- [Announcer] This program is presented
by University of California Television.
Like what you learn?
Visit our website or follow
us on Facebook and Twitter
to keep up with the latest UCTV programs.
(soothing electronic music)
- Welcome to a Conversation With History.
I'm Harry Kreisler of the
Institute of International Studies.
Our guest today is Annette Gordon-Reed.
At Harvard, she is the Carol
K. Pforzheimer Professor
at the Radcliffe Institute
for Advanced Study,
the Charles Warren Professor
of American Legal History
at the law school, and
a Professor of History
at the University.
She received the 2008 National Book Award,
and the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in History
for "The Hemingses of
Monticello: An American Family".
Her most recent book is the
"Most Blessed of Patriarchs":
Thomas Jefferson and the
Empire of Imagination,
which she wrote with Peter S. Onuf.
She is also the author of
"Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings:
An American Controversy"
among other books.
Her honors include the
National Humanities Medal,
a MacArthur Fellowship,
and election to the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Professor Gordon-Reid, welcome to Berkley.
- Glad to be here.
- Where were you born and raised?
- I was born in Livingston, Texas,
and when I was about six months old,
my parents moved to Conroe, Texas,
which was between Livingston and Houston.
So, it's in East Texas, about
40 minutes north of Houston.
- Looking back, how do you
think your parents shaped
your thinking about the world?
- Well, my parents were both
people who loved to read,
so we always had books in the house.
They were very political people,
and we discussed politics.
I was a little girl, it was in the 60's,
of course, that was a very volatile time,
things going on on the
television, conversations.
So, it was a house where
people really discussed
intellectual ideas,
argued, they're debaters.
We argued points all the
time, so it was a very,
I would say lively,
intellectual atmosphere.
- And of your parents, were
both equally an influence
or was your mother especially important?
- Well, they were influences in both ways.
I suppose my mother was important,
because my mother had
sort of plans for me.
She had ideas that I was
gonna do something wonderful.
I guess everybody's mother feels that way
about their children,
but she was very, very,
she was a schoolteacher.
She would order books for the summer.
My brothers and I were really
upset because we actually had
to have some version of school
even through the summer.
(laughs)
- What did she teach?
- She taught English.
She was an English teacher, loved grammar.
It was her thing, was
a great writer herself.
So, I think the sort of extra preparation,
the idea that she was
preparing me for something
was very, very big in my life.
So, she was a great influence.
My father was too, however,
because he was the one,
I think he was probably even
more political than she.
So, he was the one who sort
of fostered the kind of debate
and discussion quite a
lot in our household.
- Were history books especially important
in your reading lists?
- Yes, I discovered that I loved history,
sort of reading age-appropriate
history books in school,
but my parents had other
books around during that time
about black history, African-American
history, and so forth.
And even regular history, or all history.
And that's something
that I developed a love
for very early on, and so
it was a way to spend time,
particularly in the summers
in the heat of Texas
when you have to come inside.
There's a great deal to boredom.
When you don't have
distractions, you read.
And I was always in the library
checking out books, so yeah.
- And what was it like as a young person
in East Texas sort of experiencing
the civil rights movement
with knowledgeable parents
who were steeping you
in history, and thinking,
and conversation, and so on?
- Well, it was particularly
interesting for me
because I integrated our school district.
I was the first black child
to go to a white school
in our school district,
and that was a big point
because they had been
resisting, this is the mid-60's,
they had been resisting Brown.
The Brown decision coming
up with all kinds of plans
about how to avoid that,
and one was called a
Freedom of Choice plan, and
white parents were supposed
to pick white schools for their kids,
and black parents were
supposed to pick black schools.
And my parents, following the news,
understanding that the
court and the 5th circuit
and the court would probably
not uphold those rules,
decided to send me to the white school.
- And this would have
been at what grade level?
- First grader, I was a first grader.
So, for the first year,
I was there by myself
and I was very conscious of their being
on something of a mission.
My parents agreed with
the school district not
to go to the press, not
to talk to the press,
because they wanted it
to be very, very low key,
none of this escorting her to
schools or anything like that.
But just as sort of normal
as it could possibly be.
And I was there for a year by myself.
Then, of course, the court
did strike these down,
and then, everybody had to shift and move,
and I was already sort of in place.
- So, it sounds like this
background that we've just talked
about empowered you to
be a tough little kid.
(laughs)
Go through that, is that fair?
- Well, I don't know,
I've thought about this
over the years, it's the
chicken and egg thing.
Was I the right personality to do this,
or did it shape my
personality being there?
I'm sure it's a little bit of both.
I've not minded being by myself,
which I was quite often
during that time period.
You know, reading, I knew
how to sort of take care
of myself, in a way, so it
was a profound experience.
