Thomas Jefferson and the Burden of Slavery with Annette Gordon-Reed - Conversations with History

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- [Announcer] This program is presented by University of California Television. Like what you learn? Visit our website or follow us on Facebook and Twitter to keep up with the latest UCTV programs. (soothing electronic music) - Welcome to a Conversation With History. I'm Harry Kreisler of the Institute of International Studies. Our guest today is Annette Gordon-Reed. At Harvard, she is the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at the law school, and a Professor of History at the University. She received the 2008 National Book Award, and the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in History for "The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family". Her most recent book is the "Most Blessed of Patriarchs": Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of Imagination, which she wrote with Peter S. Onuf. She is also the author of "Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy" among other books. Her honors include the National Humanities Medal, a MacArthur Fellowship, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Professor Gordon-Reid, welcome to Berkley. - Glad to be here. - Where were you born and raised? - I was born in Livingston, Texas, and when I was about six months old, my parents moved to Conroe, Texas, which was between Livingston and Houston. So, it's in East Texas, about 40 minutes north of Houston. - Looking back, how do you think your parents shaped your thinking about the world? - Well, my parents were both people who loved to read, so we always had books in the house. They were very political people, and we discussed politics. I was a little girl, it was in the 60's, of course, that was a very volatile time, things going on on the television, conversations. So, it was a house where people really discussed intellectual ideas, argued, they're debaters. We argued points all the time, so it was a very, I would say lively, intellectual atmosphere. - And of your parents, were both equally an influence or was your mother especially important? - Well, they were influences in both ways. I suppose my mother was important, because my mother had sort of plans for me. She had ideas that I was gonna do something wonderful. I guess everybody's mother feels that way about their children, but she was very, very, she was a schoolteacher. She would order books for the summer. My brothers and I were really upset because we actually had to have some version of school even through the summer. (laughs) - What did she teach? - She taught English. She was an English teacher, loved grammar. It was her thing, was a great writer herself. So, I think the sort of extra preparation, the idea that she was preparing me for something was very, very big in my life. So, she was a great influence. My father was too, however, because he was the one, I think he was probably even more political than she. So, he was the one who sort of fostered the kind of debate and discussion quite a lot in our household. - Were history books especially important in your reading lists? - Yes, I discovered that I loved history, sort of reading age-appropriate history books in school, but my parents had other books around during that time about black history, African-American history, and so forth. And even regular history, or all history. And that's something that I developed a love for very early on, and so it was a way to spend time, particularly in the summers in the heat of Texas when you have to come inside. There's a great deal to boredom. When you don't have distractions, you read. And I was always in the library checking out books, so yeah. - And what was it like as a young person in East Texas sort of experiencing the civil rights movement with knowledgeable parents who were steeping you in history, and thinking, and conversation, and so on? - Well, it was particularly interesting for me because I integrated our school district. I was the first black child to go to a white school in our school district, and that was a big point because they had been resisting, this is the mid-60's, they had been resisting Brown. The Brown decision coming up with all kinds of plans about how to avoid that, and one was called a Freedom of Choice plan, and white parents were supposed to pick white schools for their kids, and black parents were supposed to pick black schools. And my parents, following the news, understanding that the court and the 5th circuit and the court would probably not uphold those rules, decided to send me to the white school. - And this would have been at what grade level? - First grader, I was a first grader. So, for the first year, I was there by myself and I was very conscious of their being on something of a mission. My parents agreed with the school district not to go to the press, not to talk to the press, because they wanted it to be very, very low key, none of this escorting her to schools or anything like that. But just as sort of normal as it could possibly be. And I was there for a year by myself. Then, of course, the court did strike these down, and then, everybody had to shift and move, and I was already sort of in place. - So, it sounds like this background that we've just talked about empowered you to be a tough little kid. (laughs) Go through that, is that fair? - Well, I don't know, I've thought about this over the years, it's the chicken and egg thing. Was I the right personality to do this, or did it shape my personality being there? I'm sure it's a little bit of