Feb. 19, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| We're kicking off Presidents Week here on the Rubin Report in partnership with Learn Liberty. | ||
| And we're talking about five different presidents in five different days with five different academics. | ||
| And joining me today is a professor of history at the United States Military Academy at West Point, Rob McDonald. | ||
| Rob, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks, Dave. | ||
| It's great to be here. | ||
| I'm very excited to talk to you. | ||
| I'm glad we're kicking off Presidents Week with you because we are gonna talk about the man that you have written this book about and edited several other books about, Thomas Jefferson. | ||
| Everyone knows my feelings about Thomas Jefferson. | ||
| This is my favorite founder. | ||
| I think this is the person whose politics have sort of affected me personally the most. | ||
| So let's just dive right in. | ||
| So let's just do, so I really want to do some 101 stuff and then I want to extrapolate on his greater political philosophies and things and later life and all that. | ||
| Tell me a little bit just about childhood first. | ||
| Let's just go into some history. | ||
| Well, Jefferson was born in what was essentially the edge of civilization in 1743 in the Piedmont of Virginia. | ||
| His father was kind of an interesting guy. | ||
| His name was Peter Jefferson. | ||
| He was sort of a planner, sort of an aristocrat, but also kind of a pioneer. | ||
| And with a William & Mary math professor named Joshua Fry, Peter Jefferson plotted this map that would serve as the kind of signature map of Virginia for a good 100 years. | ||
| So, you know, he was out there in the wilderness and Native Americans would come through Jefferson's house and, you know, travel with his dad to Williamsburg where his father was a member of the House of Burgesses. | ||
| So were they actually surveyors? | ||
| So they were doing sort of what Washington did as well and really looking at the land and parceling out where houses were going to be, where roads were going to be? | ||
| Mainly what they were doing is they were plotting the boundary line between Virginia and North Carolina. | ||
| So there was sort of an agreed upon location of it, but they were putting that within the context of the actual natural topography. | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
| So what else do we need to know about his childhood specifically? | ||
| Siblings, anything we know about his education, anything like that? | ||
| Well, I mean, you know, Jefferson has a first memory. | ||
| And I guess we all have first memories. | ||
| And his first memory, I think, is especially poignant and maybe relevant to what I predict will come up in the rest of our discussion. | ||
| When he was three years old, his family was moving temporarily from near Charlottesville to a house of a relative on the James River between Williamsburg and Richmond. | ||
| and Jefferson was being carried on a pillow, looking up into the face of an enslaved man. | ||
| So, I mean, this is the world-- | ||
| And that etched into his mind at three years old. | ||
| This is the world into which he is born. | ||
| Wow, that is incredible. | ||
| Um... | ||
| What about education-wise? | ||
| Do we know anything about high school, just the later, before the politics? | ||
| Yeah, so he had a number of different teachers. | ||
| When he was at this house, this family house that they moved to, it was called Tuckahoe, he had essentially a grammar school teacher. | ||
| Later on, he had a teacher who focused on Greek and Latin. | ||
| And then, you know, in his late teens, he moved to Williamsburg and became a student at the College of William and Mary. | ||
| And it was kind of an interesting time to be in Williamsburg. | ||
| You know, when Jefferson was reading for the law, he was, I believe, 21 years old. | ||
| And, you know, he heard Patrick Henry in the House of Burgesses talking about the Stamp Act. | ||
| You know, and he said, essentially, you know, Caesar had his Yeah. | ||
| Brutus, referring to King George III, and people shouted, "Treason, treason," | ||
| and this is when Henry said, "If this is treason, make the most of it." | ||
| And here's young Jefferson kind of hanging in the doorway, listening in, and clearly those years were formative for | ||
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him. | |
| Yeah, are there any other formative moments like that that kind of set up his political beliefs? | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
| I mean, that's a good question. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, his beliefs are being formed, in part, by all the different books that he reads. | ||
| He was a vociferous reader. | ||
| I mean, when I went to Monticello, which we'll talk about in a little bit, I mean, they talked about his library and he was inventing things. | ||
| I mean, this guy loved knowledge. | ||
| He sure did. | ||
| So much that he had the largest library in the Western Hemisphere. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I mean, that's pretty incredible. | ||
| Is that at the house in Monticello? | ||
| Is that it? | ||
| Well, he had several different libraries over the course of his life. | ||
| You know, it's a shame. | ||
| One of the things that we don't know about his childhood is exactly, you know, what he was reading as a youngster. | ||
| We have a list of books that his father owned. | ||
| His father, unfortunately, died when Jefferson was about 13 years old. | ||
| So we have an inventory of his estate. | ||
| But, you know, Jefferson's family house burned in the 1770s and, you know, he lost essentially his first library. | ||
| So there are a few questions about, you know, his early intellectual development. | ||
| But, you know, over the course of his life, he owned a number of different libraries, including the one that he would sell to the Library of Congress after the British, you know, burned down the Capitol. | ||
| I'm always fascinated by that particularly because it's like, did these people learn their political philosophies by reading or that they were alive during the founding of the country? | ||
| I'm always fascinated by that particularly because it's like, did these people learn | ||
| their political philosophies by reading or that they were alive during the founding of the country? | ||
| They knew why we came here, you know? | ||
| And that it was, so it was just sort of built into them what freedom is. | ||
| And I suspect it's probably a little bit of both. | ||
| I mean, you know, Jefferson's law professor was this incredibly significant guy named George Wythe. | ||
| And, you know, he trained a generation of jurists through his perch at the College of William and Mary. | ||
| And George Wythe introduced Jefferson to a really kind of elite circle. | ||
| Jefferson, you know, played the violin. | ||
| And the governor at the time, when Jefferson was a student, the royal governor in Williamsburg would have these dinners slash jam sessions. | ||
| And, you know, young Thomas Jefferson would be included. | ||
| And you can just sort of imagine the kind of conversations that he was, you know, party to. | ||
| You know, it was a kind of formative moment, not only for him, but also for the country that would become the United States. | ||
| Do we know about any of his other big influences at the time? | ||
| As far as individuals? | ||
| Yeah, just people that he was around, anyone else that maybe flew under the radar? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, you know, he had a really good friend named Dabney Carr. | ||
| I think their friendship was, you know, pretty typical for the time. | ||
| When they were boys, would run up this mountain that was near Jefferson's childhood home and they would hang out there under this oak tree and they made a pledge to each other that the first one to die would be buried by the survivor under that tree and that mountain that they were hiking up became Monticello where Jefferson built his home and when Carr unfortunately passed away Jefferson made good on his promise and that's the basis for the Monticello Cemetery. | ||
| Wow, that's interesting. | ||
| I didn't know that. | ||
| I must have seen it, or maybe it's part of the tour? | ||
| Yeah, well, it's at the end of the tour, so it's a quick walk. | ||
| But definitely worth seeing. | ||
| And, you know, I mean, that cemetery includes people who have passed away, you know, since Jefferson's life, but it includes, you know, many of the most important people in his life, including his wife. | ||
| You know, his wife, and he married in, I believe, 1769, and They, you know, had many children together, including a few who didn't survive infancy. | ||
| We know also that she had some miscarriages, and eventually she would die of complications from childbirth, you know, before he hit age 40. | ||
| So she's buried there as well, and no doubt she has a big influence on him. | ||
| So what do we know about his political philosophy around the founding time? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, Jefferson wrote that, in some ways, the most elemental books of public right were John Locke's two treatises on government. | ||
| He thought very highly of Montesquieu. | ||
| He felt very highly of Shaftesbury. | ||
| So essentially, you know, he was imbibing these works of people who we could probably call classical liberals. | ||
| You know, John Locke had a... That's where I was trying to get you to go. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I was hoping you were going to say. | ||
| I think it's a point that people would agree on. | ||
| John Locke has this unenviable task. | ||
| He has to explain to the British people why the glorious revolution of 1688 was okay. | ||
