Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty - Presented by Dr. John Boles, Rice University

well I'd like to say good afternoon to everybody my name is John Barr and I'm a history professor here at non started college Kingwood and this is a great crowd and we're very thrilled today we're not here actually talking about Karl Marx we're here to talk about Thomas Jefferson but it is on Friday in this very room we do have a panel of professors discussing marks 200th birthday does Karl Marx still matter and you're all welcome and invited to that five people speaking I think two or three or yes he does still matter two or three no he doesn't matter should be a lively discussion and I hope you'd be done that's really all I'm going to say except to encourage you when our talk is over today to ask questions it doesn't matter what the question is if you've got a question ask it you're not going to look stupid in asking the question sometimes all it takes is that first person to say hey I'm puzzled by this and I need to understand it and then that opens it up for a really good discussion so without anything else from me I'm going to turn it over to one of our honor students Emily crane and she will introduce our speaker today one final thing I would like welcome we have a dual credit class from final high school here today this is my friend Luke been nicked his class is here so where is that third fatal bottle all right we're glad to have you thanks for coming we appreciate it all right in go ahead a good-sized concern is to cover this report my name is Emily three I mean cohort five of those are alive today I have the honor to introduce dr. John bulls on this lovely spooky day he's currently the william p professor within peacock McMasters he's made at Rice University dr. Boles was born in Houston Texas and he's been teaching for almost 50 years next year actually look at his last year of teaching he is a wired aware publications to his credit including authored books and books articles in journals that are too numerous to list some of the samples include the irony of southern religion slave culture the university so conceived a brief history writes and of course Thomas Jefferson's an architect American Liberty which happens to be the subject of our lecture today Thomas Jefferson is one of the founding fathers of democracy and his relatives can still be seen today as much if you're well aware voting season is all around this and if you ever that's already out encourage I think you would agree that dr. Bowles is nothing short [Applause] but thanks very much thanks Emily thanks to John and Steve I realize this is Halloween and I'd like to think this will be a treat but you might consider it a trick so we'll see I'm going to talk about Thomas Jefferson and I'm going to explain why I got into Jefferson and how I wrote it and what I hope my book does that I think needed to be done obviously there were a lot of books about Jefferson already existing and when I was writing on these people would asked me sort of a tone of incredulity isn't there already a biography of Jefferson just so you know why what what were you doing doing it again so I want to explain why I thought I should do it I was a student at Rice long over fifty years ago and my senior year I took a class called Jeffersonian jacksonian democracy and in that class we read a lot of writings of Jefferson we read have bought one volume of writing just at his collected letters and we read a wonderful book about him a man named Merrill Peterson called a Jefferson image in the American mind now this book by Merrill Petersen was not a biography it actually was a history of how Jefferson had been treated in the American press and by historians since his lifetime it was sort of a history of the image of Jefferson in America and I thought that was a fascinating book I never read such a book this was the fall of 1964 I'll be graduating in the spring of 65 I was already deciding to go to graduate school so I decided that I would go to graduate school to study Thomas Jefferson because I liked it I was just fascinated by his writings his letters and that sided to go to University of Virginia because Merrill Peterson who wrote that book the Jefferson image taught at University of Virginia and the Bernard mayo another really wonderful teacher in a scholar of Jefferson also taught there and then do mom alone do mom alone was sort of the great biography of Jefferson who had started writing a multi-volume biography of Jefferson and that well he wrote it first volume was published in 1950 he didn't finish that set of books until 1984 so anyway he was there so the three many ways the three leading Jefferson scholars were at university Virginia so I went there in the fall of 1965 fully intending to write about Jefferson but I grew up in these Texas and I guess I was sort of a literalist and a literalist you know I'll get another example I have a grandson we'll be going to the client schools and when he was up in four years old he was playing soccer the way four-year-olds play soccer you know just kind of run around the field and they were more kids on his team than could play at any one time so he came off and he was sitting right on the line and I said Parker you need to move back a little bit because you're a feeder in the field says no I said Parker I know you're not you're not playing right now but you know you or your feet are in the field somebody might run into you he says no I have to sit here and I said why he said because my my coach said go sit on the sidelines he literally thought that meant you sit on the sidelines well that's kind of what literally start so I went to graduate school in the first day or so the Graduate Dean came and spoke to all the new grad students in all the fields and he said the most important thing is that you need to choose a dissertation topic really soon if you haven't thought about this much when you were going to graduate school you write a dissertation a dissertation is the sense you like a draft of a book so when he said you should choose this session topic quickly he meant like in your first year or something like that but again I was a literalist you know so when he said choose a topic quickly I thought well I guess that means you know before sunset or something like that and I had taken a course in primitive religion at Rice in anthropology department in this spring of 1965 and we read about primitive religion all over the world but also we had a one lecture about this religious revival in Kentucky called a great Kentucky revival and which people would got fell unconscious and had spasmodic jerks and that all kinds of odd things and I thought that was really fascinating and I went through the anthropology professor and says what's been written on this he says nothing