Publisher Chris Jackson talks about working on the awardwinning book between the world and me and he will attend a Book Release Party for steve hilton, former Senior Advisor to british Prime Minister david cameron. On monday and extra day of booktv. He will hear from annette gordonreed and peter onuf on the intellectual life of Thomas Jefferson, radio talkshow host discusses the importance of the 10 commandments, nprs diane reed shares her involvement with the right to die movement and you will look at the namesake of the john burke society. That is just a few of the authors on booktv this holiday weekend. For complete schedule go to booktv. Org. Booktv on cspan2, 72 hours of nonfiction books and authors this memorial day weekend, television for serious readers. We kick off the weekend with Pulitzer Prizewinning historian annette gordonreed and peter onuf talking about Thomas Jefferson. This is booktv on cspan2. Welcome to the library of philadelphia. I am representative James Roebuck and im very happy to be here this evening. I am a native philadelphian. I grew up in philadelphia, graduated from Central High School but my particular [applause] my particular focus tonight is on the fact that i went to First College at Virginia Union university in richmond from which i received a history degree of honors and then i did my masters and phd at the university of virginia in charlottesville so that is me. Subsequent to that i taught history at Drexel University for 40 years. I like to think about. It in all the right points here. I worked briefly in the Mayors Office as legislative assistant to mayor wilson good. In 1985 was selected to the state legislature where i still serve and currently the minority or democratic chair of the house education committee. The free library is dedicated to advancing literacy, guiding learning and inspiring curiosity from its awardwinning author event series to its thoughtprovoking programs like the upcoming american president ial series which will present compelling programs through the president ial election season. It is now my pleasure and honor to introduce preeminent scholars annette gordonreed and peter onuf who will be the presenters for this evening. Annette gordonreed is a professor at harvard. Received 2008 National Book award and 2009 Pulitzer Prize in history, her other honors include the National Humanities medal. Guggenheim fellowship in humanities and macarthur genius fellowship. Peter onuf is one of americas leading jefferson scholars serving as Thomas JeffersonMemorial Foundation at the university of virginia and Senior Research historian at the robert smith Institutional Center for jefferson studies. His books include the mind of Thomas Jefferson and jeffersons empire. In their new book most blessed of the patriarchs Thomas Jefferson and the empire of the imagination annette gordonreed and peter onuf present a character study of the man from monticello who we thought we knew. President ial historian john makem phrases with characteristic insight and intellectual rigor annette gordonreed and peter onuf have produced a powerful and lasting portrait of the mind of Thomas Jefferson. This is an essential and brilliant book by two of the nations for most scholars, a book that will, like its protagonists indoor. We are so pleased to have them here with us this evening. Latest gentlemen please join me in welcoming annette gordonreed and peter onuf to the free library. [applause] bank you very much. It is wonderful to be here and to be here with one of my best friends, annette gordonreed. We would like to talk a little bit about that friendship. I would not have done this book if it hadnt been for annette gordonreed inviting me and an opportunity to spend time with her. That is what a serious scholar i am. Maybe you can make a better version. People ask how we came to do this. The idea for doing it, i say that it began sometime at the end of the 1990s when i had written a manuscript about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings and american controversy. It looked at the way historians treated the story of jefferson and hemmings and i wanted to find people who had been skeptical or i thought would be skeptical of the story because i thought it is always better to have people who tell you what you do wrong as opposed to people who are just going to agree with you about whatever you are saying. I really let her down. I called him up and i said i have this manuscript i have worked on. I called him because he was the Thomas JeffersonMemorial Foundation professor, was successor to Merrill Peterson and successor to dooma malone so i thought he would be hostile to what i was saying and i wanted to hear what he had to say and he agreed to look at the manuscript and he read it and to my surprise he liked it. He actually not only like that but he wanted the University Press of virginia, that is what it was called, now it is the university of virginia press, to publish the book. I had had another from another trade publisher and i decided i wanted to go with virginia because it was jeffersons university and it is an academic president because of the nature of what i was doing i thought it would be better to have academics know that this was a book that had been vetted by other academics. Usually when you give a book to an Academic Press at least we 2, sometimes 3 scholars are asked to review it before they decide to publish it so i felt it was better to go with virginia and i did and ever since then we have been really good friends. We have been on this journey together. Peter has been writing about jefferson from the standpoint of an intellectual historian so he writes about jeffersons writings, what jefferson read and how it affected and influenced his life and he