ANNETTE GORDON-REED: My
name is Annette Gordon-Reed.
I'm introducing myself.
I'm a professor here
at the law school.
And I'm also a professor in the
history department at Harvard.
So I have a joint appointment.
And I teach classes sometimes
solely over here, and sometimes
solely over there.
And sometimes I
do joint classes--
classes together with law
students and graduate students,
and sometimes
undergrads mixed in.
I'm doing a freshman
seminar this semester
on Jefferson and
Hamilton, which is
turning out to be quite nice.
Can't get them into the
play, but I did my best.
But we'll try to come up
with something that might
be almost as good as that.
I'm going to talk a little
bit about the book, my most
recent book.
It's called "Most Blessed
of the Patriarchs"--
Thomas Jefferson and the
Empire of the Imagination.
I first want to start off
to talk about the title.
There was some concern
in my publishing house
about the title patriarch--
of the word "patriarch"
in the book-- and
blessed patriarch,
because it sounded
quite religious.
And people weren't
certain whether or not
potential readers
would not think
that this was about
a religious figure,
even though it's Thomas
Jefferson, obviously, and not
a religious figure.
I was a bit concerned about--
I like the phrase "most
blessed of the patriarchs"--
I was concerned that people
would think that Peter and I,
my co-author, Peter Onuf,
who was the Thomas Jefferson
Professor at the
University of Virginia,
that we were calling
him the "most blessed
of the patriarchs."
And we insisted that the
phrase be in quotations,
because that is a quote
from Jefferson himself.
That's a phrase that he
used to describe himself.
And I'll give you the context.
He was writing a letter to a
woman named Angelica Schuyler
Church, who many people who've
listened to the Hamilton cast
album, or who
actually saw the play,
will recognize as
Angelica Schuyler,
one of the Schuyler sisters.
And she was someone
who Jefferson
met when he was in Paris.
She was the sister-in-law
of Alexander Hamilton.
So in the small world, the
way that these things go,
Jefferson and Hamilton were
in Washington's cabinet
after Jefferson
returned from Paris.
They started out OK,
and then ended up
as enemies, bitter
political rivals.
And their rivalry is something
that has sparked controversy
on both sides.
People who were partisans
of Hamilton, people
who were partisans
of Jefferson, they've
come to, in sort of
a caricature way,
represent two understandings
about the future of America--
an agricultural
nation, or a nation
of manufacturing, industrialists
and manufacturing.
Hamilton wasn't against farmers.
And Jefferson really was
not against manufacturing.
He just thought that that
was something that was
going to come at a later stage.
But that's the battle lines
that people draw when they're
thinking about the two of them.
So Jefferson and Hamilton
are in the cabinet.
They are fighting.
And they're fighting
for Washington's favor.
And in the end, Hamilton wins.
And Jefferson decides
that he has to resign.
And before he leaves, he
sits down to write a letter.
And he writes this letter
to Angelica Schuyler Church.
And he's talking about
going back to Monticello,
I have my fields to
farm and so forth,
and to watch for the happiness
of those who labor for mine--
namely, enslaved people.
And he says, I
have my daughters,
who are going to be
living next to me and--
one daughter who's
living next to me.
If the other one
joins me, I will
consider myself as
blessed as the most
blessed of the patriarchs.
And so that's where
that phrase comes from.
And there's another
letter that he
writes a couple of years later
in which he describes himself
as living at Monticello like
an antediluvian patriarch.
So this word
"patriarch" comes back
a couple of times in the
way he describes himself.
And it's half serious, but it's,
I would say maybe 2/3 serious.
Because he is sort
of a patriarch.
And we thought, how
can we explain this.
How do we look at a person who
considers himself a Democrat,
a Republican Democrat, a
person who was for the people,
who championed the common man,
who eventually thought that his
kind, his class of
people, would die out,
and America would be
replaced by middle class--
or yeoman farmers is the way
it's typically described--
and yet, he calls
himself a patriarch.
And when you think of
patriarch, as I said,
you think of a religious figure.
You certainly think of something
from long ago, a long time ago.
And a patriarch has power
over everybody-- power
over a family, perhaps
power over a region.
Again, it sort of goes
against this notion
of a Democrat in
the way we construct
our understanding
of a person who
is interested in
the popular will,
or sees himself
as somebody who's
promoting the popular will.
So we decided to write a
book about Jefferson that
tried to explain this paradox.
And we think we
have explained him.
There's a tendency,
Peter and I think,
to write about
Jefferson as if he
were this inscrutable person.
He's called a Sphinx
in one particular book.
He's an impenetrable man.
But he's impenetrable if
you approach the subject
with the certain set,
preconceived notions
about what it means to
be a patriarch, what
it means to be a Democrat.
And if you approach it from
the standpoint of doing away
with chronology, not thinking
about the various stages
of Jefferson's life, what
really happens very often
is that Jefferson will say
something or do something,
and people will reach
back to a letter from--
if he does something,
say, in 1817,
they'll reach back for a
letter from 1803 or 1789
to explain that action.
And if you think about the
stages of anybody's life,
or all of our lives, we change.
We have different
answers to things based
upon what stage where we are.
We have different
answers to questions
when we have a particular
context in mind,
a particular set of
problems or situations.
There's no one
continuing person.
I mean, the essence of
the person is there,
but the experience has
changed the person.
I had the experience
of, I kept a diary when
I was in college at Dartmouth.
And a few years back, I
was going through things,
and I found it.
And I was reading
it, and I was aghast.
I was like, do I keep
this, do I throw it away.
What do I do this?
Because I recognized
this person,
it was the same
person in some ways,
but it was a different person.
I had not been married then.
I didn't have children.
I hadn't lost parents.
I hadn't had a real job.
All the kinds of things
that go into helping
to shape who you are.
