Christopher Hitchens on Thomas Jefferson: Influence on the Revolution & Louisiana Purchase (2006)

stable and book TV takes you there now for five and a half hours of live coverage up first Christopher Hitchens the Vanity Fair contributing editor will discuss his latest work a biography of Thomas Jefferson you're watching live coverage of the Annapolis Book Festival here on book TV on c-span 2 distinct honor and pleasure to be introducing Christopher Hitchens this morning for not only is he a fellow expatriate he was also born in Portsmouth England as was I and just now I figured out that we actually we were born in the same building educated at Oxford and anointed by the British newspaper The Guardian as one of the top 100 intellects mr. Hitchens has written prolific Lee both in books and for numerous magazines led by the nation and Vanity Fair on subjects as wide-ranging as Mother Teresa Ronald Reagan and Michael more recently he published his latest book on Thomas Jefferson once a darling of the left he now issues his socialist past although he still seems to hold some affection for Marxism however he's forsaken his erstwhile liberal friends describing him as too righteous boring and herbivorous his views then could not be pigeonholed perhaps that word contrarian best describes him ladies and gentlemen please welcome Christopher Hitchens well first of all thank you very much ladies and gentlemen coming and thank you Paul for that very handsome introduction nice to meet someone from whom I could have been separated at birth you I'm told ladies adjustment we only have 3/4 of an hour together and so it's an hour that's good all right well I was going to say that I take it that people like yourselves come to events like this in order to speak as well as to be spoken to so I'll try and be as sparing with my share of the time as I can be but bear in mind that mr. Jefferson was in power almost continuously one way or another for a quarter of a century it's quite a difficult life to compress into one book and certainly into one talk I thought I'd speak about in mind the four headings four chief headings enlightenment warn revolution nation-building and slavery Jefferson was slightly prone to self-pity he would often say the burdens of office were too great the appreciation of his efforts was insufficient the business of politics was too foul he constantly say I'm not sure I'll be back on my farm in Monticello he would now have said I mean ought to spend more time with my family and we would be able to add now from what we know more time with his two families but as it happens he could easily have elected to do something other than politics and have been perhaps not as well known but equally successful in the chosen field he could have been an excellent lawyer he was a very good lawyer it took some quite early cases also about emancipation he could have been an extremely good librarian his private library became the core of what is now the Library of Congress in Washington he designed a plow which dug a deep Ofuro in the soil he could have been it was a very good farmer he wouldn't have been a very good wine grower he never got Virginia wines up to snuff in fact they still rather lag though I think they're better than the Connecticut Chardonnay he when he had settled a minor point in a question about the rights of whaling whalers Marin the moby-dick cents between his country our country and others he decides he'd have to write a special treatise on it to study the whole matter properly before he gave his report it was a genuine polymath and the city of Philadelphia in that time while it might not have been the equivalent of say the fifth century Athens was becoming had become a magnet city for that kind of talent scientific medical philosophical and so forth obviously the best known to us of this Pantheon is Benjamin Franklin who has a reasonable claim to have discovered at least the workings of electricity in its connection to lightning but for example when Joseph Priestley who we can I think rightly call the discoverer of oxygen even though he believed in the phlogiston theory for most of his life was a brilliant scientist and after his laboratory in Birmingham in England had been smashed broken up by a mob shouting for the church and the king these are the supporters of Edmund Burke not all of them were as polite or as polished as mr. Burke was mr. Priestley decided to take his remaining instruments and his knowledge and cross the Atlantic and bring them to Philadelphia where he knew he'd be welcome there one could have met people like dr. Benjamin Rush a very distinguished physician also one of the founders of the American anti-slavery society Thomas Paine came across there with a letter indeed of introduction from Benjamin Franklin not just in order to exert his fantastic skills as a polemicist and public speaker but also in the hope of designing which what had never been tried before an iron bridge a bridge that would span water and connect distant places and survive the winter wouldn't crack and splinter as wood would do bridge building couldn't be a better definition of an Enlightenment project bridges a dialectical by definition they don't go only one way an ideal occupation for mr. Paine Jefferson was absolutely in his element in this world and I think there are two achievements that we can that we can tribute to this enlightenment atmosphere to the sort of authors and writers who they discussed in France in Italy Cesare Beccaria for example whose book on crimes and punishments have begun to revolutionize thinking in Europe what up until then executions and torture the most barbaric kind have been very commonplace when Jefferson became governor of the state of Virginia he produced an almost model Statute on crime and punishment didn't actually succeed in abortion with death penalty I'm sorry to say but in but in attempting a less retributive and more rehabilitating more humane and more scientific penal system that would be one what I would call enlightenment achievement and one that set a precedent across the United States but the most important one I believe but and probably the major subject of conversation in Philadelphia at that time was this or is this once people had began to realize that the world was not flat that the son did not revolve around it that diseases were not caused by Devils or by sin and various other quite striking disclosures of the kind they began also to think as it were inevitably that well there might be another explanation than creation for the way the world was and though there might be a designer deism was very common among this group people who believed