writes about politics as well. I am more a social historian. I write about jefferson and slavery, his private life, some of the politics as well so this was an opportunity for two people who have been looking at a person from a different perspective to come together and see what we could say about jefferson that might be new. Jefferson came into my life, i didnt write about people. I love real people, but dead people dont interest me particularly. I am interested in ideas. Jefferson because i came to virginia, out of selfdefense i had to work on jefferson. Annette gordonreed is all about people, she is a social historian. It was a thrill for me as an old guy, to find out that i could do the kind of history we were doing together. The Common Ground we have is trying to figure this guy out. We start with the premise that you cant figure him out. He didnt want us to understand him and now you are the first readers in World History to understand Thomas Jefferson. The impetus for it was we had been having conversations about jefferson all these years. There is this notion that he is this inscrutable person that is so contradictory, so mysterious that he cant be figured out and we think we can figure him out to the extent that you configure anyone out. Sometimes we can figure ourselves out. We are all very complicated people and the best approach was to look at him as a human being, as we say in the book when it is at all reasonable, to take him at his word. The caveat, to take him at his word, when he says what his intentions are, what he believes, what he thinks is going to happen. We came to the conclusion that jefferson scholarship, the jefferson personal life, his understanding as a man had run into a ditch, exemplified by one word, hypocrisy. Even the headlines even the headlines writing about the book, a book in which we say hypocrisy is not the proper lens through which to view jefferson is the word hypocrisy because it is so common, it rolls off people tongues when thinking about them without thinking of other members of the founding generation, he found that the market on that, sort of a way for people to show they know something about him by saying hypocrite and get you two thirds of the way. We wanted to move beyond that and say there is much more to writing about him and thinking about him than this trope of hypocrisy is a thing that defines it. The first clue on jeffersons he erected a wall around himself. You heard of the wall of separation between church and state. We think that metaphor applies to jefferson and the rest of the world. He insisted on his privacy, in his house, he would be all alone and nobody would penetrate that space, but that very insistence on the distinction between public and private, between his life within his family and among his friends with his slaves and his life as a statesman and a leader, his insistence that they are distinct domains is the first clue in understanding him. Why does he insist so much in this. This is where we get to the title of the book because the keyword, you can tell this book by its title, not because of the beautiful art and picture of jefferson but because of that one word, patriarch. Help these people. This is an astonishing concept. This is an astonishing idea that the great icon of democracy, the man who wrote the words that then led to the creation of this necktie that im wearing. I do this audiovisual kind of stuff, that he could call himself a patriarch which has a sort of ring of the archaic. The predemocratic, you might even say the antidemocratic. He uses the phrase in a letter he writes to Angelica Church, if people have seen the play hamilton, the woman that is one of the schuyler sisters, looking for mind at work, she says in the song, jefferson and she knew each other, met each other when he was in france and they had a flirtation. People mainly think of jefferson in relationship to mariah causeway when he was in france but Angelica Church was another married woman with whom he flirted and had a highly charged relationship and in 1793 he writes to her at the end of his tenure as secretary of state in washington cabinet, he has been beaten up by alexander hamilton. Angelicas brother in law who he is in competition with hamilton for the favor of george washington, hamilton wins this battle, jefferson is going home and he writes to her and doesnt mention the war with hamilton but he knows they were very close. He writes to her and says i am going back to monticello. One of those lines is he talked about having to go home to his fields and his farm and his books, to watch for the happiness of those who labor, he enslaved people on his plantation, talks about his daughter and says if they come live next to me and are married and do well, i will be the most blessed of the patriarchs and i will count myself as blessed as the most blessed of the patriarchs. That is a strange word to use to describe a person who saw himself as a democratic republican. A champion of the common man, a person who believed in the power of the people. The common people. A patriarch is an autocrat, patriarch is someone who rules over his domain, his family, sometimes enslaved people, think about anxious times. Another letter he describes himself as living like an antidelivery in patriarch among his farm and his family and so forth. We wanted to think how can these things exist together . We see this as a contradiction but it made sense to jefferson. More than a contradiction. Think of jeffersons association with writes. He is the president who defines the rights, the one who articulates natural rights. One of the rights that seems most natural to him is to have complete control over his domestic domain. If anyone else is exercising influence in his Household Economy