it's an old book that's not very good it's just solving mystery so that sort of puzzled me in part because I had grown up in East Texas and of course like all people in these Texas I had gone to the Baptist Church for sunday-school and so forth and I noticed when I got to college and read the US history if we ever talked about religion the US history was always religion in New England there was Pilgrims and Puritans and transcendentalist and social gospel and so forth and it struck me odd that clearly the south was the Bible Belt but it doesn't get into the textbooks so that was sort of on my mind so when the guy says choose a topic quickly I thought hmm that's what I'll do I'll study this great revival and how it was as the South became the Bible Belt so it's kind of odd I went to university Virginia specifically to study Jefferson but I ended up writing a dissertation on just outbreak in Kentucky and Tennessee between 1800 and 1805 and that eventually was published as a book called a great revival and in the academic field if you publish one book if it does very well then you're sort of typecast like movie stars know you're in a movie and you're they expect you'll do the same thing every time so I was asked to do a book on religions another look on religion in Kentucky and that led to a book on our they had a chapter on slave religion and that chapter led to a history of slavery and that led to that book called the irony of southern religion and that lit you know so I just found myself being caught up because I was top caste as a southern religious historian of writing books on different aspects of southern religion and culture and that eventually led to a two-volume text book on the history of the south and other kinds of things and I got involved in editing the Journal of southern history so I 1913 to 2013 after having talked for 45 years or so I retired as editor of a journal and not talk you know I went to graduate school nearly 50 years ago to study Jefferson and that was 45 years ago and I haven't written about look on Jefferson yet so if I'm gonna do this I better get moving you know because you know time's a-wasting so I begin to think really seriously about Jefferson now I had taken the Jefferson seminars when I was in graduate school maril Peterson's seminar and do momma long seminar and I had kept basically kept up with Jefferson's scholarship over at this time but I had not specifically researched Jefferson and so I began to think about doing it then in 2013 again when I start when I started thinking about writing a biography of Jefferson remember I've been reading about Justin for forty or five years it just hasn't been focused solely on Jefferson and I realized that the historical world had changed amazingly since 1965 if I had written about Jefferson to 1965 Jefferson was universally admired and in the early 60s certainly he was a mind Virginia and we talked about Jefferson as the father of American democracy and we talked about in movie a you talk very reverentially about mr. Jefferson whose house is up there on the mountaintop Monticello and Jefferson was probably the most popular American president past president in 1965 so if I had written about Jefferson in 1965 I would have done it in the context of Jefferson is this father of democracy no complications to that definition but just at that time that was in the mist of the civil rights movement and unless you were living under a rock you had to become aware in the mid 60s certainly lived in the south but the nation in the south particularly has this huge problem with slavery and that problem of slavery didn't end in 1865 or 1954 but we were still living with it and so race and racism and the consequences of race had become became a huge issue in American history and it for about 20 years I would argue and maybe from 75 to 90 or so the most sophisticated exciting work in the field of American history was in the field of slavery studies that that happened after 1965 and also in about 1970 women's movement the women's history developed in the South women's history had begun in New England in the north but southerners began thinking about women's history in the 1970s all of a sudden every topic in American history every generation writes its own history and every generation asks a new questions about this history but all of a sudden in the aftermath of the civil rights movement and an aftermath of the women's history movement anyone writing about any aspect of American history begin begins to ask questions about race and gender and then all of a sudden by the 1970s Jefferson's reputation a great fall because while in 1965 we could have talked about Jefferson's the father of democracy and so forth but 1980 everybody was asking the question how could Jefferson who wrote those words all men created equal be a slaveholder his entire life he was a complete hypocrite I mean the story of Jefferson's is a story of a hypocrite he also never occurred to him that women could vote he had his attitudes toward women were absolutely 18th century he wasn't a lot of person at all and all of a sudden Jefferson's reputation began to collapse in America and when most people in the 1980s and 90s talked about Jefferson they did it in a disparaging way I mean Jefferson was the basically demonized for about 30 years and by the 20th century if you ask so-called men on the street whoever that is or if he has to get tips to dn't what they knew about Jefferson they probably would say he was a president they might not know within a 50 years when he was president they knew he was a president and then what they actually knew about Jefferson was Jefferson was a hypocrite because he wrote all men are created equal but he had slaves in her life and to make it worse Jefferson had an affair with a young black woman named Sally so Jefferson is a person not to be admired Jefferson is sort of a almost a rapist but certainly a hypocrite and it's shocking but the 20th century that's what most in most Americans knowledge of Jefferson was bumper-sticker deep it's kind of shocking I was last in October of 2017 there was an op-ed published in New York Times I won't tell you this guy's name it was a and and and this op it began by saying the framers of the Constitution were all over their lot from being racist like Thomas Jefferson to suah though and he says Jefferson was hypocrite didn't read his leaves and he had fair and that's all he said about Jefferson of course I read that and I was instantly repulsed by the first line because this guy said Jefferson was a framer of the Constitution Jefferson was not involved in the writing of the Constitution Jefferson was the American ambassador to France was in Paris when the Constitution was written Jefferson is not a framer the guy who wrote that op-ed was