So what we wanted to do was to
look at Jefferson anew as much
as that could possibly be done.
So much has been
written about him.
Maybe more has been
written about Lincoln--
maybe more
biographies, more books
about Lincoln-- but Jefferson
is probably a close second.
So much has been
written about him.
We've written a lot about him.
And we wanted to do this to try
to bring a fresh perspective
on someone who we think
continues to be a lightning
rod, even today.
Now, when we first
started writing this book,
Hamilton the play was
nowhere on the horizon.
And we had no idea that
anybody would know who
Angelica Schuyler Church was.
It's funny, when we give
talks about this now,
people know who she is.
And that wouldn't have happened
without Lin-Manuel Miranda.
And only people
who've read the--
many people read the
biography of Hamilton
that Ron Chernow wrote--
but not as a matter
of popular knowledge.
The other thing that
wouldn't have happened
is that we didn't
realize that there
were going to be all of these
controversy about monuments
and statues, and his role
and the role of other people
in American life,
and memorializing
people in the American life.
So the funny thing
about writing a book
is you never know what world you
are going to release it into.
You start out in one point, and
then by the time it comes out--
and sometimes if
you're lucky, you
hit a moment that's really
good, and then that helps it.
And if you're unlucky, then
the opposite is the case.
But here, I think
we're lucky, because he
is a topic of conversation.
And we have something, I
think, to say about that.
Now, Peter and
I-- how did I come
to write a book with a person?
Historians don't
typically collaborate.
Writers are usually
pretty possessive
and are interested
in-- there's sort
of an ego involved in this.
But I wanted to do
a book with Peter,
because he was about to
retire from the University
of Virginia.
I wasn't really
too keen on that,
not that it was my business
to make that kind of judgment.
But I thought this
would be a final time
to be able to talk
with him, and to bring
the kind of
conversation that we'd
been having about Jefferson
since 1997 to other people.
Peter was one of
the first people
to read my first book, the
manuscript that I wrote.
I took it down there to him,
because he was the Thomas
Jefferson Foundation Professor.
It was a book about
the controversy,
whether Jefferson had
had a long term liaison--
and we could talk about
what we call this later on--
with Sally Hemings.
And I assumed that,
because of who he was,
he would not like
what I was saying.
And if you're writing
something that you
know is going to
be controversial,
I think it's better
to go give it
to someone who you think
might be opposed to you,
as opposed to an amen corner.
And I wanted people who
would be against the thesis.
And my thesis was
that historians
had given short
shrift to the idea,
and that they had put
a thumb on the scale,
arguing that Jefferson did not
have this connection to Sally
Hemings.
So that's how I met Peter--
in 1995, I should say.
And the book came out in
'97, but I met him in 1995.
And we've been having
this ongoing conversation
and friendship, and
talking about Jefferson.
And so I wanted to put that
on paper for other people
to see the kind of conversation
that we've been having.
We also determined that, after
we were going to call it this,
and we were going to
give it a new look,
we were going to suggest that
what we thought would be useful
would be to take Jefferson--
and I say this in the book--
take Jefferson, whenever it is
possible, reasonable to do so,
to take him at his word.
So much of what happens,
and has happened,
is that there's
been so much writing
about him that people
have a tendency
to write with undue skepticism.
Skepticism about
subjects is good.
I mean, you have to think
about what people are saying
and question it, and determine
whether it's truthful or not.
But there was an
excessive of skepticism.
It seemed that people were
writing to kind of show
how wise they were, how, well,
I know you, I've got you down,
I know your number,
and I'm not going
to be taken in by you, rather
than thinking about what he's
saying and looking
around at the context
to see whether or not
it makes any sense.
So the idea was to
take him seriously
on these notions, when
it is at all reasonable.
Sometimes it's not reasonable,
just like with anybody else.
But that was the project.
We decided not to do a
cradle-to-grave look at him.
But we were going to
look at certain themes
and to try to describe
the things that
were important to him.
And we start off talking about--
patriarch is the word.
We have three sections where
we talk about the patriarch,
and talk about his
beginnings, and how he
came to be the person he was.
Patriarch, in our mind--
we talk about the
patriarchy-- is 100%--
well, maybe, I don't want
to speak for people--
but a negative thing.
It's the thing we
were trying to defeat.
In his time, a patriarch was a
person who had a lot of power.
But he also thought of himself
as having responsibilities.
Now, that sets
our teeth on edge.
Because it's,
responsibilities, well,
let these people
decide on their own.
Let them have their own lives.
You don't have to
look after anybody.
Why do you think that?
But for him, he had power, but
he also had responsibilities.
So we start out with
patriarch to determine
how this individual came
to be the man that he was.
He was born in Virginia
at probably the highest
station in society
that you could have,
at that point, for what passed
as aristocrats in Virginia.
His father was a self-made man,
who wasn't a large landowner
or a large slaveholder.
But his mother was a member of
something called the Randolph
family in Virginia.
And it was a very old,
and a very large family.
Jefferson was a Randolph.
John Marshall, the chief
justice, was his cousin,
was part of the Randolph family.
And then there
was John Randolph,
of course, who was a
somewhat eccentric legislator
in Virginia at the time.
So this family had
a lot of influence.
So his mother gave him status.
His mother's side of the
family gave him status.
He had all the
kinds of things that
would go into making
a person self-assured,
and think of himself
as a patriarch,
as someone who could be, he
would say, a master of people.
He was, as I said, born
into a high social class.
He was given the best
education that people could
get in Virginia at the time.
He was tall at a time
when that meant something.
It was unusual.
He was the firstborn son when
that meant something, as well.
And he was white.
And he was literally
the master of--
he owned people, his family did.
And he grew up also thinking
of himself as a member,
as an adherent, to something
called the Enlightenment.