And it's not something that
I've, I've thought about it,
but I probably haven't thought about it
the way a historian should think about it.
I've sort of turned myself
to other people's lives
and not my own, but it was
a pretty, pretty formative,
and a kind of amazing thing to do.
I'm not sure that,
and people say, "Well, that's a lot to put
"on a kid," but I suppose
somebody had to do it.
- You had self-confidence,
though, from your parents.
- Yeah, oh yeah, oh definitely.
The one thing, my mother
believed I could do anything.
And that kind of, that
assurance about that
could be, you know, it's empowering,
but it could also be sometimes,
"Ah, you know, I really can't do that."
But she really did believe in me,
so that idea of her
belief and her support.
Her parents, my grandmother,
I had a grandmother who
was quite extravagant.
I remember her going to,
that she went to Sakowitz,
which was the big sort of
department store in Houston,
and buying lots of clothes, great clothes,
because I was gonna be dressed
to the nines when I went.
So, it was a kind of a family enterprise.
They didn't sit down and say,
"Now, you're on a mission."
But you could tell from all of this
that this was something
that was important.
- Now, as you're reading a
book in elementary school,
I guess, about Jefferson
and his black friend,
tell us that story, because
it starts there, in a way.
(laughs)
- Yes, it starts there.
I read a book, a biography,
a child's biography,
when I was in the 3rd
grade about Jefferson,
and the story was told
by a fictional slave boy
who was supposed to be
telling Jefferson's story.
And I noted the contrast between
the depiction of the boy,
who was sort of lazy and not serious,
and he was upset with
Jefferson because Jefferson,
you know, Marse Tom, or
however they described him,
wanted to read books and was curious,
and wanted to find out about the world.
He didn't wanna hunt,
and fish, and everything.
And I remember being embarrassed
by that because it was,
the book was sort of
in the back of our room
where they had the little library for us,
we had a real library but also a library
in the back of the room.
And I knew that my
classmates might see that,
and I knew that they would
make the identification
between me and the enslaved
boy, who was depicted in a way,
sort of unnecessarily,
in an exaggerated way
as this person who was unserious,
as in contrast to Jefferson who was white
and was supposed to be all that was good
and the enslaved boy
was stupid, essentially.
And it struck me then
that that was unfair,
but it also, the sort of interest
in Jefferson and Monticello
and slavery, sort of came,
that was the germ of it right there,
with the combination of the
interest and at the same time,
concern about the way the black
enslaved boy was depicted.
So, it started there.
People have asked me why
did the other biographies,
there was Madison and
George Washington Carver,
Dolly Madison, why did
Jefferson stand out?
It's not something you can explain.
Why does someone wanna play the
violin instead of the piano.
It just struck me.
That's how it all got started.
I continued to read
about him over the years.
- And so, you completed
your high school in Texas,
and where did you go from
there when you went to college?
- I went to Dartmouth College
in Hanover, New Hampshire.
So, the opposite end of the map.
I wanted to go away to
school in New England.
There was sort of romance in doing that.
So, yeah, that's where I went.
- At Dartmouth did you, when
did you get the history bug?
Did you get it at Dartmouth or
did you have the history bug?
- Well, I'd had the history bug since
from elementary school,
even before Jefferson.
I would read, I was very,
very interested in Egypt,
books about ancient times.
And so, the history bug
was always there for me.
At Dartmouth, it was wonderful
because Baker Library
is there, and you know, a fabulous library
and I could sort of indulge
and read all that I wanted.
And I also was a history major.
- But then, were there any teachers
at Dartmouth that interested
you in the direction
of history that stand out?
- Michael Green, the late
Michael Green, was influential.
Leo Spitzer, Elizabeth Wayland,
who's a Russian historian,
for I had a brief detour where
I was very much interested
in Russian history and
sort of read everything
that I could in Russian
novels and so forth.
Yeah, there were people
there who interested me.
- And a course on Jefferson?
- Not a course on Jefferson,
but certainly courses
in which Jefferson figured.
- And graduate from Dartmouth,
so why law school and not history?
- Well, I had had this sort
of dual interest in law.
Sort of stoked by my father
who sort of admired lawyers.
And he thought that that
would be a good idea.
And also, I think
because of my background,
I knew that my going to
Anderson Elementary School
had been started, the process
of doing that came from the law.
It came from lawyers
who made that possible,
who actually effectuated that change.
So, lawyers were seen to me as people
who could affect change in society.
I thought a little bit about journalism,
that was my first job when I was 15.
I worked at the Conroe Courier.
And this was the age of
Woodward and Bernstein,
and they were sort of heroes.
But journalism, I found
when I got to Dartmouth,
journalists seemed a little cliquey to me,
and it was sort of a boy's club.