a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School and I thought I mean I have a great admiration for the Harvard Law School and if you know if if the guy who mows our yard didn't know where Jefferson was in 1787 or you know the clerk at HEB didn't know or if my mother didn't know I would say well you know not what a professor of constitutional law who is stupid enough and uninformed enough to talk about Jefferson's or framer the Constitution when Jefferson wasn't and not was for five thousand miles and where the constitute was being written I just thought that was outrageous and this sort of captures my annoyance most Americans know nothing about Jefferson or what they know is wrong like this Harvard professor and what they do know are those two little bumper sticker things about Jefferson hypocrite and Jefferson a rapist so I thought in 2013 have I waited too long have I missed my window of opportunity there's any is there any reason to write or think or know about Jefferson in 2013 or 2015 or 2020 is he simply a bad old white man of the past that we should just put aside not aside well like you know what a historians wrote the historians role is to try to help us in the present understand somebody who lived in the past it doesn't mean you'd necessarily justify them it doesn't mean that you'd necessarily admire them it means that you want to understand what made them think what made them tick how did they live on what basis did they come to conclusions and I thought well how do you go about doing that well one of the things you have to do is have to read what they wrote so I thought well one thing I can do is I can just sit down at my desk in my library my office is in the library I just sit in my desk and I can read every word Jefferson wrote now that's easier said than done because Jefferson every morning got up and washed his feet in cold water then he wrote letters for about four hours and Jefferson wrote somewhere between 25 or 30,000 letters and all kinds of speeches and so forth and they haven't yet finished editing all Jefferson's letters but there have already been published 53 volumes of his letters there's about another 20 volumes to come plus he wrote all kinds of speeches and government papers and reports and so forth so you know being a literalist I just got volume one page one and read the first Jefferson letter he wrote and then just systematically read through all 30,000 letters and read his speeches and talks and government papers and inaugural addresses and so forth so then I thought that's the first test you do if you become familiar with and I mean intimately familiar with his paper so I bought all the volumes and I index them myself and took notes in them and so forth so I was I was really studying what Jefferson wrote so in addition to sort of familiar like theorizing oneself with the writings of a person as to sort of get inside their mind I also thought the really important thing of a historian is to talk about a person in context I mean Jefferson is not a 21st century person Jefferson is essentially an 18th century person a lot of his attitudes and a lot of his practices are consistent with the 18th century and be like it'd be like absurd for example to criticize the medical doctor in 1784 not using anesthesia when an innovation wasn't invented and so it doesn't make sense to criticize Jefferson for not having attitudes if we would have in 2016 but we're not current in 1780 so I thought so you read a person's papers and then you put a person really carefully into their context and that means not just simply the life and times of when he's person is living but you have to consider the race of that person the gender of that person the status of that person the sort of attitudes and ideas that dominate that person there so you really try to get inside the mind of a person and understand how they thought and how they acted and then I thought I want to write about Jefferson in a way I don't want to use jørgen I don't want to use the language that's accessible to any intelligent had to halt and I wanted a book to be relatively short I mean you may not think that short but I mean do ma Malone's biography is six volumes and H volume is about 600 pages so there's a thirty six hundred page biography and I thought other the only other really good biography was by Merrill Peterson published in 1970s a thousand and thirty pages of little tiny print so I wanted to write a book that was shorter than six volumes and shorter than a thousand thirty pages but written in language that was such that any person could read it and understand it I wanted to avoid jargon and I wanted to explain meaning and context and so forth so that's what I set out to do okay so there's the book now I had to admit when I first turned it into the printer press it was a good bit longer than that and my editor read it said this is really good but no one but a person like you would buy a book this long and said I want you to cut it by about 250 pages he said we could do it but you can do it better than us and that was just excruciating because you know I mean it wasn't a word in there that didn't belong and it wasn't a single story that wasn't apt and every quotation was perfect but I had to cut it so I spent eight or nine months just combing over America reading it and reading and reading it shortening and condensing it without I thought losing the character so the final result is that if they came out in 2017 so what how do I want to portray Thomas Jefferson I want to portray him holistically holistically not only put him in the time and culture in which he existed but I want to talk about Jefferson not simply as a intellectual or as a politician or as a president but I want to talk about as an Arthur it is a scientist and a paleontologist and a etymologist and Jefferson is a father and as a husband as a grandfather I want to talk about Jefferson in all the varieties of his life Jefferson was the first American architect he was the father of cryptology riding and making codes Jefferson was I mean if there ever was a renaissance person in America it was Jefferson so I wanted to capture that aspect of gyptian that amazing hunger for knowledge and I'm again I want to talk about him as a politician and as the statesman as the intellectual as a philosopher so I began by talking about Jefferson's life I described how he goes to studies with a local minister for several years and then he's 17 he goes to the College of William Mary as a sophomore he takes courses for two years then he quits he doesn't he never gets a degree because he's way way beyond the requirement of any degree and basically if they give it out phd's I guess he had gotten the PhD but he's just quit going and then he studied law for a few years and he one of the stories that indicates his brilliance it's when