both. I've not minded being by myself, which I was quite often during that time period. You know, reading, I knew how to sort of take care of myself, in a way, so it was a profound experience. And it's not something that I've, I've thought about it, but I probably haven't thought about it the way a historian should think about it. I've sort of turned myself to other people's lives and not my own, but it was a pretty, pretty formative, and a kind of amazing thing to do. I'm not sure that, and people say, "Well, that's a lot to put "on a kid," but I suppose somebody had to do it. - You had self-confidence, though, from your parents. - Yeah, oh yeah, oh definitely. The one thing, my mother believed I could do anything. And that kind of, that assurance about that could be, you know, it's empowering, but it could also be sometimes, "Ah, you know, I really can't do that." But she really did believe in me, so that idea of her belief and her support. Her parents, my grandmother, I had a grandmother who was quite extravagant. I remember her going to, that she went to Sakowitz, which was the big sort of department store in Houston, and buying lots of clothes, great clothes, because I was gonna be dressed to the nines when I went. So, it was a kind of a family enterprise. They didn't sit down and say, "Now, you're on a mission." But you could tell from all of this that this was something that was important. - Now, as you're reading a book in elementary school, I guess, about Jefferson and his black friend, tell us that story, because it starts there, in a way. (laughs) - Yes, it starts there. I read a book, a biography, a child's biography, when I was in the 3rd grade about Jefferson, and the story was told by a fictional slave boy who was supposed to be telling Jefferson's story. And I noted the contrast between the depiction of the boy, who was sort of lazy and not serious, and he was upset with Jefferson because Jefferson, you know, Marse Tom, or however they described him, wanted to read books and was curious, and wanted to find out about the world. He didn't wanna hunt, and fish, and everything. And I remember being embarrassed by that because it was, the book was sort of in the back of our room where they had the little library for us, we had a real library but also a library in the back of the room. And I knew that my classmates might see that, and I knew that they would make the identification between me and the enslaved boy, who was depicted in a way, sort of unnecessarily, in an exaggerated way as this person who was unserious, as in contrast to Jefferson who was white and was supposed to be all that was good and the enslaved boy was stupid, essentially. And it struck me then that that was unfair, but it also, the sort of interest in Jefferson and Monticello and slavery, sort of came, that was the germ of it right there, with the combination of the interest and at the same time, concern about the way the black enslaved boy was depicted. So, it started there. People have asked me why did the other biographies, there was Madison and George Washington Carver, Dolly Madison, why did Jefferson stand out? It's not something you can explain. Why does someone wanna play the violin instead of the piano. It just struck me. That's how it all got started. I continued to read about him over the years. - And so, you completed your high school in Texas, and where did you go from there when you went to college? - I went to Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. So, the opposite end of the map. I wanted to go away to school in New England. There was sort of romance in doing that. So, yeah, that's where I went. - At Dartmouth did you, when did you get the history bug? Did you get it at Dartmouth or did you have the history bug? - Well, I'd had the history bug since from elementary school, even before Jefferson. I would read, I was very, very interested in Egypt, books about ancient times. And so, the history bug was always there for me. At Dartmouth, it was wonderful because Baker Library is there, and you know, a fabulous library and I could sort of indulge and read all that I wanted. And I also was a history major. - But then, were there any teachers at Dartmouth that interested you in the direction of history that stand out? - Michael Green, the late Michael Green, was influential. Leo Spitzer, Elizabeth Wayland, who's a Russian historian, for I had a brief detour where I was very much interested in Russian history and sort of read everything that I could in Russian novels and so forth. Yeah, there were people there who interested me. - And a course on Jefferson? - Not a course on Jefferson, but certainly courses in which Jefferson figured. - And graduate from Dartmouth, so why law school and not history? - Well, I had had this sort of dual interest in law. Sort of stoked by my father who sort of admired lawyers. And he thought that that would be a good idea. And also, I think because of my background, I knew that my going to Anderson Elementary School had been started, the process of doing that came from the law. It came from lawyers who made that possible, who actually effectuated that change. So, lawyers were seen to me as people who could affect change in society. I thought a little bit about journalism, that was my first job when I was 15. I worked at the Conroe Courier. And this was the age of Woodward and Bernstein, and they were sort of heroes. But journalism, I found when I got to Dartmouth, journalists seemed a little cliquey to me, and it was sort of a boy's club. So that was sort of out for me. I figured that the actual profession might be that way. I