and the Little Society of his mountaintop plantation, his control would be subverted, his dominion would be subverted and if he is not secure in his dominion he cant be truly independent. The word independence is resonant both for the country of a whole and for Thomas Jefferson and other american men. They are independent so they can form a government based on consent with each other. We make the further move that the people and the family should be equal too and that is what he says, all men and he means including women, are equal in some fundamental human sense but the family unit itself is natural and that is the key to understanding what we are exploring between the private and the public. The family is not just a refuge, a way to get away from alexander hamilton. You can understand that, jefferson says he hates politics but he is lying. We call him out occasionally. That is not hypocrisy. Everybody has to say that it you particularly have to say in the founding period because if you were in politics for the sake of power and selfaggrandizement, you would be the enemy of democracy. We are not supposed to have political parties. People dont run for office, they stand. You understand the distinction . Standing for office means you are an upright man, people see you and they say we want you to represent us so we think as we began to explore that connection between how jefferson lives and what he thinks, that both dimensions of his life become clearer to us. Family is natural and the natural order of the family was the mail as head of the family. Is understanding jefferson born in 1743 i will remind you, understanding what natural was, the man is the patriarch, head of the family over whom he exercised power but also had responsibilities so there is the nation that is the notion jefferson has of himself, a benevolent patriarch. That is how he thought people were supposed to rule in the family. The family being the basic unit of the community, you start with family and radiate out to the community at large locally and up to the national government, as a model of families, made sense to him but gave him a particular view of who could be in the nation, who could be part of the people, that led him to believe there should be an end to slavery but africanamericans had to found their own country because he did not believe that there could be a conflict free multiracial the way we say we are aspiring to a Multiracial Society with blacks and whites, prejudice against blacks and blacks never forgive whites for what they had done, there was no way he could not at that time argue for into mixture, something that was not a plan that would be adopted. Africanamericans, black people would have their own country, we did not come to the country voluntarily but brought in changed. They would have to find their place to have their own country and their own full life. Jefferson would not conceive of a society where there were large numbers of people who were secondclass citizens. Republican nation would have to have firstclass citizenship for everybody. Not the kind of world we had after the civil war where laws were passed, and second glass citizens, we had to fight for citizenship, and malcolm x, malcolm x said, he is chiding Martin Luther king and other civil rights demonstrators saying why do you have to fight for your freedom . If you are a citizen of a country why should you have to fight for freedom . That is telling you something if you have to do it. We condemn jefferson. People condemn jefferson a great deal for that statement, that is the truth, we had conflict and serious conflict among the races from the very beginning. And he was being crazy when he suggested that is where it happened. Very easy to moralize jefferson, the morally compelling episode of the founding era was the jefferson a definition of the American People and not so much that it did not include all of us was very disturbing not to start wagging our fingers and condemning jefferson as if he falls short of a standard he should have had. The best way to get it jeffersons slavery is to work through his mind. This is one of the ways we develop our complementarity, that has beautifully retold the story or told for the first time the story of some of the people who lived at monticello. That is a story we need to hear and is very compelling to us. What was jefferson thinking . Here it is important to seem like an old boring story to you and that is jefferson and his fellow revolutionaries, by attacking monarchy, aristocracy, privilege, establish churches, all these forms of any quality and secondclass citizenship, that was talking about. Petit ready of george iii, they were killing the king. His rule had become a natural because he was making war on his own subject. People who in america revered him until the imperial crisis that led to independence. King george was a bad father and we get back to the notion of fatherhood. A simple way to understand what mobilized a lot of men, very independent men who thought well of themselves and still do in the first families is to think of george iii as someone who challenged their own patriarchy, their own fatherhood on their plantations and their families. There fatherhood was incompatible with the wicked fatherhood of george iii. We have to understand for jefferson, which we take to be a social construction, basically a like, we keep discovering we are not. Very upsetting to me, we dont think this difference should really matter. We are struggling with it. And race in this way, think of the idea of race, and the same thing as nation. And nation builders, was on the basis on natural connections among republican families who came together to govern themselves because they rejected the governance of a bad father, a bad