Empire: World History - 152. The Founding Fathers: Thomas Jefferson (Ep 2)

Episode Date: May 27, 2024

Thomas Jefferson is one of the most complex figures in the whole American Revolution. A child of the enlightenment, it was he who wrote 'we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are born equal'. Yet, throughout his life he possessed over 600 enslaved people and had sexual relations with some, including Sally Hemings. Listen as William and Anita dive into the early life of Thomas Jefferson and try to understand this contradiction. Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Assistant Producer: Anouska Lewis Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpower.com. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Durimple. Got something a little different, haven't we, this week? A little something extra. What are we doing? Something for the weekend.

It's not that. No, that's not what we're offering. Family show, for God's sake. But we are giving you four founding fathers for the price of one, if you like. We did that whopping great Washington episode and you really liked it and you were so warm about it. So we thought, if you were interested, we do these sort of shorter portraits of other major colossus figures in the founding of America who was named, who's named, you know, but you may not know that origin story. So this is all about Marvel origin stories. And where are we taking them from and two, William? So we've got four figures we're going to discuss this week. Three of them were fairly young men at the time of the outbreak of the revolution. And so in a sense, it makes sense to just do, yeah, origin stories, as you say, the youth of Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams. The exception to that, I think, is Benjamin Franklin, who had led about, you know, enough, done enough for about 10 lives by the time that the revolution broke out. He was the only one of them who had spent considerable time in Britain. He was the one who, while they were all influenced by Enlightenment ideas, he was the one who'd actually met David Hume and Lord Kames and the pillars of the Scottish Enlightenment and so on. And so, yes, it's a slightly mixed bag of stuff. They're very different characters, all of them, but all rather extraordinary. Different, but also, I mean, just made of such stuff, because I mean, we're all having a chat about this.

And, you know, we weren't quoting Cicero at the age of 13, but you've got a bunch of... Well, speak for yourself, Anita Allen. I think. Well, you probably were, actually. You're probably made of weird stuff too. But, you know, the rest of us, norms out here. I did not know who Cicero was at the age of 13. I'm quite sure. These chaps are sometimes autodidacts. They are often passionate. thoughtful, ferocious, and they have this kind of belief that they can do something. They can change their world. And as very young men, that presents itself. And most of them don't come from backgrounds where you would have expected them to be leading scientists or major military figures. Or incredibly groundbreaking lawyers. I mean, you know, just all of these roads that they come

from. Look, we're going to start with Thomas Jefferson. So now you get an idea of what we're going to do. So he's the face on the American Nicolns. the less common $2 dollar bill as well. I'm just going to read you some of the things that he said, because they will highlight what a contradiction. This man, Thomas Jefferson, thoughtful, an enormous landholder, slave owner, and yet was the man who wrote most eloquently, most powerfully, and shook an empire to the core with his words about liberty and freedom. So the one that you'll all have heard of, We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. That's from the Declaration of Independence July 4, 1776.

But he also said things about freedom and enslavement. What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is a man who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment and death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment inflict on his fellow men, a bondage, one hour of which, is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose. That is Thomas Jefferson in 1786, writing a complete demolition of slavery, and yet was a slaveholder at the time, as were many of the founding fathers. We discussed how George Washington was as well.

On the Indians, Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1786, two principles upon which our conduct towards the Indians should be founded, are justice and fear. After the injuries we have done them, they cannot ever love us. So, you know, there are all of these self-reflections in one of these founding fathers, and yet his life was led in an unusually complicated

and sometimes confoundingly different way. Have you ever seen the movie, Jefferson in Paris? Very good, much-divory movie, with Nick Naughty playing Jefferson. And Tandy Newton as Sally Hemings. Yes, a long time again, I must say, I got the ick from it. I mean, I get the ick from the whole story.

the Sally Hemings relationship. But it gets some of that complexity. It gets the idea that here is a great man, a liberal man, who is doing extremely illiberal things in his private life and in his domestic economy, if you like. What I didn't like, and I love merchant ivory films, but I could not stand the sort of hazy, swelling music and romanticism of a man who's actually just captured a girl.

And, you know, she has no choice in these matters. She is enslaved. And she is his slave. And half his age. One could say that anyone who has sex with a child at that point could be accused of many very serious crimes and end up in prison for a very long time these days. Anyway, shall we talk about where he was born? So he was born on the 13th of April 1743 on the Shadwell Plantation in Virginia, named after his mother's hometown of Shadwell in East London. So you're again, that connection.