| Why is it legitimate to overturn one monarch and bring in new ones like William and Mary? | ||
| And essentially said, you know, in the state of nature, all people have have rights. | ||
| They pre-exist government. | ||
| You know, you have the right to life and liberty and property. | ||
| Problem in the state of nature is you don't necessarily have security. | ||
| And so people band together with others to reciprocally protect their rights. | ||
| And that's the origin of government. | ||
| That's what government is for, to protect individual rights. | ||
| And if government should cease protecting individual rights, or worse, if government should trample upon those rights, | ||
| people have the obligation to first petition and complain. | ||
| But if the government continues a long train of abuses and usurpations, right, then they have the obligation to rise up and have a revolution and establish a government that does the job that government is supposed to do. | ||
| Yeah, and so it's interesting because he was writing about that at the same time he was also building the institutions that have given us so much freedom. | ||
| I mentioned right before we started, I mean, the Jefferson Memorial, which is a little off the beaten path, so people don't go to it as much as they go to the Washington Monument or the Lincoln Memorial or whatever else, but I was just there a few months ago and, you know, it's a circular Yeah. | ||
| and they have these giant plaques with some of his writing. | ||
| And it's like, man, this guy, his understanding of what freedom is, | ||
| what tolerance is, tolerance in the truest sense, his understanding, you know, he's writing about God, | ||
| but also at the same time talking about why we desperately need a separation of church and state. | ||
| He's writing about, as later in life, he was writing laws to help free the slaves | ||
| while he owned slaves. | ||
| I think all of those reasons are why he affected me so much, because it's like he was a complex man of his time, | ||
| really grappling with really hard issues, and wasn't a perfect human while doing it. | ||
| Yeah, he wasn't. | ||
| And-- | ||
| And I'm sure that will come up, but, you know, I think in some ways one of his most interesting monuments is the one he designed for himself, his gravestone. | ||
| And, you know, in the spring of the final year of his life, he designed it, you know, he wanted it to be an obelisk, and he wrote his epitaph, and he wanted it to read, you know, here was Barry Thomas Jefferson, author of the American Declaration of Independence, father of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, And father of the University of Virginia. | ||
| And it's amazing when you think about it, right? | ||
| I mean, think about what he didn't put on it, right? | ||
| He didn't mention that he was a member of the House of Burgesses, he didn't mention that he was a member of the Continental Congress, that he was a member of Congress under the Articles of Confederation, didn't mention that he was our Ambassador to France, our first Secretary of State, our second Vice President, our third President. | ||
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He mentions instead the Declaration. | |
| Well, it is, but think about what it means, right? | ||
| I mean, if he focuses on the Declaration, right, which gives us political freedom, and he focuses on the Virginia Statute for religious freedom, and the University of Virginia, I mean, you know, the body and the mind and the spirit, and I think what he was trying to tell us is that, as far as he was concerned, his greatness came not from the power that people gave to him, right, but from the power that he restored to people. | ||
| Yeah, I love that. | ||
| I mean, that sums it up right there. | ||
| This may sound like a sort of amateur question, but do we know how much work everyone was doing together on the Declaration of Independence, actually? | ||
| You know, it's probably fair to say that Jefferson writes 95% of the words that appear in the final text. | ||
| There were some changes that we know were made by John Adams. | ||
| For example, in Jefferson's, one of his early drafts, instead of writing, we hold these truths to be self-evident, he had it as sacred and undeniable. | ||
| You know, the text. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| What's the nature of the change there? | ||
| Because those don't sound too at odds with each other. | ||
| I don't think they're at odds with each other at all. | ||
| I think that in some ways the declaration I mean, this won't be a very satisfying answer for people, but I think that some changes in the Declaration were made because they sounded better. | ||
| And, you know, not to get too much... No, you've got to sell this thing, right? | ||
| Well, you do. | ||
| You do. | ||
| And, you know, so there was this late scholar at Stanford named Jay Flegelman, who wrote a | ||
| book called "Declaring Independence." | ||
| And he made this pretty cool discovery. | ||
| So there is an early engraving, a printing of the Declaration of Independence | ||
| that has all these strange punctuation marks littered through it. | ||
| And, you know, I've seen this thing, and for the longest time I thought, "What's up with this?" | ||
| And it turns out that Jefferson and his library had a book on rhetoric. | ||
| And it essentially said that there is this natural, like, human ear. | ||
| People hear things in a way that they find compelling, and there are certain rhythms, certain patterns, certain ways to emphasize words that helps make ideas more compelling. | ||
| And he suggested that when people wrote speeches or arguments, they should use a system of abbreviations and symbols to demonstrate, okay, here is where you pause, here is where you add emphasis, to take note of the rhythm. | ||
| And these symbols correspond to these strange punctuation marks that appear on this engraving. | ||
| In other words, it's as if Jefferson had an early draft of the Declaration that we've never seen because it was passed along to this printer. | ||
| And so why did Jefferson go with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness instead of the classic Lockean formulation of life, liberty, and property? | ||
| I think in part because it just has better flow. | ||
| So I wanted to ask you specifically about that line, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. | ||
| Okay, so life, we're here, okay. | ||
| Liberty, our freedom. | ||
| The pursuit of happiness is one of the most, to me, it's like the most incredible phrase you could possibly put in a founding document. | ||
| I think maybe only one other country, is there one other country that is pursuit of happiness? | ||
| Do you know? | ||
| I'm not sure, yeah. | ||
| I think one other country, and I'm blanking on who it is, has something to that effect. | ||
| But it's such an empowering statement to put in there, because it's really saying, it's on you people. | ||
| To be like, we'll protect your life, we'll protect your liberty, but pursuit of happiness, get going. | ||
| It's fascinating. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think the Declaration of Independence just deserves its reputation as this world historical document. | ||
| And it kind of sums up a philosophy of freedom. | ||
| I mean, just think about, you know, the sentence from which that quote is taken. | ||
| You know, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they're endowed by their creator, not the government, with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. | ||
| And then here's the part, the quote often ends there, but the sentence continues, that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers Yeah. | ||
| from the consent of the governed. | ||
| So there's kind of a twin test of legitimacy as far as governments are concerned. | ||
| First, they have to protect individual rights. | ||
| That's their goal, right? | ||
| But the means by which they achieve that goal, you know, need to be democratic. | ||
| There's so much there. | ||
| So let's unpack all of it. | ||
| So, endowed by their creator, was there any debate with them on whether that needed to be in there? | ||
| Because it would seem like they all basically, there was a belief in God, I think, by most of them, at least. | ||
| I don't know, were any of them? | ||
| Known to be atheists? | ||
| I don't think anyone was known to be atheists, but there was definitely a spectrum of belief. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But that phrase is interesting, because they purposely put that in there to say that you own something yourself before government, which is really interesting. | ||
| And yet at the same time, Jefferson especially was so clear about the separation between church and state, which is really kind of fascinating. | ||
| Well, I mean, the church is too important to be contaminated by the state, right? | ||
| I mean, you know, and the church, when you think about it... Was that really the view, or was it that he didn't want the church infecting... | ||
| I think it was both. | ||
| It was both. | ||
| It was absolutely both. | ||
| I mean, you know, what? | ||
| Absolute power corrupts absolutely? | ||
| When you think about the Dark Ages, right? | ||
| I mean, you have tremendous collusion between the Church and the government. | ||
| The King received his legitimacy from the Pope, right? | ||
| And in turn, the King would require everyone to support the Church. | ||
| And, you know, if you went against the state, you were going against God. | ||
| And when you went to your execution as punishment, There was not only a government executioner, but there was a priest standing next to him to tell you that you were gonna go to hell. | ||