he was 17 he goes to call it William Mary they're in Chloe's burg of course then it was just Leesburg and the the three greatest men in Williamsburg was the royal governor Frances 40a a member of the Royal Society and George width the very famous law professor dr. William small PhD v Edinburgh who's basically the professor of science Natural Philosophy and these three learning men every Friday admit for dinner and they thought about science and philosophy within a few weeks they added a fourth person to their little group there was Thomas J is these three the most learned men in Virginia well then a few weeks realized that teenager Thomas Jefferson belongs in their group so he goes to you via to call you a Mary he could becomes a lawyer he doesn't like being a lawyer he loves the law he loves the law is an intellectual discipline but Jefferson is a very peaceful gentle person he doesn't like argument he doesn't like contention and of course if you're a lawyer to these County courts in the 18th century you go out you argue with opponents Jefferson didn't like that he actually became the lawyer one of the ten lawyers who only dealt with the highest court in the land but he he never liked being a lawyer and those days lawyers didn't make much money I think a lot of lawyers don't like being a lawyer but they just like the money but they didn't make much money then either and so he quit he was elected in 1660 at 1768 he was 25 to the house emergencies that's the local government and he everybody quickly realizes he's the guy you want to have on your committee because he doesn't speak he's not an order but he put him on a committee and he'll do all the research for the committee he'll do all the thinking for the committee and he writes like an angel so you put him on your committee and you just thought of he does it and so Jefferson people began to know who Jefferson was I began to realize the quality of his mind this at the time seventeen seventy seventy one seventy two the American Revolution is on the horizon and in 1774 Jefferson intends to give a though he doesn't give talks he intends to give a talk to the House of Delegates and would instruct the delegates that Virginia has sending to the Continental Congress but he gets sick and doesn't get the readiest talk didn't get to give his talk but he just sends the text on and people in Williamsburg read his text and it realized this is a brilliant text so without asking him they publish his talk this race is like his lecture notes and they just publish it as a pamphlet called a summary view of the rights of British Americans published in 1774 it's a brilliant article to bridge address its it's one of the landmark documents pamphlets of the American Revolution and in the twenty pages or so event summary view of the rights petition Americans Jefferson lays out the intellectual in ideological rationale for the American Revolution and it's filled with the kind of aphoristic quotable language that made Jefferson so famous and that's the best event that's the talk that makes Jefferson no but known up and down the colonies it's going to be printed in the variety of cities it's actually reprinted in England I mean his name becomes mud and the eyes of the King long before he becomes a national politician but in nineteen seventeen seventy five he's elected to the Continental Congress and by this time it's clear the revolutions on the horizon so the delegates thought they needed your help explanation to their colonists and to England and to the people the world why the colonies should think about breaking off from Great American Great Britain so a committee of five is appointed to write out a declaration of the reason the colonies are going to say they're independent that's a committee consists of Ben Franklin the most famous American John Adams Roger Shulman robert Livingston Franklin's really sick Jefferson is very humble he's only twenty five thirty he's only 32 at this time he says Adams should do it Adam says no no no no said you should do this no one likes me and he says besides he says I like this phrase he says you have a peculiar Felicity of expression that is you can really write and so young Thomas Jefferson there thirty three thirty two thirty in this time thirty three he writes the Declaration of Independence and of course that it takes a while for it to be known that he was an author of it but it's an incredible document now if I had time I would sort of explicate that document because it's a whole lot more meaningful than people now know in part because Jefferson's original document was a good bit longer he had a heat of the law he had a Congress went over and edited and cut out about 25 percent or so of Jefferson's No added some lines and Jefferson's a wordsmith hated every change they made but well the most bit the biggest change they made was Jefferson had a long attack on slavery in the Declaration of Independence he talked about how evil it was for slavers to go to Africa and still these men and women and deprive them with their natural rights of course the delegates from South Carolina and Georgia don't like to be talked about blacks as men and women but they particularly don't like the idea that black people have natural rights so that is cut out Jeffersons is offended by that but it would but you would see it as the more modern document if they had been left in and then the decade the war begins Jefferson is going to become wartime governor of Virginia 1779 70 81 that's not a very happy time because Virginia is invaded by the British and the British almost captured him at Monticello at the last minute he escapes the British would love nothing better than capturing or killing the governor but the last minute he escapes some people have criticized Jefferson for being a coward because he ran away from the British troops who were trying to kill him or capture him destructs me is a hard I mean a great admirer of Alexander Hamilton says that Jefferson was a craven coward by running off the British troops nothing well do you would it make sense for the governor of Virginia to stand there by himself with no troops and just say come capture me and kill me there'd be a huge political advantage for this so he waited for the very last moment and then he got away anyway so then Jefferson's gonna be people to a psychic using with cowardice it hurts him deeply then he I haven't talked about because I the book talks about all many variety of things and 1771 he had married a young woman a young widow who had a little baby her her son had died and she and Jefferson lived together he says for 10 years the hunter happiness and she she's pregnant a lot she gives birth to sin variety of children but she nearly dies hip or pregnancy every pregnancy and in 1782 she does die and Jefferson is just incredibly