Shadwell was like, you know, a really down-at-heel place in London. It's sort of near the docks. It was grimy. it was where, you know, the ships would come in to port. And he didn't have the most sort of elevated background, like all of these men. You know, they go to America, their families to get more. How did he compare economically to Washington? Was he as rich, richer?

I think Washington was probably better off at the beginning, to be honest. They came from Snowdonia originally. And his father was like a stable planter. And he started, Peter Jefferson, he comes to America and he starts working as a surveyor and a cartographer. So they start getting money fairly quickly, but it's modest. You know, it's not a lot of money. What surprised me with all these figures is how recently they had become Americans. It isn't like they're kind of five or six generations down, deeply planted in the soil.

They're almost all second or third generation Americans. It's a young country at this point, isn't it? I mean, it is a young country at this point. Not even a country, a collection of colonies at this point. But his relationship with his mother, the mother, though, I just said, came from Shadwell, was not good. I mean, the way he talked about it was almost like, I think Christopher Hitchin described it as affected indifference.

You know, he said that, you know, she hardly spoke to him. He can't really remember having a conversation. Rather like Washington's mother. Well, she was out and out meddling and in his life and trying to derail it from time to time. But it just feels like she was the woman in the house. Both with unhappy mother situations, certainly. Yeah, very right.

And, you know, when he talked about his lack of talk, about his mother. He says, let everyone ascribe the faith and merit he chooses to such trifling questions. He didn't even want to talk about his mother in later life when he was a bigger, better man. Physically, he was very tall, wasn't he? Like Washington, he's what, six foot two? Yes. Lanky, yes. Drawberry blonde hair, freckles. Fox-like, actually. Yeah, he looked like a clever fox. He was slight and he was, yes, as you say, sort of long and limmy and also languid in his movements, you know, because he grows up in Virginia. Virginia, you know, the place where people talk and move slowly. That's like, you know, someone described it

to me. But his father makes good and starts earning some proper money. You know, as we said with the Washington case, if you're a surveyor, you can plot out the best bits of land and buy them at a song sometimes. And that's what his father was doing. And so he sort of gets born into this almost Nouveau-Riche kind of lifestyle, where he's learning the violin at nine, he's got books around him, he has an interest in music and interesting in culture. And just as in the Washington case, you know, the male figures die young at this time. There's disease rampaging around. And his father dies when he's just a teenager. And so, you know, this teenage boy inherits 5,000 acres of land and 40 enslaved people.

You know, today a teenage boy owning other human beings might make you gasp. As we described in the Washington case as well, this is what passes on. This was what powered the colonial economy. This is part of a world where tobacco and cotton are the reasons almost for the existence of these causes, but certainly what keeps the economy turning. And this is true not just of the mainland itself, but also the Caribbean, which is linked to it economically at this time in a way that link is now broken by politics, but is very much part of the same trading system and part of the same plantation system. The image that a lot of people who may have been lucky enough to see Hamilton will have of Jefferson is this sort of fast-talking, swaggering, confident, almost luscious kind of character. It's a kind of camp in the Hamilton.

Very, very camp. David Diggs in the musical was just so memorable, so brilliant. He also doubles up as Lafayette, who's also another swaggering, sort of foppish character as well. But in real life, he was incredibly shy. You know, he didn't like talking to people, squaring up to people. He was hopeless with women, and we learned from, so many biographies written about him, at a very young age, under stress he would develop migraines, particularly when he was trying to court a woman who wasn't interested,

he would suddenly sort of retire with migraines. But rather a good-looking character. There's early portraits of him. There's a wonderful portrait of him that I'm looking at the moment in the Smithsonian, with him as a young man, bewigged, serious, good chin, strong nose, sensitive but self-consciously intellectual in this young portrait. Yeah. He gets over his shyness in a way by pursuing the practice of law.

And also, you know, you can get over your shyness and get yourself a position and be anchored in this world if you get yourself a good marriage. But before you get a good marriage, you know, you've got some property. you need more property, you need a good education. So he attends William and Mary College in Williamsburg in Virginia. And Williamsburg actually, it turns out as sort of a hotbed of discontent among proto-revolutionaries who are really not happier with this way that the British are looking down on the colonial settlers as second-class citizens. And specifically beginning to tax them or threatening to tax them, which is I think what really stirs stuff up. as ever it's the money that really gets things moving.

