Thank you. It took a village. Dr. Watson has published more than 40 books, hundreds of scholarly articles, and encyclopedia referenced essays. He has coconvened National Conferences on the american presidency, moderated political debate, and delivered within 1000 keynote addresses. He has founded three nonprofit think tanks dedicated to civic education, political reform. He is a frequent media commentator on cnn, foxs special report with britt hume, msnbc, usa today, the new york times, and the bbc. Dr. Watson has lectured at the four arts numerous times and will do so in the future. We again welcome him as he works his magic with our formidable historians. There you go. [applause] dr. Watson can everybody hear me now right . Most importantly i have my coffee. Thank you, again, molly, dr. Brenneman, and the entire team at the society. And congratulations on yet another important and successful and exciting program. I would also like to thank cspan as was mentioned earlier, for covering our program, and acknowledge the generous support. The opportunity to sit and talk history, if everybody if anybody knows me, i never miss the opportunity. I never miss a nice history talk. To sit and talk with one of my heroes and arguably one of the preeminent historians of our time or any time, a man that has t, historian of the founders, the dean of revolutionary war scholars who will be here in one week. I paid him 100 bucks to say that. Dr. Watson i would like to thank joe ellis for coming for the remarks. We have about an hour, we may go over. We will try to keep it tight to an hour. I thought we would tub of dish cover a few topics, one being dr. Ellis books and his writing process. I want him to take us behind the scenes. We want to get back on the founders and get back to their eternal and important legacy, contributions up to today, and the meeting today, the relevant. We want to talk on historical to open uput i want with getting to know joe ellis as the person. Could you tell us, what sparked your interest in history and what age were you when you first realized this was your calling . Joe i do not have a canned answer to that. Usually i have already heard the questions and i am scripted to do this. I went to college at the college of lame and mary. Before william and mary. Before that i went to a Jesuit School in d. C. Called gonzaga. I was classically trained in terms of latin and greek. I did not really take much in the way of American History. I majored in philosophy at lehman mary, and when it came time afterwards at william and mary and when it came time afterwards, people come up to me and say what are you going to do, that horrible question, and you have got to have an answer. My answer was, i going to law school. I have not thought about it but i knew that was a good answer because everyone would accept that answer. My senior year i realized i did not have the money to go to law school. I was on my own, and william and mary was not cheap. I was working as a head super lifeguard in the d. C. Area overseeing pools. Anyway, i could not afford to go to law school so i thought, i can get into graduate school. Then i really did not want to go on in philosophy because philosophy was heading in this direction of semiotics, and i was interested in ideas. People said, you can go on and do history. So i applied and i got into yale, which nobody could understand however got in. Watson did you ever ask them how you got in . Ask i did not know who to think i wrote an essay that somebody thought was good, but all of the people at yale at the same time as me were much better at it than i was. At the end of a year i sort of thought, i am not cut out to do this. I was supposed to write a certain way and did not want to do that. So i sort of started saying, i am not coming back. What was i going to do . I was going to run swimming pools. Woodward, amed prominent historian at yale called me into his office and made me promise i would come back. , iaid to him, mr. Woodward do not think i am as good as all these other people. He said, joe, you are right, they actually know more than you do from reading but you can learn that. You know something that they do not know, and they can never learn. I spent the last 40 years trying to figure out what that was. [laughter] [applause] joe i was leaning forward waiting for that moment. I dont know. Hanging off the edge of a cliff here. I think it has to do something with writing. If you were not a writer and a historian, would you be an attorney . Joe i think i would be a lawyer but not a corporate lawyer, i cannot, iike but i would not be happy i have lawyers making a lot of money right me and say, i want to do what you are doing. And i say, give up. Because it is not going to work for you. I am really, in other words, like most things in life, most of the Big Decisions i have made in my life to include what i want to be when i grew up in who i want to marry, you make those decisions before you have enough information to really know whether they are good ideas. [laughter] joe isnt that right . So sometimes they work out. Like in this case it worked out. Im really happy. And i get up in the morning go down to my study and drink my coffee and try to scribble away. I write longhand. I am not technologically committed to anything, other than a rollerball black ink pens. Say it is always fun is not true, but it is fulfilling for me in a way that is really wonderful. Teaching for me, i had retired formally from teaching. I taught at williams last year, but most of the time in the five college area, the five college area, amherst and hampshire university. Writing is a solitary activity. It is lonely. Teaching is a social activity. I like the combination of the two things. Right. And i miss the teaching. I dont miss grading papers. Right. And one of the things that is happening out there in the world of undergraduates and if you dont know this, you need to know this. In the last couple of years, i know that students would give me their papers and i would make all kinds of comments on the margin, and labor intensive process, but it is important of the central part of the education, because you are playing with the minds of the syntax of the sentences, you are talking about the way they think. I spent a lot