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