distraught I mean he's almost psychologically destroyed he passes out he's unconscious people are worried about this would he lisa v is really was this life over it's kind of odd because Jefferson is very much a man of reason who disparage so displays of emotion but his his response to his wife's death was shockingly emotional his older daughter Maria so he has a one who sort of gets him out of that depression so it brings him back to the life of the living and then he is offered an opportunity to go to France maybe to sign a peace treaty but before he can get there at the peace treaty is that being signed so he doesn't get to go so he's elected the next year to the Articles of Confederation Congress remember from a US history courses article Confederation government was ratified in 1781 so Jeffs is now a member of the article confederation congress he's on every committee in just all kinds of things he writes a very famous report in 1084 the deals with how are they going to deal with the land that's this side of the Mississippi west of the Appalachians the new territory the nation had got and so Jefferson proposed that they divide all that land up and so forth and then he says that and none of this land after 1800 will slavery be legal that is if they had gone through they would never been slavery in Mississippi Alabama so forth that fails by one vote in the Congress now later in 1787 Congress revisits that issue and issues it is a Northwest Ordinance and slave says slavery shall not exist north of the Ohio River but Jefferson's original stand was a slavery should not be in any of the new territories in the previous year had heard that Virginia was gonna write a new constitution so he wrote a proposed new constitution from Virginia that said that slavery would end in Virginia 1800 actually Virginia doesn't rather than Constitution doesn't have cultural convention so his Constitution doesn't take effect but Jefferson is clearly indicating its opposition to slavery then in 1784 he's appointed ambassador to France he's actually a minister to France to try to work out trade negotiations because when we were when the revolution is over we lost our trade connections within the English Empire and so we need to have work out new trade agreements with other countries Franklin is the American ambassador to France and Jefferson Adams there to help him as trade commissioners he goes to jet to France Adams actually leaves after nine months to becomes ambassador to England and Franklin retires and then Jefferson's four five year almost five years is an American ambassador to France no what they actually just think about this for a moment Thomas Jefferson is a person as you know who loved the architecture but it there was no good architecture in Virginia he thought Williamsburg and we and Mary but he said like a pile of bricks look like a brick kiln it saw no great architecture Gershwin loved music it was a violinist he loved to sing he had never never heard a symphony orchestra he had never heard a great organ he had never heard an opera Jefferson liked art but there were no art museums of Virginia there were no color photographs he had black and white engravings Jesslyn love good food you love good wine he loved sparkling conversation but there wasn't much hop in Virginia and then he finds himself since 1784 in France behold me he wrote to a friend on the voltage stage of Europe and for the next five years he just loves the food in France the wine the art particularly the architecture the music the Opera the concerts you can read his de books I should say the Jefferson kept an account book and which he recorded every penny he ever spent and so you can read his account book and you tell everyday what Jefferson did and who he heard and what concert he went to and how much it cost and what was played now what book you bought you can reproduce Jefferson's life to an infinite degree so here he is for five years and the most cultivated civilized beautiful city in the world just loving it he particularly loves the architecture he's asked by the state of Virginia to come up with a design for the new State Capitol he sends a design based on this incredible Roman temple and named called Mason Kareem he just loves it and he when he sees the East facade of lose the Louvre the side hafsat the pyramid that today he said if we ever build a national captain the United States this is what our architecture should look like and today if you're a tourist and you drive by the Heath's Posada the Louvre you will say to yourself gosh that looks so much like Washington DC well there's no accident but Jefferson despite he loved the food and the wine and the conversation he was appalled by one thing in France most of the people in France live lives of incredible poverty you can see on their faces the look of desperation and fear I'm it's true there was the king who lived an unbelievable splendor at Versailles and there were several thousand aristocrats who lived in homes of astonishing majesty I mean homes of 250 rooms and so forth and there was the Catholic Church with just enormous wealth but 99 said the people lived in poverty you would see women pulling plows you saw people doing the chores way more difficult they should he was appalled and he thought how could it be in a country with such fertile soil such a wonderful climate such decent people why is there such poverty and desperation in hunger because he says this country is ruled by monarchy as all Europe matru about monarchy captain the great in Russia had produced upon the Hesburgh King George in England Frederick the Great and Prussia Justin says you know monarchs believe their power comes from God they have no idea that the essence the political power comes into people they believe the purpose of governments to make their life nicer to build an additional castle they have no conception that the purpose of government is to help the people so Jefferson becomes appalled with monarchy and anything that hints toward moralism he writes a letter to George Washington which he says I was opposed to monarch before I came to France I'm ten thousand times more opposed to it now so when he comes back in 1789 thinks just for six months returns from France he expects to go back to Paris as his boat pulls into Norfolk attended a newspaper that says George Washington had just appointed him Secretary of State and it didn't approve about Congress I mean they didn't write a letter you know asked what you'd like to be Secretary of State there was no vetting he was just not being asked was appointed and the Congress accepted but George Washington was kind enough say well I'll let you if you want to refuse and Jefferson didn't want to take it but he was pressured by Washington in Madison so he does so Jefferson becomes the first secretary of state