| I mean, this is an incredibly powerful combination, and I think Jefferson was too powerful. | ||
| Yeah, and I think a lot of people don't really know that, because even for myself, and I'm pretty well-versed in this stuff, I'm watching The Crown on Netflix right now. | ||
| Yeah, sure, my wife and I are too. | ||
| Yeah, and I didn't realize how intertwined the monarchy was with the church. | ||
| I guess I should have known, but it really was. | ||
| And that was part of what they were trying to protect against. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And so, I mean, when Jefferson is thinking about, alright, a wonderful moment for reform. | ||
| We have declared our independence. | ||
| We have a blank slate. | ||
| And, you know, how can we make it so that we actually have a fighting chance of surviving as a self-governing people? | ||
| You know, getting these institutional arrangements right, it's really important. | ||
| And, you know, it wasn't an easy sell for Jefferson and James Madison, who was his indispensable partner in this effort. | ||
| To get Virginia to disestablish the Anglican or the Episcopal Church as a state church. | ||
| In part because some people said, and you can sort of see their point, hey this is a dicey experiment we've endeavored on. | ||
| And if we're going to survive as a nation of free and responsible people, or a state of free and responsible people, don't we need to be moral? | ||
| Don't we need to have a basic understanding of how we should treat each other? | ||
| That we should deal honestly with each other, that we shouldn't steal from one another. | ||
| Isn't religion a good means to impart those beliefs to the people? | ||
| But, you know, Jefferson and Madison, their belief instead was that actually if you had a free marketplace of religion, then people would really be able to flourish in their beliefs. | ||
| And you get the sense that that's really what happened. | ||
| Virginia's the first state in 1786, I think it's 1832 or 1833 that Massachusetts is the last to disestablish its church. | ||
| But there's a great awakening going on during this time. | ||
| And you see a great deal of religious innovation and enthusiasm. | ||
| Do we know anything else specifically about his religious beliefs or where he sort of was on that spectrum? | ||
| So Jefferson, and you have to listen carefully to the words, Jefferson once wrote in a letter to a friend of his named Benjamin Rush that he was a Christian. | ||
| That's a word that he used to describe himself. | ||
| But then he qualified it in that he was a follower of the philosophies of Jesus, whom he considered to be the greatest man who ever lived, who he believed had every human excellence and never claimed anything else. | ||
| In other words, Jefferson called himself a Christian because he accepted Jesus' principles, his philosophies, his teachings, but he denied the divinity of Jesus. | ||
| So I think by most standard definitions of Christianity, he wouldn't be included within that circle. | ||
| We'd call him a deist. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Somebody who believed in God but thought that essentially he created the world, he created the universe, and kind of left man up to his own devices. | ||
| Do we know anything else about his sort of internal thoughts just in the days or weeks leading up to finally, you know, presenting the Declaration of Independence? | ||
| Like, was he having any worries? | ||
| Was he going, man, we might be biting off a little more than we can chew here. | ||
| Was there any concern? | ||
| Yeah, you know, he rented this apartment not far from Independence Hall called the Graff House. | ||
| And, you know, he had a couple of rooms on the second floor and he had this sort of, you know, 18th century laptop. | ||
| It was this lap desk, you know, that held his parchment and his ink and his quill. | ||
| Was that like his desk that he had at Monticello? | ||
| Because he's got that really cool desk that he invented himself, didn't he? | ||
| Yeah, well, he has a book, a revolving book stand at Monticello. | ||
| It's similar, right? | ||
| I mean, the same sort of thing. | ||
| And, you know, he's using this traveling desk to write out ideas that he and others have basically internalized. | ||
| He's not referring, he says he's not referring to any, like, text. | ||
| He doesn't have a whole lot of books with him. | ||
| And he's not even really trying to lay down any principles or any ideas that people didn't already agree upon. | ||
| For him, he said the declaration was supposed to be an expression of the American mind, right? | ||
| It was supposed to be a statement of consensus that would bring people together | ||
| around the cause of independence. | ||
| All right, so we declare independence. | ||
| What's it like the next day? | ||
| Do we have any idea what happened the day after? | ||
| What was he doing? | ||
| Yeah, well, I mean, what was Jefferson doing? | ||
| Jefferson continued on for a while as a member of the Continental Congress, but I think that he and his great partner in the enterprise of independence, John Adams, I think both of them shared the sense that now that independence is achieved, the important work is elsewhere. | ||
| The important work is not in Philadelphia. | ||
| The important work is in Williamsburg. | ||
| The important work is in Boston. | ||
| It's in the capitals of these 13 new United States where we have the opportunity to come up with new constitutions and reform the laws and essentially purge ourselves of monarchy and become this nation of 13 real republics. | ||
| Yeah, so what was actually his first job in government then after that? | ||
| So we went back to Virginia. | ||
| He was a member of the legislature. | ||
| He soon thereafter became the governor of Virginia. | ||
| He served two terms. | ||
| He looked at reforming the laws. | ||
| Some of his reforms were successful. | ||
| Others were unsuccessful. | ||
| You know, Jefferson did not have a great win-loss record as far as his legal proposals were concerned. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| The first bill that he co-sponsored as a member of the House of Burgesses, you know, in 1769, was a bill that would have made it legal for Virginians to voluntarily free their slaves. | ||
| And that measure was voted down, and Jefferson and his partner in that enterprise were sort of shouted down as enemies of, you know, the colony. | ||
| Yeah, do you know roughly what year that was? | ||
| That was in 1769. | ||
| Okay, 1769. | ||
| So let's talk about his feelings about slavery and everything else. | ||
| When I've talked about this on the show, I say that, as I said to you earlier, he was a complex man of his time. | ||
| He owned slaves while he was writing the laws to free slaves. | ||
| They address at Monticello that he probably had relations with at least one slave, possibly. | ||
| Is that cleaner? | ||
| Do we know anything specifically? | ||
| I don't think anyone, so the woman's name is Sally Hemings, and it appears, you know, it's not 100% slam dunk, but the evidence adds up to the strong probability that Jefferson and Sally Hemings, who was his late wife's half-sister, had a multi-decade monogamous relationship that yielded a number of children. | ||
| So, I mean, just in that description, there's a lot to unpack. | ||
| I mean, she was the half-sister of his late wife. | ||
| I mean, you know, Virginia family trees were oftentimes tangled vines. | ||
| And, you know, Jefferson's father-in-law was the father of this enslaved woman, Sally Hemings. | ||
| And when Jefferson's wife passed away, you know, according to family accounts, on her deathbed, she made Jefferson promise that he would never remarry. | ||
| In part because her mother had passed away and her father remarried and it seems as if she, you know, never really felt as if she was regarded in the same way as her new stepsisters and she didn't want that to happen to her own daughters. | ||
| So Jefferson made this promise and a couple years later he's in France with his daughters and he sends for the youngest of his daughter to join them in Virginia, join them in France from Virginia. | ||
| And he by name requested this elderly African American woman to accompany his youngest daughter, but she was sick. | ||
| So his family back in Virginia instead sent Sally Hemings to serve as a babysitter. | ||
| So, you know, after her arrival at some point, maybe in France, probably in France, | ||
| their relationship began. | ||
| And, you know, here's this woman who probably resembles Jefferson's wife. | ||
| Sally Hemings is three quarters white. | ||
| She is, you know, from home, right? | ||
| She represents family. | ||
| She represents Virginia. | ||
| But she's also this rare thing. | ||
| She's a young Virginian who's with him in Paris, this incredible metropolis. | ||
| There aren't many white women in Virginia who have seen what Sally Hemings has seen, who speak some French, who've experienced this important part of his life with him. | ||
| And so, and he can't legally marry her, right? | ||
| He can't violate his wife's promise with Sally Hemings because by law, you know, she could never become his wife. | ||
| God, there's so much there. | ||
| All right, so obviously we're gonna sort of bounce in and out of the slavery discussion there. | ||
| But so France, was he the ambassador at the time? | ||
| Is that? | ||
| Yeah, he was, I think so. | ||
| I mean, so he went over there initially, he was Benjamin Franklin's understudy. | ||
| And then when Benjamin Franklin left France, Jefferson was elevated to serve as our ambassador. | ||
| They had this weird term for it back then. | ||
| He was our minister plenipotentiary. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, fancy title. | ||