in effect that the order of nature showed the must have been a god or at least a starter but it didn't look as if this personal force took any direct interest in human affairs did not intervene did not answer or listen to prayers was unstacked or anything of backwardness that that it was probably necessary to have a separation in society and in government between the church in the state no other government before or since has ever deliberated on this point and resolved it in this way extremely revolutionary idea at the time probably the fact that the British crown had had its own private church the Anglican Church as call the Church of England or the Episcopal Church which obviously was going to be disestablished in America the crown wasn't gonna have its own church anymore may have made it easier but it was proposed I'm talking again now about the deliberations in the Virginia assembly by Patrick Henry and others will let us instead have the government's support not one church but all churches everyone should be tithe for the support of all churches there was to that proposition in the context only one reply which was that the government should support no church and together mr. Jefferson and his close lifelong friend mr. Madison evolved the Virginia statute on religious freedom how many people have here have been to Charlottesville to Monticello to see the house no that's excellent well then you know that on the but just for those who are watching us and wishing they were as knowledgeable as we were you will those of you at home ladies and gentlemen may not know that when mr. Jefferson designed his own memorial which takes no religious form by the way there's no cross or anything like that or he didn't have an attending priest of his deathbed either which was long foreseen he only mentions a very small number of achievements he thought he only should be remembered as founder of the University of Virginia author of the Declaration of Independence and author of the Virginia statute on religious freedom I didn't think it worth mentioning that he'd been president twice and Vice President and Secretary of State and ambassador to France or minister to France so we can we can well see the salience and he put on this and though because he was in France he wasn't present at the deliberations in Philadelphia that resulted in the Constitutional Convention I think it's obvious when you look at it that the Virginia statute on religious freedom is the embryo of the first amendment to the Constitution which is my opinion the amendment that in acts if you like all the others which makes a clear separation between church and state guarantees religious freedom by their he means it which it can be guaranteed just to say a secular state and also guarantees the right of free expression and free assembly the the the extraordinary luck of having somebody who could part of that intellectual ferment of Philadelphia take it into politics and then to the law and then into a drafting committee and finally into our Constitution is something that I think would be well certainly has been made a book in itself so that's not all I want to say about enlightenment but I've come back to it by another route but the second area where he was preeminent was that of war and revolution in the first place he drafts the manifesto of the revolution most of it at any age fails to get a clause condemning slavery and being adopted fails to get it sorry fails to get it adoption probably because of the pressure of the Carolinas and Georgia delegations but also because of the number of slave traders not holders also in New York but with that terrible initial defeat conceded he he announces if you like the first democratic revolution until that time the word democratical or democratic was generally used as an insult as the Greeks might have said autocratic or ma Biche or mob rule to be accused of being a Democrat was to be accused of favoring essentially mob rule John Adams would I think have continued using it in that way for most of his life the word democracy evolves as a non pejorative as a positive word really out of the work of Thomas Jefferson and might and in my opinion the unacknowledged draft of the Declaration Thomas Paine was the subject of my next book the unacknowledged founding father but that the the crucial thing is popular sovereignty and the for the first time the idea that rights are innate in humans not in monarchs not in bishops and not derived from the heavens though a creator is mentioned it's not specified that they are common property any human can claim and this is this idea which I believe is still the most revolutionary idea was at that time extraordinarily so when mr. Jefferson finally becomes president the very first thing he does is to declare war and he does it without consulting Congress and he sends the American fleet with the Marine Corps way out too far from land and in too far gone in time for when for them to be recalled when he finally does tell Congress he sent them this is because he wanted to make absolutely sure that this war was a success the war he declared was known to us as the Barbary war and be largely forgotten I think now in our history but of extreme importance not just as America's first war but as a war of liberation the war was against what as I say Varley called the Barbary States these are more properly described as the states of the Ottoman Empire in North Africa what we would now call Algeria Morocco Tripoli excuse me Tunisia and Libya Tripoli would have been lived in Tripoli that then would be Libya now in other words they were the Ottoman States they commanded the entrance to the Mediterranean from the Atlantic the Straits of Gibraltar The Pillars of Hercules they were in an extraordinary position to impose their will on navigation and it's calculated now by the best historians this is a lot of this is quite recent work that between 1750 say about 1750 and about 1820 about a million and a half Europeans and Americans were kidnapped by these past taken from their ships the ships were taken - and pressed into slavery you could you could avoid this if you paid a tribute to the relevant potentate the bay or salt on which most European powers tended to do there was if there was a tariff for it but the United States was in a weak position at that point to be paying the tribute and the British crown which had up until then been guaranteeing American shipping was rather vindictive and probably in fact made bargains with the Barbary States in order that they would particularly pick upon American shipping showing them what they'd lost by losing the protection of the Union Jack so the