and there you know from your history he's kind of hyper on in a real conflict with Hamilton and Adams and later Washington and these conflicts are not Mickey Mouse conflicts that ransacked Congress today these were conflicts over the nature of American government but it was clear that Hamilton was a proto monarchist in the Constitution convention Hamilton had said he thought the president should be elected to love her life and this senator should be elected for life and we should have a government just like that in England I mean if Hamilton wasn't a valid monarchist who just sort of dismissed the idea of democracy and Jefferson was confronted by this monarch ilysm and the in the Washington cabinet and that colors Jefferson's response to everything Madison everything Hamilton proposes now I don't have time to go into all the conflict that actually Madison is the one who's first leading the disputes with the Hamilton but Jefferson's going to find these three years in Washington's cabinet not very congenial because you come to differ so is substantially with Hamilton and without really wanting to Jefferson and Adams now they be they begin to realize that their fundamental differences between two groups of people they're people who believe in the democracy and want to increase the power of the legislature and there's another group that really would kind of like to make America a monarchy and so basically what we now think of as political parties begin to organize I mean they don't not no one really believes in political parties they all are opposed to him they think the parties lead to fact ilysm and people who belong to parties put their party's interest ahead of nation's interest which you can sell tell takes place today so they are opposed to parties but there have become to be clearly two different groups of attitudes about government in Jefferson by 1796 is clearly in charge of one of those parties he's going to be accidentally elected vice president in 1796 he doesn't run he doesn't intend to be in office he doesn't give a single speech doesn't mind a single thing with Madison's pushing for him in those days there was no popular election you were elected by the Electoral College completely and so when lek told colleges voted Jefferson turns out to be vice president I mean he hadn't lifted a finger to run and of course the odd thing is the president was his enemy John Adams because the Constitution said electoral meat and they are not they vote for the two people they think most out to be present there's no ticket there's no party in which there's clearly a present and VP so Jefferson becomes vice president to Adams the person that basically was running against those four sort of tumultuous periods Hamilton basically dismisses Adams Hamilton takes over and sort of four tries to rule instead of Adams and Hamilton really has Bonaparte top ambitions you think Jefferson disliked Hamilton the person who most disliked Hamilton was John Adams actually Abigail Adams hated Hamilton even worse than Jefferson's so it's an age then that I say all of this because this mythical romantic play that everybody knows about on Broadway presents this incredibly biased one-sided view of Hamilton who is this great powerful you know abolitionist and so forth which is just malarkey and doesn't capture that elitist anti-democratic sentiment this is Jefferson so real political opinions arise and by 1799 the nation is sort of rent by different political attitudes and 1800 there's a V you know she know there's a very disputed election and Jefferson and burr are have the most number of votes and so the election goes to the house to make a decision Aaron Burr everybody knew was Jefferson's the VP candidate but since they didn't have a VP designation he and that Jefferson had the same number of votes and so the Federalists the Hamiltonian stock ha we can we can we can elect burr instead of Jefferson now Jefferson Hamilton comes soon change his mind but the Federalists say they despise Jefferson because I see Jefferson's to democratic to reformist and they think they think burr is a person totally without principle great if he's totally without principle we can buy him off I mean so they begin to advocate this vote for burr because we can control them Hamilton then comes to his senses and he realized he'd disagreed a lot with Sher Singh but he realized Joseph was a man of principle so he turns his amazing energy to prevent her from being elected on the 37th vote in the house Jefferson's elected president in mid-february 1801 he's to take all this March the fourth he has about two weeks to put together government and then he he wrought two inaugural address Jefferson's first anomaly Kris which is one of the greatest inaugural address and he realizes there's a lot of hate it had been a very hateful presidential election and he had been accused of being afraid Jeffrey Jefferson French radical and the atheist to destroy the churches and so and Jefferson realized he had to sort of pool he had to pour he had to scale down this hate so he gets a very peaceful kind of inaugural address he said we've all shared this thing we all share most the same beliefs we're all Republicans were all Democrats and then he lays out and just incredibly eloquent language what he stands for and what he called his political career is political faith it's a remarkable address Jefferson gonna be president for two two terms first timers and term is most famous for the sending out the Lewis and Clark expedition and then also the purchase of Louisiana a second term as as many people's second terms gets a whole lot more contentious in part because of the embargo but in 1809 Jefferson after having served two terms as president is ready to retire he's more than whether to retire I can hardly wait now he's going back to Monticello Monticello by the way he had built in 1817 71 is a kind of a plain two-story Palladian house but when he was in Paris he loved the new palace being built by the prince psalm of germany so he decides when he gets back the united states he'll renovate Monticello so he begins renovating Monticello in 1794 it takes 15 years he lives in Monticello for 15 years part of the time there's a tent over the roof and other times it's it's incredibly frustrating but finally he's retired now he's gonna spend his life as he's always said he want to do talked about religion and science and he dedicates himself to his last greatest crusade creating the Declaration of Independence I was creating the University of Virginia and it's but nowadays you just think UVA is a nice campus and so forth but it was in terms of its organization and its curriculum and its architecture really remarkably new when it opened in 1825 Jefferson has spent much of his life argue against slavery and that some review of the rights