the third president of the united states is our topic today. Before we get to the books, introduce us to Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson is best known for writing the United States’ long-form birth certificate, the Declaration of Independence. He was a member of the Virginia General Assembly and Governor of Virginia during the American Revolution. He then succeeded Benjamin Franklin as a senior US diplomat in France. jefferson fell in love with paris, french culture and the french. Then, Jefferson’s political identity was part cosmopolitan and part parochial Virginian. He was Secretary of State for George Washington.
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We think of the first presidents as nationalists. but, in the early days of the republic, Americans identified more strongly with their state and local communities. Jefferson represented the tension of states’ rights that eventually developed into the defensive mentality that led the South to secede in 1860. Thus, there is an interesting interplay in Jefferson’s life: he sometimes defended the interests of Virginia, other times the interests of the nation.
We don’t like the word imperialism now, but back then jefferson’s efforts to expand the united states were hugely popular and “american empire” had a hopeful ring to it. He was responsible for the Louisiana Purchase, which more than doubled the land area of the United States in the early years of the nineteenth century. He sent Lewis and Clark to explore the entire North American continent, crossing as yet unknown Rocky Mountains, which helped Americans envision becoming a nation stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. so jefferson was very nationalistic in his idea that the republic would extend 3000 miles to the west.
thomas jefferson is one of the idols of what you call ‘founders cult’. A marble temple to him, shaped like the Pantheon in Rome, was built in the National Mall in Washington and dedicated in 1939. At its center is a 19-foot-tall, 10,000-pound bronze statue of Jefferson. why the pedestal?
the jefferson memorial in washington was completed in 1943 on jefferson’s 200th birthday. the memorial was president franklin roosevelt’s baby, he was instrumental in making it a shrine to democracy, using jefferson’s universal message of human freedom from tyranny. Jefferson was America’s first and most quotable wordsmith. He enlisted to fight fascism in the darkest days of World War II.
Jefferson and the Virginians, his first recommendation, a book by the thomas jefferson memorial foundation history professor at the university of virginia peter s. onuf, places our subject in the context of the state that shaped it.
the university of virginia was founded by jefferson. peter inherited the position of senior jefferson scholar at mr. jefferson university. His best-known book is Jefferson’s Empire, brilliantly conceived. Jefferson and the Virginians is his last book, written since his retirement. The book examines Jefferson’s interactions with several prominent Virginians at different stages of his political career and helps us understand how Jefferson advanced his political agenda for the United States. It is divided into sections focusing on Jefferson’s interactions with each of these people.
“When they called Jefferson a ‘Democrat,’ it wasn’t a compliment.”
onuf begins with patrick henry, a charismatic courtroom lawyer whose oratory fueled the revolution in virginia. He was the one who turned the people on in 1775-76 and became the first Governor of Independent Virginia. their relationship was initially friendly. Later, when Jefferson succeeded Henry as governor, he became contradictory. henry opposed jefferson’s legislative agenda in virginia, especially as it related to what has since become known as the separation of church and state. So, Henry starts out as a hero to Jefferson and becomes his nemesis.
There is another chapter on Jefferson and James Madison’s long political alliance, which began on the basis of their common mistrust and opposition to Patrick Henry. Onuf distinguishes Jefferson’s abstract ideas from his political practice. it shows that jefferson has an exultant approach to popular politics, while madison, better known as “the father of the constitution,” resisted key elements of jefferson’s performative democracy.
When people talk about “Jeffersonian democracy”, what do they mean?
Jeffersonian democracy has come to mean the belief that elected representatives should enact the will of educated citizens. But when Jefferson was called a “Democrat,” it wasn’t a compliment. In the 1790s, Jefferson’s democratic ideas and his support for the French Revolution frightened many people. george washington and alexander hamilton feared that French revolutionary-style democracy would mean rule by the mob. democrat and democracy did not become positive terms until the nineteenth century. thus, Jeffersonian democracy only became something that Americans took seriously en masse over a period of decades.
our next thomas jefferson book is jefferson and hamilton: the rivalry that forged a nation by historian john ferling.
ferling has written many books on the american revolution; he has an encyclopedic knowledge of this period.