situation was pretty desperate these ships were you know very powerful to they it's recorded that almost the entire I'm not making this as a local pitch because I'm in Annapolis but the entire town of Baltimore in Ireland was carried off entire population in one night by Arab slavers and never seen again they arranged that far north and all the way down into the Atlantic Jefferson had tried very hard to negotiate with the Barbary ambassador mr. Abdul Rahman he went to London to see him and said by what right do you do this to American shipping we did not take part in the Crusades we did not take part in the reconquest of Andalusia we are not a Christian country there is a treaty there still extant still is the law of the land in this country the Treaty of Tripoli which among other things states and has the full support of Congress and the Senate in stating the United States is in no description a Christian country worth remembering by the way when you hear some of today's blowhards but Abdulrahman replied that this was irrelevant that that any non-muslim could be taken into slavery according to the to the Koran and all non-muslims and other infidels were to be punished and if they didn't want to pay the special tax they could they could expect to be treated as chattel well it was decided not to be spoken to in this tone of voice and the fleet set sail and after a fairly prolonged bombardment I won't tell you the whole story and some very heroic operations now associated with the names of Stephen Decatur in particular a change of policy was imposed they the the the practice was given up of piracy and enslavement and the it's the reason why the first line of the marine anthem from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli is the line that it is because that's the first time we the American flag was planted in war on another country's soil this was a very brisk start to mr. Jefferson's presidential life and he meant it I think to why no I argued strongly in my book to show that the American Revolution was not for Americans alone that the ideas that it embodied were he hopes capable of universal emulation he had they would spread he believed they had spread to France he'd been disappointed by the defeat of his friend the Marquis de Lafayette in the fracture side within the French Revolution but nonetheless he believed that slowly and by degrees the American Revolution would export itself and could be exported by violence if necessary or if negated and I mention it because among other things we can say that at least partially it cancels the shame of the exclusion of the anti-slavery clause from the declaration of 1776 at least mr. Jefferson in his lifetime did put down one slave trade but I'm coming back to that subject too it's one revolution none for now sketchily admit the Enlightenment nation-building in order for the United States to be a revolution that could be emulated and exported and fought for overseas it had to be a serious continental power as a Jefferson's main preoccupation throughout his life he had various principles sometimes Federalists sometimes anti-federalists sometimes Republicans sometimes democratic any of these principles he would sacrifice if it gained territory or trade or power or influence for United States when this country began we were gathered today in Annapolis which was briefly its capital would still be in it if it remained the way it was but the way it was was to this continent the northern American continent what Chile is to the other side of the South American continent a long ribbon-like country trapped between the ocean and the mountains chill a very charming 13 colonies very charming too but you see how easily they might again have fallen prey to any renewal of violence between Britain Spain and France it was a very tenuous existence for Jefferson the absolutely critical thing was to gain control of the Mississippi thought we can do that we can become a real continental power the term United States of America originally coined I think this is disputed but I think it's true by Thomas Paine weighed with him very much he thought there should be more States and he was always looking for expansion first in the northwest but above all towards the Mississippi and the chance came in the early part of the last century when despite the fact that he had always been in favor of the French Revolution and even its burnup artists an expression against the British Empire he was never really neutral as between Britain and France I had gotten to taking immense political risks to be identified with the pro-french faction he wrote to the French government and said we want you to sell us New Orleans we must have it and Mississippi at all costs we understand you're willing to sell the game the idea had been given him by Thomas Paine said I think they're so broke now said pain that they would they would sell us Louisiana Jefferson said if you don't do it if you don't accept our offer in order to gain control of the Mississippi I'm willing to make a naval and military alliance with Great Britain something that would have been unthinkable for him to say under any other circumstances and mr. Italian wrong Napoleon's chief politician had to admit that they were so broke and so much and how either that he would give them more than they'd asked for every French territory in North America he wasn't even quite sure of the full extent of it they could have the lot for a given price which comes down to if you take Henry Adams this beautiful formulation doubling the size of the United States in one day at the cost of 10 cents an acre the most extraordinary and deal in history almost makes you believe in manifest destiny and well especially when you think just a digression but only a few years later mr. Lincoln's Secretary of State Macias mr. Seward is talking to his Russian counterpart who says we've got this boring extension of Siberia on your side of the Straits called Alaska it's no use to man or beast you know do fancy buying leasing okay I'll see what I've got on me oh-ho maybe God is on the side of the United States after all anyway for Jefferson this was the absolutely critical thing and this is the bit that I like and I make it I make it a crux point in my in my book I don't believe in numinous dates or anything like that even though mr. Jefferson and I actually have the same birthday but the birthday of the United States fourth of July is also the date on which Louisiana Purchase is announced in The Gazette in Washington and happier still later in the afternoon of that day Lewis and Clark received their instructions to depart from Pittsburgh and go west and to