of time doing that and they come up after class and they say, i cant read cursive. Cursive and roman numerals. Its like so you can do that because its interlinear on paper. Im anacronistic. A few years ago at our university we had smart boards installed in all the rooms. You have seen them on cnn when you can open up the Electoral College map or whatever. I am trying to think how can i use the smart board to teach about the battle of gettysburg. I thought i would show him original letters. I pulled up i cant remember whatever i pulled up and it was written in cursive. I asked the First Student, would you read it. The First Student looked at me sheepishly who said i cant. I thought maybe the student had a learning issue so i moved to the next student who said i cant and it dawned on me date couldnt read cursive and about a semester later, i had an outline for the historical period we were going to cover and i had it in roman numerals and dr. Watson said why do you have a v in your syllabus . I want to get back on the writing and your approach in just a moment. All historians i think all of us have a favorite historical place or site we like to go to. I know during your research, you devote a lot of time to pouring through these letters. I do everything myself. Which is rare today. Which you know is not i mean its rare for people of your caliber. Who are trying to produce works i dont have Research Assistance either, but its different. Its because i in doing research, and reading, i discover things that i would not be able to tell a Research Assistant to look for. Right. So like general howell in the battle of germantown returned washingtons dog. Right. Who he found on the battlefield and had it permanently returned. Thats not going to change the direction of the american revolution. I would have never found that. Right. But the i think its letters. I mean its a real interesting fact that whats going to happen with the history of the 21st century Major Political figures. Because no one writes anymore. Because there are no letters. In some ways, there is too much information because emails proliferate in ways that are infinite. Reading letters. The adams family correspondence is to me the most one of the most richest, perhaps the ripest richest source. What i said at the end of my talk, the Adams Jefferson correspondence. Sure. And you assign that to students. Ive assigned the whole thing to students at holy oak and amherst, and they almost always begin with the assumption that they are going the like jefferson and that hes going to write much more elegantly. Then they realize they dont like him as much as they like adams. Right. And that jefferson has a style that floats. His style is like his mind. Its rhapsodic. Its romantic. It floats above the details of ordinary life. And its attractive in that regard. Its beguiling. I had this one student who said, this is jefferson. This is adams. Right. Its pujellistic, its aggressive. Watching that for me, thats a source. Thats a place. I mean, i love to go back to mount vernon. Id love to go back to monticello. Those are the two places that i love to go back to. Mount tellier is being recreated in a big way at the at this moment, madisons home. I respect the work that they do. Theed a 578s i like the adams the adams i like the adams homestead in quincy, which is run by the National Parks service. Ok . Its not run by a private thing. Right. And its a real home. The other places have become museums in some sense. People actually live, you know, for the next three or four generations in the adams home. I like that. I like that kind of but if there is anything creative that i do it happens when im reading , a letter and i see things in me thinkn it that make about an issue in a way that i had not before been able to think about. I think its fantastic that you do your own research. I would agree that the story about the dog in germantown in october of 1977, a Research Assistant would have said im not going the pass this along to the professor. If you read it yourself, both howell and washington were dog lovers. Its almost an endearing moment. Imagine two leaders in battle exchanging a dog that was running around lost on the battlefield. If you wanted to probe that you could go like this. You could say, howell didnt believe in this war. Howell didnt want to be fighting washington. He hoped they would be able to defeat the Continental Army in long island and end it. That was it. He really, really, didnt want to be there. Right. And he had a relationship with washington in which he saw him as on honorable coequal. And honor exists in a way that we have a difficult time understanding now. I mean, think about this. Why is it in a revolutionary war battlefield when the two sides approach each other they dont lie down . I mean, why would you stand there while somebody is about ready to shoot you, right . Because thats dishonorable. Like generals in battles in the revolutionary war, even though they are being annihilated, will not retreat. Right. Why . Retreat is dishonorable. Dishonor. Stupido. Ok . Just get behind a rock, you know . Right. So that one little incident can be a device that gets you into a whole mentality that and one of the things i wanted to say, because i was going on too long in the talk, we are talking about a world, late 18th century that is predemocratic. Gordon comes next, you tell him i said its predemocratic. He is going to go nuts. They get along, but they have their disagreements. Its predarwin. Its prefreud. Its prepicasso. Its precanes. Its preinternet. Its even predonald trump. Yeah. So its a really different world back there. Right. Now, does that mean its lost forever . I wouldnt go there. If it was lost forever, what had what in heavens name are we bothering ourselves to go back there . Right. There are things to learn from that world. Right. But in the same way that lets say that you are an anthropologist and you go to samoa. You shouldnt expect the samoan parents to raise their kids according to dr. Spock. Right . We all know that that would be wrong to do that. Its similar to go back and expect and you get into fights about undergraduates about this. Sure. There was a young woman at williams last year. We were talking about slavery. And the constitution. And