king. This is the ugly side the we are contemplating and it is families who come together in a democracy are held together by bonds of love but what is the boundary of that family of families . It is those people who are not part of your family, who are not here in america voluntarily, who are a captive nation in chains. How would you solve that problem, do justice to the enslaved people held against their will, for you. And talking about emancipation and expatriation, the country of your own. The beginning of understanding is to see where it comes from and it comes from these ideas of what is natural and that is another way of saying what is right, what is moral. Doubly confusing because we think of the enlightenment as inevitably positive. You are enlightened, you have learned things. The dark side of the enlightenment was racial monarchy, classification, tendency to put everything in its place, a newtonian system of the way the world works. I wonder what he would make of particle physics . If you could explain to him it the minute level the world works this way but at the microscopic level all the things that you think about the Natural World dont apply at all. The enlightenment fires jeffersons imagination, wants desperately to be seen as a progressive person, now he is seen as a reactionary conservative person. During his lifetime he was seen as a wild eyed revolutionary. There are people in South Carolina who thought dont laugh at that. Craziness but the image he had at the time, someone far out there largely because in part because of his religious views, he was very afraid of how people are going to react in the state of virginia, and this tells you how you never know, and what later generations look at. When he says disparaging things about black people, that is what we fixate on. That is not the core of what he is talking about. He is making grand pronouncements about the evils of slavery and is concerned that his fellow virginian who he tested out by trying as a young man, wants to have emancipation, and 1796, st. George tucker does a similar thing. He knows virginians, there will not be a republican solution, they are not going to vote it out so he gives that 2 people. There is a pathos to this. We can sympathize with jefferson because the standard he held was it takes an enlightened people to do the right thing. This new form of selfgovernance will enable people to see the light and as they see that light, we act against slavery. It wont happen now. It may take several generations. This is where i think a nice point that turned toward jeffersons religion because this is a prayerful attitude. He praised that his children and childrens children will see the light and do the right thing about slavery. The pathos of it is it gets harder and harder to do the right thing because slaves are worth too much. They are too valuable. Just check the price of slaves. If jefferson could actually understand his own portfolio to use the modern term he would see that which he didnt. That is another thing about jefferson. That was his capital. That is what ever legacy he left to his children. He had hoped and thought and many enlightenment thinkers did, that slavery was an archaic form and it would disappear by the kind of magic that brought the light to the enlightenment because after all, free labor is more productive, isnt it . Because if people have incentives, if they are using their body to serve the interests of the people they love, their labor goes toward some good they can recognize, their own families, it is not true. This is one of the things that is important to know when we talk about jefferson and slavery it is a big discovery over the past couple generations among historians of slavery. It is an enormously profitable institution. The fact that Thomas Jefferson never became an apologist for slavery, never said slavery was a positive good is itself a remarkable thing because it was so easy to move in that direction. That is the thing we say in the book, if he had said that. If he had just said, like the generation that comes after him, that slavery is not a Necessary Evil but the generation after him said it is not a Necessary Evil, in fact it is a positive good, you could say he was no hypocrisy there. It is good. The african race was meant to be enslaved and we are enslaving them and isnt it great . He would be consistent in that point. The difficulty here is this is a person who for whatever reason, because he thought there were certain things, certain precept of the enlightenment, science would get better, the world would get better, he believed people were basically good and could be trained to become better. He believed those things and it is difficult for us in a more cynical age to actually take that seriously but we are convinced he did believe these things. People ask is on this point on religion was there anything we disagreed about because it seems we are sort of on the same page about everything, we were not on the same page about jefferson and religion. I grew up in the United Methodist tradition. When jefferson calls himself a christian, i sort of think he is saying that, assuming he was saying that not just to curry favor but to cover himself. You dont think unitarians are christians, do you . [laughter] let me finish the story. Let me finish the story. I had difficulty with that, with a person who said he didnt believe in the divinity of christ, he didnt believe in the miracles, didnt believe in the trinity, i am not talking about my personal beliefs but my understanding of what christianity is from my training and the way i was raised, and dismissive of jefferson and was about to say that arguing with peter who is from a unitarian tradition, whatever that is, unitarian tradition, convinced