The third president of the United States, author of the Declaration of Independence, and Governor of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson played a key role in executing a vision that shaped America as we know it today. In this episode, host Meghan Kelly talks with humanities scholar and host of The Thomas Jefferson Hour, Clay Jenkinson, about why Jefferson is so important to us.
00:00:00.440Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
00:00:11.760Hey 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.
00:00:25.540Thomas Jefferson was the third president of the United States, author of the Declaration of Independence, and governor of Virginia.
00:00:33.040He 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.
00:00:43.220While he led a very successful life, there were plenty of pitfalls, and he, as a man, was far from perfect,
00:00:50.460something 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.
00:01:03.860Joining us today is humanities scholar and author and host of The Thomas Jefferson Hour, Clay Jenkinson.
00:01:10.960Welcome to the show, Clay. Thanks for being here.
00:01:13.400Megan, it's a delight to be here, eager to talk about this great man.
00:01:16.300Yeah, 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.
00:01:24.920I think most people know that he authored the Declaration of Independence, and that you've got Monticello, which was his house.
00:01:31.940Some 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.
00:01:40.700Now 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.
00:01:51.040And 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.
00:02:05.580Give us the broad overview before we get into the specifics on why he's so important to us.
00:02:12.420Well, you know, there's a biography of George Washington that calls him America's indispensable man, and he was.
00:02:19.040And probably there's no greater figure amongst the founders than Washington for a range of reasons.
00:02:24.940But we can't understand the history of this country or its value system until we come to terms with Jefferson.
00:02:31.100Jefferson, Megan, really articulated the American dream.
00:02:35.540First of all, he believed that we're up to it, that we are equal to the challenge of self-government.
00:02:40.560He believed that humans are perfectible, at least up to a certain degree.
00:02:45.020He believed that we should leave European habits behind and forge a new, extraordinary, smaller Republican American culture.
00:02:53.560He 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.
00:03:06.820He's really a tremendously extraordinary man.
00:03:09.720And 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.
00:03:23.940He died at the age of 83 on July 4th, 1826.
00:03:28.440And 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.
00:03:44.760How did it come to be that a man as young as Jefferson could write the Declaration of Independence?
00:03:53.900You know, it's hard to think of, what was he, like 31 when he wrote it?
00:04:23.340He was an exceedingly shy and private person, in some ways even a secretive person.
00:04:28.320So 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.
00:04:36.760Jefferson was at the opposite end of that spectrum.
00:04:55.140He knew seven languages, three ancient and four modern.
00:04:58.640And 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.
00:05:18.040He had a capacious mind, and he kept a commonplace book.
00:05:20.860And 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.
00:05:30.880And secondly, Jefferson practiced being a good writer of English prose.
00:05:37.280He 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.
00:05:49.580And 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.
00:06:04.800And Adams came to Jefferson in his boarding house in Philadelphia and said, you must write this declaration.
00:06:48.500Yeah, your opening got right to the heart of it.
00:06:52.000So 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.
00:07:06.960And Jefferson remembers being carried on top of a horse on a pillow by a trusted black slave.
00:07:32.740Eventually, he sort of lost interest in it, I think, and became a little bit complacent.
00:07:37.940But that's the first memory of his life.
00:07:39.840And when he died on July 4th, 1826, enslaved people built his coffin.
00:07:44.800They dug the grave in the graveyard at Monticello and buried him.
00:07:50.520And 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.
00:08:02.120So for us to understand Jefferson, we have to factor that in from the beginning and throughout.
00:08:06.840Now, what we make of it is another question.
00:08:11.600He was privately tutored until he was 16 and a half.
00:08:14.520Then he went up to the logical place, the College of William and Mary.
00:08:18.420He had a brilliant set of mentors there.
00:08:21.140He, again, was reading 12, 15 hours per day.
00:08:24.060And 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.
00:08:41.460So wait, let me let me ask you there what it sounds like a rich family.
00:10:35.220You 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.
00:10:52.580Jefferson 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.
00:11:04.500And 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.
00:11:23.800So he was drawn in by his reading and by his awareness of what was happening.