So he has all of
these advantages.
But these advantages don't
make him into a Conservative.
They make him into somebody--
in his personality,
made him into somebody
who saw himself
as a progressive, and an
adherent to the Enlightenment.
He loved to read,
and he loved science.
And so adherents to
the Enlightenment
had certain ideals
that they believed in.
And one of them--
well, there are several
of them-- one of them
was skepticism about religion,
skepticism about, I should say,
the established
church, and priests,
and people who he
thought controlled others
for their own benefit.
Adherents to the Enlightenment
believed in science.
Jefferson had a complete
faith in the idea of science,
an almost too-great
faith in science,
in the sense that he not only
saw it in terms of how we think
of scientific
experiments and so forth,
but he thought that science--
I mean, he likened life
to science in a way
that, politics and those
kinds of things, the world
was scientific, in the
sense that eventually people
would get better
and better, things
would get better and better.
There would always be progress.
So he believed in
progress in a way
that maybe we don't, that
we know a little bit better
that things don't always
walk forward, straight,
better and better and better.
It's two steps forward,
three steps back
sometimes, two steps
sideways or whatever.
But he believed that things
would get better and better.
So this notion of
progress is something
that was a part of his makeup.
Antislavery-- as a
young man in his 20s,
he writes in his
commonplace book--
these are little
books that people
kept with sayings
and so forth, things
that they would clip out.
He clipped out a poem from a
man named William Shenstone
about the slave trade,
and about a man,
an African, ripped
from his homeland,
forced to cross the ocean
to labor for other people.
Now, so for people who
say, well, Jefferson
is doing all this anti-slavery
talk just for posterity,
for legacy, this is
when he's like 25, 26.
There is no Thomas Jefferson.
I mean, there was
a Thomas Jefferson,
but he wasn't "Thomas
Jefferson" at that time.
He doesn't know there's going to
be a United States of America.
He doesn't know he's going
to be president of it.
I mean, this is part of
this Enlightenment notion.
I am the young,
progressive person.
He believes from
the very beginning
that slavery is wrong,
and he writes that
from an early
period of his life.
So that's the kind of
person he starts off
as-- as an individual
who thinks that he's
going to be one of the
leading people in his society,
but he's going to be
helping towards moving
Virginia's society into
a more progressive view.
Then the Revolution comes along.
And he's a young man.
He's a young lawyer.
I have a friend who's
doing a book now
about Jefferson
as a young lawyer,
and he talks about his cases.
Some of his cases
were cases that
involved slavery, or actually
defending people, or working
on behalf of people who
were claiming their freedom.
And he did things as a lawyer
to try to move that along.
But the Revolution comes, and
he develops a new passion.
At first, as you may
know, the revolutionaries
were not really interested
in leaving Great Britain.
They just wanted the king and
the parliament to make reforms.
Eventually, they decide
they want to make a break.
And when that happens,
Jefferson really,
really does begin to
hate Great Britain.
Before, he had loved--
he grew to hate it,
in the way that you
could only hate
something that you
had really loved at one point.
And he was against the British.
He writes a declaration.
It's not known at that time that
he's writing the Declaration.
That is something that
became much more known later,
in the 1790s.
But he, among the people in the
know, understood what he did.
And the Revolution becomes
the focal point of his life.
This is the thing that
we say in the book.
We're obsessed with race--
rightly, I think.
We are obsessed with
the issue of slavery,
which I think is right.
But that was not
Jefferson's obsession,
neither one of those things.
Jefferson was obsessed about
the United States of America,
the Revolution, having been
a part of the Revolution,
having helped to
create a country.
And then, once the country is
created, how do I maintain.
How do you maintain that country
in the face of what he thought
were counter-revolutionaries,
like Alexander Hamilton?
We laugh about that.
But, I mean, you
just think about it.
You have a revolution.
Every revolution has
a counter-revolution.
There are going to be people
who are opposed to it.
And he saw Hamilton's
intense focus,
saying that Great Britain's
constitution was the best
constitution that
had ever existed,
his militarism, his notion
that the president should
serve for life, and that the
Senate should serve for life.
He thought that
Hamilton was trying
to bring British influence,
British projects, into America.
And so he thinks that this
is the counter-revolution.
So I'm saying this
to say that this
is the difficult thing about
writing history and reading
history, is to
accept that people
in the past, their categories
are not our categories.
The things that
we're interested in,
they may not be
so interested in.
And we say, don't you see.
It's like yellow fever.
You read these stories about
yellow fever in the 1790s,
and you want to say to people,
OK, what comes every summer.
It's around water.
It goes away in the winter time.
I mean, what could it be?
I mean, the mosquitoes--
maybe, maybe.
But they're not ready.
That's not the way they
thought about things,
or they would ever
have thought of that.
So he is interested
in the Revolution,
and that is the most
important thing of his life.
And if you understand
that, I think you--
we say-- you understand
a lot about Jefferson.
So the book starts off
talking about the patriarch,
the young man who gets
involved in the Revolution,
and that this is the
central focus of his life
from that moment on, until
the end of his life--
that he is trying
to protect what he
thinks he has helped to create.
That's the first
part of the book.
Then the second
part of the book,
"Traveler," goes to the idea--
has Jefferson going
to France, and shows
how the ideas that he developed
there, the things he saw there,
helped to transform him.
When he leaves, he has been
the governor of Virginia,
very poor governor.
I mean, things didn't
work out so well.
He's angry at the people
who are mad at him
about some of the things
that he did as governor.
And he goes to France.
And he sees a completely
different world.
He loves part of it.
He loves the art, the
music, the architecture.
But he's frightened of
the social life in France.
And what frightens him
the most are women.
