The Megyn Kelly Show - Thomas Jefferson and the Founding of America： History Week on the Megyn Kelly Show ｜ Ep. 459

00:00:00.440 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:11.760 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Today we are going back to the time of America's founding to focus on one of the most influential men in American politics, in American history, Thomas Jefferson.

00:00:25.540 Thomas Jefferson was the third president of the United States, author of the Declaration of Independence, and governor of Virginia.

00:00:33.040 He played a key role in executing a vision that shaped America as we know it today. Some of us continue to live his values, whether we know it or not.

00:00:43.220 While he led a very successful life, there were plenty of pitfalls, and he, as a man, was far from perfect,

00:00:50.460 something that the left is trying to use in the 21st century to cancel the American icon in an attempt to erase him from history and to make him no more than the sum of his faults.

00:01:03.860 Joining us today is humanities scholar and author and host of The Thomas Jefferson Hour, Clay Jenkinson.

00:01:10.960 Welcome to the show, Clay. Thanks for being here.

00:01:13.400 Megan, it's a delight to be here, eager to talk about this great man.

00:01:16.300 Yeah, me too. So we're gonna, I'll keep it simple, and I'll just assume people know only the basics about him, and you can fill in the rest of the story.

00:01:24.920 I think most people know that he authored the Declaration of Independence, and that you've got Monticello, which was his house.

00:01:31.940 Some of us have seen it on our tours and so on of America, but I don't know how much people know about Thomas Jefferson behind that or beyond that.

00:01:40.700 Now they're hearing every other day that he owns slaves, and he needs to be canceled, but you've spent your adult life devoted to letting people understand his full legacy.

00:01:51.040 And I know you believe very strongly that we must understand what he stood for and his words and the meaning behind them because they really are built into the foundation of where we live and how we live.

00:02:05.580 Give us the broad overview before we get into the specifics on why he's so important to us.

00:02:12.420 Well, you know, there's a biography of George Washington that calls him America's indispensable man, and he was.

00:02:19.040 And probably there's no greater figure amongst the founders than Washington for a range of reasons.

00:02:24.940 But we can't understand the history of this country or its value system until we come to terms with Jefferson.

00:02:31.100 Jefferson, Megan, really articulated the American dream.

00:02:35.540 First of all, he believed that we're up to it, that we are equal to the challenge of self-government.

00:02:40.560 He believed that humans are perfectible, at least up to a certain degree.

00:02:45.020 He believed that we should leave European habits behind and forge a new, extraordinary, smaller Republican American culture.

00:02:53.560 He believed that the glory of a nation is in its literature, its sculpture, its painting, its architecture, its gardening, and not in its warfare or its geopolitical position.

00:03:04.740 He was an isolationist.

00:03:06.820 He's really a tremendously extraordinary man.

00:03:09.720 And if there's any figure in our history who is truly a Renaissance man, can arguably be put in the same paragraph with someone like Leonardo da Vinci.

00:03:19.460 It's Thomas Jefferson.

00:03:21.560 He was born in 1743.

00:03:23.940 He died at the age of 83 on July 4th, 1826.

00:03:28.440 And as you say, he was not just the third president of the United States for two terms, but also the governor of Virginia, the first secretary of state, the American ambassador to France, and the vice president of this country under his frenemy, John Adams.

00:03:44.760 How did it come to be that a man as young as Jefferson could write the Declaration of Independence?

00:03:53.900 You know, it's hard to think of, what was he, like 31 when he wrote it?

00:03:57.260 33.

00:03:57.540 Someplace around there?

00:03:57.940 33.

00:03:58.380 33.

00:03:59.020 How did a man of 33 years write that thing?

00:04:03.840 And he wrote it relatively quickly.

00:04:06.000 He did.

00:04:08.500 So he said he consulted neither book nor pamphlet.

00:04:11.220 That may be something of an exaggeration.

00:04:13.780 He was 33.

00:04:14.600 He was the youngest member of the Virginia delegation to the Second Continental Congress.

00:04:18.560 In fact, Megan, he was an alternate.

00:04:20.760 And he was there, and he was shy.

00:04:23.340 He was an exceedingly shy and private person, in some ways even a secretive person.

00:04:28.320 So he wasn't one of those people like John Adams who stood up all the time and spoke and had opinions about everything and demanded that he be the center of attention.

00:04:36.760 Jefferson was at the opposite end of that spectrum.

00:04:39.460 But here's what he did have.

00:04:40.740 He had spent the first 20-some years of his life reading hard.

00:04:45.280 And when I say reading hard, I mean reading hard.

00:04:49.380 He says that at some points he was reading 15 hours per day.

00:04:53.860 Well, try that for a week.

00:04:55.140 He knew seven languages, three ancient and four modern.

00:04:58.640 And more than that, thanks to his first great mentor, a man named William Small at the College of William and Mary, Jefferson read essentially the corpus of Enlightenment texts, Voltaire, Samuel Johnson, Rousseau, Dolbach, etc.

00:05:15.700 And he absorbed all of these.

00:05:18.040 He had a capacious mind, and he kept a commonplace book.

00:05:20.860 And so he knew more about the history of human liberty probably than any other person in the United States as he sat there in Philadelphia.

00:05:30.880 And secondly, Jefferson practiced being a good writer of English prose.

00:05:37.280 He prided himself on being straightforward, being clear, not being Ciceronian, being very transparent, using smaller words rather than larger ones, getting always to the point, being brief. 0.98

00:05:49.580 And so when this moment came, and they were needing to have a declaration of independence to tell the world that we were no longer going to accept colonial subservience, John Adams and Jefferson were placed on this committee.

00:06:04.800 And Adams came to Jefferson in his boarding house in Philadelphia and said, you must write this declaration.

00:06:10.380 Three reasons.

00:06:11.020 First, you are a Virginian, and a Virginian must be at the head of this business. 0.99

00:06:14.720 Secondly, I, John Adams, am widely disliked and obnoxious.

00:06:17.840 And if I write it, I'll be the issue.

00:06:20.320 And third, you write 10 times better than I do.

00:06:24.060 And you know what, Megan?

00:06:24.880 He was right.

00:06:25.640 Jefferson is the best prose stylist of the founders.

00:06:29.420 I love that.

00:06:30.940 And I love that self-awareness by Adams, too.

00:06:32.980 It's so funny.

00:06:34.760 So let's back up.

00:06:35.960 So now you set him up for the audience.

00:06:37.980 Let's go back to, you know, years zero through 33 to what got him to this place.

00:06:44.780 He was a Virginian.

00:06:46.080 How was he raised?

00:06:48.500 Yeah, your opening got right to the heart of it.

00:06:52.000 So Jefferson's first memory of all of the memories of his life was being about two years old, and his father moved their family to another plantation to help out another family.

00:07:06.960 And Jefferson remembers being carried on top of a horse on a pillow by a trusted black slave. 0.87

00:07:14.300 So think of that.

00:07:15.280 The first memory of all the memories of his life is of a trust relationship with an enslaved person.

00:07:23.940 He was born into the thick of the slave economy.

00:07:27.900 He valiantly tried to extricate himself at certain points.

00:07:31.380 He was never able to do it.

00:07:32.740 Eventually, he sort of lost interest in it, I think, and became a little bit complacent.

00:07:37.940 But that's the first memory of his life.

00:07:39.840 And when he died on July 4th, 1826, enslaved people built his coffin. 1.00

00:07:44.800 They dug the grave in the graveyard at Monticello and buried him.

00:07:50.520 And so his life is enveloped with race and slavery in a way that yours isn't and mine isn't and the 21st century ours isn't, at least in this country.

00:08:02.120 So for us to understand Jefferson, we have to factor that in from the beginning and throughout.

00:08:06.840 Now, what we make of it is another question.

00:08:10.180 So he grew up in Virginia.

00:08:11.600 He was privately tutored until he was 16 and a half.

00:08:14.520 Then he went up to the logical place, the College of William and Mary.

00:08:18.420 He had a brilliant set of mentors there.

00:08:21.140 He, again, was reading 12, 15 hours per day.

00:08:24.060 And by the time he finished, he was maybe the best intellectually prepared person in America, with the possible exception of John Adams, and the best intellectually prepared president when he became president in 1801 until Theodore Roosevelt.

00:08:41.460 So wait, let me let me ask you there what it sounds like a rich family.

00:08:45.920 He was born on a plantation.

00:08:47.140 He they had slaves.

00:08:48.360 So he had money.

00:08:49.820 What was the family's dream for him back then?

00:08:52.180 Like when he was born, we weren't thinking about American independence.

00:08:55.300 Most of the people living in the colonies were pretty happy with British rule, with some minor complaints that it grew over time.

00:09:01.620 But what was the family's dream for him?

00:09:05.020 That's a great question, Megan.

00:09:06.040 And so he never intended to be part of a revolution and wasn't too happy to be in it, frankly.

00:09:11.400 He thought that he would grow up and he'd have some civic duties.

00:09:14.840 He might be a justice of the peace.

00:09:16.880 You know, it's arguable he could attend the House of Burgesses as a delegate.

00:09:20.860 Maybe, maybe he'd be governor of Virginia.

00:09:23.520 They sort of took their turn, the elite.

00:09:26.080 But he did not expect to be a figure that we're talking about.

00:09:29.580 I can tell you that.

00:09:31.000 And he was a little surprised when it all came.

00:09:33.560 And not particularly well-fitted for it, either.

00:09:36.680 He was shy and he was thin-skinned.

00:09:39.380 And you know, as well as anybody, you have to be thick-skinned to be a public figure in the United States then and now.

00:09:46.260 He grew up in privilege, but not luxury.

00:09:49.700 His father, Peter Jefferson, was a sort of self-made man.

00:09:52.640 But he married into one of the most prominent families in Virginia, the Randolph family.

00:09:58.280 And so there were expectations for Jefferson that a regular person in Auburum County, Virginia, would not have.

00:10:05.680 That he was going to have to play a role.

00:10:08.480 But that role might have been quite small.

00:10:10.980 And if it weren't for the revolution, we might not know his name.

00:10:14.880 Except for the magnificent beauty of his architecture.

00:10:18.480 So how did he get pulled into that, right?

00:10:21.720 So he finishes college at the College of William and Mary.

00:10:25.280 He's very well-read, very well-educated, and prepared for whatever life's going to throw at him.

00:10:29.280 How do we go from that to the Declaration of Independence, becoming president?

00:10:34.020 I mean, it all happened very quickly.

00:10:35.220 You know, when you look around and you realize that things have to change, that the colonial relationship had broken, there had been a whole series of warm-up events from the Stamp Act and the Townsend Acts and the Boston Tea Party and so on.

00:10:52.580 Jefferson came to the conclusion that we were going to have to break with Britain because he believed in the sovereignty of the people, that people are entitled to self-government, to self-determination, and that we were really suffering under British colonial tyranny.

00:11:04.500 And as he says in the Declaration of Independence, we should not have a rebellion for light and transient causes, but when there's a long train of abuses and usurpations showing a pattern of abuse, then we not only have a duty, I mean, we not only have a right to rise up and overthrow that government, but we have a duty to do so.

00:11:23.800 So he was drawn in by his reading and by his awareness of what was happening.

00:11:30.000 And then in 1774, he wrote a pamphlet, which was published without his permission, called A Summary View.

00:11:36.700 And everyone in all the colonies thought, this is a young man to reckon with.

00:11:41.460 This is a great thinker and even more, a great articulator of the American position.

00:11:47.320 And so he was then drawn into the national councils because of his genius.

00:11:54.040 So I have people on the show all the time who I love because when they speak, they espouse some sort of an idea in the most articulate and interesting way.

00:12:05.200 And it's an idea we may have discussed on the show a thousand times before, but the way that they articulate this idea is, I say, like, cool water on a hot brain.

00:12:14.720 You're just like, yes, thank you for saying that.

00:12:17.480 I finally get it.

00:12:18.820 I've heard it 10,000 different ways, but now I get it.

00:12:22.280 He was that guy.

00:12:25.240 He had that clarity, Megan.

00:12:26.980 You know, Alexander Pope, the British poet, said that wit is what oft was thought but never so well expressed.

00:12:34.000 And that's Jefferson.

00:12:35.800 You know, anyone could have written the Declaration of Independence.

00:12:38.660 Adams had the chance to write it.

00:12:40.320 Others were more prominent and were senior to Jefferson.