Totally. And it's around the taverns of Williamsburg that they start having these conversations which would be deemed to be seditious in England if anyone had overheard them. I very much like this tiny little factoid that I found where do you know that the comestibles, sugar and some of the sweetmeats and things in a tavern, were kept behind bars, literally in a little jail. I've seen one of the taverns that he used to frequent as a student. This is rather like wine shops in India, where you have to kind of reach through bars

to get yourself a bottle of whiskey or a crate of beer. Yeah. And people cling on to the bars. It looks very like a sort of prison break. Do you know what? I have read an esteemed, and I can't remember which one, by the way, but some esteemed historian,

and said that's why they're called bars in America. No. Yes. Is that true? I knew you'd love it. Yeah. I didn't know that. You're going to go to the bar.

Yeah? It's going to get a drink at the bar. Literally. So isn't that gorgeous? And I've just seen some of the old, you know, whatever is remaining or the little museumy things around Williamsburg. And they still have these sort of barred little rooms where they would have kept the moons. And is bars in Americanism? Yeah.

Can I have a drink at the bar? We would have said the tavern. Yeah. Going to have a drink at the tavern or the inn. That's made by day. Did you like that? I like that very much, yes. I really very much hope that that that is true.

So he's sort of starting to get involved or at least. surrounded by this aspect of, you know, grumbling unhappiness. He's not particularly revolutionary. He is an independent thinker because the kind of things that he's reading at the moment. And these are interesting because I think they will go to how he framed the independence declaration and how little of God is in there. Because among the people that he's reading and digesting and actually really respecting a people like a man called Lord Bollingbrook, who is a pioneer critic of organized Christianity,

which may actually tell you a little bit about why there is so little of God in the Declaration of Independence. I think that this is very much one strand of Enlightenment thought at this period. And while almost all the Enlightenment thinkers are very much in pursuit of reason, some take that, others do not, to also negate any need to bring in the supernatural or the divine. And so that's not, I think, unusual for the period, but it does mark him out. I mean, particularly in America, you've got to think, that, you know, these are a lot of Puritan who've escaped persecution. Yes, you definitely wouldn't want to have those views in American election today.

Yeah, but even back then, I mean, the Enlightenment was patchy in America, but he embraced it completely heart and soul. It's rationality. I mean, as you were saying, enlightenment is individualism, its progress. It is, you know, the one who is building up for all, but it is always starting at the one. So he starts to love things like, you know, math, science, philosophy, political philosophy, and he becomes this star student. He's very, very bright at an early age. This is a lovely thing. His tutor was a man called George White, who would be one of the early signers on the

Declaration of Independence. I mean, that's not bad, is it for your teacher to say, look, this is my boy who wrote this, and I'm going to be the first to sign it. Also, the Scottish scholar, William Small, who's very much a child of the Scottish Enlightenment. Exactly right. So, I mean, William, Tell us a bit more about the Enlightenment and how it might have affected Jefferson's thinking. So this period, the 1760s, is a period when, particularly in Scotland, but also in England, ideas are circulating about liberalism, the idea of natural rights that humans have, including life, liberty, health and property, which obviously are ideas that we will come back to at the Declaration of Independence.

And this is the period where man is the centre of things. that science is advancing fast, people are pushing back the frontiers of superstition. And you see that not just in philosophy, but also it's reflection in architecture. And in 768, Jefferson expands his estate at Monticello and builds this sort of perfect Palladian mansion very much on the kind of model of Chiswick House outside London, but all of these different Palladian mansions modeled originally on Palladian. Villas, villas outside Venice with these very classical forms. And the Enlightenment very much looks back to the Renaissance and the pure scientific and rational ideas retrieved from antiquity.