to British Americans said he said before he had criticized the King for not letting Virginia stop the slave trade he had that statement in the declaration independence opposing slavery that was taken out his very first act at the congressman in 1768 was arguing to make it easier for people to free their slaves and then he proposes that constitution of Virginia in 1783 they would he ended the slavery of Virginia and then that land document that were the ended slavery in the territory west the Appalachians but he comes to believe by the 1780s that his policy his group his generation is too racist they can never free the slaves and so he puts all his hope in the new generation he believes in Newton a young men been at the college away marry who are thought of growing up with liberty in their blood that they would be able to do what his generation was not able to do they'd be able to free the slaves the odd thing is Jefferson who was a committed opponents of slavery never freed his own slaves why not Jefferson was in debt his entire life mainly because his wife's father died and she which meant Jefferson inherited not all the land of his father-in-law but also all his debt so Jefferson inherits through his father-in-law's life death huge debt there was a law passed in Virginia in 1792 they said if a person isn't dead any slave that person might three can be seized by his debtors so Jefferson didn't in some sense have the legal freedom to free his slaves because if you did any of them could be just stolen by his debtors he begins to hope but they ended his life maybe he can free say he would like to be able to give him land and tools and so forth the settlements they could be free but their law is passed in Virginia 1806 says if you free your slaves within one year they have to leave the state or they'll be reinstated so Jefferson could not free his slaves and divvy up the land of Monticello and hand out to his freed slaves so there are legal problems in the way of Jefferson do I think he would have liked to done Jefferson also he has a lot of dependents he has children and grandchildren the aunts and uncles he's taking care of at any one time there are 15 or 20 people living at Monticello the Jefferson is responsible for and he doesn't know how he can you think that the sacred responsibility to take care of your dependents but how can you do it without slaves so Jefferson finds himself that even though he is the lifelong opponents of slavery he is caught up in a series of moral and legal problems to prevent him from doing what I think what he'd liked it done nevertheless to the end of his life he believes slavery is ending he doesn't know how it's going to end he has almost a mystical belief that somehow God is going to take care of this had to say that all the founding fathers thought slavery was dying institution every one of them thought slavery was dying now that seems to us our because we know it didn't die because we know we now know about the cotton gin and the rise of cotton and all that that didn't know that all the founding fathers believed that slavery was a dead and dying institution and for them the most important value was to protect the new Union and they all thought to a person if we really pushed abolition too much it would destroy the you would destroy the Union but that's unnecessary because slavery is a dying institution they were wrong on both those counts the new nation wasn't fragile as they thought it was enslaved he was not dying so what they ended his life at Jefferson is he's broke he's still in debt slavery still exists who he was the person who was a congenital optimist but the end of the life he was frustrated by how things hadn't turned out the way he wished he thought his three greatest accomplishments was the writing of their faith develop independence the writing of something called the Virginia statute for religious freedom which established just religious freedom in this country religious freedom not just for Christians or Catholics or Jews but for Muslims and Hindus and he really leads in real religious freedom and the University of Virginia he wants if there's one line that sort of Rises Jefferson it sent a letter he wrote 1821 in which he wrote about the illimitable freedom of the human mind the Declaration suit for political freedom the Virginia statute for religious freedom and university of virginia freedom from ignorance so Jefferson is going to die in 1826 july's for the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and he can look back in many ways over many accomplishments but several things he most hoped for didn't happen so I just think Jefferson has a lot more complicated complex eventful life that cannot be summarized in those world bumper stickers Jefferson's a hypocrite who has an affair time's up dr. pols last time for questions and after we take some questions he we do have his book on sale and he will sign that for you so who has a question okay you know I have a 50-minute lecture on Jefferson religious view saket Jefferson is a young man that's quite Orthodox his final minister began to say you should have you should put reason reasons should be the bar in which you test all your religious principles and they went to call your way Mary his major professor small and what with both say that reason is God put reason in your mind so you could understand things so you shouldn't believe just on the basis of dumb faith blind faith but you should believe what your mind says is rational and so for a few years in the 70s he basically departs from his orthodoxy and becomes I would call a seeker a person he doesn't know what he believes and he thinks maybe the greatest moral teachers were the writers of antiquity the Greek and Roman philosophers then in the mid seventies and early eighties he begins to change his mind he meets a reformed Anglican minister in England named Robert price Richard price he begins to read his sermons he begins to reread the New Testament in 1890 1793 he reads Priestley's history of the questions of Christianity by 1800 he's deciding that Jesus is the greatest moral teacher of all time he's moved from being thinking to ancient philosopher for the greatest leaving Jesus was he does not believe and he says Jesus never claimed to be divine it says Jesus is the best example you can be of humans and he wrote the most profound moral lessons of any person in history so he his beliefs developed from that so he begins to argue since I am Allah I am of a Sikh by myself says I don't ask people what they believe I don't say you should believe what I believe I think everybody should read the New Testament use their brain use her recent and decide what they believe in and he said this is what I believe you he believed that there was one God all-powerful the Creator he believed that Jesus