| That is very fancy. | ||
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I know. | |
| That is very fancy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So give me just the line from working in the legislature in Virginia to then becoming president, just so we get that sort of piece out. | ||
| So, you know, he is the governor of Virginia. | ||
| He then agrees to serve as one of Virginia's representatives in Congress under the Articles of Confederation. | ||
| It's at this point in 1784 that Jefferson proposes a law, the Ordinance of 1784, that is going to regulate all this territory that has been recognized as part of the United States as a result of the Treaty of Paris, which ends the War for Independence. | ||
| So all this territory from the Great Lakes down to the Gulf of Mexico, between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River, is now part of the United States. | ||
| And one of Jefferson's proposals is that slavery should not be allowed in any of this territory. | ||
| And I mean, what an amazing proposal when you think about it. | ||
| Because had it passed, the future states of Kentucky and Tennessee and Alabama and Mississippi and presumably Louisiana and Missouri and Texas, right, would not have been slave states. | ||
| and it fails by just one vote. | ||
| Now again, at that time, he owned slaves. | ||
| He did. | ||
| And this is why I think it's so interesting in how we're all just people of our time. | ||
| Do we know anything about his inner thinking about that? | ||
| Like, I think there's a certain amount of people, and I've talked about this with people, | ||
| that'll say, well, why didn't he just free his slaves then? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, why didn't he just let them go? | ||
| If he really felt that abolition was the way to go. | ||
| For a while it wasn't something that was legally doable. | ||
| Again, as a result of the failure of that first public act, the act to allow for the voluntary emancipation. | ||
| So for a while he legally couldn't free them. | ||
| And then by the time it was legal for Jefferson to free them, you could make the argument that technically he didn't even really own them. | ||
| Jefferson inherited from his late father-in-law not only a large number of | ||
| enslaved people including Sally Hemings right in her family but also a | ||
| tremendous amount of debt and you know that debt essentially just snowballed | ||
| over the course of his life. He also co-signed a loan with the governor of | ||
| Virginia who passed away. | ||
| So then Jefferson was on the hook for about $20,000 of debt. | ||
| He was also, let's be fair, he was a high roller. | ||
| I mean, you know, the largest library in the Western Hemisphere doesn't come cheap. | ||
| And, you know, he liked his furniture and his art and his wine. | ||
| And by the time Jefferson died, he was, I think, about $105,000 in debt. | ||
| which in today's money is between like one and two million dollars. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| Right. | ||
| And so his slaves really were owned by his creditors. | ||
| And I don't mean to say that to get him off the hook, but I think it's important to realize too that Jefferson | ||
| and the issue of slavery are never going to be the only issue that he's trying to | ||
| tackle. | ||
| And when you get past the 1780s, and to go back to the trajectory of his life, after he's done in France, he's summoned by Washington to come back to the nation's capital and serve as our first Secretary of State. | ||
| And we know that in the 1790s, you know, Jefferson is very quickly going to get embroiled in disagreements with, you know, his colleague, Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton. | ||
| And Jefferson essentially views the Constitution in a In a specific sort of way, he thinks that if the Constitution, you know, gives the national government a specific power, then it has that power. | ||
| But, you know, if it doesn't specifically receive that power in the text of the Constitution, he thinks that, you know, the power should remain in the hands of the states or the people. | ||
| And Hamilton clearly has a different vision. | ||
| Yeah, so in our lens of 2018, he really was a constitutional conservative, right? | ||
| He really believed if it's in that text, that's the power that's delineated, but nothing else. | ||
| Hamilton felt you can sort of extrapolate some ideas out of it. | ||
| Hamilton thought that, you know, if something could be deemed necessary and proper. | ||
| And Hamilton, you know, has a point, too, because remember, the Constitution, it wasn't created to make the government weaker, right? | ||
| I mean, it was a victory for nationalists and centralizers relative to the Articles of Confederation. | ||
| And Jefferson was part of that. | ||
| I mean, he wanted this new Constitution to be ratified, as did James Madison, his chief political ally in the 1790s. | ||
| But they thought that Hamilton was taking it too far, and that if this Constitution was going to mean anything, it had to mean what it actually said. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so this struggle, right, between Jefferson and Hamilton is in some ways regionalized. | ||
| And Hamilton's supporters are chiefly in the North, and Jefferson's supporters are chiefly in the South. | ||
| And, you know, I don't think it's a surprise that once you get into the 1790s, by and large, Jefferson's actions against the institution of slavery begin to get muted. | ||
| Right, because he needs to win this battle to preserve the liberty of the new United States. | ||
| And he really thinks that's what's at stake. | ||
| He thinks that Hamilton is essentially this crypto-monarchist. | ||
| Right, that slowly he's going to just expand the government. | ||
| That he's a counter-revolutionary. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right? | |
| I mean, if we're going to preserve the liberty of white Americans, That we can't then rock the boat on the issue of slavery and undermine, right, this coalition that he and Madison have created, which has its basis in the American South. | ||
| So, I mean, it's a difficult compromise. | ||
| Yeah, was that the only thing that they really butted heads on, or was it like, was it really a broader? | ||
| Jefferson and Hamilton? | ||
| Yeah, or it sounds like it probably had a lot. | ||
| I think, you know, so, I mean, to carry the story forward a little bit more, You know, one of the things that they could agree upon was that George Washington was really indispensable to this bold experiment with this new republic, right? | ||
| Everybody in America respected George Washington. | ||
| I mean, it's really not an exaggeration to say that. | ||
| I don't even feel the need to qualify it. | ||
| I mean, I just was at Mount Vernon. | ||
| The war ended and he was like, guys, I'm done. | ||
| Which is incredible. | ||
| I mean, because again, the greatest achievement of Washington is not that he had power, right? | ||
| It's that he gave it up. | ||
| And he gave it up twice. | ||
| He gave it up at the end of the war for independence and he would end up giving it up after serving two terms as president. | ||
| Yeah, people don't know that actually, that he didn't have to, he could've run again, there weren't any laws about that. | ||
| Because presidents were perpetually re-electable, but think about it, if Washington had run for a third term, he certainly would've been elected, and the precedent that he would've established, right, instead of the president stepping down after two terms, he would've established the precedent that the president dies in office, because Washington died in December of 1799. | ||
| So anyway, the fact that Washington's out of the picture In a way, you know, lays bare to America the emergence of what essentially would become these two political parties. | ||
| And they're not like modern parties, but they're clear alliances. | ||
| You've got the Federalists of Hamilton's side. | ||
| You've got the Jeffersonian Republicans. | ||
| And in the election of 1796, Jefferson and John Adams are put forth as the two candidates. | ||
| It's a close election. | ||
| It's a heated election. | ||
| It's a down and dirty election. | ||
| I mean, people say terrible things. | ||
| Yeah, like what kind of stuff? | ||
| I've tried to ask this. | ||
| Yeah, well, I mean, you know. | ||
| Because everyone says everything's always worse now because of Twitter, but they were saying some pretty rough stuff about it. | ||
| They were saying some really rough stuff. | ||
| You know, I think one of the famous, one of my favorite people to emerge in the past year, really like in a big way, is the NYU social scientist, John Haidt. | ||
| We've had him on this show. | ||
| I've seen the interview. | ||
| He's doing great work. | ||
| I really admire what he's doing because he's looking at how polarized we have become. | ||
| And he's laid out a few different explanations for why that is. | ||
| And one of the things that he points to is the press, the media, is becoming increasingly partisan. | ||
| And we're losing kind of the notion of journalistic even-handedness and objectivity that maybe during the middle of the 20th century was born. | ||
| So we have Fox, we have MSNBC. | ||
| That was all you had. | ||
| There was no media objectivity. | ||
| A newspaper was either Federalist or it was Republican. | ||
| There was no attempt to be even-handed. | ||
| And newspapers didn't even really have much news. | ||
| You know, there might be hearsay that was reported, but essentially they were ads and op-eds. | ||
| And if you subscribe to a Jeversonian newspaper, the Gazette of the United States was a Federalist newspaper. | ||