didn't go to history because I was reading and I was told that there were too many PhDs in history. What I didn't understand is that there's almost no PhDs, black PhDs in history, and they would have loved to have me go to the program. And I could have gotten a JD PhD, but I decided to go to Harvard Law School, and figured that if I was interested in history, you could keep reading it. - I like to ask my guests about the skills and the temperament that they think are important for the professions that they've undertaken. Now, you have dual professions, in a way - Yes, yes. - So, let's talk about that. In other words, what skills does a historian and then a lawyer really need, and is there an overlap between the two? - Well, there's definitely an overlap. I would say the skills that a historian, that I've brought to bear in doing history is curiosity. That's the first thing. You have to have curiosity and tenacity. You have to have imagination to figure out a research strategy. I mean, how do you find things that you're interested in? And that's very, very important. I think that certainly overlaps with the law. The difference between history and law on that score, however, is that historians have the luxury, have the capacity, to direct their own research. If I'm interested in Jefferson and I wanna do a book about Jefferson or whatever. If I'm interested in the civil rights movement, I can do that. Law is a service profession. A lot of people don't realize that, but lawyers are servants. And you have to learn how to have curiosity about other people's lives, you have to learn how to interest yourself in other people's lives, and do the kind of job, the concentration that's needed to be really, really serious, because lawyers, unlike historians, lawyers are dealing with, you hold people's lives in your hands. In some instances, actually people could be put away, could die based on what their lawyer does or does not do. And that seriousness of purpose has to be there. It's not a game. You can see it as a game, but it's a very important game. Not that history isn't important, but there're not no life and death stakes there. - Now, in both in a way, well, especially if you're a trial lawyer, you have to tell a story, - [Annette] Mm hmm, yeah. and a historian has to tell a story. - Yeah, oh no, the law is a writing, I mean, that's the other reason that law could be a choice for me, because lawyers are writers, as well, and they're story tellers. And even if you're in trial, even if you're doing, whether it's criminal law or civil, you're telling a story. And whoever tells the superior story wins. - The other issue here in both it would seem that you make decisions about the facts and what are to be included and excluded. - Oh, yeah. - If you're defending somebody who there's certain factual situation where you don't want it to come up in the trial. Talk a little about that, because that is very important in your very compelling first work, looking at what the historians had said about Jefferson. - Well, it's interesting, the first book that I wrote was about the historiography of this question whether Jefferson had had this long term liaison with an enslaved woman, Sally Hemings. And you know, as a lawyer, I think people, I was a law professor at the time, just a law professor at the time, I didn't have an adjoint appointment. I noticed that historians sort of view lawyers as doing what they call law office history, namely cherry-picking facts to write a brief. The problem, however, is that good lawyers don't just cherry-pick the facts. Good lawyers know the opponent's case better than the opponent, because you have to know those kinds of things. And what I saw was historians sort of cherry-picking and not, because there was no opponent, not understanding that one of these days that could come back to haunt them. Because they had less stuff out. They had shaded the truth by omission. So, what I wanted to do in writing the book was to replicate that moment when you're a lawyer, you're looking at the entire record, you know your side, you know the other side, so you know the sides, you know the story, the possible stories, but also give attention to analyze the other side. - So, is it fair to say that it was fortunate that you went to law school-- - Oh, absolutely. - Instead of history graduate school because the law and the training empowered you-- - Oh, absolutely. - To see the problem. - It empowered you, it gave you the confidence, somebody might say arrogance, (laughs) to say that you could take this on. I've talked to since I've become a historian, and I pal around with historians now. A couple of them have told me that if I had been a graduate student, they would have told me not to do my first book. They would have dissuaded me from doing that. But as a law professor, we sort of think we're mini experts on everything, and can opine on everything. But also, we had the tools and we're confident to do it because we understood that law school is about critical thinking, and critical thinking is of use in any venue. It's easy, I suppose, to well, easier to sort of replicate a story, to repeat a story, but when you get to the point of taking things apart, taking arguments apart, putting them back together, analyzing, that's what law school is about, and that's what lawyers do, and that's what law professors do. So, yeah, I think I credit my training in law school with giving me, number one, the confidence to do that and to do that first book, but I also know how to do it in a way that would be effective. - In the first book, let me give the exact title is "Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy". It's quite a read, so it's extremely well-written, but it almost reads like a mystery story. In addition, the reader becomes excited, and I'm coming at this cold in preparation for this interview. It's uncovering a truth, basically. At one point in the book, you as a person trained in the law, you tell us about the rules of evidence, and how evidence contributes to burden of proof. So, you're ready to go and you're empowering the reader to be ready to go. - Yeah, well, I saw myself, people think, you know, the publicist for the book, that we went to the University Press of Virginia, they don't usually have a publicist, but they had an idea that this book might be a crossover hit, so they hired somebody. And the idea was to sort of sell this as a trial, but that really isn't what it is. It's really more a law professor talking to students. That this is what we do to talk about how you use evidence, and how evidence can be misused. And I had the experience of sort of going through the book, my own understanding about this story was unfolding as I was writing the book. And I think if I were to do it now, I probably would go back and change the beginning of the book, because I think if you can sort of see me moving more towards the conclusion about this, that I didn't have before when I started. The book is really about how historians had written about the subject, not whether or not Tom and Sally actually had an affair. I wasn't gonna make a statement about that. I just knew that the argument was sort of tainted by understandings about race, and understandings about class. A thumb was put on the scale for whites and wealthy people. And when less empowered people said things, it was disregarded, and I thought that that lesson could be displayed in the book. But as I'm doing it, I realize I start to find information saying, "Wait a minute, "I could talk a little bit about the actual substance "of the question, too." - It's interesting because you said yesterday at lunch in a conversation with faculty that you wound up doing this because this was the time that the Jefferson movie came out. A lot of the reviews were saying, "Well, this movie is nonsense "because there was no sexual relationship." that's very interesting because not only was there conventional wisdom. Let's put it this way, there was historical wisdom about which there was no controversy before you wrote, but also that it had seeped into the popular culture. And that provoked you and rightfully so. And really it was about you're overthrowing a consensus in the history profession. Talk a little about that because that must have been quite empowering for you because you were seeing a truth, the lawyer that you were, that nobody else was really seeing, especially among those most qualified to see it. - Well, all of the sort of parts of my life came together. As I mentioned earlier, one of the things that lawyers do is they can affect change. If they see an injustice, they can take action. And that's what you're supposed to do. That feeling of outrage and an injustice was what propelled me to do this. Because I knew when people were saying, "Oh, this didn't happen, "Jefferson wouldn't be involved with a slave girl," all those kinds of things, I knew that Madison Hemings who was an enslaved man at Monticello, and the son of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, and another enslaved man, Israel Jefferson, who's real last name was Gillette, had said that it happened. And I thought, "You know, these are people "who were the objects of slavery, the victims of slavery. "If we can't listen to them, then what does that say "about us as a country, as a community, as a society?" You know, you typically reserve your greatest sympathy for the people who are victims, who are obvious victims of repression. You don't spend all of your time molly-coddling the person who has the jack boot on somebody's neck, and that was what was going on. And I felt outrage and I wanted to talk to the men, and these were largely white, male historians, who were basically dismissing this story. Just sort of lay bare their prejudices and their illogic, really. And their assurance about this was, I thought, unjustified. So, it was kind of fun. I was having a blast doing it. It was one of the most enjoyable experiences I've had. - And he's talking again about the character of a lawyer-historian. This took courage, basically, to be able to say, "This is wrong, this is not right." - That's what lawyers do. - [Harry] Right. - This is wrong, this is not right. And that's what law school empowers you to do, and the profession, the sort of history of the profession, and the heroes of the profession, are the people who do that. The people who stand up and say, Charles Hamilton Houston, who decides I'm gonna use what training I have to begin to chip away at the system of Jim Crow. And it might be crazy to do, or the tobacco lawyers who you thought would never beat that particular lobby, people were just sure that will never happen, and they eventually beat it. And they actually won. And those are the people that we revere, the people who take a chance, who stand up and say, "This is wrong," or take on the tough challenge. And so, it was in keeping with the ethos of the profession and in the ethos of what my parents taught me growing up. - And also the ethos of the civil rights movement. - [Annette] Absolutely. - It changed everything. Now, in the triumph of the conventional wisdom before you came along, let's talk a little about what's going on here. Because Jefferson is not