Women in France, who are talking
politics, who are, he says,
in the streets, away
from the nurseries,
forgetting what
they've left behind
in their nurseries, and
their husbands, and so forth.
So French family
life scares him.
And he thinks that this is,
women out of control are--
it's anarchy.
This is a problem.
This is part of the patriarchy
stuff, the patriarch theme.
But this is strange when you
think about it, because he
has a very weird family.
[LAUGHTER]
He has a very weird family.
In the midst of being
a revolutionary,
before he becomes a
full-fledged revolutionary,
he marries a woman named
Martha Wayles Skelton.
She's a widow.
Her husband has
died, Reuben Skelton.
He marries her.
And when he marries
into that family,
he marries into a family in
which his father-in-law, John
Wayles, had had six children
with an enslaved woman named
Elizabeth Hemings.
So Jefferson and
Martha get married.
When John Wayles dies,
the Hemings family,
these six children, come to
live with them at Monticello.
So you think about
this situation.
Martha-- I mean,
many white women
whose husbands and
fathers or sons
had children with enslaved
women, very often,
made them sell the kids.
Or they would certainly
put them away somewhere.
Martha brings these people
to live in her house.
And Jefferson has
a manservant, a man
named Jupiter
Evans, who had been
with him since he was a kid.
And we actually think
that Jupiter's mother
was Jefferson's wet nurse.
They were born the same
year, and they were together,
companions the whole time.
He substitutes Jupiter, who
had been traveling with him,
for Robert Hemings,
who would have
been his wife's half-brother.
He was 12 at the time.
So a man who's 30 is substituted
by a 12-year-old boy as valet.
And Robert travels
with Jefferson
all along the eastern seaboard.
He's there when
he's in Philadelphia
writing the Declaration
of Independence.
So a strange family.
I mean, to someone interested
in French families,
to have married into this
kind of situation, that's
sort of hard for us to
imagine, to have your sisters
and your brothers as
people whom you own.
And we'll never know what the
nature of their relationship
was.
We do know that Robert Hemings--
we don't know if Sally
Hemings was literate,
or we have no letters
or anything from her,
but Robert Hemings--
her brothers,
Robert, and James, and Peter--
Robert and James, definitely,
we know could read and write.
Robert's correspondence
with Jefferson in the 1790s
is missing.
It's one of those things as
a historian you would love
to have, those letters, to see
how they talked to each other,
what he said.
James Hemings was also literate,
and at a pretty high level.
We have his list
of cooking utensils
that he made of the
inventory of the things
they brought back from
France, and the handwriting
is beautiful.
And its spelling is great.
So who did that?
So we don't know who taught
them how to read and write.
Was it Martha who taught
them how to read and write?
But her connection to them--
when she dies, her sisters--
her full sisters,
and sister-in-laws,
and her enslaved half-sisters--
are around the bed.
And she gives Sally
Hemings a memento, a bell,
to remember her by.
And so they're all
around the bed,
but Jefferson is
the only guy there.
And this is the scene.
This is the weird family scene.
So he's in France thinking
French families are strange.
But he's got a pretty
strange family on his own.
So when he goes to
France, he takes with him
James, to have him taught
to be a French chef.
And he takes his
eldest daughter.
A couple of years later, he's
left two daughters behind,
and he's left them at a
place called Eppington
with Betsy Eppes, who
was his sister-in-law.
He leaves them there with Sally
Hemings, who is at this time
about 10 years old.
So Sally Hemings is
there with little girls
who are her half-nieces,
and with her half sister.
It's a very
convoluted situation.
That's why I have a family tree
in The Hemingses of Monticello,
so everybody could
keep it straight.
One of the girls dies.
One of Jefferson's
daughters dies.
And then he says, send
my other daughter to me.
He wanted her to come to France.
And he said, send her
with a careful Negro
woman, such as Isabel.
And he means Isabel Hern,
who was about 28 years old.
Isabel is pregnant, and
they don't want to send her.
So they send Sally Hemings over.
At the time she's 14 years old.
And she is the nursemaid,
or companion, to Jefferson's
10-year-old daughter.
They go across the ocean, and
she's not supposed to stay.
Isabel was supposed to come
drop Polly off, and go back
to Virginia.
When Sally Hemings comes,
she doesn't go back.
And we don't know why
she doesn't go back.
I mean, I talk in The
Hemingses of Monticello,
and little bit in
this book, about why
it would have been a
mistake to do that,
to send a 14-year-old girl
back on a ship with a bunch
of sailors for five weeks.
But she ends up
staying in Paris.
And at some point,
Madison Hemings,
the man who was their son,
says, during that time,
my mother became Mr.
Jefferson's-- because everybody
called him Mr. Jefferson,
his grandchildren,
his daughters everybody,
particularly if they're talking
to other people--
she became Mr.
Jefferson's concubine.
And while she's there,
she and her brother
are in a place where
they have the capacity
to petition for their freedom.
Because France, even though
they had slaves in the colonies,
they didn't like
slaves in Paris.
It's amazing how people
are ashamed of slavery.
I mean, they were living on it,
they're doing all this stuff,
but they do everything
to try to play it down--
in the Constitution,
"persons held to service."
The French did the
same thing, too.
They had documents.
And they didn't
want to put the word
"slave" in these documents.
But that's what they're doing.
So they didn't want
slavery in Paris.
And everybody who petitioned
for freedom had it granted.
So they could have done that.
And at some point, that's
what she wants to do.
When Jefferson
wants to come home--
he's coming home for
a leave of absence--
he wants to take his
daughters back home
and drop them off,
and take her, as well.
She doesn't want to go.
At this time, she's pregnant.
And she says to him, according
to Madison Hemings, that she
didn't want to go back.
And he promises her that
if she comes back with him,
she would have a good
life at Monticello,
and any children she had would
be freed when they were 21.