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his jefferson and hamilton is a partisan portrait, a step-by-step account of the ideological contest between men with divergent views. Jefferson feared centralization and a strong national government. Jefferson is, comparatively speaking, a states’ rights advocate. Hamilton believes in a strong central government. Jefferson is a Francophile and Hamilton is an Anglophile.
both jefferson and hamilton acted covertly in advancing their agendas. Hamilton disclosed inside information to a British representative, undermining Jefferson’s efforts, as Secretary of State, to keep a distance from Britain. Jefferson wrote a long letter to Washington in September 1792, trying to convince him that Hamilton was a monarchist attempt to destroy the Republic. Jefferson and Hamilton went head to head in the Washington cabinet. When Washington sided with Hamilton, Jefferson retreated to his plantation. hamilton eventually surpassed jefferson, until 1800.
jefferson referred to his presidential election as the “revolution of 1800”. sounds great. explain what he meant by that and how it fits with the temperament he is describing.
A decade after leaving the presidency, in a letter, he referred to his election as “the revolution of 1800.” what jefferson meant was that his election removed the dominant federalist party (the hamiltonians) from power. Jefferson’s party, which eventually became the Democratic Party, was able to win both houses of Congress and the presidency. Then, Jefferson took office with his political opposition in decline. He was able to get away from Hamilton’s economic infrastructure. the elitism of the Federalists was supplanted by what we have just described as “Jeffersonian democracy,” which elevated educated men from sometimes humble roots and placed greater faith in the idea that ordinary citizens could understand what was best for them. collective interest.
You Call Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty by John B. boles the “best complete biography of jefferson of the 21st century”. what makes this book thomas jefferson’s best life?
john boles has been a student of jefferson and the early american republic for his entire career. this is a biography that encompasses everything, from the cradle to the grave. Boles brings a balanced perspective to the positives and negatives of Jefferson’s character. it is a comprehensive biography, but it is not a face lift. takes a very hard look at jefferson and slavery, something that the current generation of historians has been delving into, due to the obvious paradox that this champion of human freedom took no appreciable steps to eliminate slavery from his native virginia . Boles makes the complex history of Jefferson’s character easy to process. it is detailed and entertaining. brings a complex human being into clear focus. on a psychological level, it is a deep analysis of a person, his political vision and his political practice. and it is very attractively written.
let’s move on to another very well written book, madison and jefferson, written by you and your partner nancy isenberg.
madison and jefferson had a personal and political relationship that lasted fifty years. These two men loved each other, respected each other, and enjoyed each other’s company. it’s an enduring partnership of 50 years, that no one had written a book about since 1950.
it’s called madison and jefferson, and not the other way around, because although madison is generally thought of as jefferson’s protégé, they were the same in every way. You could say that Jefferson’s presidency was a co-presidency with Madison, his secretary of state. People think of Madison as the brainy father of the Constitution, which is accurate, but he was also a power player in Congress, especially in the turbulent 1790s when he held political seniority. Madison was instrumental in forging the anti-Hamilton political interest in Congress that ultimately endorsed Jefferson. there was nothing jefferson didn’t ask madison about.
The book identifies uncomfortable truths that generations of patriotic mythmakers have avoided facing. it is a story of country gentlemen who practice hard politics. We think of democracy as open and honest, but both Madison and Jefferson came to believe that political progress was best organized in secret.
you demonstrate that jefferson was a person for whom friendship had a public as well as a private purpose. He drew much from his association with Madison and, later, from his correspondence with his former nemesis, John Adams. Should we remember Jefferson as one of America’s most successful political users?
Well, he had a lot of lifelong friendships and he knew how to use them to his advantage. he used his pen to mold opinions, build alliances, and forge plans, sometimes in coded letters or in small conclaves. Later, he and Madison presented preformed plans to Congress. Jefferson goaded his allies into enacting his political will.
It is impossible, at least for me, to think of any aspect of Thomas Jefferson without returning to the fact that his life of luxury, leisure, and civic engagement was made possible by slavery. I look forward to hearing about the 600 enslaved people whose work gave Jefferson his freedom.
at the muse of democracy, i write about how, from fdr to the present, every president and many members of congress have cited jefferson to further their own partisan agendas. his words were heroic. but he was someone who had inherited from his father and his mother-in-law a couple of hundred African-Americans as property. that’s the world he was born into.