So that was sort of out for me.
I figured that the actual
profession might be that way.
I didn't go to history
because I was reading
and I was told that there
were too many PhDs in history.
What I didn't understand is
that there's almost no PhDs,
black PhDs in history,
and they would have loved
to have me go to the program.
And I could have gotten a JD PhD,
but I decided to go to Harvard Law School,
and figured that if I was
interested in history,
you could keep reading it.
- I like to ask my guests about the skills
and the temperament that
they think are important
for the professions
that they've undertaken.
Now, you have dual professions, in a way
- Yes, yes.
- So, let's talk about that.
In other words, what
skills does a historian
and then a lawyer really need,
and is there an overlap between the two?
- Well, there's definitely an overlap.
I would say the skills that a historian,
that I've brought to bear in
doing history is curiosity.
That's the first thing.
You have to have curiosity and tenacity.
You have to have imagination
to figure out a research strategy.
I mean, how do you find things
that you're interested in?
And that's very, very important.
I think that certainly
overlaps with the law.
The difference between
history and law on that score,
however, is that
historians have the luxury,
have the capacity, to
direct their own research.
If I'm interested in Jefferson
and I wanna do a book about
Jefferson or whatever.
If I'm interested in the
civil rights movement,
I can do that.
Law is a service profession.
A lot of people don't realize that,
but lawyers are servants.
And you have to learn
how to have curiosity
about other people's lives,
you have to learn how to interest yourself
in other people's lives,
and do the kind of job,
the concentration that's needed
to be really, really
serious, because lawyers,
unlike historians,
lawyers are dealing with,
you hold people's lives in your hands.
In some instances, actually
people could be put away,
could die based on what their
lawyer does or does not do.
And that seriousness of
purpose has to be there.
It's not a game.
You can see it as a game, but
it's a very important game.
Not that history isn't important,
but there're not no life
and death stakes there.
- Now, in both in a way, well, especially
if you're a trial lawyer,
you have to tell a story,
- [Annette] Mm hmm, yeah.
and a historian has to tell a story.
- Yeah, oh no, the law
is a writing, I mean,
that's the other reason that
law could be a choice for me,
because lawyers are writers, as well,
and they're story tellers.
And even if you're in trial,
even if you're doing,
whether it's criminal law
or civil, you're telling a story.
And whoever tells the superior story wins.
- The other issue here
in both it would seem
that you make decisions about the facts
and what are to be included and excluded.
- Oh, yeah.
- If you're defending somebody
who there's certain factual situation
where you don't want it
to come up in the trial.
Talk a little about that,
because that is very important
in your very compelling first work,
looking at what the historians
had said about Jefferson.
- Well, it's interesting, the
first book that I wrote was
about the historiography of this question
whether Jefferson had had
this long term liaison
with an enslaved woman, Sally Hemings.
And you know, as a lawyer, I think people,
I was a law professor at the time,
just a law professor at the time,
I didn't have an adjoint appointment.
I noticed that historians
sort of view lawyers
as doing what they call
law office history,
namely cherry-picking
facts to write a brief.
The problem, however, is that good lawyers
don't just cherry-pick the facts.
Good lawyers know the opponent's case
better than the opponent,
because you have to know
those kinds of things.
And what I saw was historians
sort of cherry-picking
and not, because there was no opponent,
not understanding that one of these days
that could come back to haunt them.
Because they had less stuff out.
They had shaded the truth by omission.
So, what I wanted to
do in writing the book
was to replicate that
moment when you're a lawyer,
you're looking at the entire record,
you know your side, you
know the other side,
so you know the sides, you know the story,
the possible stories,
but also give attention
to analyze the other side.
- So, is it fair to say
that it was fortunate
that you went to law school--
- Oh, absolutely.
- Instead of history graduate
school because the law
and the training empowered you--
- Oh, absolutely.
- To see the problem.
- It empowered you, it
gave you the confidence,
somebody might say arrogance, (laughs)
to say that you could take this on.
I've talked to since
I've become a historian,
and I pal around with historians now.
A couple of them have told me
that if I had been a graduate student,
they would have told me
not to do my first book.
They would have dissuaded
me from doing that.
But as a law professor, we sort
of think we're mini experts
on everything, and can
opine on everything.
But also, we had the tools
and we're confident to do it
because we understood that law school is
about critical thinking,
and critical thinking is
of use in any venue.
It's easy, I suppose,
to well, easier to sort
of replicate a story, to repeat a story,
but when you get to the
point of taking things apart,
taking arguments apart,
putting them back together,
analyzing, that's what
law school is about,
and that's what lawyers do,
and that's what law professors do.