Jefferson was able to tell them he's already told them you will have to meet with and treat with many Indian nations and their leaders he urges on them always to treat them with the greatest of respect ask them to enter into negotiations with Washington but he's able to tell them Lewis and Clark what they can now tell these Indian leaders which is gentlemen you already live in the United States imagine the reign of the Emperor of France is over and will never come back the Spanish are not coming back you are Americans already and so would on that 4th of July he's able to sent send off the greatest enlightenment expedition ever founded there's there's a word for Orientalism for the way that Napoleon but around the same time sent all kinds of artists and scientists and geographers and seismologists and botanists and anthropologists to Egypt that we call that Orientalism Occidental ISM is what mr. Jefferson was practicing he made sure that Lewis and Clark went to Philadelphia from the great city of the Enlightenment for a long course in astronomy how to guide themselves by the Stars stellar navigation in the curing of cholera the treatment of car excuse me not a quarter of smallpox I beg your pardon that not irrelevant digression here Jefferson vaccinated everyone on his estate at Monticello including the people who where's property against smallpox he was a great partisan of dr. Jenner's invention he even discovered a method by which it could be kept cool and not lose its force when it was being transported there was a problem with it losing its potency he discovered that by keeping a cold with water or ice it could it could be taken quite a long distance he taught arranged for Lewis and Clark to be taught how to administer smallpox injections to Indians which is a small compensation for the terrible damage done to their culture by the small pox that was brought to the new world by the colonists Timothy Dwight famous devine of the time well known as the founder of Yale still took the view that vaccination against smallpox was an interference with God's design shouldn't be practiced I suppose he would have to be right since it would have to have been God who designed smallpox in the first place this is the trap you dig for yourself as a creationist so in all these other ways these merciful I became very very highly educated people trained in all these matters and navigation agriculture they would take given seeds and plants to take with them they were given instructions on how to keep cuttings and bring back specimens of botany on their return it was a genuinely scientific expedition and of course by the time it was over it could be safely said that the United States would one day extend as far as California and Oregon which of course it eventually did though mr. Lincoln's greatest ambition was to go to California and even he as president never managed to do it nor of course did mr. Jefferson but by the time the Jefferson presidency is over we know that there's going to be a major country called the United States of America and everyone else in the world knows this country cannot be messed around with militarily and it has a revolutionary manifesto somewhere about its person in the form of a declaration and now a constitution so the whole wheel of history eventually turns enormous lee in the Jefferson years so I left slavery to the last because I because I had to but because also it touches all the other things I've mentioned it's a consistent thread throughout the whole thing Jefferson tried when he was a young member of the Virginia House of Burgesses under British rule to have at least the right for the right of manumission as it was called the right of a slave owner has to say to liberate another slave that was not a thing you were allowed to do in polite society it was it wasn't you weren't able to set that that example we fought for that he fought during the Declaration as you know to have a clause included that would ban not just the trade but the the trade in slaves but also the holding of slaves and it didn't get that written in wasn't at the Constitutional Convention did succeed in having slavery prevented in the Northwest Territories and that ordinance will try his best to do so past the past the relevant legislation in his notes on the state of Virginia which I strongly recommend that you read rights such good abolitionist prose that you don't really need after you've read that to read even Frederick Douglas of Maryland all the arguments against slavery are in there already not just the degrading effect that it has upon the slaves themselves which is so to speak taken for granted but the the extremely degrading and dehumanizing effect that it has on those who profit from it and who hold other people as property it's probably not being put any better or more tersely and we can add with pride that's the slave trade of the Barbary States is put down by American force good but when the United States is doubled in size by the Louisiana Purchase and when a whole new world and another chance for another whole new start is presented Thomas Payne and Joel Barlow two of his closest friends go to the president say look mr. president we can start again do not have any slavery in the New Territories don't bring any slaves into Louisiana don't unload anyone at New Orleans that's got has to stop go and get some good thrifty German immigrants and settlers and get them settled on the land and allow freed slaves from other states to come and be given land grants in Louisiana we can start again and Jefferson said no because he was afraid of what had happened in Haiti he was afraid of the Haitian Revolution shop again negates his general support for revolutionary activity if it wasn't for the Haitian Revolution there wouldn't be the United States because if it wasn't for the Haitian Revolution to which we are in an unacknowledged debt it wasn't for the heroic slave rebellion of Toussaint L'Ouverture Napoleon wouldn't have lost his army in the West Indies wouldn't have gone bankrupt wouldn't have needed a self louisia never forget this but Jefferson didn't like the idea of a black rebellion he didn't want to see that spreading to the Carolinas that's the first thing second the crucial thing for Louisiana was the sugar crop and the sugar crop I'm getting near to half an hour I should stop in a second we will yes but I mean you've got to be spellbinding for two or 45 minutes and if and if you're spellbinding you don't need 45s sir but thank you all the same I'm glad to see no one's yet stirred or that it's I don't mind them looking at their words I hate it when they start shaking so two points here