“when I lecture, I use the term ‘shy abolitionist'”
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The question is: why didn’t he do more to put an end to it? He wrote about slavery as a sin, boldly, in the early 1780s. He wrote that slavery destroyed the virtue of white children, who, growing up, had to learn the attitudes that embodied dominance. When I lecture, I use the term “coy abolitionist,” meaning that Jefferson wasn’t going to say anything more in public than he wrote as a young man when he hoped the Virginia legislature would find a way to eradicate slavery. he left the task of getting rid of this evil to the next generation.
we focus on jefferson as the man who should have done more. But Washington was president for eight years and didn’t lift a finger to free the African Americans in his lifetime. he freed his slaves in his will, but it was not immediate. Those slaves were only freed after his widow, Martha, died.
john adams wrote the massachusetts constitution and bill of rights of 1780, including the statement that “all men are born free and equal,” which set the stage for the massachusetts courts to abolish slavery in 1783. before of that, he represented African-Americans in lawsuits to win their freedom. he hired freedmen and never slave labor.
nancy and i just wrote a book about john and john quincy adams called the problem of democracy. distinguishes the adams family from the virginian founders. in new england, they did not grow up around slaves. A New Englander might have had a domestic slave or a helper in the fields. None of the New England states held more than 1-2% of their population as slaves at any one time. in virginia that figure was around 40%.
The economic well-being of Virginians depended on slavery. However, some in the state worked to end slavery by compensating landowners for the loss of their property, a bill sponsored by Jefferson’s grandson that nearly passed the Virginia legislature in 1832. Jefferson said that blacks and whites could never live together in peace, because of understandable black resentments and white prejudice. this is what most early white Americans probably believed. then we would have to indict his entire generation and the entire leadership group for greed and collective failure to cure their society of a kind of injustice and immorality that we find ugly and impossible to reconcile.
perhaps the adamses were morally superior in this area of concern. but john adams embraced jefferson’s etiology in the 1780s when jefferson wrote that the recolonization of freed blacks in west africa or the caribbean would be the best way to eliminate slavery from american shores.
That brings us to Lucia Stanton’s “Those Who Work For My Happiness: Slavery at the Monticello” by Thomas Jefferson.
This book represents the consummation of Stanton’s career researching the history of plantation slavery. traces the lives of extended monticello families for generations. Annette Gordon-Reed’s work on the connection between Jefferson and the Hemings family won a Pulitzer Prize. Stanton’s work, as a senior investigator at Monticello for decades, laid the groundwork for what Annette wrote. stanton practically started from scratch in rebuilding the world of slaves and free laborers in the jefferson neighborhood.
The only freed slaves in Jefferson’s will were part of the Hemings family. in 1997, the dna effectively proved that they were his children. Sally Hemings, a slave woman who was the biological half-sister of Thomas Jefferson’s wife, gave birth to several of Jefferson’s children. Stanton traces the Hemings family from the Jefferson plantation to their post-emancipation life in Ohio. is a wonderfully engaging story about the diaspora servants of the house of jefferson, how they built the lives of their descendants, their work and their professional achievements.
what about the other enslaved people? what was the nature of their lives and work? how did they produce jefferson’s wealth?
In this book, you will meet people who worked at the Jefferson House. the names of the field workers were recorded but their lives were not recorded.
Jefferson spoke of his servants as his “family”. they learned marketable skills. Sally, for example, was a seamstress. one of sally’s brothers was a chef, another a brewer. White Jefferson grandchildren taught members of the Hemings clan to read and write. One of Jefferson’s granddaughters, Ellen, moved to Boston and became a critic of slavery, writing to Jefferson about her objections. She corresponded with the Hemings family; one named a child after ellen. then, she clearly felt affection, something more than a master-servant relationship. stanton is very good at figuring all this out.
in 2020, a descendant of jefferson, lucian truscott iv, opined that the jefferson memorial is a monument to “a man who wrote that ‘all men are created equal’ in the declaration of independence that founded this nation, and yet he never did much to make those words come true.” fair assessment?
yes, that’s fair. But on the other hand, as I tried to explain earlier, we have to blame the entire generation for their collective failure, you can’t place the brunt of America’s responsibility on the shoulders of one individual. are we going to celebrate only those few people who took an economic hit by freeing their slaves when everyone knew slavery was bad? that’s a pretty narrow way of looking at history.
we can’t get jefferson out of virginia or the fact that he inherited 200 slaves and died with a hundred thousand dollars in debt, which today is around 6 million dollars. Jefferson will always be a man of the eighteenth century and we cannot impose our moral expectations on the men of the eighteenth century.
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