So she accepts that.
Now, keep in mind
she's 16 years old.
She accepts that,
which is not like--
I mean, I always have to say
this-- it's not like 16 today.
I mean, a 16-year-old
today, I think of as a baby.
26-year-old people,
I think of as babies.
We're sort of extending
childhood out now
to 35 or whatever.
But 16-year-old, to me, is a
baby, but in the 18th century
would not have been.
She would not have thought
of herself as a baby.
The age of consent in
Virginia was 10 at the time.
And they raised it
to 12 in the 1820s.
And it wasn't just Virginia.
It was all these
states, all the states.
12, up until the
1890s, was really--
the 20th century
is the phenomenon
of higher age of consent,
age of consent rules.
So in any event, so she
buys this and comes back.
And the third part
of the book is
something called "Enthusiast."
We sort of break off
and talk about Jefferson
as we talk about
the plantation, we
talk about Jefferson in music,
and Jefferson in politics,
to try to explain--
again, to talk about his
life once he comes back,
how he has been
changed by France.
One of the things we say is
that France changes Jefferson's
attitude about slavery.
When he goes there,
he is the person who--
he writes in notes on
the state of Virginia,
the terrible things he
says about black people,
but also the things he says
about slavery; that it's wrong,
and it will end.
He also thinks that
there should be
emancipation, but expatriation.
The Liberal position at the
time was blacks and whites
could not live together.
Blacks should be emancipated,
but blacks and whites
cannot live together in peace.
There will be conflict, and
might lead to a race war.
And we say, you
either laugh at that
or think that that's
hyperbole, but we've
kind of been in a race war.
I mean, some
version of it, for--
we don't like to
think of it that way,
but if you think of lynching,
you think of Jim Crow,
you think of the violence,
mass incarceration, all
those kinds of things,
this has not been easy.
We congratulate ourselves.
But if you're thinking seriously
about the future of race
relations, and if you're
serious about understanding
the divisions that existed,
he knew his people.
He knew himself,
he knew his people.
And he understood this
is not going to be easy.
And we still haven't
figured it out.
So he says this in the notes.
And when he's in France--
so he says these
anti-slavery things,
which frighten him in
the sense that he thinks
that, this is published,
people in Virginia
are going to be
really angry at him.
And they would have
been, and they were.
These people thought
he was going to lead
a slave revolt, which is crazy.
I mean, just from the moderate
things he's saying about,
slavery is evil, we've
got to stop this.
But when he's in France, he
sees peasants who are starving.
This is
pre-revolutionary France.
France is about to go haywire,
because it's falling apart.
He sees a revolution coming.
And he says, it took them 1,000
years to get to this point,
it's going to take us a
time to get out of this.
So what I'm going
to do is I'm going
to become a good slave owner.
I'm going to ameliorate the
situation of enslaved people.
He thinks about-- at one
point he's thinking about,
well, bringing some Germans
over, and mixing them
with enslaved people.
And then they'll basically teach
them good habits or whatever.
And then they will
become good citizens.
So then he abandons that.
And then he says, well,
maybe I'll plant fig trees.
Because figs are easy
to pick, and that would
be good for enslaved women.
I mean, just all these
crazy kind of things--
crazy to us and crazy then--
to ameliorate the situation.
And once you start thinking
that you can become a good slave
owner, that's finished.
It's over.
Before, he saw slavery
as a state of war.
Slavery is a state of
war between a master
and enslaved people.
To go from that
to, well, I'm going
to be a good slave owner,
that's a long way to travel.
And it means that he's not
going to be able to be a force,
or not be willing to be
a force, for abolition
or anything like that
for the rest of his life.
Because he thinks
he can do this well.
And we also think
that what happens
to him is the Hemingses.
This is a family
that's around him now--
his mistress, rape
victim, however
we want to call
it at this point,
this person that
he's living with,
and her brothers and her
sisters and all these people.
And he sees himself
as a slave owner
through his
relationship with them.
But of course, his
relationship with them
is not, well, not real.
I mean, it's not like the
relationship with the people
down the mountain.
Good parts of the time,
he didn't know where
Sally Hemings' brothers were.
They just sort of went off
and hired their own time,
and worked and kept their money.
And if he needed
them for something,
he'd write to somebody and
say, do you know where Bob is?
Could you tell him to come--
that kind of thing.
That's not what you think
when you think of slavery.
But that's just those people.
So he is in the house with
these people thinking,
this is how I'm a slave owner.
The other people,
he's taken care of,
but they're in the abstract.
So he begins to, we think--
he's deluding himself about
the position that he's in.
And as I said before,
he is primarily
fixated on the United
States of America.
That slavery problem, it's
going to take care of itself.
And you think about life, how
many times you say, well, you
know, it's really this.
That little thing over
there, leave that alone.
If I can just get this
fixed, that will be OK.
And it turns out that is the
thing that is a real problem.
And that's what slavery
was like, that this
was something that was
going to take care of itself
through progress.
He knew Virginians were not
going to vote slavery out
of existence.
Slavery ended in
Virginia probably
about the only way
it was going to end.
People don't give up power,
don't give up property,
don't give up wealth,
that degree of wealth,
by people just asking
them, or trying
to persuade them in ways.
This was it for this society.
And even people who
didn't own slaves
had the hope of owning slaves.
People who could not afford
to own slaves rented slaves.
You hear people say,
well, not everybody
owned slaves in the South.
But slavery was the engine
that drove southern society.
It's like saying that if
you're not a homeowner,
the housing market has
nothing to do with you.
That's not true.
The housing market affects
interest rates, credit,
all kinds of things.
And slavery was just like that.
So even people who
did not own slaves
benefited from, were
implicated in, the institution,
and had dealings with
slaves by renting slaves,
by having privilege.