anybody. - [Annette] No. - He's an icon of American history. All men are created equal, and so on and so forth. As you said, Sally Hemings was a slave, basically. And when I read the book, what came to mind, it was what you had identified is the structure of intellectual racism, basically. And we don't think of racism being embedded in the assumptions of establishment historians. - [Annette] No. - Up until this point in time. So, on the one half we have the icon, but then you have this whole group of people who are dismissed, who are diminished as human beings, who basically it doesn't matter what they're saying, because it's not true because they're black. - Yeah, yeah. No, and that's the importance of the story. Even whatever you thought about the ultimate answer to the question, that was the thing that I thought was so striking. And that I wanted people to say, "Well, this is happening in this particular story, "where else is this happening? "How else is this happening?" And to get people to think that racism, because Dumas Malone and Merrill Peterson, these were people who were-- - [Harry] Famous historians. - Famous Jefferson historians. These were people who were considered southern liberals. They're not the people that you would think of sitting around with a clan robe on or anything like that, but it shows you how, as you said, assumptions and habits of mind can embed themselves, are embedded in the structure of how we think about things. And unless it's this constant process of questioning yourself that brings it out, and that's why it's so hard. It's a difficult thing to examine your own prejudices and assumptions and think that you might be acting in a way that is prejudicial, acting in a way that is unfair. - And it's interesting, I wanna move on to Jefferson, but there's certain things that stand out so over and above this big picture that you have of, "Well, they're black, so what they said "or wrote was not important." But as you work your way through this, there are little pieces of evidence that are quite remarkable. I'll mention a few of them. That Sally Hemings makes an agreement with Jefferson to come back from France where she could have been free, and because she was a mother worrying about her children, that she was pregnant, she would have more children, and he promised to free them when they were 21. Little things like Madison Hemings, many years later, tells this story, nobody believes it, they dismiss it, because the editor of the paper is an abolitionist-- - [Annette] Yeah, anything he says is a lie. - But Madison, in this interview, tells us little things about Jefferson. For example, he really didn't care to be a farmer. He didn't like farming, he was actually a craftsman, who liked to work in his shop, and he trained his children by Hemings to have trades and be craftsmen. So, little things that tell us a lot about Jefferson. And in a way, the fact, the way he treated his black children brings out the humanity in him, in a way. Although, he's living in this system, he's still a slaveholder. - Yeah, I think that's a really important point about small details. Because when people, when police for example, do investigations, they always keep something behind. They don't say the thing out loud, because they know if they encounter somebody who knows that detail, they obviously know something. And so, that's what you find in Israel Jefferson's statements and Madison Hemings's statement. It's little things that tell you about Jefferson, that tell you about the lies that you can check, that can be corroborated from outside information, so you know that this person isn't just making stuff up. And they never, historians, 'cause they were not interested in really finding the answer 'cause they didn't want it to be true. Going through that process to sort of corroborate what he was saying. And on the other side, I should say, looking at the Jefferson family official story that was replete with errors and lies, I should have to say, that they had to know that this person was lying about those things, yet it didn't affect their overall credibility. The only thing that was important was that they said Jefferson didn't do it. So, they ignored all the signs. So, it was like when you come to this and begin to pull it all apart, it was relatively easy to do because it was just so blatant the way they were sort of blinding themselves to indications that this story was true. - And you know, what struck me that that's why it's important, this book is so important even today where we've moved beyond the controversy, because what you're showing is in the law, you apply the same standards of evidence and burden of proof to both sides. And in this case-- - [Annette] It just didn't happen. - It didn't happen. And it didn't happen because of the racism. It's not to say necessarily, I don't know these historians, these famous historians, that they were racists, interpersonally, but they bought in to a story because it was, well, it was the conventional wisdom. - And they didn't want it to be true. - [Harry] Yeah. - Because what it would say-- - [Harry] They didn't want your version. - No, they didn't want the version, they didn't want Jefferson to be the father of these children. Dumas Malone, at the end of his life, he gives an interview to the New York Times, and he says, "Well, I could see him having sex with her one or two times, "but what I couldn't see would be a 38-year connection." Which I thought was kind of telling, it's remarkably telling. So it would be okay once or twice, but not anything long term. It was almost as if well, one or two times puts