| Everything in it would be pro-Federalist, anti-Jeversonian. | ||
| The National Gazette was the Jeversonian newspaper. | ||
| Everything in it, you know, was pro-Jeverson, pro-Republican, against Hamilton and against the Federalists. | ||
| So really controlling the papers in a lot of ways was more important than Controlling the politicians, because that was the only way you could get the politicians elected. | ||
| Sure, although I think you could make the argument that the politicians had a great deal of control and influence over the papers. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| You know, they were funding them. | ||
| They were sometimes with government money. | ||
| You know, so Hamilton gave, you know, Treasury Department printing contracts to John Fennow, who was the editor of the Gazette of the United States. | ||
| And Thomas Jefferson gave a job in the State Department as a translator to Philip Freneau, who was the editor of the National Gazette. | ||
| So in a way, you know, both of these figures are subsidizing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Now people can just buy ambassadorships to countries that nobody goes to. | ||
| So one other thing before we get to his presidency specifically, you've mentioned the Republicans and the Federalists. | ||
| I think I have a sense of what the real differences were, because you've sort of laid it out with Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, well, this gets back to a point that John Haidt makes, right? | ||
| So another thing that he says exacerbates our current state of polarization is that ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, we don't really have a common agreed upon enemy. | ||
| In the 1790s, the Federalists and the Republicans, they couldn't agree upon an enemy either, right? | ||
| For the Federalists, the enemy was Revolutionary France. | ||
| And for the Republicans, the enemy was Great Britain, right? | ||
| Their old enemy from the War for Independence. | ||
| And so, you know, there's this belief that if Jefferson gets elected, America is going to endure its own reign of terror and that he is a French Jacobin and a radical. | ||
| The president of Yale, you know, academia didn't, I don't know if it ever had a golden age, but it was certainly, it was hyper-partisan back then as well. | ||
| So, the president of Yale at the time, Timothy Dwight, Said that if Jefferson got elected, if Republicans should take power, our children will be wheedled or terrified into singing heretical hymns. | ||
| The Bible will be cast into a bonfire, right? | ||
| And all of our wives and daughters will be made victims of legal prostitution, right? | ||
| Wow, I mean, when you really think about what you know about Jefferson, though, that's so incredible because, again, he didn't have a specific issue with religion. | ||
| He was just saying we wanted a separation. | ||
| That's incredible, the way they could twist that. | ||
| Well, and in a way, I mean, the hyper-partisanship of the 1790s and the heavy breathing and the hysteria, right, that was fanned by Federalist newspapers against Thomas Jefferson, in a way that performed a great service for him. | ||
| Because when he finally did win in the election of 1800, He had a pretty low bar. | ||
| All he had to do was not cast the Bible into a bonfire, not wheedle the children into singing heretical hymns. | ||
| That's funny. | ||
| That to me sounds like kind of where we're at with truth in a modern sense. | ||
| It's like you guys keep screaming he's Hitler, and then every time he doesn't do Hitler things, he starts looking pretty good. | ||
| I think that's something to consider, absolutely. | ||
| All right, so the election of 1800 is a really interesting little footnote of history. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| Well, there's a tie, essentially. | ||
| John Adams loses. | ||
| You know, that much is clear. | ||
| But Thomas Jefferson and his running mate, New Yorker Aaron Burr, receive an equal number of electoral votes. | ||
| And, you know, one thing to take note of is the Constitution was written before parties existed and parties weren't really anticipated. | ||
| In fact, most people thought that it would be difficult to identify a person for president, that every state would be putting forward their own favorite son. | ||
| And so to essentially have a filtering mechanism that would bring forward people of truly national character, the states were required to vote for at least one person who wasn't a native of that state. | ||
| That's why the electors have two votes. | ||
| Yeah, interesting. | ||
| And so, you know, Jefferson's on this ticket with Aaron Burr. | ||
| The way it's supposed to happen is the Republicans, you know, should be coordinated enough so that somebody is designated to toss away his vote for Aaron Burr and instead vote for someone else, vote for George Washington or whomever, right? | ||
| Right, didn't matter, right? | ||
| Yeah, Daffy Duck. | ||
| But instead, they're so disciplined that they all vote for the two people they're pledged to vote for. | ||
| And the result is a tie. | ||
| And that means that the House of Representatives gets to decide who will be the next president. | ||
| The problem is, the House of Representatives that is seated at the time is the House of Representatives that was elected in 1798. | ||
| So the House of Representatives is controlled by the Federalist Party. | ||
| So the Federalists have to choose. | ||
| Which Jeffersonian do we least, you know, want? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, or who maybe can we manipulate more, or whatever it is. | |
| And so Aaron Burr, you know, did not make it clear that he understood that his role was to be vice president. | ||
| And he did not make it clear that if he was selected, he would not serve. | ||
| And there was a movement among many Federalists, who of course, right, all throughout the 1790s, it was, you know, bad thing after bad thing after bad thing being said about Thomas Jefferson. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Uh huh. | |
| When you say he didn't make it clear, meaning, did he suddenly feel that he should be the one? | ||
| Aaron Burr, you know what, if we support him, maybe he could be our guy, right? | ||
| He'll owe us. | ||
| When you say he didn't make it clear, meaning did he suddenly feel that he should be the one? | ||
| Like really, was that? | ||
| Well, I think Aaron Burr thought that the rules, you know, in his defense, the rules of the Constitution | ||
| were the rules of the Constitution. | ||
| And if the decision was up to the House of Representatives, then it wasn't right for him to step forward and try to intervene. | ||
| You know, I mean, I think that's a fair enough thing to say. | ||
| But by the same token, everybody understood that when people cast their ballots, Aaron Burr was intended to be the Vice President. | ||
| That this was an election between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. | ||
| But now, the election of 1800 was over. | ||
| It was the election of 1801. | ||
| And throughout February, there's tie vote after tie vote, split decision after split decision, in part because members of Congress are not voting as individuals, but they're voting as state delegations. | ||
| So each state delegation gets one vote, and that gives actually tremendous power to the state of Delaware's congressman, because he is a one-man delegation. | ||
| His name is James Baird. | ||
| And this is where it's like, you can't make a better ending to a movie, all right? | ||
| Who should swoop in and try to, you know, tilt things so that the winner of this contest is Thomas Jefferson, who's Alexander Hamilton? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Wow. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, so Jefferson's arch enemy. | |
| His ideological enemy, yeah. | ||
| Alexander Hamilton writes to a number of members of Congress, including James Baird of Delaware. | ||
| And essentially his argument is this. | ||
| If we support Burr, we're gonna own Burr, and we're gonna be held responsible | ||
| for all the mistakes that Burr makes. | ||
| Whether we could control him or not, all right? | ||
| But if we support Jefferson, our hands will remain without stain. | ||
| And he said one thing else, one thing more. | ||
| He said that Burr was a man, well, he said Jefferson was a man | ||
| who had principles with which he disagreed. | ||
| Burr was a man who had no principles whatsoever. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's powerful stuff. | ||
| It's powerful, but Jefferson owed his presidency, essentially, to the intervention of Alexander Hamilton. | ||
| So let's talk about the presidency a little bit, because for as much as I love the guy, I don't think a lot of people know that much about the presidency itself. | ||
| It's more about the founding and sort of everything else. | ||
| We've been talking about. | ||
| What do we need to know about his presidency? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I would say this, I would say that... So the presidency started late then, right? | |
| Am I understanding this correctly? | ||
| Because the votes went into February? | ||
| It didn't actually because, you know, it was during the administration of Franklin Roosevelt that the Constitution changed the inaugural date. | ||
| Traditionally, the 4th of March was when the President got inaugurated. | ||
| In just the nick of time, Jefferson was selected. | ||
| The 4th of March, 1801, Jefferson stood in front of the House and the Senate, and he read his inaugural address. | ||
| You know, I mean, it's kind of a remarkable inaugural address. | ||
| The line that most people focus on was one that sounded very soothing and conciliatory. | ||