And I mean, it should be said that he's fairly well off at this point. He's got the stuff that's coming from the plantation. He has got his inheritance. He's also now having left as, you know, the brightest student of George White is now practicing as a lawyer and he's making some fairly good money. So Monticello is actually a really beautiful place. He makes it look gorgeous so it stands out. All of the roads converge in one little place. Monticello, I mean, did you say it means Little Mountain? I didn't know that until I looked that up. That's sweet. And very much that classical architecture that he's putting up there. He also calls it his essay in architecture because he's always going to be fiddle-faddling with it. He's a great inventor and

redraw of things. He likes to create things on paper and then have his workers create them in real life. he's the architecture that he's putting up as a direct reflection of the kind of rationality and logic of the philosophy that he espouses. So it's very much one world in his view. A very friendly comment about him at this time because there are some lovely, lovely little details. Like he sort of, you know, sits there, he writes a lot, but he finds his chair uncomfortable. So he invents a swivel chair. He may be the man who invented the swivel chair. Is that actually true? He takes a chair and puts it on top of another chair, breaks the top off, and he uses the little

sash window pulls to go underneath it. So he can swivel. around. You know, his mind is forever whirring around. And that very much in the Franklin mode, who's building musical instruments and any number of sort of weird printing inventions, that same idea that you can, building new stoves, new chimneys, this very sort of practical use of rationality and engineering and sort of incredibly fertile imagination, all these guys seem to have. Yeah. So, I mean, you know, look, he's got the wife, he's got the job, he's got some money coming in, he's getting a bit more confident, but not much, he still doesn't like talking to people. He's not a great party go. There's a lovely thing actually. He does get

married. It's a good marriage. It's, you know, it feels like it's an arranged marriage of statute. Who's his wife? Martha Wales Skelton. She's five years younger than him. She actually looks a little bit like him. I've sort of seen pictures. You know, she's got that sort of lean kind of face, you know, that a foxy face that he has as well. And she becomes the mistress of Monticello. There is something really a bit ick about this marriage, though, because she brings with her a slave who may actually also be her half-sister. Again, I don't think this is as unusual as we would imagine, because remember this is an age. In India, you've got this happening the whole time with these half-acknowledged, sometimes married, but sometimes not wives, sometimes the BBs who are Indian,

and often children are brought home who are sometimes acknowledged and sometimes said to be half-brothers, and sometimes are presented as servants or wards. Well, I'm just going to leave this here, that his wife brings into his home, a woman who is the product of, I mean, it must be rape, you know, the raping of an enslaved woman by her father. So this person is her half-sister, who is in the vernacular of the day, Malato. Her surname is Hemmings. That's going to be important in a little while. But, you know, that's what she comes in sort of her dowry. And she's much more involved in, you know, prudifying the place and she has many more social graces than her husband does. There is a lovely comment, though, you know, they spend the evening these two, Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Jefferson,

reading Tristram Shandy out to each other in the evening. Which at the time was, I mean, we regarded it in a sense as a literary text and something you'd do at university. But I think it was the kind of Monty Python of the time. It was a kind of wacko, completely crazy novel. And reading Tristram Shandy would have been almost an act of literary rebellion, wouldn't it? Well, maybe. But Christopher Hitchens is rapier-like, as you would expect him to be. So Christopher Hitchens says, when he talks about Tristram Shandy readings in the evening,

we must thus from the first appreciate what becomes ever clearer is this story. he proceeds. We are studying a man with very little sense of humour. Such a wonderfully spare bitchy remark from Hitchens. And trying to understand Tristram Shandy without a sense of humour would have been a trial. Yeah. So are you saying, Anita, that he was socially gauche, that while clever, that he was humourless, shy and slightly awkward? I mean, I think shy. I think genuinely shy. Because you'll find out later that this thing that he'll be remembered for writing the Declaration of Independence, he pretty much had to be booted into doing

it because he just didn't want to. He didn't have confidence in speaking. Again, Chris Hitchens says he's a liar, pants on fire and he really did want to be asked and he was desperate for someone to push him into doing it. But, you know, all other accounts are that he was sort of manhandled by John Adams first and foremost and then Ben Franklin to write and then rewrite those enormously repercussive words. And that actually wasn't really him. He would be the one who would be the one who would be lurking. I mean, John Adams describes him as somebody who's sort of at the corners of the room or on the edges or in the shadows are always watching. Oh, and you can see that from his eyes, that there's just a complete inferno going on inside, but he doesn't choose to speak very much.

So when I look at it, I see shyness. I suppose Chris Hitchens might see goshness, whatever it is. He's not somebody who's going to walk into a room and suddenly dominate it. That's the difference. Between him and say, you know, Franklin, who we're going to meet later, Washington just by virtue, of his size and his reputation. John Adams, because he's really, really loud and rambunctious, this is a man who is not the person who all eyes will turn to until he becomes Thomas Jefferson of legend. But you've got him at 26 years of age in 1769.