me that i was being prejudiced, that i was being too dogmatic. It is good, Something Like that. His statement that he was a christian seriously. There have certainly been people talked about what gospels were going to come out. The tradition that came down and challenged through the ages but i back away from that. He cant call himself a christian. He was sincere in the belief that he was a christian. One of the things he says is he wanted to hear the voice of jesus as a great ethical teacher who could speak to mankind, the family of mankind. The without the intermediation of all the interpreters, all the priests, all the people who had selfinterest in interpreting him in a certain way. The miracle is simply speaking a violation of the law of nature and you are saying god is not lawful and creation doesnt make sense. Trying to understand, the laws that govern gods creation, this is the deist position which is easily trivialized and rejected because it doesnt involve a leap of faith. I think that is wrong. To believe in an orderly world, the possibility that jesuss gospel of peace and love could become universal and all peoples in the world to participate in that you couldnt believe what was going to happen soon. It had to be something you could only pray for. It would not happen in your lifetime. That awesome faith in creation deserves more respect than it has gotten from people who assume that their embrace of some miracle, mysticism, teaching, that is special to them because of their personal relationship to a god like christ, this is jeffersons insistence. I will throw this out to you calvinists, there must be one out there or two. Jefferson said this. I am the real christian. John calhoun, wherever you are in the audience, you are an atheist. He believed that. Thinking there would be religion he knew religion would be a part of American Life forever so he takes a razor blade and cuts of the bible, removing all the miracles, all the things he thought violated the laws, the rules of science that kept jesuss pure teachings in tact and he wanted this to be part of a civic religion for the new Republican Society and for a time what was called the jefferson bible, he named it the lives and morals of jesus of nazareth, not jesus christ but jesus of nazareth, was given out to members of the house of representatives when they were elected. Can you imagine . Published by the government. That would never happen in texas. Now you are picking on everything. Tell everybody you are from texas. He thought that kind of book would be a good book for a new Republican Society. Religion was supposed to be important but the ethical teachings of jesus, not the miracles, not the other things that he thought had to be interpreted by people, explains by people with ulterior motives, people who were connected to the social monarchy were somehow connected to kings together. In the cold war, the communist menace or whatever or a country in sort of system we think is opposed, his system was monarchy and not just people who are religious teachers but people who are hooked up with this monarchical form of government that held down the common people, did not allow people to participate in government. He was looking toward a future day, nows the time for unitarians to clear yourself. Every young man in america would be a unitarian. He is a visionary. It comes back to one of our big themes, his spiritual quest is about making sense. For him, people who were no longer constrained to worship in statesupported churches, they will become increasingly enlightened and through competition of the religious marketplace, separation of church and state makes possible, what will emerge will be a genuinely democratic religion of the people. That will shape their own ethical vision. We said if we have selfgovernment, and enlightened people will do the right thing. Jefferson didnt think it was enough just to let people as they were make these momentous decisions, they need to be educated, enlightened, they needed to be taught. And a truly christians, enlightened christianity would do that for the American People. I would risk saying jefferson advocating a christian nation. Dont start pushing back at me because that is a term that is used on the far right. He also believed in nature and the creation of natures god, there was intelligent design. It made sense. This was his quest to make sense of the world in the face of his own ignorance and all the things he didnt know, all the things he couldnt predict but he prayed for the light. I think with that we are supposed to take questions from you guys. He is going to be taking that. He is our guy. We will get a microphone to you. Thank you for that provocative interesting presentation. Could you say a word about jeffersons mentor and what role, if any, did the henry adams work have in your understanding of this ethereal empire of the imagination moved . We quote henry adams at the beginning because he creates the line people use about the semi transparent shadow that suggests jefferson is an inscrutable individual with a lot of influence. Henry adams was a masterful writer. And he was an adams. His family added an ambivalence relationship with jefferson. It was enormously influential. Jeffersons lot teacher studied law with him longer than most people studied law, almost five years, he said he was an ancient master, his dear friend, this is when he is murdered later on. He was of incalculable importance to jefferson as a mentor and he was antislavery in the figure of enlightenment, we talked about williamsburg and jefferson being there and suggesting his relation with others for the governor, that these people were his teachers, they set him on a path and he told his grandson later on, he thought young