on technique you see the Enlightenment the discovery of wonderful new techniques isn't always progressive it isn't always revolution it isn't always emancipating mr. Eli Whitney's cotton gin is a wonderful discovery it really is but unfortunately it makes cotton a lot more profitable and cotton is never going to stop being labor-intensive so there's a wonderful new invention that actually doesn't emancipate people it rather continues to hold them in slavery well the cotton interest had dominated that far but now the sugar interest takes over and if the sugar harvest isn't cut and brought in quickly then the Caribbean islands thought outside the American orbit they'll dominate the trade instead so Jefferson decides to capitulate and the chance of a second new start is is lost consciously lost because he had the advice and the police of pain and bother not to do it and because of the enormous size of the Louisiana Purchase it means it's going to be carving and cloning into new states all the time it's already begun to do so and it means that by the end of this process in other words the vast addition of territory and the huge extension of slavery that very very soon that pretty nearly by the time of Jefferson's death it would be the case that the number of slave states or the number of free states would be approximately equal state of affairs which is later occurred in a very momentous speech by Abraham Lincoln who says that he doesn't think the Union can long endure half slave and half free well that admire of Jefferson has to concede that this was the state of affairs gifted to mr. Lincoln passed on to him by mr. Jefferson and this is a terrible irony for those of us who believe in the in the American ideal well I think that it's now that the the bawdy hand of time is on the prick of noon as I believe Mercutio says some of will correct me if I'm wrong and I think I have sketched for you why Jefferson is so fascinating why so paradoxical and why as I close my book in saying I believe that he illustrates that history is not a morality tale but a tragedy it's been nice having you as my prisoners and I'm now happy to be your hostage Legendre thank you for coming have questions you have questions ladies and gentlemen please go to the microphone in the middle of the room to ask them thank you for your talk so it's on alpha Hut okay thank you sir I recently heard that the declaration the first line Jefferson have written we hold these truths to be sacred in an altar bowl and then Franklin revised it to say we hold these truths to be self-evident so I'm wondering I mean Jefferson's original formulation doesn't sound as enlightenment as Franklin's and I'm wondering if you had any thoughts about that I mean I mean words are kind of symbolic of our underlying experiences so it does I think it's a distinction with a difference we had had sacred and an Oregon says self-evident Thanks you're quite right though sacred doesn't necessarily have to have a non secular meaning you're certainly right to the best of my knowledge I think it's in affiliates in Jerry Weinberger's excellent new book on Benjamin Franklin but anyway that the term self-evident is his I mean remember this is quite an impressive drafting committee they've got that they have they have Franklin and Jefferson and several other gifted people they also have the collected works of John Locke which if you look at and then compare with the final document is an extraordinarily def bit of plagiarism in the word for word almost is the bit for example which says that people are likely oft often will put up with a tremendous amount of oppression and inconvenience if they see no other way of living that you can load them with more and more taxes and chains and sinful but when a long train of abuses usurpations and so forth culminates then they'll rebel and now that's more most word-for-word from Lords treatise on civil government if Franklin had been the chief drafter instead of just one of the committee the might even have been a joke in the Declaration but with Jefferson you could be absolutely sure there would not be with the one of the sad things about writing about him mr. discovered it really had no sense of humor at all and the proof of this is he thought tristram shandy was a hilarious book and would read it aloud to his wife and have him/her Martha Sally's half-sister read it to him on the long winter evenings you just have to picture that for a laugh fest I greatly enjoyed your exposing the various issues that your book has and the little details that you've given us and aside from your birthday July 4th what was the primary interest or stimulus for you to tackle or study and then write about Jefferson um Jefferson isn't born on the fourth of July neither am i so I may have run those two things together in fact though I was born April 13th and so was he he was actually born on April the twenty-something he was born on to the old calendar I wasn't wondered what the astrologers did the horoscope artists did whenever one had to shift over a Zodiac or two but your Jefferson would have stayed in Aries I think by his David on his tombstone it gives both dates why wasn't i interested in him well I would never have dared propose writing a book about him I don't think when I was approached and asked to do so I thought yes almost immediately because everything one writes if about America is in some way writing about Jefferson as I say Washington is necessary presidency to study there are several others I'd say we're necessary obviously Lincoln certainly Roosevelt these are quite short intervals of time Jefferson's right there from the beginning the declaration prior to that the preparation for the revolution the Committees of Correspondence the final appeal to King George the vindication of the rights of North Americans then Paris where he helps to draft the Declaration of the Rights of Man first time ever such doctor have been made in French soil becomes Universal Declaration then Secretary of State then vice-president then for the a lien and Sedition Act contest all of this then the war with the Barbary States then the attempt to use international sanctions for the first time ever as a means of preventing war is the reason why second term is such a disappointment because he thinks that the economic warfare argument that the boycott will embargo will bring an end to the war which in Britain in France and the constant raids on American shipping and I actually do think if it had been given a bit more time it might have worked it's the first time anyone's tried that as a let alone as a superpower and then in retirement writing more papers than most