00:12:44.260 But if they had written it, it would, I think, be regarded as a sort of routine state paper today.

00:12:50.380 What Jefferson brought to it was that incredible lucidity that you're talking about and a kind of passion that was under tight reign, that he controlled that passion.

00:13:02.260 And then he found the 35 most interesting words in the English language.

00:13:07.700 We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

00:13:20.020 Nobody else could have done that.

00:13:23.080 Nobody else could have written that sentence.

00:13:25.040 Imagine John Adams writing that sentence.

00:13:26.760 It would have been two and a half pages long with footnotes and arguments and scholastic logic and attacks on his enemies.

00:13:34.100 Jefferson knew how to get to the point.

00:13:37.380 You know, he wrote 83 volumes worth of letters and so on.

00:13:41.460 And I've never read a single paragraph of Thomas Jefferson that wasn't immediately clear.

00:13:47.620 Ask that of any other person you've ever heard of.

00:13:51.960 Every time you say it or I hear it or I read it, I get the chills.

00:13:56.340 You hear those words, especially spoken out loud, no matter how many times.

00:14:00.500 Right.

00:14:00.680 It just it gives you a chill.

00:14:02.280 That's him.

00:14:02.900 I mean, imagine being the person who had that effect on humanity, on an entire country full of people for centuries.

00:14:11.500 Like it just gives you some perspective on his gift.

00:14:14.640 But you've pointed out, I know, that Jefferson with the written word, no equal.

00:14:21.960 Jefferson with the spoken word, he was no Churchill.

00:14:26.580 That's to put it lightly.

00:14:27.700 So he had a slight stammer of some sort and a high pitched and reedy voice.

00:14:32.380 So nothing like my voice, I'm afraid.

00:14:35.000 And he gave as few speeches in the course of his life as possible.

00:14:38.460 First of all, he didn't think that speechifying was a very good thing because you always oversimplify and you play to the crowd and you, you know, you wind yourself up into statements that you probably would pull back a little on if you could.

00:14:51.620 So the most famous example is his first inaugural address.

00:14:54.960 It's March 4th, 1801, contested election, first president to be inaugurated in the new Capitol in Washington in the unfinished Capitol building.

00:15:04.120 He's staying at a boarding house not so far away.

00:15:06.540 He strolls without a military escort, without bands and a carriage and so on.

00:15:12.900 He strolls over to the Capitol and there he delivers his first inaugural address, one of the two or three masterpieces of that genre.

00:15:20.900 But he mumbled and he was so quiet and soft-spoken that people were leaning forward.

00:15:28.480 There were about a thousand people there and they wanted to know because he regarded this as the second American revolution.

00:15:34.240 So they wanted to know what's this guy going to bring to us?

00:15:37.960 You know, how many radical changes is he promoting?

00:15:41.600 Because a lot of people had fears that Jefferson was too radical, spent too much time in France.

00:15:45.800 And so Jefferson reads out this magnificent inaugural address in which he says, every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle.

00:15:54.720 We are all Republicans.

00:15:56.020 We are all Democrats, all Federalists, he said.

00:16:00.560 It's amazing.

00:16:01.800 But he mumbled and no one could hear it.

00:16:03.520 And so people went out afterwards and bought printed copies on the street.

00:16:08.360 And that was it.

00:16:09.020 He gave a second inaugural address in 1805.

00:16:11.880 But other than that, no State of the Union messages, no stump speaking.

00:16:16.200 When he left the presidency voluntarily in March of 1890, he went home to Monticello and he never left its environs for the last 17 years of his life.

00:16:25.280 He's not one of us.

00:16:26.520 He's not Chris Christie.

00:16:27.560 He's not Donald Trump.

00:16:28.540 He's not Bill Clinton.

00:16:30.820 Yeah.

00:16:31.060 And he back then he could have run for a third term.

00:16:34.640 He wasn't limited by the term.

00:16:36.300 Easily.

00:16:36.880 Easily.

00:16:37.100 Yeah, exactly.

00:16:37.720 So he voluntarily walked away.

00:16:39.960 So before he gets to the presidency, because I think that the run for presidents is very interesting in his case and how I've heard and read you discussing how contentious it was and ugly.

00:16:49.940 You know, we think that we live in the ugliest political times ever.

00:16:53.140 We got to read some history to know it's been ugly for a long time.

00:16:56.780 But before all that, talk about the American Revolution.

00:17:00.380 You mentioned he was part of the Continental Congress, this American group that was helping advise on the war while it while it took place from 1774, plus four years.

00:17:11.100 And he was part of that.

00:17:12.900 So how did he get pulled into that?

00:17:14.620 Was it because of his the treaty that you that you mentioned or what was the name of the paper that he that got published?

00:17:19.240 He got pulled in because of his capacity as a thinker and a writer.

00:17:23.440 And then he became the governor of Virginia during the darkest period of the war.

00:17:28.100 He had a good war and a bad war, but mostly a bad war.

00:17:31.300 He's not a warrior.

00:17:32.140 He's not Washington.

00:17:33.040 He's not even James Monroe.

00:17:36.020 He's a philosopher and he's a thinker.

00:17:38.320 And he's a little bit.

00:17:40.960 He's so refined that it's hard to imagine him with a musket in his hand.

00:17:45.260 You can't imagine him at Valley Forge because he's a creature of enormous comfort.

00:17:50.680 So he's sort of a penman of the revolution.

00:17:53.120 He became governor.

00:17:54.220 Just at that time, the war went went sour and the British invaded the South, invaded Virginia.

00:17:59.500 Jefferson handled it pretty not well, let's say.

00:18:05.620 And in fact, he was investigated for malfeasance because the British invaded all the way up to the capital at Richmond and scattered the government.

00:18:14.800 And eventually, Bannister Tarleton brought some dragoons up the hill to Monticello.

00:18:19.320 Jefferson fled into the woods, which I suppose was a rational thing to do.

00:18:22.900 But he never lived that down.

00:18:24.640 He never was able to live that down.

00:18:25.660 He was found guilty of cowardice.

00:18:26.660 And so Deirdre Roosevelt, for example, couldn't stand Jefferson because Roosevelt goes where the trouble is. 0.95

00:18:34.420 Roosevelt jumps right into the fire, right into the battle, right onto the grenade.

00:18:38.380 And he thought Jefferson was the kind of person who slips away.

00:18:41.580 And it's a little bit true. 1.00

00:18:44.180 And so at the end of the war, Jefferson's career was in disarray.

00:18:49.500 His wife had died at the age of 33.

00:18:51.520 He had almost what we would call a nervous breakdown over that, I think.

00:18:55.720 And it looked as if he was done.

00:18:58.900 You know, he'd live out his life on his plantation, but in kind of disgrace.

00:19:03.160 But Madison got him sent over to France to serve as the American minister there.

00:19:08.540 And Jefferson recovered.

00:19:09.820 And he came back.

00:19:11.480 And things, of course, went from strength to strength with Jefferson.

00:19:14.580 But the nadir of his career was being governor of Virginia.

00:19:18.540 And here's what the takeaway from that is.

00:19:20.840 He learned a lesson.

00:19:22.460 He was such a small-hour Republican that he read his job description in the most minimalist way.

00:19:27.800 When the people really wanted a strong leader, even maybe a temporary dictator at that point.

00:19:33.020 Save us.

00:19:33.920 Save the state.

00:19:35.300 Jefferson didn't have it in him, both philosophically or in his character set.

00:19:39.140 But when he became president, he did not make the mistake, Megan, of undervaluing his power.

00:19:45.500 He behaved more like a Hamiltonian as president than at any other time in his life. 0.56

00:19:51.240 And he knew that when you have power, you don't duck it.

00:19:54.680 You need to use it carefully and within the limits of the Constitution.

00:19:57.480 But you must be willing to assert power or you can't be an important leader.

00:20:03.460 Or you can't be entrusted with it.

00:20:05.700 So, OK, so that's fascinating because I did read he was investigated for cowardice in connection with the fleeing while governor of Virginia.

00:20:13.020 But you raise a good point.

00:20:14.120 He saved his life and he knew he wasn't a fighter.

00:20:17.700 Like he kind of knew himself pretty well.

00:20:19.680 This wasn't going to go well for him if he stayed and fought.

00:20:21.660 So he lived to fight another day, you might say, and in a different way.

00:20:26.420 And then he gets the idea to run for president.

00:20:29.620 Was when he won, was it the first time he had run?

00:20:33.700 No.

00:20:34.320 So let me clarify one piece there.

00:20:36.680 He would say I'm not sure we have to believe him.

00:20:39.520 He would say he never wanted to be the president of the United States.

00:20:42.280 He looked on it as sort of his jury duty, that he was called upon by the American people, that he would rather be home with his rutabagas and his landscape gardening and his books.

00:20:53.440 And maybe that's true.

00:20:54.420 You know, they were all pretending to be Cincinnatus out of the world of Plutarch.

00:20:58.720 But Jefferson always said he would rather not have had the president.

00:21:02.820 He called it splendid misery.

00:21:04.180 And when he left voluntarily after two terms, and he certainly would have been reelected because of the Louisiana Purchase, among other things, he said, never has a prisoner released from his shackles felt more relief than I do upon this occasion.

00:21:17.000 I have no more desire to govern men than to ride my horse through a storm.

00:21:21.300 Well, maybe.

00:21:22.140 He's no Bill Clinton who wanted to be president from 16.

00:21:24.940 And maybe Jefferson is putting it on a little thick.

00:21:27.680 But he stood for the presidency reluctantly in 1796, pushed forward by others.

00:21:31.980 He came in second, and under the electoral college system, then he became vice president, which meant we had a Federalist president and a Republican vice president.

00:21:41.460 In 1800, he sort of did want to be president for this reason.

00:21:45.140 He wanted to throw the rascals out.

00:21:47.460 He felt that the Federalists, Washington, Adams, and particularly Colonel Hamilton, were taking the country towards aristocracy and monarchy and a strong central government.

00:22:00.520 And that this was really a violation of the principles of the revolution.

00:22:04.160 And so he stood to restore the country.

00:22:07.380 And he called it, when he won, America's second revolution, that he had brought us back to the true principles of the thing.

00:22:14.560 So, you know, you have to unpack that with ambition and rhetoric and posturing.

00:22:19.400 But I do think he was a very reluctant political figure.

00:22:23.320 And he certainly would have been reelected in 1808 and chose to retire.

00:22:28.780 And he said that the precedent set by George Washington of two terms is essential to the health of a republic.

00:22:36.240 When was he sent over to France?

00:22:38.060 Was he our ambassador to France?

00:22:40.640 Yeah, 1784 to 1789.

00:22:42.400 He was called technically our American minister to France.

00:22:44.780 But that was right after the debacle of the revolution and the death of his wife.

00:22:50.060 And he went to France and he did recover, Megan.

00:22:52.400 He fell in love with French high culture, the sculpture, the painting, the music.

00:22:57.380 He said, if there's one thing I covet in violation of the Ten Commandments, it's European music.

00:23:03.060 He fell in love in Paris with a British-Italian woman named Maria Cosway, the last love, I think, of his life.

00:23:11.100 She was married and sort of what happens in Paris isn't going to really work very well back in Virginia.

00:23:17.080 But he lost control of his head, which almost never happened with Jefferson.

00:23:22.900 He went into northern Italy, doing so with a map to try to figure out how Hannibal had come over the Alps with his elephants.

00:23:30.240 Jefferson was one of the most curious men who ever lived on Earth.

00:23:35.000 And so he had a great five years in France and he toured wine country and he became America's first true wine connoisseur and the wine advisor to the other four of the first five presidents because of his mastery.

00:23:48.040 Everything Jefferson touched, he mastered.

00:23:50.440 And the one definition of genius, Megan, is it's an infinite capacity for taking pains.

00:23:55.020 And if ever that were true, that's Jefferson.

00:23:57.240 Now, this woman you mentioned in France was not his first love.

00:24:02.580 You mentioned his wife, Martha, right?

00:24:04.860 I think he had a Martha, too, in addition to the most famous Martha, Washington.

00:24:08.560 So he fell in love with Martha.

00:24:10.300 She died at a young age.

00:24:11.720 And I always joke with my husband, Doug.

00:24:14.180 I'll say, honey, you know, God forbid anything should happen to me.

00:24:17.520 And after a suitable time, you meet a nice young woman and you fall in love and, you know, you want to get remarried.