people until they got to be a certain age, not fit for making their own decisions, tomball your self after imminent people, imminent men and he was one of the people suggested, ask yourself if it was a difficult situation, what would he do as an answer. You might say the mentor for jefferson was a cultural hero, his model of the relationship between the generations, passing on the wisdom and the life. That is why he is a professors favorite founder because he is one of us. Playing off the idea of cultural hero can you address his fascination with and importance of music to him which you address in the book . We have a chapter on music. Instead of the sort of this is not a typical biography of jefferson. There are certain themes and we have different chapters. The patriarchate sets up his life and the second was traveler when he goes overseas and the last is called enthusiast and music is the first chapter in their. He said music was the favorite passion of his soul. He played the violin and there is some evidence he played the cello. What he is saying, you like to sing for people, he is saying when he was by himself, bacon and isaac granger, he called isaac jefferson, he was always singing when he was riding along, he was singing and his granddaughter was singing all the time. His wife martha was an excellent harpsichord just, she sang. That was a part of family, making family, music was an integral part of this, singing together, playing Music Together with his daughters, his younger daughter mariah is enthusiastic. She tried to please him, and the sons of Sally Hemmings were violinists, made his his signature tune was one of jeffersons favorite tune, what he was known that music attached you to people, it was a sentiment, an important way to have a meeting of the mind. And can be a distant chile person. Music was a way of making connections to people. Everybody brings something to it but you have to be welltrained. It is a vision of democracy and it is completely unrealistic but something he and his family could practice for the American People. Think of American History as an extended jazz riff for jefferson, and would be harmony, it would not be rank risk, virtual, and there wouldnt be dueling so lows. It would be one great beautiful song. And he is performing and thinking about what matters most as a society as a whole. In front, and what would jefferson think of our freedoms of today . Only freedom from monarchy or freedom for slaves and women, women did not get the vote until 50 years after male slaves got the vote. What was he thinking about today . She says that with the smile on her face. I think the emancipation would be difficult for him, what was on the racial front. It is not natural. The suspicion when blacks are intellectually inferior to whites, most people believed that and many people believe that today. But never the suspicion that would have been clear. Someone asked me when i was working on the hemmings of monticello in 2008 people asked me would he be more upset about barack obama thenpresident or Hillary Clinton being president . He would be a republican. I dont think there is any question he would be more upset about a woman president because that would have violated nature. He understood there were men in other countries who were leaders and sometimes a woman got to be a king or queen if something went wrong. He understood men, when he talks about slaves and slave people revolting and rising up against masters, he is talking about men. And object of fear for him. I would qualify that, i hesitate once again because i get in real trouble and could be on the road for a while but the qualification i would make is this. Jeffersons notion of democracy isnt that we are all capable to govern ourselves intelligently. He thinks you have to work for it. The letter that gets people upset, he wrote to his daughter martha when she was 12 years old about how she can please him. If you do this i will love you. Anybody raised on fred rogers has been in this neighborhood. Most of you did that didnt happen to you. Mister rogers, good presbyterian teacher loves you as you are. Jefferson dozens. Not that he doesnt love his daughters but he wants them as the marines want you to be, all that you can be. That was a misapplication of something. The point is serious. What do you think . Show me. With his granddaughters and their ability to learn. I will push back a little bit. The letter he writes when he was 12, was a middleaged guy who lost his wife, has two daughters, he has no idea what to say to them. He lost the separate spheres of male and female at a loss of what to do. Gradually over time by the time he gets granddaughters he knows what to say. I am not saying you are attacking him but qualifying this notion, that he is being the dutiful father. Comes from a place of panic. How am i going to do this . They dont have a mother . I am now in control of this. The idea we should let someone else we argue all the time. There is a man in a black hat behind him. You paint jefferson as an idealist. Always willing to accept the best, a time when he gave into absolute cynicism, he lost some faith in the potential great question. The thing about optimism, dont want to sound too psychoanalytic. This is not when azeris. The highest proportion of psychoanalysts per capita in the world. All i am saying is love and hate are very close to each other. Same effect as freud would say. Optimism and pessimism only makes sense together. You cannot be optimistic unless on the other side is the fear of failure that it wont be here. He lived constantly with fear of failure. That is one of the reasons he engaged in what i call a spiritual quest. He was afraid it would all fall apart. You would pray too. We talk about spiritual