00:11:30.000And then in 1774, he wrote a pamphlet, which was published without his permission, called A Summary View.
00:11:36.700And everyone in all the colonies thought, this is a young man to reckon with.
00:11:41.460This is a great thinker and even more, a great articulator of the American position.
00:11:47.320And so he was then drawn into the national councils because of his genius.
00:11:54.040So 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.
00:12:05.200And 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.
00:12:14.720You're just like, yes, thank you for saying that.
00:12:40.320Others were more prominent and were senior to Jefferson.
00:12:44.260But if they had written it, it would, I think, be regarded as a sort of routine state paper today.
00:12:50.380What 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.
00:13:02.260And then he found the 35 most interesting words in the English language.
00:13:07.700We 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.
00:14:35.000And he gave as few speeches in the course of his life as possible.
00:14:38.460First 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.
00:14:51.620So the most famous example is his first inaugural address.
00:14:54.960It's March 4th, 1801, contested election, first president to be inaugurated in the new Capitol in Washington in the unfinished Capitol building.
00:15:04.120He's staying at a boarding house not so far away.
00:15:06.540He strolls without a military escort, without bands and a carriage and so on.
00:15:12.900He strolls over to the Capitol and there he delivers his first inaugural address, one of the two or three masterpieces of that genre.
00:15:20.900But he mumbled and he was so quiet and soft-spoken that people were leaning forward.
00:15:28.480There were about a thousand people there and they wanted to know because he regarded this as the second American revolution.
00:15:34.240So they wanted to know what's this guy going to bring to us?
00:15:37.960You know, how many radical changes is he promoting?
00:15:41.600Because a lot of people had fears that Jefferson was too radical, spent too much time in France.
00:15:45.800And so Jefferson reads out this magnificent inaugural address in which he says, every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle.
00:16:09.020He gave a second inaugural address in 1805.
00:16:11.880But other than that, no State of the Union messages, no stump speaking.
00:16:16.200When 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.
00:16:39.960So 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.
00:16:49.940You know, we think that we live in the ugliest political times ever.
00:16:53.140We got to read some history to know it's been ugly for a long time.
00:16:56.780But before all that, talk about the American Revolution.
00:17:00.380You 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.
00:17:54.220Just at that time, the war went went sour and the British invaded the South, invaded Virginia.
00:17:59.500Jefferson handled it pretty not well, let's say.
00:18:05.620And in fact, he was investigated for malfeasance because the British invaded all the way up to the capital at Richmond and scattered the government.
00:18:14.800And eventually, Bannister Tarleton brought some dragoons up the hill to Monticello.
00:18:19.320Jefferson fled into the woods, which I suppose was a rational thing to do.
00:20:05.700So, OK, so that's fascinating because I did read he was investigated for cowardice in connection with the fleeing while governor of Virginia.
00:20:36.680He would say I'm not sure we have to believe him.
00:20:39.520He would say he never wanted to be the president of the United States.
00:20:42.280He 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.
00:21:04.180And 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.
00:21:17.000I have no more desire to govern men than to ride my horse through a storm.
00:21:22.140He's no Bill Clinton who wanted to be president from 16.
00:21:24.940And maybe Jefferson is putting it on a little thick.
00:21:27.680But he stood for the presidency reluctantly in 1796, pushed forward by others.
00:21:31.980He 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.
00:21:41.460In 1800, he sort of did want to be president for this reason.
00:21:47.460He felt that the Federalists, Washington, Adams, and particularly Colonel Hamilton, were taking the country towards aristocracy and monarchy and a strong central government.
00:22:00.520And that this was really a violation of the principles of the revolution.
00:22:04.160And so he stood to restore the country.
00:22:07.380And he called it, when he won, America's second revolution, that he had brought us back to the true principles of the thing.
00:22:14.560So, you know, you have to unpack that with ambition and rhetoric and posturing.
00:22:19.400But I do think he was a very reluctant political figure.
00:22:23.320And he certainly would have been reelected in 1808 and chose to retire.
00:22:28.780And he said that the precedent set by George Washington of two terms is essential to the health of a republic.