00:24:23.580 You must never do it.

00:24:25.260 Never.

00:24:25.620 I will haunt you from the grave. 0.90

00:24:26.960 I will haunt you.

00:24:28.580 This woman actually kind of said that.

00:24:31.300 And that was the deal that was struck before she died.

00:24:34.340 That's the family tradition, that as Martha was dying at the age of 33 from complications of birthing her sixth child, she was almost continuously pregnant.

00:24:44.800 No birth control in those days.

00:24:46.300 She said to have brought the family in and Jefferson by her side at her deathbed. 0.77

00:24:53.180 And she said, I want you never to remarry.

00:24:55.480 I want you to pledge not to because she had been, in her mind, the victim of a stepmother.

00:25:00.900 And so that's the family story.

00:25:02.920 Whether it's 100 percent true, we can't know.

00:25:05.120 But probably it's true.

00:25:06.520 Jefferson never did remarry, as you know, although he found other ways of fulfilling his sexual and romantic life.

00:25:15.320 Right.

00:25:15.520 The French gal was just one example. 1.00

00:25:18.100 We'll get to the others.

00:25:20.060 Yeah.

00:25:20.260 So, you know, you remind me when you talk about your husband, Doug, Theodore Roosevelt's first wife died.

00:25:26.440 She was just 23, of Bright's disease.

00:25:29.060 And he was a Victorian, so he was never going to remarry.

00:25:31.580 Well, he did.

00:25:32.200 He married his childhood sweetheart, Edith.

00:25:34.440 And thank goodness he did, because it really was the making of his greatness, I think.

00:25:39.940 But he said to his sister, Bami, when she found out that he was engaged, he said, you have to hope there's no heaven.

00:25:48.300 Because if in heaven we meet all those that we loved in life, this is going to be awkward.

00:25:55.260 That's amazing.

00:25:56.880 Unless it turns out that we're just these recognizable souls who know and love each other without that identity on us.

00:26:02.100 You know, like, I love the theory that you travel through this world with the same sort of set of souls who are important to you, and they may come back in different forms.

00:26:09.860 It could be your wife in the next life. 0.96

00:26:11.720 It could be your child in this one.

00:26:13.000 You know, I don't know.

00:26:14.060 Who the heck knows?

00:26:14.800 But it's fun to think about, sort of.

00:26:16.500 And then it's kind of depressing.

00:26:18.000 Okay.

00:26:18.420 So he's heartbroken.

00:26:20.100 He goes over to France.

00:26:21.180 He finds a woman with whom to spend some time.

00:26:24.520 She's married.

00:26:25.620 She's French.

00:26:26.540 It's not going to work out.

00:26:27.580 But a soothing balm, nonetheless.

00:26:28.860 He moves back to America and, bam, things start happening for him on a great and next level.

00:26:35.000 Sometimes when you, you know, you mentioned the Nader when he was governor of Virginia.

00:26:38.800 Boy, oh, boy.

00:26:39.920 Who knew?

00:26:40.680 Like, if he could have just been shown the crystal ball then of how life would work out and how revered he would become, that he would be the president of the United States, little did he know.

00:26:49.820 So he runs for president, doesn't make it the first time, becomes vice president, and then he runs after Adams.

00:26:57.040 And that run was ugly.

00:27:00.940 That was really ugly.

00:27:02.520 Tell us about it.

00:27:03.240 Well, first of all, the 1790s were a depressing crisis decade in America because the revolution was over.

00:27:12.300 The new constitution was in place, largely the work of James Madison and secondarily Alexander Hamilton.

00:27:20.040 Now the question was, Megan, we have our independence.

00:27:24.920 How shall we interpret it?

00:27:26.160 Who are we?

00:27:26.960 How much government do we need?

00:27:28.700 What's the relationship between state government and the national government?

00:27:32.260 Should the president have powers beyond strictly enumerated powers in Article II of the Constitution, et cetera?

00:27:41.440 All these questions.

00:27:43.040 Really, it amounts to what is the meaning of the American Revolution?

00:27:46.000 And on the Hamilton side, and he was enormously powerful and much more active than Jefferson ever was.

00:27:53.660 Jefferson always had to play the languid aristocrat, and it was above all of this.

00:27:57.600 Hamilton would get right down in the mud.

00:28:00.000 And Hamilton wanted a high-toned central government, and he thought that war and militarism were glorious things.

00:28:06.000 And he wanted a national bank, and he wanted to give special incentives to infant industries and to have a mixed economy.

00:28:12.560 And on the other hand, here's Jefferson, who wants an agrarian culture, you know, those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God.

00:28:19.600 And he wants a limited government and state government to be more powerful than the national and to be a nation uniquely dedicated to peace and so on.

00:28:28.960 And so they're at each other's throats in the cabinet of George Washington, and Jefferson finally leaves because he can't stand the sheer political intensity of it.

00:28:38.500 And, you know, he's a harmony obsessive, which is a problem in a political figure.

00:28:43.500 So anyway, he stands against Adams, loses, becomes his vice president, stands a little bit more willingly in 1800 and wins.

00:28:50.120 But the election was contested because under the rules of the Electoral College at the time, the person with the most number of votes becomes president,

00:28:59.580 and the person with the second most number of votes becomes vice president, doesn't have anything to do with parties.

00:29:05.120 And so when Jefferson stood for the presidency in 1800, he got 73 electoral votes.

00:29:10.800 He defeated John Adams.

00:29:12.240 But his vice president, Aaron Burr, also got 73 electoral votes.

00:29:18.480 And the Constitution doesn't know how to understand this.

00:29:21.840 All it saw was a tie.

00:29:24.180 You know, everyone knew Jefferson was president and Burr was vice president, but the Constitution didn't know that.

00:29:29.060 And so, as you know, that puts it into the House of Representatives.

00:29:32.420 The House of Representatives votes by state, one vote per state, not by individuals.

00:29:37.700 And this was the outgoing federalist House of Representatives filled with people who either loathed Jefferson or worried that he was too radical.

00:29:46.680 And so they tried to make an accommodation with Burr to put him in the presidential chair and oust Jefferson,

00:29:54.400 which they were within their constitutional rights to do, by the way.

00:29:58.340 The House has enormous power in such situations, and we may see it again.

00:30:03.440 But this got so intense that it took 36 ballots in the House of Representatives before the federalists finally gave up and let Jefferson be installed.

00:30:11.960 And during that time, there was talk of civil war.

00:30:14.980 And Jefferson's protege, James Monroe, down in Virginia, the governor, actually began contingency planning for a militia that would invade the District of Columbia to take the government back for Jefferson if necessary.

00:30:29.640 And federalists were doing something similar on the other side.

00:30:32.820 Jefferson predicted that the country might collapse if he were not installed as president.

00:30:38.220 And so when we think that we live in a crazy time, think of January 6th or think of the election of 2020.

00:30:44.980 This blows doors on that.

00:30:46.100 This blows doors on January 6th.

00:30:48.120 This is actual potential insurrection being planned.

00:30:54.660 There's some story about Jefferson paying off the media to do hit pieces on Burr.

00:31:01.380 Like, I think about it from my business because, you know, the media gets used today in very different ways that are objectionable.

00:31:08.220 Not a new thing.

00:31:11.080 Well, Megan, I'm going to quibble with you just slightly.

00:31:14.460 You're basically right.

00:31:15.820 Jefferson paid an unscrupulous journalist, if you can call him that name, James Callender, to write negative things about the Adams administration.

00:31:25.660 And Callender went way too far and got very personal and ugly.

00:31:29.260 And it actually spoiled Jefferson's relationship with Abigail Adams and nearly destroyed his relationship with John Adams.

00:31:36.180 And Jefferson was guilty.

00:31:37.480 He was paying this guy.

00:31:38.920 And then when it was found out, this is the less admirable side of Jefferson.

00:31:44.840 When this became clear, he said, oh, no, I was just giving him grocery money.

00:31:49.320 I no more suspected he would write ugly things about Adams than the man and the moon.

00:31:54.720 No, I mean, he was a poor man.

00:31:56.620 I wanted to encourage him.

00:31:58.740 I'm not responsible for the stuff he wrote.

00:32:01.160 And everyone who knew Jefferson lost respect for him over this.

00:32:05.600 It's one thing to do this.

00:32:07.360 It's another thing to fake it and to pretend otherwise.

00:32:10.920 And Jefferson had a habit when he was caught in a compromising political situation of lying instead of just saying, you know what, it's hardball, folks.

00:32:20.960 Sometimes you just have to do this stuff.

00:32:22.780 And so Adams got over it.

00:32:25.740 His son, John Quincy, never did.

00:32:27.600 And Abigail was nip and tuck for about 15 years. 1.00

00:32:32.620 Not like GW.

00:32:33.980 He would have told the truth.

00:32:36.200 Well, so we're told, right?

00:32:38.900 Right.

00:32:39.340 Maybe he just has better biographers, you know, from the start who never let the narrative get out of control.

00:32:44.880 But to me, it's hard to know.

00:32:46.200 The narrative is all important.

00:32:46.900 You're right.

00:32:47.320 The narrative is all important.

00:32:48.400 But it's heartening to know in a way that dirty tricks, dirty politics, dirty media have been around since the founding.

00:32:54.740 And that perhaps we're not as we're not the most disgusting journalists who ever lived. 0.96

00:33:00.620 Perhaps there were even more disgusting. 0.92

00:33:03.580 I hate to think you're at the lowest of the low.

00:33:06.580 I'll tell you one thing they had that that we don't.

00:33:09.200 And I don't want to go into this because I'm sure you're sick to death of it.

00:33:13.120 But the vulgarity of our time, the personal innuendo and the name-calling and the deliberate undermining of people's basic integrity and professionalism is new.

00:33:28.220 And it's out of control.

00:33:30.760 And I do think that it's a clear and present danger to the future of the republic.

00:33:38.320 And that, yes, we've had some rollicking elections.

00:33:41.200 And the election of 1800 was certainly one of them.

00:33:43.080 And there was name-calling and so on.

00:33:44.580 And I think one of – I think Callender called John Adams a hermaphrodite.

00:33:49.460 And I don't even think he knew what he was saying.

00:33:51.680 But we are now in a period recently of intense guttering.

00:33:59.200 And Jefferson would – he would walk away.

00:34:01.840 I mean, Jefferson would walk away from that sort of thing because he couldn't take it.

00:34:05.620 And I don't know how anyone takes it, frankly.

00:34:08.880 You're speaking at the political level, but it's also true at a cultural level.

00:34:12.480 You know, I've been railing about this.

00:34:14.280 I make fun of myself a little because I'm starting to sound like that old lady who's like, young lady, put some clothes on. 0.98

00:34:19.420 But it's also true that just turning on the television today, the normal television, exposes you and your family to risks that it didn't used to.

00:34:30.560 You know, like the Super Bowl where you're going to see something very raunchy and inappropriate with your six-year-old unexpectedly.

00:34:36.420 It's just our culture.

00:34:37.520 You look around now and the, you know, just gratuitous nudity and vulgarity.

00:34:42.120 It seems to be everywhere in a way I'm sure those guys could never have imagined.

00:34:50.360 Absolutely.

00:34:51.240 I mean, I don't want to sound like that old guy either.

00:34:53.560 But the fact is that if you turn on your television and surf around for a couple of hours, you feel like you need to go take a shower.

00:35:01.460 The language, the sexual innuendo, the sexualization of young women in this culture, the talk of – and the violence, you know, the sheer amount of violence you can see on any evening of television in the United States.

00:35:17.440 These things can't be good.

00:35:20.080 I mean, a culture mirrors itself in its cultural constructs, its literature, its music, its poetry, its dance, its, in our case, television and film.

00:35:31.260 And we're mirroring something that is degrading to the human spirit.

00:35:38.280 And I've just been in Europe for the past few weeks.

00:35:41.860 It happens there too, of course, but it's not like it.

00:35:44.520 It's not like it there.

00:35:45.900 It's more high-minded.

00:35:47.180 The soundbite is longer.

00:35:48.400 The respect is higher.

00:35:49.940 There's talk of literature.

00:35:52.000 There's talk of philosophy.

00:35:53.100 There's talk of political theory.

00:35:55.600 Even Boris Johnson, for all that's wrong with him, you know, he can quote Shakespeare, scads of it.

00:36:01.580 He can quote Homer in the original ancient Greek.

00:36:04.820 We need to really address this.