people could elite could read in a lifetime designing a wonderful library helping out the Library of Congress after the burning of 1812 the University of Virginia and the Jefferson Bible which I also recommend everyone should get hold of a copy of you can usually I think the Unitarian Church has published a good addition addition both Forest Church Jefferson took the Bible in one hand in a pair of scissors no razor blade in the other and cut out all the bits that were mad or immoral or mythical or self contradictory or other were otherwise wicked or absurd leaving him with as you can imagine extremely short book but but quite terse and this this was his contribution to enlightenment think he didn't dare publish in his lifetime but it was one of his that was just one of his retirement jobs and he could do it in all relevant languages whether it's a parallel text so that's why I wanted to derive much thank you very much it's been enlightening I'm wondering for another reason for your writing this might have something to do with past being prologue for the future I heard you say that that Jefferson was in favor of of exporting democracy through violence starting a pre-emptive war overseas without consulting Congress his attitude towards religion these strike me as vaguely familiar concepts today I'm wondering what what you think Jefferson's attitude might be towards the current political frame of mind thank you well I'm glad I didn't trail that code in vain first well the thing about it is as you know this past is prologue stuff is all very well but it's very very difficult to ask what anyone would do much beyond their own lifetime I mean if we cuz I read a book about George Orwell once I said I he died in 1951 but I said from what he what he wrote in about from the tropics he'd written on I disagreed with Mary McCarthy and others who for what he would have supported the Vietnam War he's still being alive and I thought I could prove it because of what he'd written about Indochina and because of what his attitude to Empire as well as to communism was I thought I had a reasonable shot of saying that that's only extending matters by a couple of decades really what he would have thought much beyond 1984 as it were which is pretty important well with Jefferson therefore it's not very much harder if he was to come back the things that would astonish him would be most of all I think what we call mixed I think it's a silly term marriage in other words he would be amazed to see how many descendants he and Sammy had and where they were living with whom and how many of them had been living on the white side of the color line since at least the sense of servation 20 all his children by Sally Ann Chi were registered as white in that in that head for example the extent of that would amaze with the pleasant attitude American womanhood there's something amazing about his indifference on this point he never says anything about the rights of women doesn't seem to interests him at all he thought they were great and he thought they were doing perfectly well exactly where they were that he would be astounded by American girls shall we say the girls these days and he would be appalled that we had not yet conquered Canada that's that would have really not you you mean to say that the British flag still flies over North you know I mean see we have have the young men of America being asleep whereas their honor whereas their fire disgraceful state of affair what he would have said about our current difficulty i rage I know I mean therefore he certainly he had had a warning from ambassador Abner Ehrman of Tripoli in the meeting they had with John Adams in London of the menace of radical Islam he'd been told in terms know the Koran gives us the right to make you slaves or to kill you and we claim it as a religious right that on behalf of our kings I mean the combination of the two would have been very powerfully nauseating to him obviously and so it's yes one can extrapolate to that I think used the term pre-emptive war will you see as with Iraq since they've been fighting going on all this time anyway never stopped it wasn't even really a ceasefire in 1991 it's the word pre-emptive may be the wrong one I mean if a million and a half Europeans and Americans have been enslaved by this country it's been going on as a regular business stopping it by surprise naval attack isn't really pre-emptive in fact you should be impeached if you don't do it you have to be able to know who your country's enemies are and deal with them by force and with Brio and that's what he did but I know that that spirit is not the current one you didn't have any stomach for that and many people in fact rather as the Greeks used to call they were so frightened of the Furies that they wouldn't name them they wouldn't say the Furies they'd say the humanities the kindly ones call them that they might make nice all units under the breath it's like Voldemort people now say people call mr. sack are we with his plan for an ultimate caliphate based on the official assim position of Taliban law and with the intention of annexing and overcoming all of its neighbors and who uses the methods of beheading and torture as sectarian warfare and sabotage of schools and hospitals and and even mosques in pursuit people call him an insurgent I'll try to make nice with someone with whom that's pointless so there they're trying to hope that we don't have to fight these people because they're scared of them well this is contemptible I don't think I need to Jefferson's authority to say that well maybe she wants to do it for sitting down I don't mind we go up story I'm afraid the our friends from c-span need you too sorry about that just very briefly could you elaborate on your knowledge of his poetry writing when he started and over his lifetime I don't know anything I don't know any Jefferson poetry I mean I'd know that he had a great company had a great command office he'd be able to quote a lot of it from from Latin and Greek as well but if he wrote any I feel lamentable ignorant of the fact he doesn't seem to me to be in the poetic type I have to say there is a sort of there is a ghastly little sort of sampler verse very near the end of his life I think it's inversely made if it's sort of basically thing about about his dead children being angels or I can't even bear to think about it actually it's so it's written to try and cheer up his younger daughter about about her dead sisters it's the product of a weak moment sorry I can't be any more I just curious about what happened to those million-and-a-half people that ended up in North Africa did they blend in with the