The Megyn Kelly Show - Thomas Jefferson and the Founding of America: History Week on the Megyn Kelly Show | Ep. 459

Episode Date: December 22, 2022

History Week on The Megyn Kelly Show concludes with a look at one of our Founding Fathers.Megyn Kelly is joined by Clay Jenkinson, American humanities, scholar, author and educator, to discuss the life and legacy of President Thomas Jefferson, his early life and education, the rise of Jefferson into a political leader, his natural talent for writing, his authoring of the Declaration of Independence, his home at Monticello, his love life and family struggles, the media’s role in politics, his life after politics, the controversy of his alleged relationship with Sally Hemings,the attempted cancellation of Jefferson and how his legacy will continue to live on, his rivalry and reconciliation with John Adams, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Today we are going back to the time of America's founding to focus on one of the most influential men in American politics, in American history, Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson was the third president of the United States, author of the Declaration of Independence, and governor of Virginia. He played a key role in executing a vision that shaped America as we know it today. Some of us continue to live his values, whether we know it or not. While he led a very successful life, there were plenty of pitfalls. And he, as a man, was far from perfect, something that the left is trying to use in the 21st century to cancel the American icon in an attempt to erase him from history and to make him no more than the sum of his faults. Joining us today is humanities scholar and author and host of the Thomas Jefferson Hour,

Clay Jenkinson. Welcome to the show, Clay. Thanks for being here. Megan, it's a delight to be here. Eager to talk about this great man. Yeah, me too. So we're going to, I'll keep it simple and I'll just assume people know only the basics about him and you can fill in the rest of the story.

I think most people know that he authored the Declaration of Independence and that you've got Monticello, which was his house. Some of us have seen it on our tours and so on of America. But I don't know how much people know about Thomas Jefferson behind that or beyond that. Now they're hearing every other day that he owns slaves and he needs to be canceled. But you've spent your adult life devoted to letting people understand his full legacy. And I know you believe very strongly that we must understand what he stood for and his words and the meaning behind them, because they really are built into the foundation of where we live and how we live. Give us the broad overview before we get into the specifics on why he's so important to us. Well, you know, there's a biography of George Washington that calls him America's indispensable

man, and he was. And probably there's no greater figure amongst the founders than Washington for a range of reasons. But we can't understand the history of this country or its value system until we come to terms with Jefferson. Jefferson, Megan, really articulated the American dream. First of all, he believed that we're up to it, that we are equal to the challenge of self-government. He believed that humans are perfectible, at least up to a certain degree. He believed that we should leave European habits behind and forge a new, extraordinary, smaller, Republican American culture. He believed that the glory of a nation is in its literature, its sculpture, its painting, its architecture, its gardening, and not in its warfare or its geopolitical position. He was an isolationist. He's really a tremendously extraordinary man. And if there's any figure in our history who is truly a Renaissance man, can arguably be put in the same paragraph with someone like Leonardo

da Vinci. It's Thomas Jefferson. He was born in 1743. He died at the age of 83 on July 4th, 1826. And as you say, he was not just the third president of the United States for two terms, but also the governor of Virginia, the first secretary of state, the American ambassador to France, and the vice president of this country under his frenemy, John Adams. How did it come to be that a man as young as Jefferson could write the Declaration of Independence? It's hard to think of, what was he like, 31 when he wrote it? 33. 33. How did a man of 33 years write that thing? And he wrote it relatively quickly. He did.

So he said he consulted neither book nor pamphlet. That may be something of an exaggeration. He was 33. He was the youngest member of the Virginia delegation to the Second Continental Congress. In fact, Megan, he was an alternate. And he was there and he was shy. He was an exceedingly shy and private person in some ways even a secretive person so he wasn't one of those people like john adams who stood up all the

time and spoke and had opinions about everything and demanded that he'd be the center of attention jefferson was at the opposite end of that spectrum but here's what he did have he had spent the first 20-some years of his life reading hard. And when I say reading hard, I mean reading hard. He says that at some points he was reading 15 hours per day. Well, try that for a week. He knew seven languages, three ancient and four modern. And more than that, thanks to his first great mentor, a man named William Small at the College of William and Mary, Jefferson read essentially the corpus of Enlightenment texts, Voltaire, Samuel Johnson, Rousseau, Dolbach, etc. And he absorbed all of these. He had a capacious mind and he kept a commonplace book. And so he knew more about the history of human liberty probably than any other

person in the United States as he sat there in Philadelphia. And secondly, Jefferson practiced being a good writer of English prose. He prided himself on being straightforward, being clear, not being Ciceronian, being very transparent, using smaller words rather than larger ones, getting always to the point, being brief. And so when this moment came and they were needing to have a declaration of independence to tell the world that we were no longer going to accept colonial subservience, John Adams and Jefferson were placed on this committee. And Adams came to Jefferson in his boarding house in Philadelphia and said, you must write this declaration. Three reasons. First, you are a Virginian, and a Virginian must be at the head of this business. Secondly, I, John Adams,

am widely disliked and obnoxious, and if I write it, I'll be the issue. And third, you write 10 times better than I do. And you know what, Megan? He was right. Jefferson is the best prose stylist of the founders. I love that. And I love that self-awareness by Adams, too. It's so funny. So let's back up. So now you set him up for the audience.