him in the range of a normal white guy, but the other is sort of alien to him. And so, I think that said a lot about his values. - In addition to your lawyerly skills, and I mean that in a complimentary way, and your research, your prodigious research in all of these works, there is an element in your work and in your talk of common human insight, basically, common sense. Well, what would a person do in a situation like, talk a little about that, because it's really the case that you have to understand people to a certain extent to see what's going on. - Yeah, it's an interesting thing because I think it's something that sets me a little apart from conventional historians who don't like to believe there's such thing as a human nature. That there's not, I think that there's not a, I don't believe there's a fixed human nature, but I do think that there are some commonalities that run throughout human existence and recurring themes in history. Lawyers sort of rely on that. I mean, historians might be skeptical of it, but lawyers rely on it. And judges rely on it. And it's very important to sort of see those patterns and to understand where they're coming into play. And this is a story that demanded that. Because we don't have Jefferson's writings about this, we don't have Sally Hemings's writings about this. - There are no written records, letters, diaries-- - Between the two of them. I mean, Jefferson's friends talk about, a friend of his talks about this in a diary, but there's nothing in between the two of them. So, what you're basically doing is drawing reasonable inferences from people's behavior, and repeated behavior. And I would trust that over what people say anytime. That's the kind of thing that you have to bring to bear in this situation. - Let's talk a little about Jefferson. Now, your new book, "Most Blessed of the Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination". This is co-written with leading Jeffersonian historian. What were you all trying to do in this book? - Well, we were trying to sort of strip away a lot of, I think the layers that had been put upon Jefferson, to try to pull him out, to extract Jefferson's own understanding about what he was doing in the world. We think that a lot of books have been written about, that are basically sort of saying what Jefferson ought to have done, ought have been doing in the world. And you should've done this and you should've done that, and you didn't do this and blah, blah, blah, blah. Instead of thinking, "Well, what did he think he was doing?" This was a person who started out life in a particular way, had a particular mission. And we try to discover, re-discover what that mission was by looking at his own writings, looking at his actions, and to sort of stand aside and not be all about judging him, which is what has happened now. He's become sort of the whipping boy for slavery, as if he was the only slaveholder in the founding generation, if he was the only racist white man in the founding generation. It's really kind of like a caricature. And it's being, hes' sort of stuck in a ditch. So, we wanted to recover this person who was interesting and important to American history, but do it by looking at the world through his eyes, not absolving him of anything, but to say, "What did he think he was doing?" - And this again, so that in a way if you, before your writings, if the historiography builds up Jefferson, and they turn him into a, at one level, he's not human. And that by bringing his humanity back in, then, and I look at your book which is much more than what I'm gonna talk about, but it's kind of the evolution of his ideas. So, here is a man who said, "All men are created equal," and then he comes out of Virginia, he goes to France, he becomes a revolutionary politician, so his ideas evolve, and I wanna talk a little about that. So, he starts as a man, before the revolution, the American Revolution, as a man of ideas who's a patriarch in Virginia, a landowner, and a slave owner. - Yes, that's all of those things, but he also is crucially, he sees himself as an inherent to the enlightenment, and he sees himself as a progressive person. Jefferson looked at life through the eyes of science, that we're gonna be making new discoveries, inoculations, all these kinds of things that are gonna make life better. And life is gonna get better and better the more educated people become. He develops the sort of tenets of progressivism at that time, he's sort of skeptical of the church, of organized religion, he is anti-slavery. As a young man, he copies a poem about the evils of slavery, of the slave trade, and it's commonplace, but before he's in public life at all. So, he's establishing himself as, I'm a person who is, not better than his Virginia cohort, but he's more advanced than his Virginia cohort. And this is the attitude that people have about him throughout his life. There's a story, it may be apocryphal, of Jefferson standing on a courthouse eating a tomato at a time when many people thought tomatoes were poisonous. So, this idea of him as the avatar of the enlightenment takes hold very early on. And that's how he sees himself. So, he's this patriarch, as you said, and at the same time he sees himself as a progressive, that eventually people like him, they will become obsolete as the world becomes more enlightened. - And he talks about slavery as a stain on Virginia and on society, and he makes some modest efforts to overturn it, but he discovers that the system won't move basically. Is that a fair way to say it? - After the revolution, and we have, there's the United States of America, he