So, yeah, I think I credit
my training in law school
with giving me, number one,
the confidence to do that
and to do that first
book, but I also know how
to do it in a way that would be effective.
- In the first book, let
me give the exact title is
"Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings:
An American Controversy".
It's quite a read, so it's
extremely well-written,
but it almost reads like a mystery story.
In addition, the reader becomes excited,
and I'm coming at this cold
in preparation for this interview.
It's uncovering a truth, basically.
At one point in the book,
you as a person trained
in the law, you tell us
about the rules of evidence,
and how evidence contributes
to burden of proof.
So, you're ready to go
and you're empowering
the reader to be ready to go.
- Yeah, well, I saw myself,
people think, you know,
the publicist for the book,
that we went to the
University Press of Virginia,
they don't usually have a publicist,
but they had an idea that this book might
be a crossover hit, so
they hired somebody.
And the idea was to sort
of sell this as a trial,
but that really isn't what it is.
It's really more a law
professor talking to students.
That this is what we do to talk
about how you use evidence,
and how evidence can be misused.
And I had the experience of
sort of going through the book,
my own understanding about
this story was unfolding
as I was writing the book.
And I think if I were to do it now,
I probably would go back
and change the beginning of the book,
because I think if you can sort
of see me moving more
towards the conclusion about this,
that I didn't have before when I started.
The book is really about
how historians had written
about the subject, not
whether or not Tom and Sally
actually had an affair.
I wasn't gonna make a
statement about that.
I just knew that the
argument was sort of tainted
by understandings about race,
and understandings about class.
A thumb was put on the scale
for whites and wealthy people.
And when less empowered
people said things,
it was disregarded, and I
thought that that lesson
could be displayed in the book.
But as I'm doing it, I realize I start
to find information
saying, "Wait a minute,
"I could talk a little bit
about the actual substance
"of the question, too."
- It's interesting because
you said yesterday at lunch
in a conversation with faculty that
you wound up doing this
because this was the time
that the Jefferson movie came out.
A lot of the reviews were saying,
"Well, this movie is nonsense
"because there was no
sexual relationship."
that's very interesting because
not only was there conventional wisdom.
Let's put it this way,
there was historical wisdom
about which there was no
controversy before you wrote,
but also that it had seeped
into the popular culture.
And that provoked you and rightfully so.
And really it was about
you're overthrowing
a consensus in the history profession.
Talk a little about that because
that must have been
quite empowering for you
because you were seeing a truth,
the lawyer that you were,
that nobody else was really seeing,
especially among those
most qualified to see it.
- Well, all of the sort of
parts of my life came together.
As I mentioned earlier, one of the things
that lawyers do is they can affect change.
If they see an injustice,
they can take action.
And that's what you're supposed to do.
That feeling of outrage
and an injustice was
what propelled me to do this.
Because I knew when people were saying,
"Oh, this didn't happen,
"Jefferson wouldn't be
involved with a slave girl,"
all those kinds of things,
I knew that Madison Hemings
who was an enslaved man
at Monticello, and the
son of Thomas Jefferson
and Sally Hemings, and
another enslaved man,
Israel Jefferson, who's
real last name was Gillette,
had said that it happened.
And I thought, "You know, these are people
"who were the objects of
slavery, the victims of slavery.
"If we can't listen to them,
then what does that say
"about us as a country, as
a community, as a society?"
You know, you typically
reserve your greatest sympathy
for the people who are victims,
who are obvious victims of repression.
You don't spend all of your time
molly-coddling the person
who has the jack boot
on somebody's neck, and
that was what was going on.
And I felt outrage and I
wanted to talk to the men,
and these were largely
white, male historians,
who were basically dismissing this story.
Just sort of lay bare their prejudices
and their illogic, really.
And their assurance about this
was, I thought, unjustified.
So, it was kind of fun.
I was having a blast doing it.
It was one of the most
enjoyable experiences I've had.
- And he's talking again
about the character
of a lawyer-historian.
This took courage, basically,
to be able to say,
"This is wrong, this is not right."
- That's what lawyers do.
- [Harry] Right.
- This is wrong, this is not right.
And that's what law
school empowers you to do,
and the profession, the sort
of history of the profession,
and the heroes of the profession,
are the people who do that.
The people who stand up and say,
Charles Hamilton Houston,
who decides I'm gonna use
what training I have to begin to chip away
at the system of Jim Crow.
And it might be crazy to
do, or the tobacco lawyers
who you thought would never
beat that particular lobby,
people were just sure
that will never happen,
and they eventually beat it.
And they actually won.
And those are the people that we revere,
the people who take a
chance, who stand up and say,
"This is wrong," or take
on the tough challenge.
And so, it was in keeping with
the ethos of the profession
and in the ethos of what my
parents taught me growing up.