00:36:07.360 And it's not the culture war that we keep talking about.

00:36:09.900 That's important too.

00:36:11.460 But it's the whole culture that's descending into this swamp.

00:36:15.200 And, you know, I'm a liberal, so I'm not allowed to talk about it.

00:36:19.700 But we have to talk about it.

00:36:21.360 We can't have an anything-goes civilization and really expect to lift ourselves into the discipline that it takes to be a self-governing Republican people.

00:36:33.040 Do you feel like, as an aside here, do you feel like that downward spiral is reversible?

00:36:37.620 Because I don't remember any time over our history where we've gone down and then we've gone back up.

00:36:43.880 You know, we've tightened our standards.

00:36:45.880 We've gotten a little bit more elegant and sophisticated and kind and better read.

00:36:50.760 I just feel like it's been a slow downward spiral culturally to the point now where people are spending their day on their phone looking at triple X porn.

00:37:01.940 You know, it's like, how much lower can you go?

00:37:05.520 But I do ask myself all the time, is this rock bottom?

00:37:09.880 Perhaps we're hitting the bottom and we can now go on an upward trajectory where we start reading more and we start rejecting these base instincts.

00:37:20.680 What do you think?

00:37:22.460 Maybe.

00:37:23.100 I think I think it's possible for our culture to reverse itself.

00:37:25.920 We have renaissances and we have reformations and we have the Enlightenment.

00:37:29.540 But I don't see it coming, Megan, and I think we're not quite at the bottom yet.

00:37:34.760 But here's the problem.

00:37:35.460 Even if we got a little more civil, you know, Jefferson, if he stands for anything, stands for civility, that he would say, I disagree with what you say, but I defend to the death your right to say it.

00:37:46.020 Or he would say to you, if you and I disagree, Madam, I disagree with you, but let us disagree as rational friends.

00:37:50.840 You know, let's not take this personally.

00:37:52.180 This is it's important that we have different points of view in a free society.

00:37:56.340 It's a free marketplace of ideas and so on.

00:37:58.960 So, yes, we might get a little more civil.

00:38:01.240 I think we're we're going to pull back from this brink.

00:38:04.400 And I do think I don't want to talk about Donald Trump, but I do think he was sui generis.

00:38:08.020 He was a unique figure.

00:38:09.180 And so that's going to be he's distorted the lens a little bit.

00:38:12.620 But I think we're going to be thinking about him.

00:38:14.380 Of course, we're both thinking about him right now.

00:38:16.140 I mean, it's like when you were talking, I was definitely thinking about him because, yes, some of his principles are Jeffersonian.

00:38:22.920 He definitely wanted smaller government.

00:38:24.380 He rolled back regulations.

00:38:25.900 He's more isolationist than we've seen from the Republican Party or lately from the Democratic Party.

00:38:31.260 But everything you said about civility.

00:38:36.020 No, hard stop.

00:38:39.140 Agreed.

00:38:39.680 So let's say we can pull back from that brink.

00:38:42.000 And I think we can a little bit.

00:38:43.680 That doesn't bring paradise lost back.

00:38:48.240 You know, in other words, things that drop out of the system because we no longer have the critical capacity to read hard literature.

00:38:55.760 We don't have the desire to read literature.

00:38:58.220 We've dismissed a lot of it as somehow dead white males or whatever.

00:39:01.320 Or, you know, it's triggered some response or other.

00:39:03.840 And I'm for trigger warnings and I'm for sensitivity and expanding the canon.

00:39:09.220 Within reason.

00:39:10.140 But when you drop a great book, let's say you drop Dante's Inferno out of the curriculum, it doesn't come back 40 years from now.

00:39:17.700 It never comes back.

00:39:19.120 Because how would it?

00:39:20.360 Under what circumstances would Chaucer be rediscovered after he fell out of the curriculum for two generations?

00:39:27.340 And so we're in danger.

00:39:30.300 And I don't want to go too far with this because cultures are very vibrant and America is the most vibrant culture on earth, I think.

00:39:36.660 But I think we are in danger of jettisoning some of the greatest works of art and literature for knuckleheaded reasons.

00:39:43.900 And that this really is a sign of a national decline.

00:39:51.620 It's depressing, but it sounds right.

00:39:54.100 I'm just trying to think, you know, there is no modern day politician who can compare to Jefferson.

00:39:59.140 But thinking about, you know, someone who is from a farming family, promotes, loves gardening, loves the arts, though, you know, has both sort of that Midwestern sensibility, but that sophisticated appeal when it comes to the arts and culture and so on.

00:40:14.780 And yet wants the government out of your business, not in your business, and yet respect for the other side.

00:40:21.800 No figure is coming to mind.

00:40:24.040 I like Rand Paul's a libertarian.

00:40:26.060 He wants the government out of your business.

00:40:27.700 He's, you know, from Kentucky.

00:40:30.500 He's he's got some of these things, but I don't know.

00:40:34.260 It's tough to look in modern day America for any figure like this.

00:40:37.300 And that's one of the reasons why we miss some of our founders and what they stood for.

00:40:41.060 Let's go back to his.

00:40:42.820 So he gets elected.

00:40:43.580 He gets he gets in the White House.

00:40:45.280 And by this point, refresh my memory, because I know the capital used to be New York.

00:40:49.280 Then at some point it gets moved to Washington when he was president.

00:40:53.340 Was it already in Washington?

00:40:54.980 It was.

00:40:55.300 Yes.

00:40:55.900 So the District of Columbia came into its own in eighteen hundred.

00:41:00.060 So the Adams, John and Abigail, lived in what we call the White House for a few months.

00:41:04.540 It was completely unfinished.

00:41:06.000 And, you know, famous talk about hanging her laundry in the East Room and they still hadn't plastered all the walls and there were no steps into it.

00:41:12.900 And it was a mud, no landscaping.

00:41:15.480 Jefferson becomes the first president inaugurated in Washington.

00:41:18.640 And he does a lot of improvements to the White House, as you would expect.

00:41:23.160 You know, every time he moved into any building for any length of time, he remodeled it, even rental properties in France.

00:41:29.700 And he spent fortunes to remodel places you can only spend three or four months in.

00:41:33.720 And this is why, of course, he died helplessly in debt.

00:41:36.980 But he improved the White House.

00:41:38.900 And he's the first president really to make the case for Washington.

00:41:42.360 You know, Albert Gallatin, the secretary of the Treasury, said he said every member of Congress in the cabinet detests Washington without a single exception.

00:41:50.240 Because it was just mud and pigs and swamps and think of the miasma of a summer in Washington, D.C.

00:41:58.060 Jefferson saw it as this beautiful new symbol of a new nation dedicated to new principles.

00:42:03.060 And, of course, he was right.

00:42:04.460 But it was a rough time.

00:42:06.340 So Jefferson is the president in Washington.

00:42:08.240 He has a staff, Megan, of one.

00:42:10.880 His only staff member at the beginning was Meriwether Lewis, who went on to be, you know, the captain of the Lewis and Clark expedition.

00:42:17.900 Think of that.

00:42:19.520 He lived in the White House.

00:42:20.400 There were enslaved people serving, you know, cleaning the bathrooms, baking bricks, cutting timbers, bringing firewood, cooking, etc.

00:42:30.320 We have to face that.

00:42:31.580 That's part of the story, too.

00:42:33.400 But his only public servant, his only official servant during this period was a private secretary.

00:42:40.300 And the first of those was Meriwether Lewis.

00:42:42.440 And Jefferson wrote back to his daughter, Martha, who was back in Charlottesville, and said,

00:42:46.160 Mr. Lewis and I live like two mice in a church in this great house.

00:42:51.680 So what was Meriwether?

00:42:53.040 I love the name Meriwether.

00:42:54.440 What do they call him?

00:42:55.520 Weather?

00:42:56.600 Marriott.

00:42:59.380 So what are they doing?

00:43:00.700 I mean, what's Meriwether Lewis doing for Thomas Jefferson before he decided to go exploring?

00:43:05.940 He's an aide to camp.

00:43:07.160 You know, so Jefferson sends a message to Congress.

00:43:09.240 Lewis takes it.

00:43:10.140 Jefferson's daughters came to visit.

00:43:11.440 Lewis met them on the outskirts of Washington, helped them to do the shopping that they would need.

00:43:16.500 Lewis, you know, handle tasks for Jefferson.

00:43:18.540 But he was meant to be Jefferson's secretary.

00:43:20.560 But Jefferson wrote all of his own correspondence.

00:43:23.020 You know, he prided himself on this.

00:43:25.140 Jefferson, here's, this will blow your mind.

00:43:27.400 They only had four cabinet ministers then, a very small government.

00:43:30.180 But Jefferson insisted on seeing every document from every cabinet office before it went out.

00:43:36.100 Nothing could ever leave the executive branch of the government until Jefferson had had a chance to review it.

00:43:42.020 He was administratively maybe one of the greatest administrative people in the history of the country.

00:43:48.740 He had an enormous capacity for this sort of thing.

00:43:51.480 Get up, spend seven hours at his writing desk, absorb masses of information, write three personal letters, seven public letters, review a treaty, maneuver.

00:44:01.480 You know, he was, he had capacities that probably no other president had.

00:44:09.140 The downside of Jefferson is that he's a little bit aloof and he wants America to be sort of a second or third rank country.

00:44:18.200 He wants us to be a farmer's paradise.

00:44:21.080 Because Hamilton's like, no, we're going to be the powerhouse of the world if we only let ourselves.

00:44:25.080 But Jefferson probably was the best administrator of any president I've ever known.

00:44:31.800 It's making me think of all those debates we had when Obamacare was being debated and they weren't reading it.

00:44:36.700 And I remember the stack of papers was up to here.

00:44:39.200 Nobody was reading it.

00:44:40.200 If he could see that, he'd be horrified.

00:44:41.980 So what did he do once he, once he took over as president, you mentioned the Louisiana Purchase.

00:44:51.340 Let's go through that and the other sort of big ticket items that he's responsible for.

00:44:57.640 So above all, he balanced the budget.

00:45:00.700 Jefferson believed that a national debt is a national disgrace, that it's a way of taxing our children and grandchildren without their consent.

00:45:07.460 He wanted a constitutional prohibition on a national debt, except in emergency situations.

00:45:13.580 And he wrote a famous letter to Madison from France in which he said a national debt that goes beyond the generation that undertook it should be declared null and void under natural law.

00:45:23.500 That was his famous Earth Belongs to the Living letter.

00:45:26.360 So he was a fiscal hawk.

00:45:28.820 And he really hamstrung his administration by devoting 73% of annual revenues to debt retirement.

00:45:35.660 So think of that, 73% of the $10 million per year that came into the federal coffers.

00:45:41.260 Jefferson devoted through Gallatin to debt retirement, and he retired 37% of the national debt, Hamilton's gift to America, during his two terms.

00:45:50.500 And Madison then went farther down that path.

00:45:53.220 So that's number one.

00:45:54.400 Number two, he's trying to get access to the Mississippi River and to New Orleans because everything west of the Appalachians found its way to market down the Ohio and the Tennessee rivers into the Mississippi.

00:46:05.660 And so whoever controlled New Orleans controlled the economic destiny of the country.

00:46:12.140 And the Westerners are very restive and demanding that he do something to keep the Mississippi River open.

00:46:17.300 And so he sends James Monroe to join Robert Livingston in Paris to try to open the Mississippi.

00:46:22.760 And they're prepared to spend $6 million to buy the village of New Orleans.

00:46:28.420 And Napoleon, in the most extraordinary counteroffer in human history, instead of selling Jefferson a town for $6 million, offers to sell the entire Louisiana territory for $15.6 million.

00:46:42.160 And Jefferson bought, without really wanting to, 828,000 square miles and 575 million acres at $0.03 per acre.

00:46:54.520 So it was like one of the greatest accidents in human history.

00:46:57.260 But Jefferson had the good sense to accept a bargain of that sort when he saw one.

00:47:02.640 And we've carved, you know, 11 states out of the Louisiana Territory.

00:47:06.900 I live in one in North Dakota.

00:47:08.320 I mean, this was the greatest land sale in human history.

00:47:12.280 And Jefferson was smart enough to do it, although he did believe that it was technically unconstitutional.

00:47:20.600 What? Why?

00:47:21.220 Because the Constitution doesn't grant the federal government the power to buy land.

00:47:26.120 And so he's a very strict constructionist.