population are they some of them still enslaved so we don't know the blacks here in this country what happened to the whites that ended up there whether a number of memoirs of them because some escaped and unlike those Africans who are unlucky enough to be taken into the Middle Passage and then to America dying in huge numbers on the way and never seeing Africa again these people could be ransomed in a huge amount of activity in a town like this at about that time there would have been at every Sunday service a short talk about what was happening and a request for money to try and redeem or ransom people because it was partly a racket it was partly a protection racket as well you could you could pay not to be enslaved and if you were you could pay to be ransomed but so some of them were ransomed and we have extraordinary memoirs of them my the top of my head I should be able to recommend at least one book there's a book called captives by a very good English historian called Linda Colley who's greatly enhanced our knowledge of this period I think that that's gives the best account many of them were put to work in the desert and elsewhere and were died as slaves I mean we'll work to death many died in jail where they were held as possible objects of bargaining and ransom they're kept in a cellar till someone would raise the money for them often they died for the maltreatment they're some of them the young ones were sold into prot into prostitution that into child brothels in the in the ports along the North Africa coast and that's the story it's it's rather I'm afraid as you would expect that the there are I've noticed quite a lot of very light-skinned people especially in Morocco and it's conceivable that there's a certain amount of that because the would it be no no prohibition of any kind or an intermarriage well not that there really was in in America either in that there was no police no prohibition on inter I hate to say I won't use the word racial because I don't believe that our species is subdivided into race but you know what I mean black white sex was not illegal in any way at least not in one direction if you follow me don't have to draw your picture there may have been some of that too and with many we just don't know they vanished they vanished they vanished from history too until recently slave today is that so no the wrists still slavery in in North Africa as before it's almost always a licensed by the Koran the some in Chad there's a good deal in Sudan of course I don't think it's I'm sure it's not still legal in Morocco or Algeria or Libya or Tunisia no but in the this sort of Saharan belt there is there is a more than just people trafficking there's actual indentured slavery yes and those people would be the descendants of the same prophet ears well we know the names of the people who became rich in West Africa by selling their kinsmen we know we know what the family fortunes are in West Africa in a lot of cases in particular cases of case of Benin for example so that if the reparations argument which some people want to reopen which I consider a very interesting argument is ever reopen there's a question of who should be paid will be of course very hard but possible to decipher who should pay would be interesting too and we would know in some cases which African potentates and which great fortunes should be made to to cough up some conscience money so I say bring it on because it's it's very educational in the unless I'm mistaken most people in this room don't know this already my general experience is people dead well it's true so it's worth knowing and I think it would it would instruct our children in in what the past of all this was so here's to hear your your views on the thing that was probably the most popular thing that Jefferson did in his lifetime and enriched in retrospect still doesn't seem like a terrible great idea and that was his embargoes well I did mention debuggers a bit saying it was the first time that anyone tried to use economic diplomacy instead of warfare as a composition of a dispute the the problem with the war the problem with it really is the United States has a coastline and a border that's far too long at least did then including with the awful factor of Canada Jefferson resented so much but if you're if you're in say upstate Vermont and you someone comes around from the excise man it's the office and said you can't trade this way anymore because the president wants to get a peace agreement between Britain and France in the United States they're going to say well I'm just waiting till you leave you know it's not popular at all he Jefferson thought that okay that will happen of course some people will resent it which they really really really did especially along this coast the Maryland coast but he thought no never mind it will have a long-run effect people will start going for what we would now call import substitution they'll instead of importing things that start to try and manufacture them for themselves and there was in fact quite a lot of import substitution done and people did begin to to invest in the idea of making it in America instead of importing it an argument still goes on of course but in the end the Congress has lost patience it was too unpopular and we'll we'll never know if it would have the French the Bonaparte's side was weakening at that point considerably Paine and Jefferson also discussed setting up something like the United Nations an international Confederation to put down things like piracy but also to avoid war two mutually reduce the size of navies to avoid wasteful competition and to try and open up Spanish America by getting Spain to loosen its hold on the Southern Cone but that didn't come to any come to anything in their lifetimes either please what do you think Jefferson would think about the Iraq adventure that were in now well would you would let me see I'll have to submit myself to the safekeeping of others in the audience would you ladies and gentlemen not say it already I had already answered that question I'm relieved sir pay attention in the back but what's the thing surprise you in doing a research writing this book about Jefferson any surprises yes I thought I'd knew about the Sally Hemings relationship as Morris everybody now does there's a small group that holds out that says that the DNA evidence isn't completely conclusive because it could have been another male Jefferson at a rather same time around the same place that's I may not even be technically true but if it if it is I don't think that it can possibly cancel the argument that my friend Annette gordon-reed made in her brilliant book just