He's a very good lawyer. He's doing very well. He's getting status and stuff. And then he's elected to Virginia's House of Burgesses. So, I mean, do you want to describe to people what the House of Burgesses is? So a Burgess is a freeman of a borough, and the House of Burgesses is the elected representative element in specifically the Virginia General Assembly. So it's the legislative body for the colony of Virginia. And so it's the House of Parliament for Virginia, specifically. And while he's there, you know, sort of these important matters of Virginia life come up. And one of them is why the Rivana River can't be open to navigation. So what does he do? You know, this. this whole idea that you should be able to transport tobacco in particular with greater ease. And, you know, people say, look, the Rivana River, you can't navigate it. It's just an obstacle.

So you have to, you know, take all this tobacco stuff to the James River, which is much further away. And he doesn't understand this. You know, he's sort of arguing for it. But then he jumps into a canoe to prove it, which I thought was really interesting about him, because I've never thought of him as particularly a roughty-tifty-tuffie man of action. More a lawyer than a boatie. Well, sort of soft hands, you know, whereas you've got sort of the others that are the gnarled and crispy hands of Washington and even Adams, who is, you know, we'll find out, was more farmer at heart. Or Franklin busy making all sorts of sort of gadgets and spammers and sort of burns and acid and all sorts of things going on in his life. But I always thought of him as being manicured, actually. But he does. He sets off in a canoe to discover why the Rivana Road.

Why is everyone saying the Rivana cannot be open to navigation? And he starts listing all the obstacles. And he forms a plan to remove them. He's talking about cutting through a waterway. So in effect, America could have had its own sort of sewers canal type thing if they'd have followed his plan. I mean, they don't, but they could have. So again, this is such a young age to be so convinced of your own prowess that not only will you not accept an argument that the Rivana can't be used to make tobacco production easier. You jump in your canoe, you go and have a look. You see that, yes, they do have a point.

It's really tricky. then you sit down and think, well, give me a pencil and paper. I'll show you how to sort that out. And that again is something he shares with Frankton, is it? This sort of self-helpie thing, Franklin's sort of, you know, building his own bifocals, inventing bifocals and building them himself. Don't give away too much of your Franklin episode, my friend. You're only going to be sorry. But look, Virginia itself, he's sort of there working for Virginia, working for Virginians. But Virginians themselves had never felt further away from the British government. Because, the British, as you say, they've imposed taxes.

Yes, we should say a little bit about the taxes. So specifically, the thing that really ratchets up the pressure is the fact that the Brits have sprint, as they see a fortune protecting America in the French and Indian Wars, what we call the Seven Years War. And they have. There's been great regiments marched across the continent. Fleets have sailed from Portsmouth to Boston. And like all wars, it's extremely expensive.

and it is that cost of war, it is the debt from that war that gets the British Parliament talking about how do we pay for it. And this is what starts talk about a stamp act, about taxing imports, and this is what provokes rebellion. People don't want to be taxed, understandably. They haven't been used to being taxed and they don't want to. I think we're going to go into the stamp tax in a lot more detail in our American Revolution. But you're absolutely right to say that is the touch paper that lights it for, certainly for Adams, and he writes sort of excoriating treaties about the Stamp Act and why it's just so completely wrong, moral, sense, good sense, and everything else grounds.

So it is the thing that also tips Jefferson over there. To join us after the break when we find out what he ends up doing about it. Welcome back. So just before the break, we had sort of Jefferson fairly well set up. He's got a wife. He's got Monticello. He's got a good job. He's trying to create the first Suez Canal in America, although people don't follow it. but they could have done, you know, because it would have worked. And he's one of these Burgesses representing the interests of Virginia, or rich Virginia, anyway, you know, the ones that have money and land. But in 1769, all of that is going to change because this House of Burgesses in Virginia is dissolved just like that by the British governor.

Because what he regards as this kind of grumbling that's been going on in the tea rooms, taverns and bars of Virginia. Secessionist talk. Yeah, he says it's insubordinate. nation. You know, if you're going to completely start complaining about taxes, that's fine. You don't get to have your own government. Let's not even pretend that you're running anything here, because it is the crown, it is British Parliament, and you've been getting ideas above your station. And this is really infuriating. Imagine to a young man who thinks he's climbing the ladder, doing everything right, climbing and climbing and he's got to this point, and it means nothing.