00:47:28.300 He's very, you know, you do what's in the Constitution and nothing more.

00:47:32.300 And so he looked at it and said, no, I think this is illegal.

00:47:35.480 And so he actually, in the summer of 1803, when this was all happening, wrote two amendments to the Constitution, the proper mechanism.

00:47:43.060 One to authorize the purchase and the other to authorize the incorporation of the new territory by way of new states. 0.95

00:47:49.080 And Madison, who was way, you know, like, shrewder than Jefferson, his secretary of state, said, are you nuts? 0.94

00:47:54.300 Just do it.

00:47:56.200 You will be committing the greatest crime against the future if you turn this thing down on a constitutional scruple.

00:48:04.440 This doesn't happen in the world.

00:48:06.420 And he said, the people will forgive you, which they did, of course.

00:48:10.380 And he said, the president has to have some implicit power to do great things for the country.

00:48:16.580 Come on.

00:48:17.040 And so Jefferson had that shield of Madison's greater sense.

00:48:21.620 And he he made the purchase.

00:48:23.720 And we are the I mean, how many times have we paid for this thing?

00:48:26.800 Fifteen point six million dollars, 15 trillion, fifteen hundred trillion.

00:48:32.600 Why did Napoleon do such a bad deal?

00:48:34.680 He was always desperate for money at the time.

00:48:37.160 He was about to read.

00:48:38.540 You know, there'd been a peace in 1802.

00:48:41.120 So Europe was sort of in an interlude between the Napoleonic moments.

00:48:46.200 And Napoleon realized he was about to go back to war with Great Britain.

00:48:49.480 He knew he had no Navy.

00:48:50.960 So the minute the war happened, Britain would occupy New Orleans and he would lose all that anyway.

00:48:55.520 So he thought, I'll sell it to the Yanks and get some money and they can either keep it or lose it.

00:49:01.160 It won't bother me because I won't be able to keep it no matter what.

00:49:03.860 And so he got the money he needed to prosecute his wars.

00:49:06.980 He got out from his Vietnam, if you want to call it that, had been in Haiti. 0.52

00:49:10.680 He sent troops to put down the Black Rebellion in Haiti and they got yellow fever and malaria and they were decimated.

00:49:18.240 And so he got bogged down there.

00:49:20.160 If he hadn't been bogged down Napoleon in Haiti, he might have occupied New Orleans and reasserted the Louisiana territory for France.

00:49:28.940 But it was just too much of a nightmare. And he wanted to wage war against Austria and Britain and he needed ready cash.

00:49:35.940 And Jefferson had it.

00:49:38.160 Wow. That's a great story.

00:49:40.640 Yeah, it's very cool.

00:49:42.140 So and others were looking at this territory in the United States from Europe.

00:49:46.020 Very, you know, the way I don't know, a big NFL linebacker looks at a stake.

00:49:50.920 They were they were interested.

00:49:53.060 And then too late. It was ours as part of America.

00:49:55.460 Yeah. Now, there was something else that Jefferson did that I think is interesting.

00:49:58.840 And that is he and it won't surprise the audience now having heard you.

00:50:02.200 He did. He took steps to make sure we were not looking like becoming acting like anything close to a monarchy.

00:50:10.500 Went too far, maybe, Megan.

00:50:12.480 So he I mean, this was this was his style and maybe it was slightly a posture, but it was his style.

00:50:18.860 So he greeted visitors in the White House and slippers.

00:50:22.120 He wore old clothes, sometimes that were too small for his.

00:50:25.360 He had long, long than two, six foot, two and a half inches tall.

00:50:29.180 He he opened the doors to the White House himself.

00:50:33.680 He didn't have, you know, valets or servants doing that.

00:50:37.200 But when Anthony Mary, this very pompous British minister and his wife, Mrs. Mary, came to dine, Jefferson kept them waiting.

00:50:48.160 And then when the dinner bell rang, the Marys thought as the senior diplomats in Washington that they would have pride of place.

00:50:56.100 But everyone just went and found places at these tables.

00:50:59.040 And Mr. Mary was jostled around and Jefferson took took Dolly Madison's arm as his dinner date since he was a widower.

00:51:08.760 And the Marys were like they just came apart over this.

00:51:12.180 And so at the end of the dinner where they'd really been snubbed, I mean, they were right.

00:51:16.740 They came up to Jefferson and said, we demand to know what is the protocol of this White House.

00:51:22.700 And Jefferson said, well, my madam, it is pell-mell.

00:51:26.640 And this almost created an international incident.

00:51:29.740 Anthony Mary tried to make it one.

00:51:31.300 The British government said, oh, you know, these yanks.

00:51:35.140 But it was Jefferson's attempt to remind all of us that we were a republic with a small r.

00:51:43.120 We're not aristocracy.

00:51:44.600 We're not monarchy.

00:51:45.460 There will be no kings.

00:51:47.600 Adams had carried a ceremonial sword around.

00:51:49.740 He couldn't cut a watermelon with a sword.

00:51:53.400 He tripped over it.

00:51:54.540 Adams wanted titles of nobility for the president and other national officers. 0.94

00:51:59.300 And so the wits of Congress began to call him his rotundity because he was pompous and fat.

00:52:06.000 So Jefferson was trying to tone this thing down.

00:52:08.040 And that's why he didn't give his State of the Union message in person.

00:52:10.780 He said, that's what kings do.

00:52:12.760 You know, King Charles III will open the next session of Parliament by giving a great monarchical speech.

00:52:19.620 We don't do that here.

00:52:21.180 And so he tried to set the tone for this much more casual, informal style.

00:52:29.760 I really credit him with this.

00:52:31.980 You know, politics is theater, as we well know from recent events.

00:52:37.460 And Jefferson used political theater to say, this is a republic, and I'm not a king.

00:52:44.280 I'm maybe the first among equals here.

00:52:46.540 You've called me as if on jury duty to be your president, but I'm not going to change the way I operate.

00:52:52.220 I'm a farmer from Virginia, and I'm a scientist.

00:52:56.220 That sounds wonderful.

00:52:57.300 This tone is really fun, but if you ever want to just laugh yourself silly, just read the account of Anthony Mary when he wrote back to the court of St. James how appalled he was by this Bulgarian. 0.99

00:53:10.220 And Jefferson, of course, was the last person in the world to be called a Bulgarian.

00:53:14.440 Oh, I will.

00:53:15.060 I 100%.

00:53:15.980 How do I spell Mary when I look it up?

00:53:18.100 I mean, R-R-Y. 1.00

00:53:19.080 He was everything but.

00:53:20.520 Okay, I will.

00:53:21.380 Oh, so the other thing is he didn't want any national celebration of his birthday or the president's birthday.

00:53:28.820 He didn't want the president's face to go on the money, which he ultimately lost.

00:53:35.160 I mean, we do have our president's faces over time, not the current president, on our money.

00:53:40.020 And even Jefferson, I had to look this up, he's on the nickel, but he's also on the $2 bill.

00:53:44.980 He might like that because it's so, you know, poorly circulated.

00:53:48.200 But he didn't like that because that's also something we do in aristocracy, like the Queen of England or now the King of England goes all over the money and so on.

00:53:58.060 You couldn't be more right.

00:53:59.220 You nailed it.

00:54:00.260 So, first of all, he didn't like paper money because paper is paper.

00:54:04.020 And so it only has the value that's ascribed to it.

00:54:07.060 And so he wanted our money.

00:54:08.740 He's a little primitive economically, but he wanted our money to be stamped on precious metals because if you have a piece of gold, you can spend that in Poland or South Africa.

00:54:16.420 But a dollar bill is worthless outside of the strength of the economy of the United States.

00:54:22.620 And he certainly didn't want faces on our currency.

00:54:26.080 You know, he wanted the buffalo and the elk and the moose.

00:54:31.100 You know, he loved the moose.

00:54:32.480 And so he wanted Niagara Falls on the natural bridge in Virginia.

00:54:36.820 And I agree with him.

00:54:38.600 We would be a lot better.

00:54:39.780 Especially now with the cancel culture mania.

00:54:43.260 Who will escape whipping, Megan? 0.94

00:54:44.920 So if we have a moose on our currency, there's no controversy around a moose or an antelope or a buffalo.

00:54:51.240 I never thought about that.

00:54:52.300 Are the cancel warriors trying to get rid of the nickel?

00:54:55.180 If you're going to cancel, we've got to cancel.

00:54:57.540 If they're consistent.

00:54:58.680 You know, I collect $2 bills because they're actually pointless.

00:55:04.860 But they're fun.

00:55:05.660 I remember watching when I was a little kid an episode of Bewitched.

00:55:10.040 And there was some episode in which Samantha the witch had brought back George Washington and Abe Lincoln.

00:55:17.700 And George Washington wanted to know why Lincoln was on a bill that was worth a lot more than the bill George Washington was on.

00:55:26.280 And Abe Lincoln was trying to convince him that the one was far better because it was so ubiquitous.

00:55:32.500 You should feel good.

00:55:34.100 Well, there you go.

00:55:35.100 See, Bewitched again.

00:55:38.140 All right.

00:55:38.440 So small government, Louisiana Purchase.

00:55:41.520 That wasn't exactly.

00:55:42.780 Well, I mean, it wasn't large government.

00:55:44.760 It was just doubling the size of the country, which was a smart, smart, strategic move.

00:55:49.440 So after two terms, he says, I'm not running again.

00:55:52.060 I'm getting on that horse.

00:55:53.480 I'm going back to Virginia in my beautiful house, Monticello, and I'm going to live the life of a farmer.

00:55:59.980 So he did.

00:56:01.720 And that's where his story takes a turn in historical circles.

00:56:08.540 Because was it then that he had his relationship or was it before that?

00:56:12.520 Was it all this time that he had his relationship with Sally Hemmings?

00:56:16.800 Let me just say, as we enter this field of horrors, that we don't know 100% certainly that he was involved with Sally Hemmings.

00:56:26.900 No, I believe that he was.

00:56:28.480 And the circumstantial evidence is huge, but it probably would not hold up in a court of law.

00:56:34.340 The DNA has shown that at least one of Sally Hemmings' children was the progeny of a male Jefferson.

00:56:42.360 Not necessarily this Jefferson.

00:56:44.260 It could have been his uncle or his brother.

00:56:48.140 But, you know, let's face it, we're pretty sure that this was Jefferson.

00:56:51.920 So when did this start?

00:56:53.960 Jefferson went to France in 1784, and he took with him two people, his daughter, Martha, and an enslaved man named James Hemmings.

00:57:02.420 Same family.

00:57:03.120 While they were in Paris, Jefferson sent James to culinary school.

00:57:08.800 He wanted him to learn French cuisine, typically Jefferson.

00:57:12.400 Paid for this, paid for clothing and tuition and so on.

00:57:16.080 And James quickly learned French, and he did become a master chef.

00:57:20.860 More on that in a moment.

00:57:22.540 So meanwhile, Jefferson has two daughters back in Virginia staying with their aunt and uncle,

00:57:28.220 and one of them dies of teething and a whooping cough.

00:57:32.280 So Jefferson gets very concerned, as you might expect, and says, I want Maria, Mary, to be sent over to join us here.

00:57:41.240 I insist.

00:57:43.680 And so she was sent over.

00:57:46.620 He wanted an elderly black woman to be the chaperone, someone who had had smallpox. 0.74

00:57:50.760 And for reasons that have never been explained, his kin sent his nine-year-old daughter with 14-year-old Sally Hemmings, sister of James Hemmings.

00:58:02.260 So here's a 14-year-old chaperone leading a nine-year-old Virginia girl across the Atlantic Ocean to catch up with her father.

00:58:11.580 They got first to England, and Abigail and John Adams met them there.

00:58:17.540 And when Abigail saw Sally Hemmings, she thought, uh-oh, this can't be good.

00:58:23.800 Maybe she just meant she's too young, but she was alarmed.

00:58:26.900 And so Sally Hemmings, at the age of 14, comes to live with Jefferson near the Champs-Élysées in Paris, and it's thought that the relationship began there.

00:58:38.700 And under some account, she was pregnant when she came back.

00:58:41.600 But here's what's so interesting about this, more interesting than the salaciousness of this story, Megan.

00:58:45.760 James Hemmings and Sally Hemmings, at some point in France, discovered that they were free, that France outlawed slavery.

00:58:56.100 And under French law, if they claimed it, they would be protected because Jefferson could not own them in France.