00:22:42.400He was called technically our American minister to France.
00:22:44.780But that was right after the debacle of the revolution and the death of his wife.
00:22:50.060And he went to France and he did recover, Megan.
00:22:52.400He fell in love with French high culture, the sculpture, the painting, the music.
00:22:57.380He said, if there's one thing I covet in violation of the Ten Commandments, it's European music.
00:23:03.060He fell in love in Paris with a British-Italian woman named Maria Cosway, the last love, I think, of his life.
00:23:11.100She was married and sort of what happens in Paris isn't going to really work very well back in Virginia.
00:23:17.080But he lost control of his head, which almost never happened with Jefferson.
00:23:22.900He went into northern Italy, doing so with a map to try to figure out how Hannibal had come over the Alps with his elephants.
00:23:30.240Jefferson was one of the most curious men who ever lived on Earth.
00:23:35.000And 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.
00:23:48.040Everything Jefferson touched, he mastered.
00:23:50.440And the one definition of genius, Megan, is it's an infinite capacity for taking pains.
00:23:55.020And if ever that were true, that's Jefferson.
00:23:57.240Now, this woman you mentioned in France was not his first love.
00:24:02.580You mentioned his wife, Martha, right?
00:24:04.860I think he had a Martha, too, in addition to the most famous Martha, Washington.
00:24:28.580This woman actually kind of said that.
00:24:31.300And that was the deal that was struck before she died.
00:24:34.340That'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.
00:25:56.880Unless it turns out that we're just these recognizable souls who know and love each other without that identity on us.
00:26:02.100You 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.
00:26:09.860It could be your wife in the next life.
00:26:40.680Like, 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.
00:26:49.820So he runs for president, doesn't make it the first time, becomes vice president, and then he runs after Adams.
00:27:43.040Really, it amounts to what is the meaning of the American Revolution?
00:27:46.000And on the Hamilton side, and he was enormously powerful and much more active than Jefferson ever was.
00:27:53.660Jefferson always had to play the languid aristocrat, and it was above all of this.
00:27:57.600Hamilton would get right down in the mud.
00:28:00.000And Hamilton wanted a high-toned central government, and he thought that war and militarism were glorious things.
00:28:06.000And he wanted a national bank, and he wanted to give special incentives to infant industries and to have a mixed economy.
00:28:12.560And 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.
00:28:19.600And 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.
00:28:28.960And 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.
00:28:38.500And, you know, he's a harmony obsessive, which is a problem in a political figure.
00:28:43.500So anyway, he stands against Adams, loses, becomes his vice president, stands a little bit more willingly in 1800 and wins.
00:28:50.120But 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,
00:28:59.580and the person with the second most number of votes becomes vice president, doesn't have anything to do with parties.
00:29:05.120And so when Jefferson stood for the presidency in 1800, he got 73 electoral votes.
00:29:24.180You know, everyone knew Jefferson was president and Burr was vice president, but the Constitution didn't know that.
00:29:29.060And so, as you know, that puts it into the House of Representatives.
00:29:32.420The House of Representatives votes by state, one vote per state, not by individuals.
00:29:37.700And this was the outgoing federalist House of Representatives filled with people who either loathed Jefferson or worried that he was too radical.
00:29:46.680And so they tried to make an accommodation with Burr to put him in the presidential chair and oust Jefferson,
00:29:54.400which they were within their constitutional rights to do, by the way.
00:29:58.340The House has enormous power in such situations, and we may see it again.
00:30:03.440But 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.
00:30:11.960And during that time, there was talk of civil war.
00:30:14.980And 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.
00:30:29.640And federalists were doing something similar on the other side.
00:30:32.820Jefferson predicted that the country might collapse if he were not installed as president.
00:30:38.220And so when we think that we live in a crazy time, think of January 6th or think of the election of 2020.
00:31:15.820Jefferson paid an unscrupulous journalist, if you can call him that name, James Callender, to write negative things about the Adams administration.
00:31:25.660And Callender went way too far and got very personal and ugly.