| Jefferson said, you know, we're all Federalists, we're all Republicans. | ||
| I think really what he meant was we all believe in federalism and we all believe that we should be a republic. | ||
| But that statement was a statement about unity and how we really should come together. | ||
| But for me, one of the most notable quotes of the speech is where Jefferson, he summed up all the great advantages that America enjoyed. | ||
| You know, we have a great people, we have a large quantity of land, amazing resources. | ||
| And he asked, you know, what remains to close the circle of our felicities? | ||
| And he said, one thing more, my fellow citizens, a wise and frugal government Which will restrain men from injuring one another, but will otherwise leave men free to their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and will not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. | ||
| This, he said, is the sum of good government. | ||
| So, I mean, Jefferson is really the only... That's pretty good. | ||
| There's a lot of good stuff in there. | ||
| He's the last president to promise to do less than his predecessor. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So, in effect, he was saying, we will not grow the federal government. | ||
| If you earn it, you keep it, and we're going to keep you safe. | ||
| But that's pretty much it. | ||
| I mean, it's a beautiful thing. | ||
| I mean, it's really consistent with what he wrote and what the Continental Congress ratified in the Declaration of Independence. | ||
| I mean, if the purpose of government is to protect individual rights, that adds up to, it's to stop people from injuring one another. | ||
| And to otherwise leave them alone. | ||
| Now, in practice, I have to say. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I was gonna get to. | ||
| Now let's talk about what happened once, you know, day two. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Well, you know, in some ways there's a lot of success. | ||
| Jefferson repeals all internal taxes. | ||
| So one of the big controversies of the 1790s was Hamilton, as Secretary of the Treasury, called for and succeeded in levying a whiskey tax, which, you know, led to this uprising in Central and Western Pennsylvania in the middle of the 1790s. | ||
| So Jefferson, he realized, among other things, that these taxes were really expensive to collect. | ||
| And he questioned Hamilton's motives. | ||
| He thought that Hamilton, in a way, was looking to employ tax collectors and establish a network of supporters and also, you know, to bring people in more remote parts of the United States, sort of under the boot of the federal government, to make them feel the power and to develop habits of obedience to the federal government. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| So he thought by taxing whiskey, In Pennsylvania, you could get the people that are a little more West to go, man, that thing's powerful, we gotta watch out. | ||
| Well, whiskey essentially for them was their substitute for hard currency. | ||
| You know, a lot of them grew corn and other oats that could be turned into whiskey. | ||
| It's not that they all consumed the whiskey, but they could barter with it, right? | ||
| I mean, there's a lot of corn in a bottle of whiskey. | ||
| And the bottle of whiskey is not going to rot over time. | ||
| It's going to get better with age. | ||
| So it's a really good form of alternative currency. | ||
| But to pay this tax, you're supposed to pay in hard money, which they didn't have. | ||
| And if you didn't pay, you had to go to court in Philadelphia, which could take you away from your farm for months at a time. | ||
| I mean, there was a lot that was wrong with this legislation. | ||
| Was that also partly Hamilton just trying to stick it to Jefferson? | ||
| It's like, we know Jefferson doesn't want the federal government to grow, we know he doesn't wanna raise taxes, so we're gonna try to jam this thing through. | ||
| I think it was Hamilton's way of spreading out the burden of funding the federal government. | ||
| I mean, Hamilton envisioned a federal government that would take on all sorts of responsibilities that weren't explicitly delegated to it in the Constitution. | ||
| And one of those was assuming the revolutionary war debts of the states. | ||
| So the states owed a lot of money during the revolution. | ||
| They owed some money to foreign creditors, but the bulk of it they owe to their own soldiers, right? | ||
| You wouldn't receive actual payment, you know, if you were a soldier fighting for say, Massachusetts. | ||
| Instead you would receive an IOU, a bond note, and the problem was your family couldn't eat that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They needed real money. | ||
| And so there were investors who would, you know, buy those for pennies on the dollar because who knows if this promise, which wouldn't come true for another 10 years, who knows if that government that made that promise would even exist in 10 years. | ||
| We could lose the revolution. | ||
| And who knows that the face value would really be all that meaningful given the high level of inflation that was taking place during the revolution. | ||
| So people stuck their necks out, they took some risks, and they bought up the stuff at pennies on the dollar. | ||
| And then, you know, those investors tended to bundle together these promissory notes and sell them to even larger, more important investors. | ||
| And I think what Hamilton was on to was the fact that if The states owed this money to those powerful investors. | ||
| Those powerful investors would have sort of a real interest in seeing the financial success of those states. | ||
| But if instead the new national government assumed those debts, And owed that money to these rich and important people that these rich and important people these powerful people would have a vested interest in seeing the national government have a more robust capacity to tax. | ||
| Think about that. | ||
| I mean, Hamilton's a ninja, right? | ||
| He comes up with a scheme that makes it in the interest of the most well-off people in America to see higher taxes. | ||
| But wouldn't it be even better if those taxes were dispersed and not imposed upon the people who lived along the coastline through tariffs and things, but instead through these excise taxes like the one on whiskey? | ||
| So Hamilton and Jefferson basically must have been at loggerheads the entire time, right? | ||
| Yeah, I mean there's one description where Jefferson writes that they were like two cocks about to fight, right? | ||
| This was really a tense time and a difficult moment. | ||
| But that's all behind us in 1801. | ||
| And, you know, Jefferson is going to slim down the federal government. | ||
| He's going to slash the federal workforce, in part because he repeals these taxes and he could let go of all these tax collectors. | ||
| You know, it's so funny to think back on this. | ||
| It's like he was the third president of the United States and he was talking about slimming down the government then. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He was. | |
| Like people talk about it now, like, you know, cut some government, you know, cut some pork, cut some regulators, cut some whatever. | ||
| The awesome thing is it's not just talk. | ||
| I mean, during the course of Jefferson's presidency, a presidency where we have a really big splurge, by the way, you know, when we decide to, for $15 million, double the size of the United States by purchasing Louisiana, even with the purchase of Louisiana during the course of Jefferson's presidency, he pays down one third of the national debt. | ||
| That's a significant achievement. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What else do we need to know about his presidency? | ||
| Well, you know, maybe like a lot of presidents, the first term seems really good. | ||
| The second term, maybe not so much. | ||
| I mean, one of the things that Jefferson thought Louisiana might do, right, is provide us with a land moat that, like the Atlantic Ocean, would insulate us from the problems of Europe. | ||
| I think it's fundamentally unfair to say that Jefferson wanted us to be more like France. | ||
| I think Jefferson wanted us to be as removed from the problems of Europe as possible. | ||
| In fact, he wrote that if France is able to maintain possession of Louisiana, You know, this vast territory immediately to our west, it will become our natural and habitual enemy. | ||
| And the United States will have to marry itself to the British fleet. | ||
| So buying Louisiana in a way helps America to maintain its diplomatic neutrality and avoid, you know, the problems of European warfare. | ||
| And remember, of course, if France is in Louisiana to our west, Britain is still in Canada to our north. | ||
| And those two nations being at war, it's almost like a law of physics, you know, during this time period. | ||
| What was the sell job for the Louisiana Purchase like? | ||
| You know, it's interesting because it wasn't a tough sell at all. | ||
| You know, the news arrived in the United States that this treaty had been negotiated by James Monroe and by Robert Livingston, you know, with Napoleon in France. | ||
| The news arrived on July 4th, 1803. | ||
| So, great timing, right? | ||
| And that we could double the size of our country without firing a single shot. | ||
| And we're a nation that we double in population every 20 years. | ||
| So, I mean, this really provides the United States with some breathing room, with some room to grow. | ||
| And it really seems to solve a lot of problems. | ||
| There's a problem that people aren't talking about, but that Jefferson's thinking about, that I think is really revealing and really instructive. | ||