- And also the ethos of
the civil rights movement.
- [Annette] Absolutely.
- It changed everything.
Now, in the
triumph of the conventional wisdom
before you came along,
let's talk a little about
what's going on here.
Because Jefferson is not anybody.
- [Annette] No.
- He's an icon of American history.
All men are created equal,
and so on and so forth.
As you said, Sally Hemings
was a slave, basically.
And when I read the
book, what came to mind,
it was what you had
identified is the structure
of intellectual racism, basically.
And we don't think of
racism being embedded
in the assumptions of
establishment historians.
- [Annette] No.
- Up until this point in time.
So, on the one half we have the icon,
but then you have this
whole group of people
who are dismissed, who are
diminished as human beings,
who basically it doesn't
matter what they're saying,
because it's not true
because they're black.
- Yeah, yeah.
No, and that's the
importance of the story.
Even whatever you thought
about the ultimate answer
to the question, that was the thing
that I thought was so striking.
And that I wanted people to say,
"Well, this is happening
in this particular story,
"where else is this happening?
"How else is this happening?"
And to get people to think that racism,
because Dumas Malone and Merrill Peterson,
these were people who were--
- [Harry] Famous historians.
- Famous Jefferson historians.
These were people who were
considered southern liberals.
They're not the people
that you would think
of sitting around with a clan
robe on or anything like that,
but it shows you how, as you said,
assumptions and habits of
mind can embed themselves,
are embedded in the structure
of how we think about things.
And unless it's this constant process
of questioning yourself
that brings it out,
and that's why it's so hard.
It's a difficult thing to
examine your own prejudices
and assumptions and think
that you might be acting
in a way that is prejudicial,
acting in a way that is unfair.
- And it's interesting, I
wanna move on to Jefferson,
but there's certain things
that stand out so over
and above this big
picture that you have of,
"Well, they're black, so what they said
"or wrote was not important."
But as you work your way through this,
there are little pieces of evidence
that are quite remarkable.
I'll mention a few of them.
That Sally Hemings makes
an agreement with Jefferson
to come back from France where
she could have been free,
and because she was a mother
worrying about her children,
that she was pregnant, she
would have more children,
and he promised to free
them when they were 21.
Little things like Madison
Hemings, many years later,
tells this story, nobody
believes it, they dismiss it,
because the editor of the
paper is an abolitionist--
- [Annette] Yeah,
anything he says is a lie.
- But Madison, in this interview,
tells us little things about Jefferson.
For example, he really
didn't care to be a farmer.
He didn't like farming, he
was actually a craftsman,
who liked to work in his shop,
and he trained his children
by Hemings to have
trades and be craftsmen.
So, little things that tell
us a lot about Jefferson.
And in a way, the fact,
the way he treated his black children
brings out the humanity in him, in a way.
Although, he's living in this system,
he's still a slaveholder.
- Yeah, I think that's
a really important point
about small details.
Because when people,
when police for example,
do investigations, they
always keep something behind.
They don't say the thing out loud,
because they know if
they encounter somebody
who knows that detail, they
obviously know something.
And so, that's what you find
in Israel Jefferson's statements
and Madison Hemings's statement.
It's little things that
tell you about Jefferson,
that tell you about the
lies that you can check,
that can be corroborated
from outside information,
so you know that this person
isn't just making stuff up.
And they never, historians,
'cause they were not interested
in really finding the answer
'cause they didn't want it to be true.
Going through that process to sort
of corroborate what he was saying.
And on the other side, I should say,
looking at the Jefferson
family official story
that was replete with errors and lies,
I should have to say,
that they had to know
that this person was
lying about those things,
yet it didn't affect
their overall credibility.
The only thing that was important was
that they said Jefferson didn't do it.
So, they ignored all the signs.
So, it was like when you come to this
and begin to pull it all apart,
it was relatively easy to do
because it was just so
blatant the way they were sort
of blinding themselves to indications
that this story was true.
- And you know, what struck me that
that's why it's important,
this book is so important
even today where we've moved
beyond the controversy,
because what you're showing is in the law,
you apply the same standards of evidence
and burden of proof to both sides.
And in this case--
- [Annette] It just didn't happen.
- It didn't happen.
And it didn't happen
because of the racism.
It's not to say necessarily,
I don't know these historians,
these famous historians,
that they were racists,
interpersonally, but
they bought in to a story
because it was,
well, it was the conventional wisdom.
- And they didn't want it to be true.
- [Harry] Yeah.
- Because what it would say--
- [Harry] They didn't want your version.
- No, they didn't want the version,
they didn't want
Jefferson to be the father
of these children.