was not divine but the greatest moral teacher of all time he believed that God controlled every aspect of the universe even gravity and how nations worked and he believed there was life after death and he says that's all Jesus ever asked for the idea of the Trinity that's a man-made idea doesn't that words not in the New Testament so while people thought he was radical and atheist and so forth he came to believe that he was a Christian as Jesus would have wanted they had to say there's no modern denomination that was saying that is the limit that is all you have to learn but that was Jefferson's view heba's he was not he was not an atheist he was a deist of a certain kind but he had amazing admiration for Jesus as a person and as for him for a moral teacher and he believed in life after death so make him better what you wish him he's not really that ought to talk to anything okay yeah I mean we may even think he's more blue I mean as long as we believe in freedom of religion and freedom of speech and the role of Reason as long as we believe in humans being able to make their own government I mean Jefferson will live forever yeah and in that sense I think he is he is the architect of American liberty okay okay I was thinking this I heard so Jefferson as you know does have a longtime relationship with a young woman named Sally it's not clear exactly how it came about when we know he was in France with his daughters and his younger daughter was coming over and they were supposed to sin he thought an older slave woman to kind of be her nursemaid but that woman got sick so they sent fourteen-year-old Sally who was kind of her playmate and Jefferson's sort of non-clustered she arrives didn't know what to do with her and she's there three years and it's somehow Jefferson's notices there's this very attractive young woman in his household sally is extremely like complexioned she is the half-sister to Jefferson's departed wife and she has everybody said uncanny or is months to his deported wife even the way she kind of walked and talked so here's Jefferson a 45 year old man he discovers surprisingly in his household is this beautiful young woman who looks so much like his departed wife we don't know exactly what happened and when it happened there's some rumors that when she came back from 7089 that she was pregnant there's no inconvertible evidence of that but clearly in 1794 after he returned from the Secretary of State he and Sally became began a long-term relationship the person who studied this most carefully as then as an ED Gordon read about the black woman who's a historian at Harvard who spoke here a couple years ago and in her she has a wonderful book called the Hemings of Monticello that won a pulitzer prize and she argues that Jefferson and Sally Hemings have a long-term consensual affectionate relationship would probably could say love and she says you know it's not you can often say that when planters had enough air for slave women it was something kind of like rape but not all the time and to say that Sally had no role in this is to deprive her of any sense of agency so a net Gordon read says that again she called it a long-term consensual mutually consensual relationship based on affection if not love and she only has children when we can show that Jefferson was in Monticello nine months before she never has children when Jefferson's not around at the right time and Jefferson promises that he will free all her children so at the end of his life he frees her children he does not free her because if he freed her she had to leave the state see he works a deal out with his daughter that treat Sally as free he'll give her a house and she will live as though she's free but if I technically free her she'll have to leave and she doesn't want to do that so I think Jefferson does have I think if we say affair rape it sounds horrible and hateful at least an aunt Gordon Reed holds out the possibility that it's a relationship based on love and respect which you know okay rest of what Oh heaps about all accounts my ex slaves and so forth he treated them very well but I mean that's kind of a complicated thing you know I mean treating your slaves well I'm a Koosh I mean you could have somebody who beat him and this sentiment all that but still you know he was a slave owner he in his own light he is the kind of slave owner make sure they have adequate food and clothing and medical care and so forth but he doesn't really and I said say he thinks it's safe he's wrong he thinks it's dying out but his hands are tied by those 1792 and 1806 laws so okay most slaves who are voluntarily free there are there is an increase of people framed the slaves the term is manumission following the American Revolution that most of that happen for the 1806 law said that if you freed the slaves they had to leave and most people who freed their slaves were not terribly in debt like General John Randolph of Roanoke has no children has no wife has plenty of money frees his slaves George Washington famously frees his slaves in 1799 not he says in his will that when his wife dies their slaves will be free Jefferson Washington had no biological ken was very wealthy his freed slaves could just stay there you know so there are a lot of things that there are a lot of restraints at Jefferson phases that George Washington doesn't face but nearly every example of a person who frees the slaves before 1806 it's not in debt and can do it or can afford to bomb lien elsewhere and set them up free and Illinois somewhere Washington's release ATS of Hamilton Hamilton Devine he is one of his aides in the American Revolution they were very close and people who are pro Hamiltonian whatever say that Hamilton sort of gained the sort of control hamlet Washington and Washington sides with Hamilton and a whole series of issues about the creation of the Bank United States and Excise terrorists and so forth what actually in the midst of all that Jefferson and Washington state closely and you might think because they boast of themselves as farmers and agricultural reformers and they both are quite interested in sort of laying out the new capital city of Washington DC so Jefferson does break with Washington really over the issues that Hamilton started on the excise tax and the funding of the funding of bonds and so forth but Jefferson always admires Washington and he writes a very he says Jefferson Washington was not a great genius like Hamilton was or like Adams was but he's a person of incredible character incredible judgment and was indispensable person he doesn't say such nice things about Hamilton although I just say that he has a bust of Hamilton in his in Monticello forever and he once said we didn't dislike each other as humans we just disagreed fundamentally on everything politically [Applause] you