strongly recommend it's just called Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings an American story is the subtitle before she did all this work before the DNA test was run and when you know that Sally was not as his property but his wife's half-sister in other words Sarah Hemings and Martha Jefferson had the same father and grandfather both of them English why should any race Anglo that she was a privileged house servant who was in the room when Martha died and heard Jefferson say to his wife promised he'd never marry again that she's taken that they meet on French soil where slavery is illegal and though he doesn't need any extra staff at the American Embassy he asks her she'd like to stay in perhaps join his town and then his letters show expenses for for her and for a separate place for her to live so I think I need to draw you one of those pictures I keep mentioning the critical thing to know I think and that a net discovers so brilliantly is when Jefferson's little daughter died he he couldn't stand it um it had it been so much death that he was he said you must have the remaining one brought him in Paris where the older one already was he must send her over I can't bear any more of this I want to have them with me and he sends this to his cousin's the Epps's who and he says you might send old misses and he mentioned some old slave woman who's a stout respectable person to bring the child across but while the letter is in transit he doesn't know that this will this not older older woman has become pregnant again she can't make the trip so here he doesn't without consulting his cousin say well the only girl we can think of on the strength the only slave we've got who could do it who's smart and bright and so on and reliable this Sally will give her the other child Sally and they'll cross together Jefferson meets them not knowing who is going to be escorting his daughter and the plan had been for the other slave woman to go home on the next boat having delivered little kid he doesn't let Sally Hemings go home he asks her to stay and though I defend him to the last ditch as a secularist I here's what I think I think that when he saw Sally getting off that boat he thought oh maybe there is a God after all that's what I think he said it couldn't really be any plainer well you know so none of this really is you asked for a surprise okay so I thought I felt I knew all that but what I realized as I went through it and with the help of our net Gordon Reed and her extraordinary scholarship on this is that we're accustomed to argue it like this would Jefferson have done this could he have done it so all that partly with the rather awful implication that I wouldn't have lowered himself with either a black person or a slave depending on what attitude to Jefferson you take it would have been as it were beneath him Garry wills historian I normally admire and have learned a lot from makes the outrageous suggestion that Sally Hemings was a prostitute that she would sleep with anyone on the estate for money for which there's no evidence at all there's nothing to support such an opprobrious charge but what if as a net proposes what if Sally Hemings had a say in this what if she thought well here I am in Paris he's asked me to stay slavery isn't illegal here my brother's here working as a cook being taught to do French dishes it's a lot nicer than a mountaintop in Albemarle County Virginian the guy's obviously under pressure he's a widower and but he's you know still as it were he's still a the man I could do worse it's an upgrade and what she may well have said to him is okay but if I have any children and they're not going to be slaves mr. Jefferson sir because that seems to be what the bargain was because all her children were freed his children by her were freed and no other said well and so was she and in law you can you may not say that acting as if you've made a bargain proves that you made one but you can adduce it as evidence that a bargain was made and if you look at it like that and if you imagine her as a partner in it which i think it's only fair to do since she was obviously a very smart and tough and brave girl then you think well and this is what I proposed in my book well why not consider her not as a buried scandal or was an object of we'll discuss but is one of America's founding mothers now buried under the under the Hampton Inn I think it is good courtyard Ramada Inn courtyard in Charlottesville under its parking lot but that maybe we could do something about that and the just Clinton closing loosely and Truscott the third was a direct descendant through the Coolidge family of Thomas Jefferson a senior member of the Jefferson Family Association meets every at Monticello he refuses now to go to any more of the family reunion events because they won't allow Sally's children to be buried in the family graveyard on the mountainside they still won't but he has produced with a net self a book wonderful work of photographs of all of the descendants all right across the country several dozen of them we can trace and that's the perfect refutation that book of Jefferson's belief that the slaves should be freed they'd have to depart from the United States once they are free they couldn't stay on once they couldn't be free black people living in in the United States it's that it's the perfect refutation in practice of the pessimism that poisoned his and his life and that's such a blot on his record sorry for long answer but a lot of that was new to me as I hope and believe it may be to you and I thought it was worth worth the speculation mr. Hitchens thank you so much for your insights ah speed a pleasure thank you thank you yeah that was just insurance you're less about the bigger up Jim Burnie should get your hammer you want to go into I have to tell you I found you know I was Christopher Hitchens the first of five authors will bring you today from the Annapolis Book Festival starting

Channel: The Film Archives

Views: 347,645

Rating: 4.8266921 out of 5

Keywords: Street, Jazz, Dance, Thomas, Revolution, Thomas Jefferson (US President), Wall Street (Film Subject), United States Of America (Country), Ddr, Engine, Start, Under, New, Tank, Orleans, Friends, Band, Film (Musical Group), Musical Ensemble (Musical Performance Role), Gas, Nickelback, Blues, Groove, The Band (Musical Group), Music (Industry), Cold, Fusion, Trio, Starting, Industry (Organization Sector), Piano, Louisiana, Rockstar

Id: g64uP0xKUcM

Length: 60min 57sec (3657 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 11 2013

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[u/palsh7]

Happy 4th of July.