believes that there has to be a republican solution to slavery, republican meaning majority rules. People have to vote. But he knows that at that time, the people of Virginia are not gonna vote slavery out, and he turned his attention to other things that he can do. And that is, become involved in politics, and help develop the United States of America. Now, what he doesn't understand is that slavery, by not dealing with slavery, that the United States of America, several decades after that would split. By the mid 19th century, it's already clear near the end of his life that it's possible that the North and the South would go to war over slavery. But that is not something that he would have contemplated or advocated as a young man. It had to be people voting, and that was never. I mean, people say that he should've done this, he should've fought harder, but I don't really know how. I don't think the people of Virginia and the South were ready to vote slavery out. - And as a revolutionary politician at the time of the War of the Revolution, he sort of, you were suggesting in your lecture yesterday, comes to the conclusion that Native Americans and the slaves are not us, in a way, because of the possibility they have to align with the British to get their freedom. So, it's a state that becomes very difficult for him to deal with in terms of his original ideas. - At first, he's anti-slavery as a young man. After the revolution, it becomes clear that African-American people are a threat because he knew. He said, "How can you love a country "that has treated you like this?" We are enemies and we're gonna be enemies. And he's talking in the abstract about African-Americans in general, and whites in general, but the interesting thing about it is that in his personal life, he begins to think that he can manage, he knows how to manage the situation to sort of stave off that kind of hostility. But he did not think that was possible on a large scale. - And so, he goes to France and he sees America in comparison with France. And that leads him to extol the virtues of our natural surroundings, and the small landholder, the character of the individual that comes from his ownership of property. And you call it at some point, you say at one point in the book that it leads to, in his mind, a domestication of slavery. So, he develops a theory that says, in effect, there's a public realm, and that public realm depends on the individual farmer with his property, his land, and his slaves. And that is the source of liberty, in a way. So, that's the next step in his-- - Yeah, France is critical to his understanding of things because when he leaves Virginia, he's kind of sour on Virginia. He has a terrible time as governor, his behavior was put under investigation, he was exonerated, but he left for France in a kind of surly mood about his fellow Virginians. And he gets to France and he sees, he loves the music, he loves the architecture, there're things about the society he loves, but he's aghast at the status of women, women who are forward, and participating in politics. He's aghast at beggars on the street. He talks about and his daughter talks about being in a carriage and having beggars and people desperately beggin' for money. And there's starvation. So, he begins to say, "Well, you know, we have it bad, "but we aren't as bad as this." And he becomes sort of sanguine about, much more sanguine about the situation with enslaved people in Virginia. And he develops this idea that he can ameliorate. Christa Dierksheide has written a book about, that talks about amelioration, Jefferson's ideas about amelioration of slavery, making it better. And once you do that, you're just gone. I mean, from a state of war and evil to well, you know, I could do this in a way that makes it all right, then that's a way of comforting yourself about this, and he becomes comfortable in the institution. He sees the Hemings family, which the family was, six of them were the half-siblings of his wife, including Sarah, Sally Hemings. He sees his relationships with them as sort of exemplifying how he was as a slave owner. Well, of course, they're different than other enslaved people, but these are the people who are in the house, the people with whom he has the most intimate relations, and he sees himself acting as a good slave owner, with respect to them. - A benevolent. - [Annette] A benevolent slave owner, the thing we can't accept. - Patriarch. - Benevolent patriarch, which of course, we're like, "Ah, you know you can't do that." But that's how he saw it. And so, the person who had this very serious idea about the evils of slavery says, "I can do this the right way." And of course, as I said, as we've said, that's the road to perdition right there. - And the other element in this is his role as the founder of the University of Virginia. And so the idea that future generations who were trained in the enlightenment would be able to solve this problem, but not here and now while I live. - Yeah, solve it without bloodshed. And that eventually this would come, but of course, as we know, that's not what happened. - This is kind of a case study in theory and practice, in a way. Talk a little about that, because here is this American leader who had these, could state clearly these very powerful ideas of the enlightenment, but as he lived his life in Virginia as a patriarch, as he goes to Paris, and brings over the young slave girl to take care of his young daughter. As he comes back, he really, his ideas sort of confront reality, which he can't change, and his ideas change. But we do see, I think that