exists in 1830. It's not exactly what was imagined in 1776 or 1787 and it continues to evolve. Well, and you talk about that. We've been talking about the founding era, the 1780s, the 90s and the 1810s. Near the end of the book, it takes on, in some places, almost a melancholy tone about the change that's occurring. You write, you know, a defensiveness and outlook came to dominance in Virginia. Can you talk a little bit about that? Well, and I think, you know, I sort of hinted this, you look at the sort of relative decline of Virginia as a nation, as a state. It's no longer the most popular state. By 1860, it's the sixth most popular state. It's lost, it's losing population. Its economy is on the decline. It has a different kind of political leadership. The old tobacco fields are worn out. In the 1820s and 1830s, a lot of people are talking with a sense of, you know, a decline in malaise and the long time agricultural collapse. There are reasons for Virginians feeling having a sense of depression and malaise. And I think, I'm thinking here of Dan Jordan's book on the local politicians in Virginia, how different kinds of politicians you no longer have the kind of thoughtful statesmen who could, in some sense, think larger than their state and think about what was good for the nation. But now you had people who had to, you had to be, think about election. You had to think primarily about local concerns. You had to deal with local issues. And that you had to be a skill public speaker. And you kind of, Dan Jordan's book leaves you with the idea that you couldn't imagine a Washington or an Adams or a Madison being elected after 1830 as a kind of decline. And that, and I make the point that after Monroe, not a single Virginia, as a politician from Virginia, become an elected president. And you think about, you know, for the first five presidents are Virginians. And then there's a long, long, long run after that. And so I think there, Virginia, again, everybody is aware in 1788, that Virginia is the largest and the oldest and the most populous. And in some sense, the most important of the states. That's no longer two in 1860. It's economy and it's, and actually, I mean, you can see that very much when Jefferson's daughter, Ellen, you know, Marys and moved to New England. She's just amazed when she and her husband, new husband, go to go to Massachusetts. She has a sense that it'll take a hundred years. That the northern states are a hundred years in advance of economy and society of Virginia. And Jefferson sort of agrees. It's this fatal stain on our society. So there is just speaking of decline. And another question from one of our viewers was we were talking about we need a Jefferson's view that we need a Southern University. Why didn't William and Mary qualify? William and Mary was still sort of, I think, stuck in the past and didn't didn't modernize the way Jefferson wanted to and didn't modernize its curriculum and so forth. And I mean, actually, in a lot of ways, University of Virginia is a quite remarkable institution, you know, we know, obviously know it's architectural beauty and so forth, but it's open elective system. It's, you know, that's all amazingly modern. And instead of learning by rote, you listen to lectures and took exams and so forth. So University of Virginia is not ahead of its time, or just simply architecturally, but in sense of how it's supposed to work. Now, in fact, the students were not nearly as curious and advanced and open minded. Jefferson thought they're all going to be kind of little Jefferson's, you know, people incredibly dedicated scholarship and so forth. And they're teenage spoiled boys. Yeah, it didn't work that way. Well, we're almost out of time. Let me ask you, John, one last question that gives you a chance to comment a little bit about not only this book, but your views on history in your dedication, you open up the book, of course, of the dedication, we always do when writing the book, and you talk about you've been publishing for 50 years, and you say, gee, this is perhaps my last book. Can you comment on the changes in teaching and writing history in the past 50 years? And you've only got four minutes to do it. Well, I've taught a variety of institutions. And I've taught, I think there's been a decline in, at least in the nation, there's been decline in interest in reading and maybe even reading ability. But I think one of the advantages we have today, if you do it, for example, if you do a seminar today, you have access to sources online and in print. That you simply couldn't have had 50 years ago or 40 years ago. And you have an access, I mean, I think students now have no idea what an advantage the internet is, how easy it is to find stuff online, how you can, how you're a simple library will have millions of books available online that you didn't have years ago. And I find that it's such a different experience when you do term papers and so forth, the things that you have to look at. Also, I have to say that college, the increased diversity of people in the classroom makes it a lot more fun to teach. I mean, it's really fun to say, you know, let's just say you're teaching. You could teach a similar objection, for example. You'll have in your classroom two or three black students. You'll have students from India. You'll have, you know, you'll have southern students and northern students. That wouldn't have been true when I was teaching 50 years ago. And it brings about a different kind of conversation. Different questions are asked. You have to respond in different kind of ways. And the history, I have to say, when I was in graduate school, history was overwhelmingly still political history. Social history was beginning. Women's history hadn't yet caught on. Religious history was a brand new field. And those are all really mature, advanced fields now. And so today, when I started doing this most recent book on the seven Virginians, I felt I was doing a really, really old fashioned history. This is kind of history that I was introduced to, you know, in 1961. And I myself had gone in different directions. I find that students oftentimes, I think, I mean, I teach at an incredibly elite university where the students are like Ivy League students. And they've all had really good educations before they come to rice. I have to say, though, that I find that students in high school don't have the kind of preparation in reading that I had had. I mean, I went to a small country school. But we talked about things in our classes that I find students now don't talk about. Sometimes I'm kind of surprised the kind of things that students don't know that I thought everybody knew. And I mean, you can go to college now. You can get a degree in history and not take a single course in the colonial history or the founding fathers or history of political ideas or the cause of the civil war. I mean, it's kind of stunching to me that, you know, the sort of what I thought sort of the basic building blocks of historical understanding are often missing. Well, it's fascinating. I mean, you're talking about both the dramatic expansion and the diversity of materials. Yes. Of subjects. Yes. And of students. And I love when I have the opportunity to teach not only countries. We love the international students because of their perspective, but age, differences, gender, race, and so on. It's fascinating. Well, John, we're out of time. This has been fascinating. The book for our viewers is Seven Virginians. The Men Who Shaped Our Republic by John Bowles. We hope you have an opportunity to enjoy this discussion, but also to enjoy various works. Thank you very much, John. I enjoyed your questions. Thank you.