00:31:29.260And it actually spoiled Jefferson's relationship with Abigail Adams and nearly destroyed his relationship with John Adams.
00:32:07.360It's another thing to fake it and to pretend otherwise.
00:32:10.920And 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.
00:32:20.960Sometimes you just have to do this stuff.
00:32:48.400But it's heartening to know in a way that dirty tricks, dirty politics, dirty media have been around since the founding.
00:32:54.740And that perhaps we're not as we're not the most disgusting journalists who ever lived.
00:33:00.620Perhaps there were even more disgusting.
00:33:03.580I hate to think you're at the lowest of the low.
00:33:06.580I'll tell you one thing they had that that we don't.
00:33:09.200And I don't want to go into this because I'm sure you're sick to death of it.
00:33:13.120But 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.
00:33:44.580And I think one of – I think Callender called John Adams a hermaphrodite.
00:33:49.460And I don't even think he knew what he was saying.
00:33:51.680But we are now in a period recently of intense guttering.
00:33:59.200And Jefferson would – he would walk away.
00:34:01.840I mean, Jefferson would walk away from that sort of thing because he couldn't take it.
00:34:05.620And I don't know how anyone takes it, frankly.
00:34:08.880You're speaking at the political level, but it's also true at a cultural level.
00:34:12.480You know, I've been railing about this.
00:34:14.280I 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.
00:34:19.420But 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.
00:34:30.560You know, like the Super Bowl where you're going to see something very raunchy and inappropriate with your six-year-old unexpectedly.
00:34:51.240I mean, I don't want to sound like that old guy either.
00:34:53.560But 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.
00:35:01.460The 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.
00:35:20.080I mean, a culture mirrors itself in its cultural constructs, its literature, its music, its poetry, its dance, its, in our case, television and film.
00:35:31.260And we're mirroring something that is degrading to the human spirit.
00:35:38.280And I've just been in Europe for the past few weeks.
00:35:41.860It happens there too, of course, but it's not like it.
00:36:21.360We 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.
00:36:33.040Do you feel like, as an aside here, do you feel like that downward spiral is reversible?
00:36:37.620Because I don't remember any time over our history where we've gone down and then we've gone back up.
00:36:45.880We've gotten a little bit more elegant and sophisticated and kind and better read.
00:36:50.760I 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.
00:37:01.940You know, it's like, how much lower can you go?
00:37:05.520But I do ask myself all the time, is this rock bottom?
00:37:09.880Perhaps 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.
00:37:35.460Even 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.
00:37:46.020Or he would say to you, if you and I disagree, Madam, I disagree with you, but let us disagree as rational friends.
00:37:50.840You know, let's not take this personally.
00:37:52.180This is it's important that we have different points of view in a free society.
00:37:56.340It's a free marketplace of ideas and so on.
00:37:58.960So, yes, we might get a little more civil.
00:38:01.240I think we're we're going to pull back from this brink.
00:38:04.400And I do think I don't want to talk about Donald Trump, but I do think he was sui generis.
00:39:54.100I'm just trying to think, you know, there is no modern day politician who can compare to Jefferson.
00:39:59.140But 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.
00:40:14.780And yet wants the government out of your business, not in your business, and yet respect for the other side.
00:41:06.000And, 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.
00:41:38.900And he's the first president really to make the case for Washington.
00:41:42.360You know, Albert Gallatin, the secretary of the Treasury, said he said every member of Congress in the cabinet detests Washington without a single exception.
00:41:50.240Because it was just mud and pigs and swamps and think of the miasma of a summer in Washington, D.C.
00:41:58.060Jefferson saw it as this beautiful new symbol of a new nation dedicated to new principles.
00:43:25.140Jefferson, here's, this will blow your mind.
00:43:27.400They only had four cabinet ministers then, a very small government.
00:43:30.180But Jefferson insisted on seeing every document from every cabinet office before it went out.
00:43:36.100Nothing could ever leave the executive branch of the government until Jefferson had had a chance to review it.
00:43:42.020He was administratively maybe one of the greatest administrative people in the history of the country.