00:59:04.580 And they came to Jefferson and confronted him and said, I'm sure you're aware of this.

00:59:11.040 Why should we go back to Virginia with you?

00:59:13.080 We're free.

00:59:13.700 Why would we go back to be enslaved at Monticello?

00:59:18.700 And according to Sally Hemmings' son, who gave a report in Ohio around 1873, Jefferson said, look, here's the deal.

00:59:26.780 If you come back with me, James, and teach somebody else French cuisine at Monticello, I'll free you, and I'll give you some startup money, and you can go north to wherever you might wish to go.

00:59:41.480 And he did.

00:59:42.360 He said to Sally Hemmings, according to her son, if you come back, any children that you have, and I don't think he was presuming that they would be his, but if you come back, any children that you have, I will free you when they're 21 years old.

00:59:56.120 So this bargain, odd though it might seem to us, occurred in Paris when James and Sally Hemmings confronted the future third president of the United States and said, you don't own us anymore.

01:00:13.080 And so I don't, you know, the story could have played out in a number of ways.

01:00:17.300 They could have stayed in France.

01:00:17.900 It's so hard to imagine that somebody being told you're free wouldn't say, I'm going to stay free.

01:00:23.880 I'm not going back to the United States and my kids are going to be free from the moment of birth and not enslaved zero to 21 and then free thanks to you.

01:00:32.340 So it's just such a different time and so hard to understand, though we we must try.

01:00:38.840 He so once again, he this is post his wife's death and he's he's made this promise not to remarry.

01:00:45.460 And he has this French lover.

01:00:47.420 But Sally comes over.

01:00:49.620 So, yeah, so she was Sally at the White House when he became president.

01:00:53.700 Did she go to the White House?

01:00:54.840 No, probably not.

01:00:58.380 Not certainly.

01:00:59.680 So she's back at Monticello.

01:01:02.940 Jefferson makes frequent trips back to Monticello.

01:01:05.140 He said he would never spend August and September in Washington.

01:01:07.820 Who would?

01:01:08.420 Which rational person would?

01:01:09.680 Which before air conditioning, I can well understand.

01:01:13.160 So Virginia is so, so cool.

01:01:15.560 Not great, but he's at least in the mountains in Virginia.

01:01:17.780 So so he went back and so historians are unclear.

01:01:22.280 And the great historian on this is Annette Gordon-Reed, who has a fabulous and important

01:01:26.220 book called The Hemings Family of Monticello.

01:01:29.040 But she may have been in Washington for a short amounts of time, but probably not.

01:01:34.660 But here's the thing.

01:01:35.480 Dumas Malone, the great Jefferson biographer who's been dead now for a quarter of a century,

01:01:41.380 but he was sure that the Sally Hemings story was was fake news, let's say.

01:01:47.340 And he decided to prove it.

01:01:48.800 So he studied Jefferson's comings and goings and what he proved, and he published it in

01:01:54.860 an appendix in one of his volumes, is that Jefferson was at Monticello nine months before

01:02:00.920 each of Sally Hemings was children were born and he wasn't at Monticello.

01:02:06.100 And then she didn't get pregnant. 0.85

01:02:08.600 And so his attempt to exonerate Jefferson actually locked it in to a certain degree.

01:02:15.400 Yeah, in a different way.

01:02:16.940 But at least he had the good, you know, the integrity to publish his findings.

01:02:22.580 And so, you know, here's the thing to think about.

01:02:25.200 So they were together for 34 years, Jefferson and Sally Hemings.

01:02:29.580 And that's not a very simple relationship, as I'm sure you can appreciate, way more complex

01:02:36.340 than we probably can understand.

01:02:38.640 She had access, almost sole access, to his private suite of rooms.

01:02:43.000 There was a hidden door.

01:02:45.180 She could come and go without being much noticed.

01:02:48.680 But Jefferson's daughter, Martha, lived in Monticello for most of his years, most of his

01:02:54.340 retirement, certainly, she had to know that this was going on.

01:02:59.280 But here's what's so interesting.

01:03:01.320 They never talked about it.

01:03:03.500 It was this sort of taboo subject never to be addressed.

01:03:09.340 She knew, he knew that she knew, she knew that he knew that she knew, Sally Hemings is

01:03:15.420 around and never did they have a confrontation so far as we know.

01:03:21.160 And after Jefferson's death, his daughter, Martha, brought in her children when she was

01:03:26.360 dying and showed them some document to prove that Jefferson could not have been the father

01:03:32.040 of Sally Hemings' children.

01:03:34.100 So a family narrative, let's call it, I almost said cover-up, emerged early and they fingered

01:03:39.900 his nephews, Samuel and Peter Carr, as the likely impregnators of Sally Hemings.

01:03:46.220 They've been exonerated by DNA, and so far as we know, the DNA points to Jefferson.

01:03:51.940 So just think about that for a moment, Megan, that this whopping secret of a cross-racial 1.00

01:03:57.300 relationship that can't be simple opportunism, it's something more than that, surely.

01:04:03.420 It's going on for decades in a house where there are really not many places to hide.

01:04:08.620 And Jefferson, because of the sheer force of his sense of himself, makes everyone around

01:04:17.900 him not talk about it.

01:04:20.980 What was the, I mean, I understand slavery was lawful back then, but what would the culture

01:04:27.100 have been around that kind of a thing?

01:04:28.960 You know, would it have shamed a slave owner like Jefferson for doing this kind of thing,

01:04:35.160 or was that par for the course?

01:04:38.780 It was par for the course.

01:04:41.140 I'm guessing that this sort of thing was not universal, but very nearly so.

01:04:46.300 And by the way, when the story broke in 1802, it broke during Jefferson's first term.

01:04:50.340 So imagine this humiliation, this extremely private man.

01:04:53.120 This had to be one of the hardest periods of his entire life, and it broke, and it was

01:04:58.360 debated in different state capitals and so on.

01:05:01.420 But John Adams, as usual, was shrewd and wise.

01:05:05.640 He said, I don't know that this is necessarily true of Jefferson.

01:05:09.380 It sounds a little out of character, but he said, I'll tell you this, it follows from slavery.

01:05:15.080 If you own another human being, you can buy and sell that person.

01:05:19.100 You can whip that person. 0.99

01:05:20.420 Under certain circumstances, you can kill that person with impunity. 0.99

01:05:23.660 You can divide families.

01:05:24.900 You can do whatever you want, basically, without any intrusion by outside forces.

01:05:32.120 Why would we ever think there's a line in the sand that's sexual privacy that's not going

01:05:37.900 to be crossed by people who own and whip other human beings? 0.83

01:05:42.220 And of course, he nailed it, as always.

01:05:43.900 I mean, that's exactly right.

01:05:44.940 So let's say Jefferson didn't do it.

01:05:46.680 Let's just assume that the DNA comes out and he's exonerated and was his uncle.

01:05:51.580 The story is still true, right?

01:05:54.580 Because it's universal and slavery invites every form of abuse.

01:06:00.260 So there's no answer to this.

01:06:02.700 I mean, it used to be that people tried to protect Jefferson and say it couldn't have

01:06:05.620 happened and so on and so forth.

01:06:07.380 I have one law of life.

01:06:09.040 All bets are off below the waist.

01:06:11.200 There's nobody that you can know about their most intimate lives for sure, ever.

01:06:17.440 Yeah, it's a good law.

01:06:18.700 And you spoke about what he said on his deathbed to his daughter or what Martha, his daughter,

01:06:25.780 said.

01:06:26.280 She said, right.

01:06:27.100 Sally had a different story to her children on her deathbed, as I understand it.

01:06:33.080 Well, so her sons went to Ohio.

01:06:36.560 So Sally was three quarters white and her children there would have been seven eighths white and 0.99

01:06:43.640 several of them were white enough in appearance to pass.

01:06:48.220 That was the word used then.

01:06:50.540 And Jefferson allowed several of them just to sort of walk away and be absorbed into the

01:06:54.640 larger world.

01:06:56.040 But several of them who were freed chose to live their lives as African-Americans.

01:07:00.660 But at any rate, Sally Hemmings, late in her life, and after Jefferson's death, she was

01:07:06.060 allowed to walk away and live privately in a small house in Charlottesville.

01:07:10.760 She was never freed, but she was allowed to walk away.

01:07:14.500 Late in her life, she seems to have told her sons what her truth.

01:07:19.360 And that truth was what I told you about the confrontation in Paris and the fact that all

01:07:24.120 of her children had indeed been freed and that Jefferson was the father.

01:07:29.220 He didn't pay particular attention to these children, didn't claim them as his own.

01:07:35.000 So this is a very fascinating, troubling, hard to understand thing, as you said earlier.

01:07:45.360 We can't get our brains around this sort of thing today.

01:07:48.720 Yeah, how could somebody so heroic be so horrific at the same time?

01:07:54.100 And it's just you have to understand it through the eye of the cultural times.

01:07:59.100 I mean, it's we can't even understand slavery.

01:08:00.840 It's like, how can you understand slavery at all?

01:08:03.380 It was it's not like nobody recognized how horrible it was.

01:08:07.600 You know, the country was extremely divided over it and what would wind up fighting a civil

01:08:10.620 war in part over it.

01:08:12.540 But there were lots of people who were engaged in it, who had been born doing it, like Jefferson's

01:08:18.340 family and who I don't know.

01:08:20.740 I can't say that he didn't think there was anything wrong with it, because I know, weirdly,

01:08:25.180 at the same time he was exploiting it, he was also occasionally trying to end it.

01:08:28.920 It seemed like he kind of knew it was wrong, but he wasn't ready to let go.

01:08:33.300 I don't know if you can liken it to some sort of an addiction.

01:08:36.160 It was like he recognized it was wrong, I think, but he just wouldn't stop doing it.

01:08:40.680 Well, let me try to just give the tiniest answer to this, because we could spend days

01:08:46.340 talking about this now without probably clarifying it much.

01:08:50.080 But a couple of things.

01:08:50.940 First of all, what will they say of us?

01:08:53.800 You know, 200 years from now, what will they say of us?

01:08:55.900 It's not going to be pretty.

01:08:57.460 If if I knew where my coat was made and my shirt, I'd probably have a hard time sleeping

01:09:02.200 tonight because they weren't made in Ohio.

01:09:03.820 I can tell you that.

01:09:04.800 And the conditions.

01:09:05.160 I don't know how they tested your shampoo.

01:09:07.520 Exactly.

01:09:08.080 So, you know, we're complicit in ways that we would rather not address.

01:09:13.160 And we also, when the when the epitaph of America comes out, they're going to say they

01:09:17.280 burned oil.

01:09:18.420 I mean, this miracle carbon, they they use it as a fuel.

01:09:21.360 Are they nuts?

01:09:22.560 So what will they a what will they say of us? 0.91

01:09:24.680 And you know what Hamlet says, he says, treat every man according to his desserts and 0.94

01:09:27.860 who shall escape whipping.

01:09:29.180 I'm for that.

01:09:29.880 Number two, it was a different era, but most of Jefferson's closest friends were abolitionists.

01:09:38.360 Thomas Paine, the philosopher Condorcet in France, Lafayette came back and he confronted

01:09:44.460 Jefferson about this.

01:09:46.820 Richard Price, Joseph Priestley.

01:09:49.540 It's not as if Jefferson was surrounded by people who were complacent about slavery.

01:09:53.960 He was the people that he loved and respected were were Enlightenment figures who all understood

01:09:59.060 that slavery was a terrible thing.

01:10:00.980 And let me let me just say this much more, Megan, if if Jefferson had been born in Philadelphia

01:10:06.420 or New York or Boston in a family that owned no slaves, nobody would have been a greater 0.96

01:10:13.060 antagonist to slavery than Thomas Jefferson.

01:10:15.680 So there's the tragedy of it.

01:10:17.400 In other words, he meant it when he said all men are created equal.

01:10:20.980 Jefferson's instincts are all for human liberty.

01:10:22.980 He was tragically born into Virginia and and to a certain degree, he was not going to get

01:10:31.260 out from under this.

01:10:32.480 He could have done more than he did.

01:10:34.140 There's no question about that.

01:10:35.740 And he became somewhat complacent later in life.

01:10:38.340 But but the tragedy is that he was plopped down into the world where this was routine.

01:10:44.280 And amongst the slave owning class, he was one of the more enlightened ones. 0.56

01:10:48.700 It got way more vicious of the other end.

