Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On Most Blessed Of Th

About Thomas Jefferson. They start now on booktv. Miss gordon reed won the National Book award and the Pulitzer Prize for her first book also about Thomas Jefferson. Good afternoon and welcome to the seventh annual gaithersburg book festival. I am a Nonfiction Book critic at the washington post. It is honored to be here in gaithersburg and take part in this wonderful literary festival. I have been to a lot of these and there are few that are as inviting and welcoming, excuse me . I will try to speak as loudly as i can. A few housekeeping announcements. For the consideration of everyone here if you can keep your phones quiet that would be great. If you are tweeting the event we need your feedback, there are surveys to complete at the tent and on the festival website. If you completed you can win a 100 visa gift card which you should spend on books. Speaking of books our office will be signing at the book signing area intent a, line 4 right after the presentation and copies are on sale of their book at the politics and prose tend. That said lets get started. It is hard to imagine a better pairing of authors to discuss Thomas Jefferson. Annette gordon reed is professor of American University at Harvard University and author of the hemingways of monticello which won the Pulitzer Prize for history after it was published in 2008. Peter onuf is author of jeffersons empire, among several works on jefferson and he is the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation professor at uva. He is Thomas Jefferson professor at Mister Jeffersons university. No pressure there at all. Most blessed of the patriarchs, Thomas Jefferson and the empire of imagination. Much conversation about jefferson is on the contradiction between the ideal he imagined for the nation and the details of his own life and one of the strengths of this book is it is not a defense and not an attack. Jeffersons aspirations were inextricably linked to his limitations. The book explores his for self perception and does so in part by focusing on the action at monticello which reflects him as a few places can. I am excited to hear from them so i will get out of the way. They will speak 25 minutes and take your questions. It is my pleasure to introduce Annette Gordon reed and peter onuf. [applause] thank you, great to be here and great to be here with my good friend Annette Gordon reed. She didnt know we were going to be good friends when she first encountered me. Maybe you want to tell that story because we want to tell you about ourselves because it is interesting. An interesting thing for historians to collaborate in the way we collaborated. People do it but often one person will be one chapter and another person will do another. We wanted to have one voice in this and it is interesting we should do this because when i first encountered peter i expected him to be an enemy. In 1995 i had written a manuscript, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings, an american controversy and i was looking for people who would be open opponents to what i was saying which was basically that historians had given short shrift to the story that Sally Hemmings and jefferson had had Children Together and over a period of 38 years, historians mislaid the evidence so i went through and wrote about this and i was looking for people who would be in a position because that is the best way to know if you have a good story or not. Not to listen to an amen corner but those will be opposed to it. He was a Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation professor at the university of virginia and i thought he is likely to be opposed to this so i called him up and asked if he would read the manuscript. Fully expecting to get back, red pencil and everything and to my surprise he liked the book and suggested that the University Press of virginia publish the book, the press at Mister Jefferson university and we have been friends ever since and having a conversation about jefferson for all that time. I didnt think at the beginning we would end up writing a book but when he thought he was going to retire and ride off into the sunset i was like no, no. He is as busy now as ever. I said we should do this project forever to keep them in my life and this is the result of it. The most jarring thing for me was i dont do people. I am a jack reed student. That is an inside joke for people who studied with my professor at johns hopkins. I am an idea guy. I had to say some things about jefferson over the course of my career because i am as carlos accused me of being the jefferson professor, now emeritus. The idea of doing a biography is the last thing i could imagine doing because it is all about a person. I was a bit taken aback when Annette Gordon reed invited me to do this and it is one of the best things that has ever happened to me. Because i care about people, real people today, but dead people are not terribly interesting to me as people. Im exactly the opposite. I care about you. Took me a while to pick up on that. That was really hurtful. We would like to start off talking a little bit about the project and we will spend the first 20 minutes on the title and 5 minutes for the rest of the book but you might wonder about the title most blessed of the patriarchs because we could take a jeffersonian vote to find out how many of you love Mister Jefferson and how many are deeply conflicted at how many people hate him, that is okay. You would think he would call himself something else. This is a self description. That is why there are quotes on the title. Where does this patriarchy business come from . We have two pools in the first section of our discussion and we will see what happens. One is to unpack as they say the first part of the title and the subtitle will get equal attention because that really announces our ambition in this book which is to Say Something interesting for the first time in decades about Thomas Jefferson. We would say