00:43:48.740He had an enormous capacity for this sort of thing.
00:43:51.480Get up, spend seven hours at his writing desk, absorb masses of information, write three personal letters, seven public letters, review a treaty, maneuver.
00:44:01.480You know, he was, he had capacities that probably no other president had.
00:44:09.140The 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.
00:44:18.200He wants us to be a farmer's paradise.
00:44:21.080Because Hamilton's like, no, we're going to be the powerhouse of the world if we only let ourselves.
00:44:25.080But Jefferson probably was the best administrator of any president I've ever known.
00:44:31.800It's making me think of all those debates we had when Obamacare was being debated and they weren't reading it.
00:44:36.700And I remember the stack of papers was up to here.
00:45:00.700Jefferson believed that a national debt is a national disgrace, that it's a way of taxing our children and grandchildren without their consent.
00:45:07.460He wanted a constitutional prohibition on a national debt, except in emergency situations.
00:45:13.580And 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.
00:45:23.500That was his famous Earth Belongs to the Living letter.
00:45:28.820And he really hamstrung his administration by devoting 73% of annual revenues to debt retirement.
00:45:35.660So think of that, 73% of the $10 million per year that came into the federal coffers.
00:45:41.260Jefferson devoted through Gallatin to debt retirement, and he retired 37% of the national debt, Hamilton's gift to America, during his two terms.
00:45:50.500And Madison then went farther down that path.
00:45:54.400Number 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.
00:46:05.660And so whoever controlled New Orleans controlled the economic destiny of the country.
00:46:12.140And the Westerners are very restive and demanding that he do something to keep the Mississippi River open.
00:46:17.300And so he sends James Monroe to join Robert Livingston in Paris to try to open the Mississippi.
00:46:22.760And they're prepared to spend $6 million to buy the village of New Orleans.
00:46:28.420And 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.
00:46:42.160And Jefferson bought, without really wanting to, 828,000 square miles and 575 million acres at $0.03 per acre.
00:46:54.520So it was like one of the greatest accidents in human history.
00:46:57.260But Jefferson had the good sense to accept a bargain of that sort when he saw one.
00:47:02.640And we've carved, you know, 11 states out of the Louisiana Territory.
00:52:57.300This 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.
00:53:10.220And Jefferson, of course, was the last person in the world to be called a Bulgarian.
00:53:21.380Oh, so the other thing is he didn't want any national celebration of his birthday or the president's birthday.
00:53:28.820He didn't want the president's face to go on the money, which he ultimately lost.
00:53:35.160I mean, we do have our president's faces over time, not the current president, on our money.
00:53:40.020And even Jefferson, I had to look this up, he's on the nickel, but he's also on the $2 bill.
00:53:44.980He might like that because it's so, you know, poorly circulated.
00:53:48.200But 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.
00:54:08.740He'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.
00:54:16.420But a dollar bill is worthless outside of the strength of the economy of the United States.
00:54:22.620And he certainly didn't want faces on our currency.
00:54:26.080You know, he wanted the buffalo and the elk and the moose.
00:57:46.620He wanted an elderly black woman to be the chaperone, someone who had had smallpox.
00:57:50.760And 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.
00:58:02.260So here's a 14-year-old chaperone leading a nine-year-old Virginia girl across the Atlantic Ocean to catch up with her father.
00:58:11.580They got first to England, and Abigail and John Adams met them there.
00:58:17.540And when Abigail saw Sally Hemmings, she thought, uh-oh, this can't be good.
00:58:23.800Maybe she just meant she's too young, but she was alarmed.
00:59:13.700Why would we go back to be enslaved at Monticello?
00:59:18.700And according to Sally Hemmings' son, who gave a report in Ohio around 1873, Jefferson said, look, here's the deal.
00:59:26.780If 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.
00:59:42.360He 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.
00:59:56.120So 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.
01:00:13.080And so I don't, you know, the story could have played out in a number of ways.
01:00:17.900It's so hard to imagine that somebody being told you're free wouldn't say, I'm going to stay free.
01:00:23.880I'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.