01:10:51.120 I'm not trying to defend him in any way.

01:10:53.140 I'm merely saying to explain that Jefferson, had he been born in London or or Philadelphia,

01:10:57.560 would have been the greatest spokesman for abolition that existed in that era.

01:11:05.860 Didn't he have something I'm trying to rack my memory?

01:11:09.680 Didn't he have something in the original draft of the declaration, perhaps speaking to this

01:11:15.360 and he took it out because he knew that there wouldn't be support for it amongst the southern

01:11:20.200 states?

01:11:21.740 He didn't take it out.

01:11:22.960 It was taken out.

01:11:23.920 So he the longest paragraph and he has this huge indictment of George III, you know, quartering

01:11:28.180 troops in our houses and taking us across the Atlantic for star chamber trials and, you

01:11:33.380 know, and trying to whip up Native American reprisals in the West.

01:11:38.000 The longest single paragraph in that indictment of George III says that he has waged war against

01:11:44.380 human nature itself by perpetuating the slave trade.

01:11:47.560 Jefferson says, if we've tried from time to time to do something to restrict the slave

01:11:53.060 trade, and every time we do, the British crown or the British council or the parliament vetoes

01:11:57.600 it.

01:11:58.420 So he's blamed.

01:11:59.280 This is a little disingenuous, but he's blaming the British for the problem of slavery that

01:12:03.280 it somehow had been kind of imposed on us by outsiders, which is not true, but there's

01:12:08.320 an element of truth in it.

01:12:10.180 And that paragraph was removed at the insistence of the Carolinas and Georgia because we needed

01:12:15.840 unanimity.

01:12:17.120 Then the Constitutional Convention occurs in 1787.

01:12:19.520 Jefferson wasn't there.

01:12:20.840 They kicked the problem of slavery down the road with the three-fifths clause and the fugitive

01:12:24.700 slave clause and so on.

01:12:26.600 We have kicked it down the road and we thought it was over in 1865.

01:12:31.960 But as you so well know, its after effects, its implications, its ramifications are not

01:12:40.060 over yet.

01:12:40.760 And I think one of the things we're going to have to do as a people is we are going to

01:12:45.420 have to wrestle this thing to the ground. 0.88

01:12:47.980 You know, Lincoln said, we can't go on until we free the slaves.

01:12:50.980 Fair enough.

01:12:52.520 Johnson, Lyndon Johnson said, we can't go on until everyone has equal voting rights and so

01:12:57.340 on, rights to transportation, to housing.

01:12:59.780 We still have so much work left to do and it's going to take all of us and we're going

01:13:06.160 to have to face up to this.

01:13:07.480 And I know that's where a lot of the cultural wars wind up, but we are going to have to wrestle

01:13:13.420 this thing to the ground in a way that produces a new national narrative and does substantial

01:13:18.700 justice to this lingering poison in our national consciousness.

01:13:24.780 It's so hard because it's been so politicized and, you know, it's become partisan.

01:13:31.580 It's no longer, oh, this is a stain on the nation with which we all must deal.

01:13:35.420 It's more like you're in your camp.

01:13:37.160 It's become a political football and you resort to your political corners.

01:13:41.560 So I don't feel particularly hopeful about that particular, quote, courageous conversation.

01:13:46.480 I hope I'm wrong.

01:13:47.500 Let's move to the second chapter of his relationship with John Adams.

01:13:53.980 They were frenemies, as you pointed out, but there was a new horizon.

01:14:01.020 The rainbow came out.

01:14:02.140 Well, I shouldn't say the rainbow.

01:14:03.000 I don't mean to suggest anything romantic.

01:14:05.700 That has a different meaning in today's day and age.

01:14:08.040 But they did find each other via correspondence and form a truly close, lifelong connection.

01:14:15.800 You're absolutely right.

01:14:16.820 And this is almost the best of all Jefferson stories.

01:14:20.180 So they were friends.

01:14:21.960 Then they were enemies around 1799 through 1804, let's say.

01:14:27.860 Then they were frenemies, but they agreed.

01:14:30.220 Jefferson wins the election of 1800.

01:14:32.680 He goes to see John Adams.

01:14:34.460 They have a kind of an intense moment.

01:14:36.820 And Adams slams his fist down and says, you have put me out, Mr. Jefferson.

01:14:40.600 You have put me out.

01:14:41.680 And they never see each other again, ever.

01:14:43.860 You know, it's an age of very weak transportation infrastructure, among other things.

01:14:49.600 Adams goes back up to Quincy, Massachusetts, near Boston.

01:14:52.040 Jefferson retires to Monticello.

01:14:53.720 It looks like they're never going to communicate again.

01:14:57.280 And neither one of them is willing to take that risk because so much has happened.

01:15:03.500 And maybe just let it go.

01:15:05.320 But Benjamin Rush, the famous Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, signer of the Declaration of Independence, the medical advisor to Lewis and Clark, and father of dream psychology in the United States, the hero of the yellow fever crisis in Philadelphia in 1793.

01:15:22.060 He decides he decides he's going to reconcile them.

01:15:25.040 So he writes to each one of them saying, you know, you should do this.

01:15:27.760 And they keep resisting.

01:15:29.060 And finally, he writes to each one, Jefferson's now retired, saying that the other one is eager for reconciliation.

01:15:37.060 So with this ruse, he gets John Adams to write a letter.

01:15:41.620 John Adams, on the first day of January 1812, writes this very, very, very tight and little careful letter to Jefferson, sending him a book that his son had written.

01:15:49.880 And Jefferson then responds with a very careful and wary response.

01:15:55.240 And Adams warms up a little and Jefferson warms up a little.

01:15:58.180 And then suddenly the sluice gates of their ancient love and affection open and they exchange 144 letters during the last 14 years of their lives.

01:16:07.260 And they are magnificent letters.

01:16:08.900 I urge you and everybody who hears this to get a copy.

01:16:13.040 They exist in a number of forms and read the correspondence because it's thrilling.

01:16:17.360 They talk about religion.

01:16:18.440 They talk about Native Americans.

01:16:19.500 They talk about the meaning of the American Revolution.

01:16:21.220 They talk about Napoleon and the life of Jesus. 0.66

01:16:24.000 They talk about the origins of Native American languages.

01:16:27.740 They talk about their favorite Greek and Latin classics.

01:16:31.120 And they dispute a few things.

01:16:32.780 Adams still wants to pick a few fights.

01:16:34.400 But in his fifth or sixth letter, Adams writes to Jefferson and says, one of the great things ever written in a letter.

01:16:40.660 He says, my friend, we must not die until we have explained ourselves to each other.

01:16:46.860 And they did.

01:16:47.820 And they died simultaneously, as you know, on the 4th of July, 1826.

01:16:51.880 But the reconciliation is an amazing thing.

01:16:55.460 And I have to say two things about it in closing.

01:16:57.560 One is that Adams did the heavy lifting.

01:17:00.880 Jefferson is like Muhammad Ali in Zaire, bobbing and weaving and avoiding conflict.

01:17:05.960 Adams was the heavy lifter in this correspondence.

01:17:08.760 And he wrote three or so letters to every one that Jefferson wrote.

01:17:12.300 And secondly, Adams loved Jefferson.

01:17:15.320 So your rainbow metaphor is not so far away.

01:17:18.940 He actually loved Jefferson.

01:17:20.580 Jefferson esteemed John Adams.

01:17:23.440 But Adams had a huge capacity for love.

01:17:26.980 And he was willing to overcome the deep bitterness he felt that he was right about the way Jefferson had treated him in those difficult years.

01:17:37.600 And so it ends beautifully.

01:17:39.540 And that correspondence is every time I'm depressed about this country, I read the Jefferson Adams correspondence and cheer up.

01:17:46.600 Wow.

01:17:48.180 I love all that.

01:17:48.960 And I do want to read it.

01:17:49.800 I've never read it.

01:17:50.580 I'd be amazing if there was any sort of anything close to a petty moment.

01:17:54.920 Like, can you believe George's hair?

01:17:57.100 What's he doing?

01:17:57.760 I don't know how it would go.

01:18:00.660 But just to see that there were petty moments.

01:18:02.760 And they were all from Adams.

01:18:04.300 There were petty moments.

01:18:05.580 And Adams envied everybody.

01:18:07.620 He thought Washington was overrated.

01:18:09.540 He thought Jefferson was overrated.

01:18:11.620 He thought everybody was overrated because he didn't get enough of, you know, he didn't ever got what he was like the Rodney Dangerfield of the founding generation.

01:18:20.440 And when Paul Giamatti played him in the miniseries, it was exactly right.

01:18:24.620 Yeah.

01:18:24.780 So everyone was overrated except for himself.

01:18:27.180 And, you know, the one thing about Adams, too, that we know is he was anything but afraid of confrontation.

01:18:32.040 So I'm not surprised to learn he was more in the lead on sending the correspondence and repairing the relationship.

01:18:39.180 You know, there was nothing he was afraid to do.

01:18:40.660 He was afraid to drive Jefferson away.

01:18:44.120 That was the only thing he was afraid of.

01:18:45.960 And Jefferson, to his credit, took some body blows in that correspondence.

01:18:50.540 And chiefly, chiefly, Adams said, you know what?

01:18:54.040 I was right about the French Revolution.

01:18:55.400 You were wrong.

01:18:55.960 I knew you were wrong.

01:18:56.920 You knew you were wrong.

01:18:58.280 You were stubborn.

01:18:59.000 You said it was going to end happily.

01:19:00.260 It didn't.

01:19:00.820 I want you to admit you were wrong.

01:19:02.720 And Jefferson says, OK, OK.

01:19:04.620 You know, you're right on that one.

01:19:06.080 You are certainly right.

01:19:07.580 That's a big one.

01:19:08.220 That's amazing.

01:19:10.900 I do want to.

01:19:11.360 Is there one book that's got it all?

01:19:12.680 You sort of have to piece it together through various.

01:19:14.340 I've got your producer's address.

01:19:15.960 I'm going to send you a copy and you have to promise to read it.

01:19:18.900 OK, I will.

01:19:19.740 I look forward to reading it.

01:19:21.720 And then they died.

01:19:22.680 They died not only on the same day, but they died 50 years to the day from the signing of the Declaration of Independence, which is just I mean, you got to believe in some sort of higher power.

01:19:32.840 I don't know what the higher power is for any particular individual, but whether it's a combination of God, the American spirit, the Holy Spirit, there's something going on there.

01:19:43.460 You know, Jefferson probably would disagree with you, but but I won't.

01:19:47.160 So they died within four hours of each other.

01:19:51.100 Adams was 91.

01:19:52.180 Jefferson was 83.

01:19:53.480 Jefferson died of prostate cancer and a urinary tract infection.

01:19:56.880 He was kind of starting to come apart.

01:19:58.520 And Adams died of basically sheer old age and Jefferson died first.

01:20:04.980 He died at around noon on the 4th of July.

01:20:07.840 He had been hanging on for a couple of days.

01:20:09.700 He wanted to reach that milestone, as people often do.

01:20:14.700 And his last words were, is it the fourth?

01:20:17.280 He's coming in and out of a coma.

01:20:19.500 And John Adams, then a few hours later up in Massachusetts, his wife is long since dead.

01:20:23.660 And he died in his last words, Megan, where Thomas Jefferson still survives.

01:20:29.640 He was wrong as always, but you can see that he couldn't let it go, that Jefferson mattered to him.

01:20:36.140 And I don't think that was said with envy.

01:20:37.600 I think it was like Jefferson, you know, there was a beauty in this.

01:20:43.480 And then John Quincy Adams was president.

01:20:45.140 He said what you said.

01:20:46.340 He said, this is no coincidence.

01:20:48.580 This this is surely the hand of of of Providence here.

01:20:51.940 Wow, that's incredible.

01:20:55.080 You know, 83 and 91 seems impossible for the time.

01:20:58.760 That would be like living to 200 today.

01:21:01.100 I mean, how did they live such long lives, given no antibiotics and no penicillin, like so many things that will get us through today?

01:21:11.260 You've asked such great questions.

01:21:12.820 And this is another one.

01:21:13.760 You know, so I was once asked by a fifth grader, if Jefferson came to our world, what would he want to take back with him?

01:21:22.980 And so I thought about it, you know, I said penicillin because four of his six children died before their sixth birthday.

01:21:31.520 His children would have lived today.