Dumas Malone, at the end of his life,
he gives an interview to the
New York Times, and he says,
"Well, I could see him having
sex with her one or two times,
"but what I couldn't see would
be a 38-year connection."
Which I thought was kind of telling,
it's remarkably telling.
So it would be okay once or twice,
but not anything long term.
It was almost as if well,
one or two times puts him
in the range of a normal white guy,
but the other is sort of alien to him.
And so, I think that said
a lot about his values.
- In addition to your lawyerly skills,
and I mean that in a complimentary
way, and your research,
your prodigious research
in all of these works,
there is an element in
your work and in your talk
of common human insight,
basically, common sense.
Well, what would a person
do in a situation like,
talk a little about that,
because it's really the case
that you have to understand
people to a certain extent
to see what's going on.
- Yeah, it's an interesting
thing because I think
it's something that sets me a little apart
from conventional
historians who don't like
to believe there's such
thing as a human nature.
That there's not, I
think that there's not a,
I don't believe there's
a fixed human nature,
but I do think that there
are some commonalities
that run throughout human existence
and recurring themes in history.
Lawyers sort of rely on that.
I mean, historians might
be skeptical of it,
but lawyers rely on it.
And judges rely on it.
And it's very important to
sort of see those patterns
and to understand where
they're coming into play.
And this is a story that demanded that.
Because we don't have
Jefferson's writings about this,
we don't have Sally Hemings's
writings about this.
- There are no written
records, letters, diaries--
- Between the two of them.
I mean, Jefferson's friends talk about,
a friend of his talks
about this in a diary,
but there's nothing in
between the two of them.
So, what you're basically doing
is drawing reasonable inferences
from people's behavior,
and repeated behavior.
And I would trust that over
what people say anytime.
That's the kind of thing that you have
to bring to bear in this situation.
- Let's talk a little about Jefferson.
Now, your new book, "Most
Blessed of the Patriarchs:
Thomas Jefferson and the
Empire of the Imagination".
This is co-written with
leading Jeffersonian historian.
What were you all trying
to do in this book?
- Well, we were trying to
sort of strip away a lot of,
I think the layers that had
been put upon Jefferson,
to try to pull him out,
to extract Jefferson's own understanding
about what he was doing in the world.
We think that a lot of books
have been written about,
that are basically sort of
saying what Jefferson ought
to have done, ought have
been doing in the world.
And you should've done this
and you should've done that,
and you didn't do this and
blah, blah, blah, blah.
Instead of thinking, "Well,
what did he think he was doing?"
This was a person who started out life
in a particular way, had
a particular mission.
And we try to discover,
re-discover what that
mission was by looking
at his own writings,
looking at his actions,
and to sort of stand aside and
not be all about judging him,
which is what has happened now.
He's become sort of the
whipping boy for slavery,
as if he was the only slaveholder
in the founding generation,
if he was the only racist white man
in the founding generation.
It's really kind of like a caricature.
And it's being, hes'
sort of stuck in a ditch.
So, we wanted to recover this
person who was interesting
and important to American history,
but do it by looking at
the world through his eyes,
not absolving him of anything, but to say,
"What did he think he was doing?"
- And this again, so that in a way if you,
before your writings, if
the historiography builds
up Jefferson, and they turn him into a,
at one level, he's not human.
And that by bringing his
humanity back in, then,
and I look at your book which is much more
than what I'm gonna talk about,
but it's kind of the
evolution of his ideas.
So, here is a man who said,
"All men are created equal,"
and then he comes out of
Virginia, he goes to France,
he becomes a revolutionary politician,
so his ideas evolve, and I
wanna talk a little about that.
So, he starts as a man,
before the revolution,
the American Revolution, as a man of ideas
who's a patriarch in Virginia,
a landowner, and a slave owner.
- Yes, that's all of those things,
but he also is crucially, he sees himself
as an inherent to the enlightenment,
and he sees himself as
a progressive person.
Jefferson looked at life
through the eyes of science,
that we're gonna be
making new discoveries,
inoculations, all these kinds of things
that are gonna make life better.
And life is gonna get better and better
the more educated people become.
He develops the sort of
tenets of progressivism
at that time, he's sort of
skeptical of the church,
of organized religion, he is anti-slavery.
As a young man, he copies
a poem about the evils
of slavery, of the slave
trade, and it's commonplace,
but before he's in public life at all.
So, he's establishing himself
as, I'm a person who is,
not better than his Virginia cohort,
but he's more advanced
than his Virginia cohort.
And this is the attitude that people have
about him throughout his life.
There's a story, it may be apocryphal,
of Jefferson standing on a
courthouse eating a tomato
at a time when many people
thought tomatoes were poisonous.
So, this idea of him as the avatar
of the enlightenment
takes hold very early on.
And that's how he sees himself.