| And it brings us maybe to another moment where Jefferson compromises. | ||
| You know, Jefferson the strict constructionist? | ||
| Where in the Constitution does the national government have the power to acquire new territory? | ||
| Yeah, I was actually gonna get there. | ||
| You know, I mean, it's not there. | ||
| And Jefferson, you know, his first impulse is to do what a strict constructionist would do if he wanted, you know, to have more power under the Constitution. | ||
| He drafted a constitutional amendment that would have explicitly authorized the purchase of Louisiana. | ||
| So he was going to try to do it the right way. | ||
| The right way, so to speak, yeah. | ||
| He was going to try, but, you know, almost like one of those, remember the cartoons like Tom and Jerry and, you know, they'd be like, whenever anyone has an ethical dilemma, a little cartoon angel, or a little cartoon devil, right? | ||
| Well, the cartoon devil over Jefferson's shoulder was James Madison. | ||
| And on the other shoulder, there's another cartoon devil named Albert Gallatin, his Treasury Secretary. | ||
| They urged him, they said, look, this is just, you're playing with fire here. | ||
| And this deal is almost too good to be true. | ||
| If we send this out, this amendment, out for ratification, what if we don't get the three quarters of states necessary? | ||
| What if it takes too long? | ||
| What if Napoleon gets cold feet? | ||
| What if he pulls out of the deal? | ||
| And they said, just let the Senate approve the treaty, let the House of Representatives appropriate the funds, and just sign this, just make this happen. | ||
| And did he just, he just accepted that recommendation from them? | ||
| He did. | ||
| I mean, you know, there was a risk that he understood. | ||
| And essentially asserting that this was an implied power of the Constitution. | ||
| Right, because I would imagine his base at the time that probably really loved him for all the reasons that we're talking about here, they might have been kind of pissed, like, wait a minute, wait a minute, aren't you the guy that's not supposed to expand power? | ||
| Sadly, Dave, I think you're giving too much credit to people, right? | ||
| I mean, this is maybe an early illustration of the fact that, you know what, when your guy is in power, maybe you're not so good about making sure that he follows all the rules. | ||
| And if you liked the proposal, if you like the public policy that he's pursuing, in this case doubling the size of the country peacefully, then you're not going to be too critical about how it's accomplished. | ||
| Right, which is what we see now every day, every political issue out there. | ||
| Any other major accomplishments in the second term? | ||
| Well, you know, I mean, there are accomplishments throughout, but I think the major controversy in the second term deals with the fact that for all the benefits that came to the United States through the purchase of Louisiana, sadly, one of them wasn't insulating us from the problems of Europe. | ||
| And, you know, Britain and France continued to be at war, and they were harassing our ships on the high seas. | ||
| And, you know, the British especially were, you know, threatening our commercial vessels as well as our naval vessels. | ||
| And, you know, more and more people were clamoring for war. | ||
| And Jefferson and Madison, too, they weren't pacifists, but they understood that it was a really rare war that made a country more free. | ||
| And Madison even wrote in 1791 that of all the enemies of true liberty, war is the most to be feared because it sows all these seeds that compromise liberty. | ||
| Compromises to civil liberties, debts, taxes, standing armies. | ||
| And that's if you win, right? | ||
| So Jefferson wants to try to avoid a war with Britain or with France And he comes up with the idea of having a general trade embargo. | ||
| So we're not going to put our ships out at risk. | ||
| We're not going to allow our commercial vessels to trade with the rest of the world. | ||
| We're going to keep them home, safe in our own ports. | ||
| We'll produce for ourselves. | ||
| We'll manufacture for ourselves. | ||
| And this will provide us with diplomatic leverage. | ||
| that is going to bring Great Britain and France to their knees. | ||
| As Paine once wrote, "Europe will need America "as long as Europe needs to eat." | ||
| And indeed, bread prices rose, but it did not have the immediate effect | ||
| that Jefferson hoped for. | ||
| Yeah, so how did his presidency end, basically? | ||
| You know, I mean, I think it ends in a mixed way. | ||
| The embargo stretches from 1807 to 1809. | ||
| One of Jefferson's last acts is signing the bill that repeals it. | ||
| Madison is going to institute sort of a watered-down embargo, a series of laws called the Non-Intercourse Acts. | ||
| But the fact that this embargo, as Onerous and unpopular as it is in certain parts of America and it's popular. | ||
| It's unpopular everywhere. | ||
| I mean, you know, uh, Salem, Massachusetts was the second most important port in Massachusetts, you know, second only to Boston. | ||
| Um, it was one of America's largest cities at the time. | ||
| And there are all these dock workers, all these sailors who are out of work, their soup kitchens, their bread lines. | ||
| And then the South, right, where you have large farms or plantations that are producing agriculture for export, their produce is sitting in warehouses rotting. | ||
| And yet, despite all that, Jefferson and Madison retain enough support so that Madison, in the election of 1808, Jefferson's hand-picked successor, is going to handily defeat his Federalist opponent. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So the later years, after the presidency, in terms of public life, what was he doing? | ||
| I mean, I think Jefferson helps to establish the precedent that retired presidents kind of keep their nose down and don't interfere in the news. | ||
| He really had a great friend in the new president, James Madison. | ||
| And in terms of their private correspondence, they're still, you know, communicating with one another. | ||
| Madison will sometimes ask for advice. | ||
| Jefferson will sometimes, you know, respond to those requests by giving it. | ||
| But by and large, Jefferson is going to turn his attention to new projects. | ||
| And perhaps, you know, this is what you think about as you get on in years and become retired. | ||
| You start thinking about the future and the future isn't you, right? | ||
| The future is the next generation. | ||
| And so Jefferson is going to devote the waning years of his life to the creation of a new university, one that he hopes will be better than the old College of William & Mary. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And Monticello's only what? | ||
| that will provide a temptation to the use of other states to come and drink of the cup of knowledge with us. | ||
| It's a great quote. | ||
| And that's the University of Virginia, which is established in 1819 by the state legislature. | ||
| And Monticello's only what? | ||
| It's five miles away. | ||
| So right there. | ||
| Monticello, he was building that throughout his presidency or when did that actually start? | ||
| Monticello is one of those projects that never ends. | ||
| All these guys had that project, right? | ||
| They always had these things that it was like over the course of 40 years it was still being built. | ||
| I suppose that's true. | ||
| People sometimes refer to Monticello 1 and Monticello 2. | ||
| Right around the time that Jefferson got married, they began the process of building Monticello 1. | ||
| The drawings, the designs, his designs. | ||
| He designed it, right? | ||
| He designed it, right? | ||
| But then, you know, he always learned. | ||
| He spent his lifetime learning and he came up with new ideas and better ideas and he revised his plans. | ||
| So they ended up having to pull down part of what had already been built and then reconstructing some and, you know, building more. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So by this point, I think it's fair to say that the house itself, the walls are all there, right? | ||
| And the interior work maybe is mostly done. | ||
| But, you know, the work on this, you know, plantation, Monticello, it continues. | ||
| I mean, it continues not just for Thomas Jefferson, but of course, right, for his enslaved workforce. | ||
| And the issue of slavery is one that by the time he reaches retirement, It's really sad, right? | ||
| I mean, here's a guy who always has a plan, who always seems to have the energy and the will, right, to make the world a better place. | ||
| And by the 1810s and teens, you have slavery becoming a much more divisive national issue. | ||
| You have An increasing polarization between the North and the South. | ||
| In part because, you know, one unmentioned achievement of Jefferson's presidency is that at the earliest constitutionally allowable moment, Jefferson is able to sign into law a bill that ends the international slave trade. | ||
| So you can no longer legally bring people from Africa as slaves to the United States. | ||
| And that's possible in part because not only do you have growing anti-slavery sentiment in the North, but Southern planters who already own slaves, in a way this is like an anti-competitive law for them. | ||
| You know, upstarts who want to get new land and grow cotton. | ||
| Now the slaves that are already owned are going to be more valuable because there's limits to the supply. | ||
| But the cotton boom has been exploding, and there's more westward expansion, and people are moving on the other side of the Mississippi River, and Missouri wants to be admitted to the Union as a state that allows slavery. | ||