the first time in decades because we have often said jefferson scholarship is run into a ditch and the ditch is hypocrisy. You use that word and that settles the discussion. You dont want to talk about him, take anything he says seriously anymore and we think he is an interesting person. Biography and history is not about your best person who is your best friend forever. It is someone who is important in the world, who has done important things, helped Shape Society and no question jefferson has done that. We wanted to rediscover that person and talk about why he is an interesting individual so we take the phrase most blessed of the patriarchs from a letter jefferson wrote to Angelica Church who was one of the schuyler sisters, young people who listen to the soundtrack to that cast album know who she was and a handful of people get to see it apparently. But she is Alexander Hamiltons sisterinlaw and jefferson knew her in paris, met her in paris and writes to her in 1793 after he is about to leave, resigned from washingtons cabinet and has been bested by angelicas brother in law and is going home to lick his wounds essentially and talks about his family which is important to him and he says if his daughter came to live next door to him and everything works out as they have planned he will consider himself as blessed as the most blessed of the patriarchs. We loved that phrase because this is jefferson talking about himself in a somewhat unguarded way. He uses this phrase in another letter a couple years later but had an adjective, he says he is the antidelivery and patriarch so he really means it. This is not a one off in this disruption of himself. Peter says it is a bit jarring because the patriarch is someone you think of as an autocrat, someone with absolute power over everyone. Yet he is the apostle of liberty, the apostle of democracy and for the common man. How did he come to think of himself in this particular way. We set up the book in the fashion that tries to explain him. With three sections. The first is called patriarch, the second is called traveler. We taken to france and talk about his experiences there and the third is enthusiasm. When we examine other aspects of his life that were important to him. Music, visitors, privacy, prayer. Jeffersons religious life is one of the more interesting all of it is interesting but one of the most interesting parts of the book is to think about how he thought of himself as a christian. That is the structure of the book and it all goes back to this notion of patriarch, unpacking what that means. We begin with that idea and this is not a conventional biography but we take jefferson home where he imagines himself to be in that letter. He always complained about public political life and how miserable it was and he was in it. For him home was a sacred place, it was the whole reason he was in politics, to protect his home. We take jefferson as seriously as we can throughout this book, but one thing we cant take seriously is his protesting that he is schizophrenic. They didnt have that terminology at the time, that he is two different people, the man who had to do politics, that miserable vocation and the man at home where he flourished. He wasnt at home all that much over the course of his life until he retired and second and more importantly, it was home that was at the heart of his political vision. It wasnt the negation of politics or the opposite of politics, it was the very reason for politics. What does home mean to jefferson . One thing it means, this is where the word patriarch comes in, it means control, dominion over not only his white family, very old white men know what im talking about when white guys were important, father knew best. I have never known best especially in this collaboration. There was something to jefferson and many men of his day with the possible exception of ehrenberg, who thought Patriarchal Authority in the home was natural. It was natures designed. That is the way life had to be organized. There had to be a captain of that ship. There had to be somebody who was the head of household and household is the key term because the economy was organized by household. Every household was an economic unit as well as the site of infection and domesticity that we still remember now, it used to be like that, right . So we begin with the ideas that jefferson is not embarrassed about being a powerful, even despotic and autocratic man but to be blessed, it must be because he is enabled to do things for those that are in his power. Power is a means toward an end. He sees himself as a benevolent steward. This opens up our discussion by suggesting from the beginning that jefferson sees himself and is not embarrassed to tell us that he is a slaveholder. What people think about, question whether jefferson is wrestling with this, go to sleep at night saying marco i am an owner of slaves, aint it awful . No. He didnt do that. He was comfortable with the notion of progress and that eventually slavery would die. This is a difficult thing for us to accept because the idea that things would inevitably get better and better and better because i dont think many my impression is we dont think that way now. There seems to be the line to progress is not straight. Two steps forward and three steps back, veered to the left, veer to the right, he actually believed, he had a scientific mind, thinking just as there was scientific progress, that politics was progress as well, society was progress so he could rest easy in this world particularly after he comes back from france as we talk about how france changes his understanding of slavery, himself as a patriarch, he always thought of himself as a patriarch who was responsible, that is the other side of it. We hear patriarch and automatically think of the bad side of it, dominion in power you are talking about, he is also thinking of himself, you use the term benevolent but responsibility. These other people over whom i have exercised responsibility. The family understands