You may not have
owned black people,
but you had power
over black people.
And you think about what
that meant to people--
particularly people
who had nothing,
it may have meant more to
people who had nothing--
to have that kind
of social power
to know that there was
always somebody below you
that you could look down
on, and somebody that you
could actually order around.
So he gives up this
dream, his early dream,
of doing something
about slavery.
The religious stuff, he helped
with the Statute of Religious
Freedom in Virginia,
which is a precursor
to the First Amendment.
Education, he wanted
to do something about.
He wanted a public
education system.
The people in Virginia did
not want to pay for that.
And so he had to settle--
public education, K through
12, elementary school--
didn't want that, so
he settled for starting
a university; the University of
Virginia, where his statue was
shrouded a few days ago.
That was his dream.
And that's what
he set himself to.
And we end with the final
catastrophe at Monticello,
because Jefferson was not
very good with business.
The fixation on
politics, the fixation
on serving in government,
and so forth-- and he
didn't really care
about farming that much.
I mean, people think
of him as a farmer,
but what he really
was, was a builder.
I mean, he's a woodworker.
Madison Hemings
said he didn't have
but little care for agricultural
pursuits, unlike Washington.
He said it was his mechanics
that he spent most of his time
with-- mechanics
meaning carpenters.
And that's what he did.
So he was happy to leave all
the farm to his grandson.
And when he did that, production
at Monticello tripled.
Because his grandson
came in and started--
Monticello is sort of like
a backdrop to Jefferson.
While he's sitting there
writing great thoughts,
doing various things,
it's a backdrop for him.
It is not something
that actually
seized his imagination more than
as a picturesque kind of thing.
I planted 80 peach trees.
Well, it's ornamental.
It's an ornamental farm.
That's what he wanted.
So he ends up dying bankrupt--
$107,000 in debt,
people estimate.
Think of $107,000 in 1826 money.
That's a lot of money.
That's millions of dollars.
And Monticello has to be sold.
They lose everything.
But the people who
lose the most are
the enslaved people, who were
auctioned off to pay creditors.
Now, many of those people
ended up back where they were,
because Jefferson's
grandson bought them back.
And most of them were
settled in the area.
But still, think of the
catastrophe of that.
You've lived your life
in a particular place.
I mean, enslaved people
didn't have much,
but a sense of place and family
and all those kinds of things
mattered.
And to be disrupted from
that was not a trivial thing.
So in the end, the
patriarch who thought
that he could take
care of everybody
really ended up being taken
care of by other people.
That was not the way
it was supposed to be.
That was not the way
he had envisioned it.
And it's a tragedy.
As I said, as much as we
feel for him and his family,
the enslaved people
were the ones who
suffered the most from that.
Sally Hemings and her sons,
two of her older children,
leave Monticello to
live as white people.
And we have no idea
what happened to them.
We know they got
married and had kids,
but we don't know
their descendants.
The two youngest children
were freed in his will.
And they took their
mother, and they
moved in to Charlottesville.
In 1830, she appears in a
census as a free white woman
living in Charlottesville.
And they did a
special census in 1833
to see what African-Americans,
what black people, free blacks,
wanted to go back to Africa.
This was after Nat Turner.
And they're trying to rid
Virginia of free blacks.
And they go around and ask if
they want to go back to Africa.
And they go back to ask her
and she says, of course,
no, back to Africa.
And she's listed in that census
as a woman of color, a Negro,
freed in 1826 when
Jefferson died.
So there are no formal
papers for her being freed.
He did not free her formally.
He did not free the first
two children formally.
Because, I mean,
obviously they want
to go live as white people.
And if you have
papers, then that
means you were a
slave, which means
that you were part
black, which they
didn't want people to know.
And Sally Hemings, to
put her name in a will--
what he would never
have done to free her--
then you had to-- if you freed
somebody over the age of 45--
you had to say how you were
going to take care of them.
So then he would have said--
you had to petition
the legislature
to allow the person to
remain in this state,
because slaves couldn't remain
in Virginia for more than a
year after they were freed.
And he would have
to say, and here's
how I'm going to take
care of Sally Hemings
for the rest of her life.
He would never do that.
I mean, that's not
going to happen
when you could just say go.
And that's what she did.
And she lived in
Charlottesville until 1835,
And she dies, and
then her two sons
move out to Chillicothe, Ohio.
One of them leaves to
live as a white man
in Madison, Wisconsin.
And it is his family line that
provided the blood for the DNA
tests that were done the year
after my first book came out.
And the other one,
Madison Hemings,
is the one who left
the recollections.
He stayed in the
black community,
even though some of
his children passed
into the white community.
And he's the one who
tells us the story
that I think, in many ways,
the recollections of life
at Monticello are some of the
most important recollections,
important source of information
about that place that we have.
And we rely upon that a
great deal in our book.
And much of what
he says has been
corroborated by other means.
So that's the book.
I mean, that's the
thing we put out there
before we knew all the things
that were going to happen.
And I'm getting a lot
of questions now because
of the statue business, and
the monuments, and all of this.
Is Jefferson like Robert E. Lee?
How do we handle this?
The president talked about
Jefferson in this way.
So we've gotten a little bit
more than we bargained for,
but we're happy
for the attention.
So with that, I'd like to
take your questions if I can.
AUDIENCE 1: When you were
talking about Hamilton
and Jefferson, I kept thinking
about how important Virginia--
it's the midsection of the East
Coast, where the colony was--
to those people.
But when you started talking
about the Revolution, which
I guess was as much selling
the idea of being independent
[INAUDIBLE] and all of that,
how much did you find thinking
about the farther regions?
New England being so
different from Virginia,
the south of Virginia, how
those people all did or didn't
interrelate, or were
expected to interrelate,
any thinking about that, that
you found in your research?