he's a man who doesn't like conflict, he likes to ameliorate situations, but when you have a structural problem like racism, that's not enough. - No, it's not enough. And it's not enough to absolve him, it's not enough for him to become a good slaveholder. Slavery was comfortable for Jefferson. It brought him a lifestyle that allowed him to live as a man of letters, of the republic of letters. Madison Hemings talks about him, that Jefferson spent most of his time in his office writing those thousands of letters that we have, communicating with people over the seas, and other people in the rest of the United States. He didn't have to worry about keeping his life in order. There were people who did that for him. Enslaved people, and his daughters who actually served as the hostesses after he lost his wife. Slavery brought him a level of comfort, and there are many things you think about saying, you know, this is really bad, but if you're getting something out of it, if you don't have the emotional push to do something about it, most of the people who freed slaves in Virginia during that time period were acting under the influence of religion, of Evangelical religion, the Quakers, the Methodists, and Baptists. He was not operating under that system. Religion can make you do things, irrational things. And we think it's obviously the moral thing. But to get rid of your property would have been thought of as an irrational thing. - And he was a debtor, he was in debt. - Oh yes, he was in debt to do that. But there were time periods if he had conducted himself differently early on, he could have, if he'd made it a mission to sort of work his way out of debt, he probably could have done that. But how ofen, it's a human failure. You know something is wrong, but you do it anyway. - And it does take what we were talking about, your human insight, your insight about people, to at least, we've knocked him down from the icon that he was, but he was a human being operating in his times. And his solutions weren't adequate given what the horror of slavery was. - But he did other things. One of the other things that I think you have to do in approaching Jefferson is to have a little bit, to think about yourself. I mean, here was a person who was a revolutionary, he wrote the Declaration of Independence, an ambassador, a vice president, a president, he founded a university. That's a lot of stuff to do in your lifetime. And then you say, "Oh, and why didn't you solve the slave problem?" So, you think about, "What have I done?" What are all the people when we come up against someone like that, what have we done actively to transform our own circumstances? Maybe we've done one or two things, but we certainly haven't been all of those things. That's a lot to ask for somebody in one life to say that he'd do everything. His attitude was, well look, our generation founded a country, we broke away from the largest, excuse me, the most powerful nation on Earth, and we formed our own country, and we set up a government. Can't you do something? What is the next step that you're gonna take? Well, it could be an excuse if you wanna call it that, but it just seems to me to be, if you look at the record and you compare it to what I'm doing, what other people are doing, it's a lot to be judgmental about somebody who's done so much when we've not done anything like that. - One final question, looking back into your career, are there any insights that you have that you could share with us about overturning assumptions, looking at reality, that would apply to the present disturbances that we have and movements like the Black Lives Matter movement, the confrontation with the police, because it would seem in pointing out and overthrowing structural racism and intellectual discourse, it's relevant for the situation we have now. - Well, you have to be, and this is a difficult thing, you have to think something is at stake. There has to be a moral, morality is a part of the inquiry. People say you're not supposed to apply your morality to historical. I just don't see how, you can't check that at the door. And morality, I think, demands that people understand that our common humanity, which means that we have to be empathetic, we have to try to imagine what it's like to be a person who is a citizen of the country, but a second-class citizen. What does that do to our country, what heights are we not reaching, what goals aren't we reaching by having large segments of our population who don't have access to true citizenship? So, it's about other people, but it's also ultimately about ourselves as a country. We have to want the United States to progress. And that requires really deep soul searching, and it requires work, the kind of work that I said before, questioning your own assumptions. And I don't know how to tell people to do that exactly, but I could say that you should. - Well, on that note, I want to thank you for being our guest today, being on the campuses, the Jefferson lecture. It was quite an occasion for some remarkable insights. Thank you very much. - Thank you. - And thank you very much for joining us for this Conversation With History. (soothing electronic music)
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Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)
Views: 33,774
Rating: 4.6753926 out of 5
Keywords: Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, slavery, historical view, Annette Gordon-Reed
Id: a2QKEWKFGRo
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 54min 42sec (3282 seconds)
Published: Tue Oct 25 2016
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