| And the North is opposed to this, by and large. | ||
| And this increasing polarization, it sucks in Thomas Jefferson as well. | ||
| And I think he increasingly sees the United States as being a nation that's divided between the North and the South. | ||
| So what do we know about his last writings or thoughts about slavery? | ||
| Well, you know, there are a number of younger people who are endeavoring to do, you know, pretty cool things, right? | ||
| There's a guy named Edward Coles, who is a well-off Virginian who has this sincere kind of life commitment to free his slaves. | ||
| And so what he does is he moves from Virginia, with all these people who he legally owned, to Ohio. | ||
| And there he divvies up the land and he makes sure that they get education and training | ||
| and that they could survive and succeed on their own. | ||
| So at that point, you could take your slaves over state lines | ||
| and then those laws would be applicable. | ||
| You could. | ||
| And remember, I mean, the reason he's taking them to Ohio is that Ohio—Jefferson's Ordinance of 1784 failed by one vote, but the compromise was the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. | ||
| And that drew the line at the Ohio River. | ||
| So the land north of that would prohibit slavery. | ||
| So Coles is intentionally taking these African Americans to a place where slavery was not going to be on the table. | ||
| And he liberates them. | ||
| And he writes to Jefferson. | ||
| He says, what do you think of my idea? | ||
| And Jefferson, you know, essentially responds, I think it's great. | ||
| I hope you succeed. | ||
| And I will pray for you. | ||
| But at my age, prayers are pretty much all that I can offer. | ||
| That's all that I've got left. | ||
| So it's a shame because, again, Jefferson at this point, deeply encumbered by debt, you know, deeply involved as the at least paper owner of slaves. | ||
| I mean, again, his creditors, you know, are in some ways the possessors of these people who are essentially held hostage at Monticello. | ||
| I mean, it's really poignant, and it's really sad. | ||
| And, you know, some people call Jefferson a hypocrite. | ||
| I don't think that's quite the right word, because, you know, Jefferson did engage in actions designed to blunt the growth of slavery. | ||
| And Jefferson, more than any officeholder of his generation, you know, took measures and made proposals To curb slavery. | ||
| See, and that's also why I find him to be so fascinating, because of course, by our standards now, we would all be abolitionists. | ||
|
unidentified
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Sure. | |
| We would all be screaming, of course slavery should be illegal and we should all have equal rights and all that. | ||
| But there's also a realism of being a person of your time. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And it seems that in most cases where he had the opportunity to do something, he did actually do something. | ||
| So to judge him from our perspective now, When I hear people do it, and this goes with many historical figures, it just seems, it's like a sort of paper tiger to me. | ||
| I mean, in some ways, one of the critiques that Federalists levied against Jefferson was that, one, which kind of tickles me, he said, you know, he's much more fit to be a college professor than a man of state, a man of action, a man of consequence. | ||
| And I totally get, you know, the insult toward college professors. | ||
| I totally get it. | ||
| But I would say that there's something fundamentally flawed about this notion that Thomas Jefferson is this pie-in-the-sky theorist. | ||
| I mean, he really is a pragmatist. | ||
| I mean, he's a man of vision, and he's a man of principle, but he's also a man who believes that You know, what we can get done, we should get done. | ||
| And just as he compromises on the issue of slavery and essentially puts it on the back burner in the 1790s to try to, you know, wrestle back control from the Federalists who he thought were counter-revolutionaries endangering the freedom of white Americans. | ||
| In his retirement, removed from power, looking at what he could possibly do and what he just couldn't possibly do. | ||
| The University of Virginia was by no means a foregone conclusion, and by no means was it an easy sell for the state legislature to get them to fund this with the public's money. | ||
| But it was doable. | ||
| It was within reach. | ||
| And doing something to end slavery was not within reach. | ||
| And so, you know, in a way it's kind of a shame, but Jefferson would try to marshal support for this new university in Virginia by pointing to the Missouri crisis and exploiting the increased tensions between the North and the South. | ||
| And he'd say to people in Virginia, do we really want to be sending our sons? | ||
| To these seminaries in the North? | ||
| To Harvard and Yale and Princeton where they're going to be contaminated with all these Northern ideas? | ||
| Wouldn't it be better to keep them here? | ||
| Wouldn't it be better to bring Northerners to us and to let them see our way of life and our way of thinking? | ||
| Now, to others, he says that the Missouri crisis is, you know, a mere ripple on the Sea of Liberty. | ||
| But within Virginia, I think he really tries to leverage this moment of sectional tension to help, you know, move his proposals for the University of Virginia across the finish line. | ||
| And it clearly worked. | ||
| It worked. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Anything else we need to know about the, I mean, he died at Monticello, right? | ||
| Well, yeah, I mean, he died on the 4th of July, 1826. | ||
| Man, this guy had something with timing, huh? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it was a very timely demise, right? | ||
| I mean, Thomas Jefferson in the last few months of his life, you know, started to express a wish to live to see | ||
| the 50th anniversary of American independence, the 4th of July, 1826. | ||
| And, you know, as the weeks and then the days passed, it became increasingly doubtful | ||
| that that goal would be achieved. | ||
| You know, he was on his deathbed by the beginning of the month. | ||
| There were a couple of people who were attending to him. | ||
| There was his grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph. | ||
| There was his grandson-in-law, a West Point dropout named Nicholas Petrist. | ||
| And his doctor, a professor of medicine at the University of Virginia, Dr. Robley Dunglison. | ||
| And Jefferson was fading in and out of consciousness. | ||
| How old was he at the time? | ||
| He's 83 years old. | ||
| So a good long life, right? | ||
| But on the night of the first, he wakes up and he asks, is it the fourth? | ||
| Right? | ||
| And they disappoint him. | ||
| Not yet, right? | ||
| This time with a weaker voice. | ||
| And again, the answer is no. | ||
| And it seemed like he could go at any moment. | ||
| and the answer is no and around eleven p_m_ on july third eighteen twenty six | ||
| and seem like he could go at any moment his eyes | ||
| just sort of split open and and he asked the force | ||
| and snickers trist who apparently hadn't had enough time to west points honor | ||
| code that lies to thomas jefferson | ||
| And he nods his head. | ||
| He says, yes it is. | ||
| He couldn't bear to let him down. | ||
| And a lot of historians seem to have it wrong. | ||
| They say that those were Jefferson's last words. | ||
| But if you look at the notes of Dr. Robley Dunglason, according to his account, he then offers Jefferson another dose of medication. | ||
| And Jefferson, having been assured that the 4th of July had already arrived, says to Dr. Dunglasson, no doctor, nothing more. | ||
| So it'd be a terrible story if right then, right there, on July 3rd, Jefferson died. | ||
| But the good news is he lived until noon the next day. | ||
| He died 50 years to the hour after the ratification of the Declaration of Independence. | ||
| And if that's not incredible enough, right, up in Braintree, Massachusetts, John Adams is on his deathbed. | ||
| And his last words around 5 p.m. | ||
| are, he has no idea what's happened down in Virginia, his last words are, Thomas Jefferson survives. | ||
| So on one level, I'd like to think that Jefferson at that moment, you know, being carried upward on the wings of angels is laughing his butt off, right? | ||
| Because once again, he's proven John Adams wrong. | ||
| But I'd like to think, too, that on another level, John Adams was right. | ||
| That, you know, Jefferson does survive. | ||
| His ideas survive. | ||
| The ideas of the revolutionary generation survive, right? | ||
| They're always going to be contested, and we're always going to have to figure out how we make them real in our ever-changing world. | ||
| But there's something timeless about those ideas. | ||
| And I think that, you know, John Adams and James Madison and George Washington, and certainly Thomas Jefferson, enduringly made a mark on the face of the world in favor of freedom. | ||
| Rob McDonald, you know how to end an interview. | ||
| That's how you do it. | ||
| It was a pleasure talking to you. | ||
| It was great, I enjoyed it. | ||
| This is what it was all about. | ||
| I'm so glad that we kicked off Presidents Week doing this because it just, it gets into all of the richness of their perfections and imperfections and why it's applicable today and all that good stuff. | ||
| So we are gonna link to Rob's book right down below. | ||
| It's Confounding Father Thomas Jefferson's Image in His Own Time. | ||
| The Amazon link will be right down below. |
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