So, he's this patriarch, as you said,
and at the same time he sees
himself as a progressive,
that eventually people like him,
they will become obsolete
as the world becomes more enlightened.
- And he talks about slavery
as a stain on Virginia
and on society, and he
makes some modest efforts
to overturn it, but he discovers
that the system won't move basically.
Is that a fair way to say it?
- After the revolution, and we have,
there's the United States of America,
he believes that there has
to be a republican solution
to slavery, republican
meaning majority rules.
People have to vote.
But he knows that at that time,
the people of Virginia are
not gonna vote slavery out,
and he turned his attention
to other things that he can do.
And that is, become involved in politics,
and help develop the
United States of America.
Now, what he doesn't
understand is that slavery,
by not dealing with slavery,
that the United States of America,
several decades after that would split.
By the mid 19th century, it's
already clear near the end
of his life that it's
possible that the North
and the South would go
to war over slavery.
But that is not something that
he would have contemplated
or advocated as a young man.
It had to be people
voting, and that was never.
I mean, people say that
he should've done this,
he should've fought harder,
but I don't really know how.
I don't think the people of Virginia
and the South were ready
to vote slavery out.
- And as a revolutionary
politician at the time
of the War of the Revolution, he sort of,
you were suggesting in
your lecture yesterday,
comes to the conclusion
that Native Americans
and the slaves are not us, in a way,
because of the possibility they have
to align with the British
to get their freedom.
So, it's a state that
becomes very difficult
for him to deal with in
terms of his original ideas.
- At first, he's
anti-slavery as a young man.
After the revolution, it becomes clear
that African-American people
are a threat because he knew.
He said, "How can you love a country
"that has treated you like this?"
We are enemies and we're gonna be enemies.
And he's talking in the abstract
about African-Americans in general,
and whites in general,
but the interesting thing
about it is that in his personal life,
he begins to think that he can manage,
he knows how to manage the situation
to sort of stave off
that kind of hostility.
But he did not think that was
possible on a large scale.
- And so, he goes to
France and he sees America
in comparison with France.
And that leads him to extol the virtues
of our natural surroundings,
and the small landholder,
the character of the individual that comes
from his ownership of property.
And you call it at some
point, you say at one point
in the book that it leads to, in his mind,
a domestication of slavery.
So, he develops a theory
that says, in effect,
there's a public realm, and
that public realm depends
on the individual farmer
with his property,
his land, and his slaves.
And that is the source
of liberty, in a way.
So, that's the next step in his--
- Yeah, France is critical
to his understanding
of things because when he leaves Virginia,
he's kind of sour on Virginia.
He has a terrible time as governor,
his behavior was put under investigation,
he was exonerated, but he
left for France in a kind
of surly mood about his fellow Virginians.
And he gets to France and he sees,
he loves the music, he
loves the architecture,
there're things about
the society he loves,
but he's aghast at the status of women,
women who are forward, and
participating in politics.
He's aghast at beggars on the street.
He talks about and his
daughter talks about being
in a carriage and having beggars
and people desperately beggin' for money.
And there's starvation.
So, he begins to say, "Well,
you know, we have it bad,
"but we aren't as bad as this."
And he becomes sort of sanguine about,
much more sanguine about the situation
with enslaved people in Virginia.
And he develops this idea
that he can ameliorate.
Christa Dierksheide has
written a book about,
that talks about amelioration,
Jefferson's ideas
about amelioration of
slavery, making it better.
And once you do that, you're just gone.
I mean, from a state of war
and evil to well, you know,
I could do this in a way
that makes it all right,
then that's a way of
comforting yourself about this,
and he becomes comfortable
in the institution.
He sees the Hemings family,
which the family was,
six of them were the
half-siblings of his wife,
including Sarah, Sally Hemings.
He sees his relationships
with them as sort
of exemplifying how he
was as a slave owner.
Well, of course, they're different
than other enslaved people,
but these are the people
who are in the house,
the people with whom he has
the most intimate relations,
and he sees himself acting
as a good slave owner,
with respect to them.
- A benevolent.
- [Annette] A benevolent slave owner,
the thing we can't accept.
- Patriarch.
- Benevolent patriarch,
which of course, we're like,
"Ah, you know you can't do that."
But that's how he saw it.
And so, the person who
had this very serious idea
about the evils of slavery says,
"I can do this the right way."
And of course, as I said, as we've said,
that's the road to perdition right there.
- And the other element
in this is his role
as the founder of the
University of Virginia.
And so the idea that future
generations who were trained
in the enlightenment would be
able to solve this problem,
but not here and now while I live.
- Yeah, solve it without bloodshed.
And that eventually this
would come, but of course,
as we know, that's not what happened.