that that was the way. It is problematic now but not as problematic as exercising dominion over enslaved people. That section we cannot accept, cannot even then there were people who rebelled against that particular notion but that is how he sees himself. He grew up in a society, his first memory is of being handed up on a pillow to an enslaved person, talk about at the end of his life, many people discuss this, when he is dying his grandson says he says something, the only person in the room who knows what he is saying is an enslaved man, last manservant who understands what he is saying almost like mothers are the only people who can understand their kids when they are speaking, lift him up on his political that is what he wants and jefferson closes his eyes and soon after dies, the first person he remembers seeing and one of the last people he saw at the end of his life was an enslaved africanamerican person. These people bounded his life. So this is an institution he is comfortable in, himself personally, intellectually as a man of the enlightenment he knows this cant continue. He believes it is against the enlightenment but progress would come at this institution would go away. We cant accept that because we know what happened. We are looking backwards and understand what it took to do that. But that was the way of feeling comfortable at this institution so he didnt feel guilty. There is not this, we keep looking at contradictions and arent you upset, how do you do it and that is not those are our views, those are not his issues. To make sense of this we need to explore that idea of the empire of the imagination we suggest in our subtitle. There is a tension here between the intimacy and entanglement of black and white lives under slavery and jeffersons comfort in that situation and the vision that someday there would be an end to slavery because as he tells us from very early in life, he announces slavery is a radical injustice and that injustice must be righted. He says in his only book notes in the state of virginia, the likelihood that the wheel of fortune would turn and there would be black over white, if there were a just god, that would happen. This is a startling admission from a slaveholder. In that sense in the long term not comfortable with slavery but right now in the short term he is was how do we get from the shortterm to the longterm . That is the thrust of our book, tried to explain that. This is where enlightenment needs to be better understood. Think of the trope or the idea of white spreading. This is the image that was very popular in this period of how it was the donning of an age of reason when enlightened men and women were able to discern patterns in nature, to make sense of what the creator had intended and that idea that there is an ultimate intention in the future, that all men would be treated equal, that there would be freedom for all the peoples of the world and here is the key point. He sees his enslaved people as a captive nation. A separate people. Even while he lives with his slaves intimately. How do we get to a point in which those nations could be separated so that enslaved people could be free people and independent people . Here is the key thing and it points to a fundamental problem with what we call democracy and republican government, and that is majority rules. That is the mother principle of republican government. Jeffersons enlightenment, the rest of you, we feel enlightened with these glaring lights but you are cast in the darkness. Only when we turn those lights on will you understand what your moral responsibilities are. You will see what needs to be done and we then will act as a people to rectify this injustice. In a way that we now find profoundly offensive, that is by racial separation, colonization as it was called in the 19th century, by the creation of an independent black people somewhere else, in other words ripping apart those intimate arrangements that life within households, plantation households, in which we explore and study jefferson. There is the arc of the story. How do we get there and how does jefferson live with this . He lives with it because he prays for it and believes in you, my fellow americans, i should say virginians. We are not in virginia, are we . That one day you will see the light. Exactly and he did in fact believe that and that is the thing that is so difficult for us because we dont have that notion. We also have the notion that we are trying to at least on paper or idealistically to have a multiracial society. What peter is describing is the lack of his confidence that we could do that. In virginia he says if in fact there has to be emancipation but there has to be separation. White people will never give up their prejudices against blacks, black people will never forgive whites for what they did. How could you love a country that has treated you the way blacks have been treated. There has to be a separation and when you have that separation the people then could be in their separate nation, come together with amicable relations among nations but we reject this principle and so this has been the source of the problem with jefferson even though i have to say this was the feeling many people had during the time period. That was considered the enlightened position. Marshall, james madison, monroe, Harriet Beecher stowe. All of these people did not have a belief that you could have this one country together because we talked about the fact that home was important to jefferson and family. The notion was the family is the basic unit, then the community, the state and out to the nation. How can you be equal citizens if people cannot be in your family . How can you say we are all one people if we are not actually one people . Obviously he could not advocate for that. It is difficult to advocate for that now actually. Everybody is one was not something that was on the table for him and he also suggested if we had that separation we would end up with a race war, people laugh at that