ANNETTE GORDON-REED:
Well, there's
a very good book by a man
named Robert Parkinson.
It's called The Common Cause.
It's a very long book,
but it's a very good book,
that talks about how
those groups of people--
because you're right, they're
very, very different--
they came over to the continent
for different reasons,
different religion--
New England,
extremely religious.
I mean, it's sort
of interesting,
now you think about the
South as the religious place.
But then, I mean, it's New
England and the Puritans.
I mean, they had
established churches.
I mean, and they kept them
even after the Revolution
in Connecticut and places.
Rob talks about how they
used race, actually,
to bring people together--
the fear of servile
insurrection.
Even in New England, where there
are not that many black people,
when they first started
having skirmishes,
there was the threat of
conflict with the redcoats,
with the British, but one of
the first things they think of
is, what are we going to
do about the black people
in the town.
And they were
immediately frightened.
So these were people that
they had lived with all along.
But until there was a
conflict-- then all of a sudden,
they're a potential
fifth column.
They're potential enemies.
So Rob talks about
how they actually--
and I think he
documents it very,
very well-- one of the things
that knit together people
from New England to South
Carolina, all these places,
was a fear of African-Americans.
And Native Americans, too.
That it was the whiteness--
we are one people,
and then there
are these others who
are in our midst.
And the British
are trying to use
those people, enslave people.
Because many of the
enslaved people did
go over to the British lines.
And many of the Indians,
Native Americans,
fought with the British.
So strangely enough, it
was race that was used
to pull these people together.
Because they're very different.
You're right; very, very
different interests,
all kinds of things.
But that was one thing
that they could agree on.
AUDIENCE 2: Lord Dunmore became
the most hated [INAUDIBLE]..
In fact, 1765, Lord Dunmore
became the number one enemy
of these guys.
He became Washington's enemy.
And this is how Washington got
where he was, his generalship,
at the Philadelphia Convention.
ANNETTE GORDON-REED:
Dunmore, the proclamation
issued that said
that any enslaved
of a rebel who joined
the British army
would get their freedom.
And that really frightened
the Virginia colonists,
because they were--
Virginia at the
time was 40% black.
Who's been to Williamsburg?
Colonial Williamsburg is very--
I'm associated with it.
It's a very, very tough
thing to pull off.
Because Williamsburg
was half and half.
You think of it now
as a very white place,
because you don't have
a lot of black people
who are interested in
walking around, pretending
to be enslaved in Williamsburg.
It's hard to get the
demographics right there.
But so if you
think about a place
that, in some areas like
that are 50-50, or overall,
40% of the population of
Virginia is black at this time.
So this is a real
threat to them,
if they team up with the
British and Native Americans.
And so it's an old story.
We don't seem to
get out of this,
pitting people against one
another based upon race.
But that's an easy way, a
quick way, to bind people--
people who were
very, very different
in their cultures and
their orientations,
and their religions.
And you're right, Dunmore
becomes the number one enemy.
He's a symbol of the
possibility of getting together
the British and Native
Americans and black people.
In the back, you.
AUDIENCE 3: I was
just wondering if you
had a suggestion
for a non-historian
to read more about the
economic effects of slavery
on non-enslaved whites.
Because I thought that
was an amazing point.
And I just wondered
what we know about it.
ANNETTE GORDON-REED:
Well, a nonacademic one,
that's a tough one.
AUDIENCE 3: For a non-historian.
I'm willing to read
an academic book.
What's the best learning
we have right now?
ANNETTE GORDON-REED:
Well, Robin Einhorn
has written a book
about economics,
on the economics of slavery.
I think Ed Baptist's book--
AUDIENCE 3: I read that, yeah.
ANNETTE GORDON-REED:
--is good on that point.
Let me think more about that.
There's just a lot
of stuff out there.
AUDIENCE 4: Yeah, just
speaking as a writer,
taking off your scholar's
hat, to what degree
do you try to think about--
because that's [INAUDIBLE]
I think, what you're doing
here-- think about how
Jefferson would think?
Maybe what we would say
in contemporary terms,
get into Jefferson's head.
ANNETTE GORDON-REED:
Well, you have to.
I mean, that's what it is.
And you try to do it
based upon the things
that he's written, the
things that he does.
I mean, I know people have
a fetish for documents.
Documents are important, I know.
But I trust
reasonable inferences
from people's repeated
actions over what they say.
In things that people are doing
over and over and over again,
you can infer things from that,
that these are their values.
And so yeah.
I say in someplace, it's
an imaginative enterprise.
That doesn't mean
you're making stuff up,
but you have to try to see
the people in their time.
There are certain ways
of patterns of thought
that you can discern
from Jefferson.
So it is kind of
getting into his head.
Fawn Brodie, who wrote the first
book that talks about Jefferson
and Hemings, she took it from
a psychobiography perspective,
a Freudian perspective.
And I think that's a
little bit different
when you have a particular
school of psychology
that you're analyzing
people through.
But I think common
sense observations
about people's
behavior, and reading
widely in their own
writings and so forth,
they give you a good
idea about what--
you can't do it 100%, but you
can get a good, reasonable idea
of what he was thinking, and
what he would have thought.
Did you have your hand up?
I thought-- no, sorry.
Anyone else?
AUDIENCE 5: I'd like
the end of your title
of your book, the imagination,
Empire of Imagination.
If you think about the early
part of the 19th century,
late part of the 18th
century, imagination
had specific
overtones, particularly
literary overtones.
[INAUDIBLE] I wonder if you were
using that word, "imagination,"
in that golden way that
the romantic writers--
ANNETTE GORDON-REED: Well, I
think we were thinking about it
in terms of Jefferson's vision.
Jefferson is seen
as a visionary.
And that word was sort of a
pejorative during that time,
because you're up
there in the clouds.