- This is kind of a case study
in theory and practice, in a way.
Talk a little about that,
because here is this
American leader who had these,
could state clearly
these very powerful ideas
of the enlightenment,
but as he lived his life
in Virginia as a patriarch,
as he goes to Paris,
and brings over the young slave girl
to take care of his young daughter.
As he comes back, he really,
his ideas sort of confront reality,
which he can't change,
and his ideas change.
But we do see, I think that he's a man
who doesn't like conflict,
he likes to ameliorate situations,
but when you have a structural problem
like racism, that's not enough.
- No, it's not enough.
And it's not enough to absolve him,
it's not enough for him to
become a good slaveholder.
Slavery was comfortable for Jefferson.
It brought him a lifestyle
that allowed him to live
as a man of letters, of
the republic of letters.
Madison Hemings talks about
him, that Jefferson spent most
of his time in his office
writing those thousands
of letters that we have,
communicating with people
over the seas, and other people
in the rest of the United States.
He didn't have to worry about
keeping his life in order.
There were people who did that for him.
Enslaved people, and his
daughters who actually served
as the hostesses after he lost his wife.
Slavery brought him a level of comfort,
and there are many things
you think about saying,
you know, this is really bad,
but if you're getting something out of it,
if you don't have the emotional push
to do something about
it, most of the people
who freed slaves in Virginia
during that time period
were acting under the
influence of religion,
of Evangelical religion, the Quakers,
the Methodists, and Baptists.
He was not operating under that system.
Religion can make you do
things, irrational things.
And we think it's
obviously the moral thing.
But to get rid of your property would have
been thought of as an irrational thing.
- And he was a debtor, he was in debt.
- Oh yes, he was in debt to do that.
But there were time periods
if he had conducted himself
differently early on,
he could have, if he'd
made it a mission to sort
of work his way out of debt,
he probably could have done that.
But how ofen, it's a human failure.
You know something is
wrong, but you do it anyway.
- And it does take what
we were talking about,
your human insight, your
insight about people,
to at least, we've knocked him down
from the icon that he was,
but he was a human being
operating in his times.
And his solutions weren't adequate given
what the horror of slavery was.
- But he did other things.
One of the other things
that I think you have
to do in approaching Jefferson
is to have a little bit,
to think about yourself.
I mean, here was a person
who was a revolutionary,
he wrote the Declaration of Independence,
an ambassador, a vice
president, a president,
he founded a university.
That's a lot of stuff
to do in your lifetime.
And then you say,
"Oh, and why didn't you
solve the slave problem?"
So, you think about, "What have I done?"
What are all the people when
we come up against someone
like that, what have we done actively
to transform our own circumstances?
Maybe we've done one or two things,
but we certainly haven't
been all of those things.
That's a lot to ask for
somebody in one life
to say that he'd do everything.
His attitude was, well look,
our generation founded a country,
we broke away from the largest, excuse me,
the most powerful nation on Earth,
and we formed our own country,
and we set up a government.
Can't you do something?
What is the next step
that you're gonna take?
Well, it could be an excuse
if you wanna call it that,
but it just seems to me to
be, if you look at the record
and you compare it to what I'm doing,
what other people are doing,
it's a lot to be judgmental about somebody
who's done so much when we've
not done anything like that.
- One final question, looking
back into your career,
are there any insights that
you have that you could share
with us about overturning
assumptions, looking at reality,
that would apply to the present
disturbances that we have
and movements like the
Black Lives Matter movement,
the confrontation with the police,
because it would seem in pointing out
and overthrowing structural racism
and intellectual discourse, it's relevant
for the situation we have now.
- Well, you have to be, and
this is a difficult thing,
you have to think something is at stake.
There has to be a moral, morality
is a part of the inquiry.
People say you're not supposed
to apply your morality to historical.
I just don't see how, you
can't check that at the door.
And morality, I think,
demands that people understand
that our common humanity,
which means that we have
to be empathetic, we have to
try to imagine what it's like
to be a person who is a
citizen of the country,
but a second-class citizen.
What does that do to our country,
what heights are we not reaching,
what goals aren't we reaching
by having large segments of our population
who don't have access to true citizenship?
So, it's about other people,
but it's also ultimately
about ourselves as a country.
We have to want the
United States to progress.
And that requires really
deep soul searching,
and it requires work, the kind
of work that I said before,
questioning your own assumptions.
And I don't know how to tell
people to do that exactly,
but I could say that you should.
- Well, on that note, I want to thank you
for being our guest today,
being on the campuses,
the Jefferson lecture.
It was quite an occasion
for some remarkable insights.
Thank you very much.
- Thank you.
- And thank you very much for joining us
for this Conversation With History.
(soothing electronic music)