01:00:32.340So it's just such a different time and so hard to understand, though we we must try.
01:00:38.840He so once again, he this is post his wife's death and he's he's made this promise not to remarry.
01:15:05.320But 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.
01:15:22.060He decides he decides he's going to reconcile them.
01:15:25.040So he writes to each one of them saying, you know, you should do this.
01:15:29.060And finally, he writes to each one, Jefferson's now retired, saying that the other one is eager for reconciliation.
01:15:37.060So with this ruse, he gets John Adams to write a letter.
01:15:41.620John 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.
01:15:49.880And Jefferson then responds with a very careful and wary response.
01:15:55.240And Adams warms up a little and Jefferson warms up a little.
01:15:58.180And 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.
01:17:23.440But Adams had a huge capacity for love.
01:17:26.980And 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.
01:18:11.620He 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.
01:18:20.440And when Paul Giamatti played him in the miniseries, it was exactly right.
01:19:22.680They 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.
01:19:32.840I 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.
01:19:43.460You know, Jefferson probably would disagree with you, but but I won't.
01:19:47.160So they died within four hours of each other.
01:21:35.480You know, obstetrics was in a barbaric.
01:21:38.320Jefferson once said when you whenever he saw two doctors in the road, he looked up to see whether there were turkey vultures flying overhead.
01:21:44.440Medicine was bleeding and purging and it was barbarism.
01:21:46.520And 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.
01:21:56.700And 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.
01:22:07.980And one of his 10, his personal 10 commandments is no man ever regretted having eaten too little.
01:22:12.940Adams was like a John Bull Englishman eating pork and beef and mashed potatoes and so on.
01:23:14.260And in the wake of George Floyd and the push for cancellations, Thomas Jefferson has just been marred beyond belief.
01:23:22.520That name has been just absolutely marred.
01:23:25.260And 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.
01:23:34.520And I wonder what you think of it, because now it's crossed over.
01:23:38.820I'll just give the audience a couple of examples.
01:24:15.980It's the I'm trying to find exactly who did it.
01:24:18.340But oh, now they're talking about how it offers a lecture on the horrors of slavery as soon as you get there.
01:24:23.560That one of the visitors or somebody who runs another institute said the whole thing has the feel of propaganda and manipulation.
01:24:30.660People 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.
01:24:40.120According to the New York Post, is all men are created equal being lived up to in our country today.
01:24:44.220One reads, when will we know when it is?
01:24:46.380It continues supplying a negative answer to the first question.
01:24:48.940And Ibram X. Kendi, Ta-Nehisi Coates are in the visitor's center's shop.
01:24:53.620Only a single biography of Thomas Jefferson exists there.
01:24:57.820And then finally, you've got New York City Hall removing the Thomas Jefferson statue that just happened last November of 2021.
01:25:05.800Two of his descendants want his D.C. memorial replaced.
01:25:09.000I just I just it's like it reminds me of the Winston Churchill whatever foundation they get together every year.
01:25:17.420And now it's turned into just an annual Winston Churchill bash fest.
01:25:21.020We're unable to separate the misdeeds from the man that they and I realize they're all part of the same thing.
01:25:27.700But 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.
01:26:50.320And 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.
01:26:59.740And if you had to be a slave, you know, Monticello, and that he was reluctant and so on.
01:28:31.500But 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.
01:28:41.300And I think he's taken a permanent hit.
01:28:47.440But I think we have to be careful here, not to use the cliche of the baby in the bathwater,
01:28:52.540but we have to be careful not to just pretend we can sweep American history clean and then feel better about it.
01:28:58.680The facts of American history don't go away if you remove Jefferson's statue.
01:29:02.120In 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.
01:29:30.520We've been largely a Christian country that's believed in grace and forgiveness and redemption.
01:29:35.200Only now have we turned on that in a way that, you know, you're only about your worst sin.
01:29:40.700Let's end it on a positive note because that is what makes us feel good about him and his contribution to our past.
01:29:47.180I 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.
01:30:20.100But 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.
01:30:34.840He wouldn't have used the shining city on the hill because he's a secularist, but you get the point.