But we were thinking
about it in terms of,
he talks about America
as an Empire of Liberty--
Empire of Liberty, or it's
sometimes Empire for Liberty.
And what distinguishes
him, I think,
from a Washington or other
founders at that time,
is that he's actually thinking
very hard and seriously
about the future of America.
And the idea was that
there would be a country
from one ocean to the next.
And you had to have
that, because you
wanted the United States out
of European balance-of-power
fighting.
If you have parts of the
country that are just America,
if you don't take all of it,
the French will be in there.
The Spanish will be in there.
The English will be in there.
And they will be fomenting
dissension and problems
with it.
We're thinking about
his imagination,
his imaginative
construction of America,
and the future of America.
Thinking, and one day, North
America and South America
will join.
And they will be a
bulwark against Europe.
I mean, he's sitting there
thinking in this way.
It's sort of
megalomania in a way,
to put it in a pejorative term.
There are people out there.
There are Native
Americans out there.
There are other
people out there.
And he says of those people,
he says Native Americans,
he says, we can marry.
He could openly say Native
Americans and whites can marry.
Your blood will
run in our veins.
We'll be one people,
blah, blah, blah.
And we shall become one people.
But he can't say
that about blacks.
He can't, even though
in his household,
his wife's sisters and
brothers are there,
and he has his own children.
I mean, it would be hard
enough for a white politician
to say that today.
What white politician
have you heard say--
or any politician,
American politician, say--
we should all become one people?
We can all be one people,
but we have to have
our own separate little places.
Separate little
neighborhoods, but we're one.
But that was the
problem for Jefferson,
because he thought that this
would be a Republican society,
a society of citizens.
And he thought that
citizenship required--
it's a mating pool.
You have to be a family.
How can you say that you're
equal citizens, but say,
but you can't be in my family?
You can't be my daughter-in-law.
You can't be my son-in-law.
A nation, a group of people,
as I said, is a mating pool.
These are people who have the
capacity to form families.
Because families, he thought,
is the basic unit of society.
And you have families
up to the local--
from the community, then the
local government, and the state
government, and then
the federal government,
it's all one big family.
But he didn't know
that you could--
he also didn't
think you could have
second-class citizens, that
you would have blacks here,
or people here, where you
have one tier of citizenship
and then another.
Blacks had to form
their own country.
And then you could
meet whites and blacks
on a plane of equality.
But here, there's always
going to be strife.
There's second-class
citizenship,
and not everybody is
going to mate together.
And that's it.
But he didn't know that we could
have a country where you have
first-class and
second-class citizenship,
or we can say that
we all believe
that we're brothers and
sisters, but we're not really
going to marry each other.
We're not going to mix that way.
That was not something
he could conceive of,
and that's what we've had.
AUDIENCE 6: There's
two Jeffersons.
ANNETTE GORDON-REED:
Oh, just two?
[LAUGHS]
AUDIENCE 6: I'm
looking at it from--
SIRI: I'm not sure I--
ANNETTE GORDON-REED: Siri says,
I'm not sure I understand that.
AUDIENCE 6: Thomas Jefferson,
there's a pre-cotton Jefferson
and the post-cotton Jefferson.
When he gets all these
ideas against slavery,
and all of these
other things, there
is minimum cotton in the South.
About 1815, '16, there's
cotton all over the South.
And Jefferson changes
in his later writings.
The interesting point was--
there's a couple of things
that I've looked at, where
one of the ministers says,
no white man can work
the cotton field.
And these people reply,
the aristocrats, and they
guarantee that.
I think that's really
the two Jeffersons.
I think he would have been
fine, had there not been cotton.
ANNETTE GORDON-REED:
Well, I don't know.
I think, there's cotton in
1815, but I don't really know--
I don't think he's really
paying attention to that.
AUDIENCE 6: Tobacco market's--
ANNETTE GORDON-REED: Yeah,
the tobacco market is gone,
but he's still thinking that--
in the 1850s, he's
thinking of diffusion.
This crazy idea that--
well, it's not a crazy idea,
but it's crazy to us.
The idea is that once
you buy Louisiana,
and people said don't let
slavery go into that territory,
although slavery
was already there.
I mean, the slavery
was already--
people act like Louisiana,
that territory, was empty.
It wasn't.
The Spanish were there.
The French were there.
There was slavery there.
The war would have come sooner
if the federal government had
said, you're getting
rid of slavery there.
But he thinks that you
spread slaves around,
and it will be easier.
Jefferson had a serious
case of New England envy.
New England had been able
to emancipate, excuse me,
to do away with slavery,
because there were not
that many black
people in New England.
So he thought, and
others thought as well,
that if they were spread around,
if they were not concentrated,
if you were in a place where
there's 40% black people,
it would be possible to provide
for gradual emancipation.
That's the theory.
But of course, we know
that once you do that,
once you get them out
there into the territory,
and there is cotton,
and there is sugar--
even down in Louisiana--
then it becomes much
more profitable.
I think you're right.
At the end of his life,
he's beginning to see
what's happening down there.
But he was not that
great a business--
I mean, he was not
economically inclined in ways.
But the change on slavery
becomes, even before, I think,
1850, he's stepping back.
AUDIENCE 6: --1815.
ANNETTE GORDON-REED:
Yeah, no, but he's
stepping back from that,
talking about it, in the 1790s.
He only talks about it
when people write to him
and ask him something,
and then he'll
give his usual answer to it.
But he's pulled back from that.
He's fixated on the
Revolution, excuse me,
on the United States.
This other thing over here,
it'll take care of itself.
Right now, I've got
to fend off Hamilton
and the Federalists and the
counter-revolutionaries.
That thing will
take care of itself.
And of course, that's the thing
that destroys the country.
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