the constitutional convention. She said, look, they made the wrong case choice. They made the morally reprehensible choice and thats the end of the story. We cant talk about it anymore. I said, what do you mean we cant talk about it . This is this trigger thing, this notion that you have got to recognize that this is a different world and come to terms with that world and understand in fact if they had actually tried to insert an article ending slavery or saying slavery should be on the road to extinction, the constitution would have never passed. Right. So what happens then . Right. So you get your way. You know, what happens then . The south ends up being separate. They make an alliance with england because of the cotton trade. Slavery probably lasts longer. Its hard to know. You cant go back and play the tape, but i feel strongly that you cant impose a politically correct identity politics agenda on from a 2017 perspective on something yeah. Yeah. And there were founders opposed to slavery, hamilton, franklin, and others, but it was politically not going to happen. You had mentioned john adams is one of those founders that is hard to like according to at a lot of historians and probably not that popular. Yet you have been enamored with him. Yeah, i dont like him. I love him. In terms of that, adams getting right to the point, is a part of the reason why you like adams. Because ive always seen him like truman and grant. I can read truman, i can read grant, they were blunt, got right to the point. Whereas im still working on figuring out jefferson and washington. Is that part of the charm of adams, his directness and bluntness . Is that why you love him . Thats true, but only partially the reason. I mean, compared to truman and grant, adams is a genius and its also funny as hell. He has a real sense of humor about himself. Grant never did. Grant doesnt have that. Neither did truman. He understands himself psychologically much more than any modern politician ive ever seen. He understands what love means. He understands what a realistic and hes a contrarian. Yes, he is. Who thinks that the fact that he lost the election of 1800 to jefferson is the single most important contribution he ever made to American History because he was right to keep us out of a war with france. He lost the election for that reason. Because of it. And that his definition of leadership is a definition thats unenforceable in our modern political culture. Rather do whats right and lose than suffer the consequence. The people, the public. Whats the people . The people is the, you know, the swoonish thing that changes its mind and can be unpredictable. The public is the long term interest of the people. Right. Which at any given time most of the people dont understand. Your job as a leader is to understand that. In the case of washington passed the jay treaty. Very unpopular. The right thing to do. Lines us up with britain economically for a century. Adams, avoid war with france. Right thing to do. Would have been devastating to the american economy, et cetera. Those are acts of leadership by washington and adams as president that would be unthinkable in a contemporary context because everybody would be poll driven and they would say you cant possibly do that. So its a form of leadership. Its like when mark twain went to the holy land. He said christ has been here once and will never come again. [laughter] to thesegoing people arent coming back. Just to know that that form of leadership actually existed people did that. Thats really wonderful. You mentioned the adamsjefferson letters, which we would both agree are one of the most important sources to understanding the founding period and anybody who writes on this topic needs to go back through them. Theres a great story about adams and jefferson having a falling out having a fallout over the election. Come back together, dying on the same day. Dying on the same day. If you made that up, nobody would accept it. Hollywood agents wouldnt put that in a film. Would say, you cant do that. The 50th anniversary of the signing of the declaration of independence. They both passed on july 4. Same day. 50th anniversary to the day of the declaration. Remarkable. Almost to the hour. Again, you cant make this stuff up. Is there something about the Adams Jefferson letters that you particularly like or you particularly find relevant or important to your work on the founding . I alluded to it on in my remarks. They are a summing up of the revolutionary generation. The generation is passing of its 1812 to 1826. They are old. They are getting to be old guys. They are looking back together at what theyve done and the way its they have shaped the revolution and the way it has shaped them. And as adams said, you and i ought not to die before we have explained ourselves to each other. They were bitter enemies throughout the 1790s. Jefferson was a duplicitous son of a gun. He hired several scandal mongers. James calendar. Also he is eventually that blows the whistle on the Sally Hemmings thing with jefferson. It is watching two of the preeminent founders think about what has happened and what it dontand the fact is they burglary. Two men lived the same experience and dont agree about what it means. It is what i would call the american dialogue that i find and thenmpelling reinforces my notion that history is an argument and an argument you can see the american argument formulated with them. Is why the, correspondence is seminal. What i like about it is you have these two elder statesmen late in life reminiscing. These two old bulls reminiscing about their hey day and taking different perspectives. Jefferson to me has been remarkably enigmatic and plants evidence and tries to be above the fray, but he is duplicitous in the fray. These letters, i think jefferson is more direct. He is forced into it. If you want to depict it. Jefferson liked to stand with his arms folded to sort of protective himself from intruders. Adams pacing back and forth and periodically grabbing him by the lapel. I think both of them are performing. They dont know we are going to be here in palm beach, but they know they are going to be they know these letters are going to be read for several hundred years after they write them. They are writing them to