And this is the heavy-handed empire, which always kind of backpires. I mean, we saw that happening in India as well, where you said, right, okay, you know what, you don't have any freedoms. No, that's it. You know, after the Defense of India Act after World War I, you know, yes, okay, you fought for us. But you know what? You're getting a bit grumbly. So we're just going to take away your rights.

We're going to take away what you thought you had earned and what you have. And people like Jefferson, who are smart, they don't like this at all. So they start to congregate in this place called the Apollo Room in the Rums, in the Raleigh Tavern, which has now become a landmark, by the way. If you go to Williamsburg, you can go and see it. I love that it's in a tavern. Yes. That's brilliant.

Well, all the best revolutions in a pub. It's true, though, isn't it? It's true. But there is this actual start of a movement that Jefferson is part of. It's the first anti-colonial boycott, isn't it? Yes, tell us about that. So they make a decision to boycott goods which are taxed by Parliament, which basically means imports.

I mean, the most obvious one is tea, which is now coming brought by our old enemies, the East India Company. And everything that arrives as an import from Britain is taxed on arrival. And all this, by boycotting fancy imports, in other words, sort of luxuries coming in from London, this is very much encouraging what in India,

they call it with the same spirit Swadesh. I mean, things that are made by, they're doing their own. homespun things. And this is throwing themselves back on their own resources. No more fancy imports. We can do our own things. We can go our own way. So the boycott is part of it, but also for Jefferson, this is really seminal as well, because he starts to learn to write a revolution. So he starts writing these treaties against the British, against what the British are doing. He's part of this committee of correspondence who are working on a legal means of establishing

contact between different opposition forces in the different colonies to try and get this sort of idea of a continental Congress together that we have to fight this together, not just as Virginians, but maybe there's something bigger that we can do, a Pax Americana, if you like, you know, so these states in peace working together against this thing that's affecting all of us. And he starts sort of basically taking out his pen and filling it with ink and writing these very eloquent pieces to convince people to fight, to do what Virginia. Virginia is doing to say this isn't fair. I mean, it's happening organically anyway, particularly in Boston as you'll find out. But he's kind of like starting to, if you like, sort of grow into his

chops a bit as a revolutionary man. We should say this is also, this is boycott before boycott. Boycott is named after a person. Yes, isn't he an Irish landowner? Captain Charles Boycott, an absentee Irish landlord and it's Parnell and the Irish Land League that boycotts him in 1880 and comes up with the word. I don't know what word they were using 100 years earlier in Virginia. He doesn't use boycott, but what he does do is he starts comparing the American situation and the Virginian situation to the Peasants Revolt. So if you start invoking the language and the memory of the Peasants Revolt in your writing, you are threatening the crown directly.

So this very gentle, soft-handed, quiet man who won't look you in the eye. Who is a lawyer, who has the kind of lawyer's wig and all that kit, is now actively breaking the law. Well, it's off the leash now. Let's leave revolutionary politics for a moment. And can we talk about this one thing which is still, it is a hot potato even now, which is his relationship, stroke, exploitation, stroke. I mean, you pick the word you want with Sally Hemmings. Do you remember I mentioned that his wife had come into the marriage with her own half-sister, who was the product of a relationship with Jefferson's father-in-law and one of the slaves on his own plantation? and this woman has children, six children, in fact, the youngest of whom is a girl called Sally Hemings. Now, Sally Hemings's name is now intrinsically linked to Jefferson's.

I mean, partly because of, you know, the way that the movies portray it. And just remind us, what did the Nick Nolty, Tandinutian film say about it? Because I think I've blanked it out on my eye because I find the whole thing a bit ick. So the Merchant Ivory film, as I remember it, and it is 20 years since I saw it, does make it into a romantic relationship, but also highlights the disparity between the way that Jefferson treats Hemmings and his other slaves and the high-blown sentiments of his Declaration of Independence and the rights of man. And so it does both things. But yes, it definitely turns it into a romantic relationship.

But it's a longstanding thing with a woman who can't say no. Let's just be really frank about it because an enslaved woman has no rights to say no to the advances of their masters. It isn't uncommon for children to be born from these. So I hesitate to call them relationships, or maybe relationships, depending on what you feel about the Jefferson Hemings' entanglement relationship, whatever you like. What's also complicated is the whole relationship with the children.