01:21:35.480 You know, obstetrics was in a barbaric.

01:21:38.320 Jefferson once said when you whenever he saw two doctors in the road, he looked up to see whether there were turkey vultures flying overhead.

01:21:44.440 Medicine was bleeding and purging and it was barbarism.

01:21:46.520 And so if you're a woman or if you're anyone, but especially if you're a woman, you want to live now of all the moments in the history of the planet.

01:21:56.700 And so, yes, but Jefferson was a vegetarian more or less, not entirely, but essentially he said he wanted meat to serve as sauce to his vegetables and not the other way around.

01:22:07.980 And one of his 10, his personal 10 commandments is no man ever regretted having eaten too little.

01:22:12.940 Adams was like a John Bull Englishman eating pork and beef and mashed potatoes and so on.

01:22:18.060 He just had good genes, apparently.

01:22:19.800 But but here's the one thing you should remember.

01:22:22.380 The death age was in the 40s at this era, Megan.

01:22:25.000 But if you got through your like your first 15 years, you could live a full life.

01:22:29.140 You're three score and 10.

01:22:30.680 It's those first 15 that were the great site that cut down people in that era.

01:22:36.240 So, wow, my God, that's so depressing.

01:22:38.720 All these children dying.

01:22:39.680 And yeah, we didn't even touch on the fact that I wasn't at five of his six children ultimately who would die.

01:22:44.400 Ultimately, the last one was Maria. 0.70

01:22:47.420 The younger daughter died in April of 18 for while he was serving his first term and that shattered him, as you might expect.

01:22:54.280 And he said, others may give of their abundance, but I of my want have now lost half of all that I have.

01:23:00.160 My evening prospects now hang on the slender thread of a single life.

01:23:03.880 And that single life was his daughter, Martha, who did survive him.

01:23:07.720 Thank God.

01:23:08.200 Right.

01:23:08.460 She lived the rest of his life with him.

01:23:10.940 So now here we are today in 2022.

01:23:14.260 And in the wake of George Floyd and the push for cancellations, Thomas Jefferson has just been marred beyond belief.

01:23:22.520 That name has been just absolutely marred.

01:23:25.260 And that's not to undo any of the discussion we just had about slavery and his support of it and his being born on the into it on the on the wrongdoing side.

01:23:34.520 And I wonder what you think of it, because now it's crossed over.

01:23:38.820 I'll just give the audience a couple of examples.

01:23:40.480 All right.

01:23:40.740 He started the University of Virginia.

01:23:42.320 That's that's another thing we didn't even get to.

01:23:43.660 But he he started UVA and now their student newspaper just this past August calling to remove his name from the campus.

01:23:51.160 It's his university.

01:23:52.400 OK, so they want his name gone.

01:23:54.400 A New Jersey school just removed his name over the slave ownership.

01:23:58.300 This is in August of 2022.

01:24:00.260 Not not even right post George Floyd.

01:24:02.380 I mean, that was when the fever was very hot.

01:24:06.460 July 2022 Monticello going woke, trashing Thomas Jefferson's legacy in the process.

01:24:13.760 They let's see.

01:24:15.980 It's the I'm trying to find exactly who did it.

01:24:18.340 But oh, now they're talking about how it offers a lecture on the horrors of slavery as soon as you get there.

01:24:23.560 That one of the visitors or somebody who runs another institute said the whole thing has the feel of propaganda and manipulation.

01:24:30.660 People on the tour now seem sad and demoralized placards with conversation starters on the topic of civil rights festoon, a patio outside the snack shop.

01:24:40.120 According to the New York Post, is all men are created equal being lived up to in our country today.

01:24:44.220 One reads, when will we know when it is?

01:24:46.380 It continues supplying a negative answer to the first question.

01:24:48.940 And Ibram X. Kendi, Ta-Nehisi Coates are in the visitor's center's shop.

01:24:53.620 Only a single biography of Thomas Jefferson exists there.

01:24:57.820 And then finally, you've got New York City Hall removing the Thomas Jefferson statue that just happened last November of 2021.

01:25:04.760 On and on it goes.

01:25:05.800 Two of his descendants want his D.C. memorial replaced.

01:25:09.000 I just I just it's like it reminds me of the Winston Churchill whatever foundation they get together every year.

01:25:17.420 And now it's turned into just an annual Winston Churchill bash fest.

01:25:21.020 We're unable to separate the misdeeds from the man that they and I realize they're all part of the same thing.

01:25:27.700 But they in the in the minds of these people, they overtake and out overshadow all the good people like Jefferson or in the case of Churchill that they did.

01:25:39.100 What do you make of it?

01:25:40.880 There's a lot there, Megan.

01:25:42.340 I'll start this way.

01:25:43.500 He's going to survive this.

01:25:45.700 In other words, he's not going to be erased.

01:25:48.920 Some wish to do that.

01:25:50.580 This won't happen.

01:25:52.340 Moreover, he wrote the most important document in American history.

01:25:55.220 And that document has liberated peoples all over the world.

01:25:59.940 Ho Chi Minh was quoting the Declaration of Independence.

01:26:04.360 Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton used it as the model for their own Declaration of Rights in Seneca Falls.

01:26:14.500 So Jefferson's legacy is secure.

01:26:17.600 He himself is taking some very severe body blows.

01:26:20.560 You know, there's talk of the Jefferson Memorial.

01:26:22.360 There's even talk of Mount Rushmore.

01:26:23.740 I think he will survive this.

01:26:25.600 I take the whole man theory, Megan, that we have to balance this out.

01:26:29.840 Yes, it's very, very bad.

01:26:31.280 And I'll tell you why it's so bad.

01:26:33.060 Because he's the one who said all men are created equal. 0.94

01:26:35.840 You know, Washington didn't say that.

01:26:37.240 Madison didn't say that.

01:26:38.160 Monroe didn't say that.

01:26:39.680 Jefferson said it.

01:26:40.580 And so he's like the poster child for this thing because it's so obviously impossible to square these two things about Jefferson.

01:26:48.580 So he's really taking it.

01:26:50.320 And part of this is reaction because for so many decades he was kind of given a pass on this question that among slaveholders he was sort of the best of them.

01:26:59.740 And if you had to be a slave, you know, Monticello, and that he was reluctant and so on.

01:27:04.760 And that's not really true.

01:27:07.200 So part of this is a corrective to a long period of white narrative that has not faced the unpleasant truth about this thing.

01:27:17.360 So I think the pendulum has swung dangerously, and Jefferson is just part of a much larger movement, as you know.

01:27:24.600 I think it will swing a little bit back, and I think he will survive this.

01:27:28.800 But here's my point, and I'll see if you agree with this.

01:27:32.600 You mentioned UVA.

01:27:34.580 A, I think it's ridiculous for UVA students to apply to that university, to accept a position at one of the world's great universities,

01:27:42.680 and when they get there, to trash the man who built it.

01:27:45.220 But that's another question.

01:27:46.320 I think that's a form of presentism that's kind of disturbing.

01:27:51.380 But certainly this is what I would say, that you can't talk about the University of Virginia without an asterisk

01:27:56.320 that says the lands were leveled by enslaved people, the bricks were baked by enslaved people, 0.93

01:28:02.820 the timbers were cut by enslaved people, all the buildings were built by them. 1.00

01:28:07.300 When the university opened, they were the janitors, they were cleaning up people's waste materials,

01:28:13.040 they were the cooks.

01:28:13.740 So fair enough.

01:28:15.400 When I went to Vanderbilt in my first year in the early 1970s, they boasted of having nine African-American students.

01:28:21.880 They have a long, really troubled history in this way, and yet every janitor at Vanderbilt at that time was an African-American.

01:28:29.300 So, you know, we have to face this.

01:28:31.500 But I think Jefferson will survive because he's Leonardo da Vinci with a very, very, very serious problem at the center of his life and his moral character.

01:28:41.300 And I think he's taken a permanent hit.

01:28:44.560 I think that permanent hit is just.

01:28:47.440 But I think we have to be careful here, not to use the cliche of the baby in the bathwater,

01:28:52.540 but we have to be careful not to just pretend we can sweep American history clean and then feel better about it.

01:28:58.680 The facts of American history don't go away if you remove Jefferson's statue.

01:29:02.120 In fact, in some ways, it becomes harder to talk about the facts and the complexities and the paradoxes of American history once you erase too much.

01:29:11.060 That's right.

01:29:11.760 And also, you kind of erase the hope amongst children that if they sin, they could still be remembered as someone great.

01:29:18.440 They could still achieve greatness in their life and be remembered for their goodness instead of their worst mistakes.

01:29:24.200 Jefferson's a more extreme case of it.

01:29:27.060 But typically in our American past, we've gone for grace.

01:29:29.880 We've allowed it.

01:29:30.520 We've been largely a Christian country that's believed in grace and forgiveness and redemption.

01:29:35.200 Only now have we turned on that in a way that, you know, you're only about your worst sin.

01:29:40.700 Let's end it on a positive note because that is what makes us feel good about him and his contribution to our past.

01:29:47.180 I read that you said we have to know about Jefferson because he's the man who found the language to express the greatest aspirations that humanity has.

01:29:57.140 Oh, that's exactly right.

01:29:59.100 He found the words to say the thing we know on an inherent level, but maybe never recognized until we read it from his pen.

01:30:07.420 Absolutely.

01:30:08.120 I'm glad I wrote that because I believe it 100 percent, Megan.

01:30:12.700 And I think Jefferson articulated the aspiration of a free people.

01:30:17.580 OK, the asterisk is there.

01:30:19.120 We grant that.

01:30:20.100 But he understood America better than anybody else, that this was going to be the land of dreams, of aspirations, that we were going to be an idealistic nation, that we were going to try to be an exceptional nation.

01:30:34.840 He wouldn't have used the shining city on the hill because he's a secularist, but you get the point.

01:30:39.640 He pitched us very, very, very high.

01:30:42.880 And when we're at our best, as we occasionally are, we are Jefferson's people.

01:30:48.280 When we are at our best, we are that people, an enlightened, thoughtful, evidence gathering, rational people who work by majority rule.

01:30:56.580 When we're not at our best, it's not because we're bad people.

01:31:02.000 It's because he pitched us so high.

01:31:04.080 And in fact, he pitched us so high that he himself gets a C minus or a D along the levels of ideals that he promoted.

01:31:11.580 And I say this.

01:31:12.400 Thank God we had a dreamer in the beginning of this thing.

01:31:15.480 Hamilton was a more brilliant financier.

01:31:18.540 Madison was a better political theorist.

01:31:20.420 But only Jefferson could say this, that humans have rights to human happiness if they figure out how to pursue it.

01:31:26.700 And without Jefferson, America is just a country, very rich one.

01:31:31.940 Jefferson made us this people.

01:31:34.400 And you know this if you travel in Europe.

01:31:36.300 They're hard on us.

01:31:38.040 And when we're backed into a corner, we go right into Jefferson that whatever is wrong with us, there is so much that's right with us.

01:31:45.940 And we are a self-correcting people, and we're not going to give up until we do justice for everybody and everything.

01:31:52.400 And that's Jefferson, not alone, but more than any other figure in our history, with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln.

01:32:00.540 Wow.

01:32:01.240 Well said.

01:32:02.020 Clay, thank you so much for all of your insights and your research and bringing it to us in such an easy-to-understand way.

01:32:08.520 It's been an absolute pleasure.

01:32:10.180 It's been a delight for me to have this conversation with you, and I thank you for your respectful and really interesting questions.

01:32:17.500 So let's talk again.

01:32:19.220 Yes, it's a date.

01:32:20.360 All the best to you.

01:32:22.400 Thanks to all of you for joining us today and all week on History Week on this show.

01:32:26.840 Really enjoyed it.

01:32:27.720 I hope you did, too.

01:32:28.500 I found it fun and enlightening.

01:32:30.120 I learned something.

01:32:31.340 And I love history, but I feel like I don't know enough about it.

01:32:33.920 So hopefully you're with me.

01:32:35.420 You enjoyed it.

01:32:36.140 And hopefully you're also, like me, off tomorrow and getting ready to have a very, very Merry Christmas and holiday season.

01:32:44.580 All my best to all of you, and we will see you again live very soon.

01:32:50.560 Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. 0.94

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The Megyn Kelly Show - December 22, 2022

Thomas Jefferson and the Founding of America： History Week on the Megyn Kelly Show ｜ Ep. 459

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