quest, the young man who is railing against priests, and the natural progression, taking stock of all the things that havent worked, the end is pretty bad because he ends up broke. For a long time it is pretty clear that this is not going to work out. He keeps fantasizing about ways to get out of this. He has a Development Plan for milton, a town we think of charlottesville as his town but for most of his life milton which is pretty much nothing now, he wanted to buy property, but near the end he is pretty clear that it is going to fall apart. It was nasty in politics. He did a lot of other handed things. A lot of nasty stuff. Did a lot of southern politics. That is it, another word for it. Havent had the benefit of reading either of your books yet but i intend to. Letters to john adams and so forth but i have a problem reconciling the hypocrisy, and the Founding Fathers as it pertains to slavery. My limited understanding of American History at this time, when the Founding Fathers in the colonies were confronted with opposing the evils of the british monarchy, the institutions we inherited from the old world that were evil, slavery being foremost. And the two colonies that were insisting on having slavery in South Carolina, georgia, am i correct . You are wrong. Slavery was legal everywhere. It was legal everywhere. Insist on it being can you get to the kernel of the question . We have to move on. I find it hard, it is easy to say as a white person, that he was really being hypocritical. He inherited the institution. My impression is he didnt like it but inherited it. , we dont like the word. It is understandable. A difficult thing for people to reconcile. What we say about jefferson, we have a set of beliefs, dont always have the strength to live up to. It is a glaring flaw to us because we go back and see by not dealing with this, when jefferson was living, we see what happened but if they had tried to deal with the standard answer, there wouldnt have been a union if they had pressed. No america. That is our point. We missed the point. They would not have why not coming . They could make their peace on their own. People had an interest in creating a union but would not have been able to do it. It is important to remember Abraham Lincoln and the way he turns back to jefferson for the ideas and principles that would justify a war for the union and an end to slavery. It is a sign that we dont believe in progress, what lincoln believed, what he thought he had initiated and achieved. Do we believe the story or do we turn back on say it was a cynical joke against mankind . A question regarding sally having . Why do you think jefferson did not free her . We talk about this, talk about this and other books as well. Our understanding is in that relationship, what you do is free the woman, he freed the children but not her. When jefferson died, in order to free her, put her name in the documents, put her in a will to say i am free, everybody knew who sally was in relationship to sally jefferson. Her last name was not given but people wrote songs about the business, put her name in a will and petition the legislature to have her remain in the state because a law in virginia said if you didnt get legislative permission you had to be leverage in your be reenslaved. At the time, she was 50 years old. You could not free and enslaved person below the age of 21 or above the age of 45 without explaining how you were going to take care of them. How they would be provided for. Sally hemmingss name in a will, the petition to the legislature and i am going to leave her to take care of herself. We would never have argued about this question. If he had done that, that would have been an admission that everything they were saying was true and he did not want to do that. The most important person in jeffersons life was martha randolph, his oldest daughter. This is just my speculation, looking at what he had to do. I dont believe he would humiliate her like that, to make that admission on his deathbed. The other thing is i dont think jefferson would have thought that it was a proper thing to free a 53yearold woman. A man even if he could, he did free people who were older at the time and explain how they would be taken care of. I dont think he wanted to admit this and i dont think he would have wanted to free a 53yearold woman. He had to free harriet, his daughter, because any child she had, the two oldest children, beverly and harry, go off as white people, they dont want freedom papers because they are living as white people. If they have freedom papers people know they are not all white and that is not what they wanted. He has to free her because she is young and could have children and she has children in virginia or in a Slave Society the children are enslaved because they follow what your mother was. Sally hemmings, for reasons we wouldnt be talking about him. We would not be here tonight talking about him. If he had admitted he lived 38 years and had 7 children with an africanamerican enslaved woman he would never have been on mount rushmore, he would not have been president , he would not have been just not possible. And he was all about very much into this notion of legacy. Legacy, he thought he was going to live, he wanted to live through the ages. He knew they had done Something Special in creating the United States of america and he wanted to be remembered for that. The White Community would never have accepted him as a hero if he had done that. Look what has happened now. Look what has happened now. All of the reevaluation of him about his religion and this, it is valid. He knew that. He was not a fool. People say whenever jefferson says the people are not ready. He was a for most politicians of his era and he knew his people