Three of the children passed into white society and denied their African heritage. Well, that's because they're white enough. Their skin is light enough. And one son is not light enough and remains in the black community and writes a memoir about his family. All the children are given emancipation by Jefferson, but Sally is not, which is very odd sits, very uneasily,

with what we know about Jefferson elsewhere. Yeah, and what he writes and what he really truly seems to believe in, but he has this blind spot when it comes to Sally Hemings. Look, so just take you back a little bit. Thomas's wife passes away in 1787, it's a few years after his wife dies, he takes a teenage Sally Hemings to Paris, you know, Jefferson and Paris. So it's a big trip for him because he's trying to drum up support from the French

who have revolutionary ideas to support the American cause as well. And this young girl, Sally Hemings, is meant to be the maid to his daughter. So just, you know, get that in perspective. She's the maid to his daughter. She's 30 years, 3-0 years younger than him. Slavery is illegal in France, so she can't be, you know, held as a slave. she's legally free while she's in France. Her older brother is already in Paris.

Jefferson sent him there to learn French cooking, presumably. I mean, I don't know for sure, but so he can cook nice French things back in Monticello when he goes back. But it is at this point that most believe their relationship becomes sexual. And when, you know, they're preparing to return to Virginia, and this is, I think, says a lot about whether how consensual these things are. Sally refuses to leave. She doesn't want to go because she has freedom in Paris.

But she does eventually concede, negotiating privileges for herself and the promise of freedom for future children. And they do have six children. And as you say, those six children are emancipated, but she never is. She never gets the deal for herself. It's very complicated and very unpleasant, isn't it? Unsavory, isn't, don't you think? Yeah.

Yeah. And the idea of these negotiations that she has to negotiate for her children before going back. I mean, the newspapers at the time, you made great hay of this. And again, I'm putting them in inverted commas relationship between these two people. and they refer to Sally Hemings as his concubine, which is something that sort of wounds him. We're looking at them through a lens now, but it does feel very uncomfortable to me. About the children and the different trajectories faced by children of slightly different skin colour. But this is very much the complex and unpleasant colour politics of the 18th century,

that you have sexual relations around coloniser and colonised, and the children are stuck between the two worlds and have to fit their way in as best they can. Yeah, there's also a forgotten passage of the Declaration of Independence because everybody remembers we hold these things to be self-evident that all men are created equal. And it's poetic, it's lyrical, it's powerful, it turned the world upside down. There is also, you know, in the Declaration of Independence where all of the faults of King George are being enumerated by Jefferson's pen, there's this one. He, King George, he's talking about, has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating

its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who have never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation hither. The piratical warfare and opprobrium of infidel powers is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain, determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold. He has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative. attempt to prohibit or restrain the excreable commerce, and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguishing die. He is now exciting those very people to rise in arms against us and to purchase the liberty of which he has deprived them by murdering the people on whom

he has obtruded them, thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another. It's really dense, but if you look at it, what is being said in this is how dare the king be paying black slaves to rise up against our revolution? This is a man who owned over 600 enslaved people, making him the most prolific slave-owning US president in history. Yeah. So, I mean, you know, and we will talk about this much more in the American Revolution episodes. But Britain is freeing black slaves and paying them to fight for them. And he is saying, you know what, you started this slavery thing. And now you have the temerity. And you force them on us. You force slavery on us.

It seems to me, I mean, I'm, you know, please do feel free to respond if you read that in a different way. But what it certainly looks like to me is that you force that on us. And that's what we have now. He calls it an abomination. But it's an abomination. And yet freed only 10 in his life out of 600. Well, it's all so confusing. Anyway, look, that is the paradox that is Thomas Jefferson. And I think that's pretty much all we have time for today. But do join us again next time for the next founding father, who is...

Alexander Hamilton, no less. Hooray. Alexander Hamilton. As seen, exactly. As seen on the stage. Very much looking forward to that. But if people can't wait, what can they do, William Dorempal. They can join our class.

Up Empirepod UK.com and they can hear all these founding fathers episodes immediately. And next week, when we move on to the revolution, they'll be able to hear all four of our American Revolution pods again and binge them with the wonderful Maya Jaslov talking about her work on the revolution from her extraordinary award-winning book, Liberty's Exiles. And it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnand. And goodbye from me, William Durempal. Thank you.