Let's go back to, you know, years 0 through 33 to what got him to this place. He was a Virginian. How was he raised? Yeah, your opening got right to the heart of it. So Jefferson's first memory of all of the memories of his life was being about two years old and his father moved their family to another plantation to help out another family. And Jefferson remembers being carried on top of a horse on a pillow by a trusted black slave. So think of that. The first memory of all the memories of his life is of a trust relationship with an enslaved person. He was born into the thick of the slave economy. He valiantly tried to extricate himself at certain points. He was never able to do it. Eventually,

he sort of lost interest in it, I think, and became a little bit complacent. But that's the first memory of his life. And when he died on July 4th, 1826, enslaved people built his coffin. They dug the grave in the graveyard at Monticello and buried him. And so his life is enveloped with race and slavery in a way that yours isn't and mine isn't and the 21st century ours isn't, at least in this country. So for us to understand Jefferson, we have to factor that in from the beginning and throughout. Now, what we make of it is another question. So he grew up in Virginia. He was privately tutored until he was 16 and a half. Then he went up to the logical place, the College of William and Mary. He had a brilliant set of mentors there. He, again, was reading 12, 15 hours per day. And by the time he finished,

he was maybe the best intellectually prepared person in America, with the possible exception of John Adams, and the best intellectually prepared president when he became president in 1801 until Theodore Roosevelt. So wait, let me ask you there. It sounds like a rich family. He was born on a plantation. They had slaves, so he had money. What was the family's dream for him back then? Like when he was born, we weren't thinking about American independence. Most of the people living in the colonies were pretty happy with British rule, with some minor complaints, and it grew over time. But what was the family's dream for him? That's a great question, Megan. So he never intended to be part of a revolution and wasn't too happy to be in it, frankly. He thought that he would grow up and he'd have some civic duties.

He might be a justice of the peace. It's arguable he could attend the House of Burgesses as a delegate. Maybe, maybe he'd be governor Virginia, and they sort of took their turn, the elite. But he did not expect to be a figure that we're talking about, I can tell you that. And he was a little surprised when it all came, and not particularly well-fitted for it either. He was shy, and he was thin-skinned. And you know, as well as anybody, you have to be thick-skinned to be a public figure in the United States then and now. He grew up in privilege, but not luxury. His father, Peter Jefferson, was a sort of self-made man, but he married into one of the most prominent families in Virginia, the Randolph family. And so there were expectations for Jefferson that a regular person in Auburn County,

Virginia, would not have, that he was going to have to play a role. But that role might have been quite small. And if it weren't for the revolution, we might not know his name, except for the magnificent beauty of his architecture. So how did he get pulled into that, right? So he finishes college at the College of William and Mary. He's very well read, very well educated and prepared for whatever life's going to throw at him. How do we go from that to the Declaration of Independence, becoming president? I mean, it all happened very quickly. You know, when you look around and you realize that

things have to change, that the colonial relationship had broken. There had been a whole series of warm-up events from the Stamp Act and the Townsend Acts and the Boston Tea Party and so on. Jefferson came to the conclusion that we were going to have to break with Britain because he believed in the sovereignty of the people, that people are entitled to self-government, to self-determination, and that we were really suffering under British colonial tyranny. And as he says in the Declaration of Independence, we should not have a rebellion for light and transient causes, but when there's a long train of abuses and usurpations showing a pattern of abuse, then we not only have a duty, I mean, we not only have a right to rise up and overthrow that government, but we have a duty to do so. So he was drawn in by

his reading and by his awareness of what was happening. And then in 1774, he wrote a pamphlet, which was published without his permission, called A Summery View. And everyone in all the colonies thought, this is a young man to reckon with. This is a great thinker and even more a great articulator of the American position. And so he was then drawn into the national councils because of his genius. So I have people on the show all the time who I love because when they speak, they espouse some sort of an idea in the most articulate and interesting way. And it's an idea we may have discussed on the show a thousand times before. But the way that they articulate this idea is, I say, like cool water on a hot brain. You're just like, yes, thank you for saying that. I finally get it. I've heard it 10,000 different ways, but now I get it. He was that guy. He had that clarity, Megan. Alexander Pope, the British poet, said that wit is what oft was thought but never so well expressed. And that's Jefferson. Anyone could have written the Declaration of Independence. Adams had the chance to write it. Others were

more prominent and were senior to Jefferson. But if they had written it, it would, I think, be regarded as a sort of routine state paper today. What Jefferson brought to it was that incredible lucidity that you're talking about and a kind of passion that was under tight reign, that he controlled that passion. And then he found the 35 most interesting words in the English language. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Nobody else could have done that. Nobody else could have written that sentence. Imagine could have written that sentence.

Imagine John Adams writing that sentence. It would have been two and a half pages long with footnotes and arguments and scholastic logic and attacks on his enemies. Jefferson knew how to get to the point. You know, he wrote 83 volumes worth of letters and so on. I've never read a single paragraph of Thomas Jefferson that wasn't immediately clear. Ask that of any other person you've ever heard of. Every time you say it, or I hear it, or I read it, I get the chills. You hear those words, especially spoken out loud, no matter how many times, right? It just, it gives you a chill.

That's him. I mean, imagine being the person who had that effect on humanity, on an entire country full of people for centuries. Like, it just gives you some perspective on his gift. But you've pointed out, I know, that Jefferson with the written word, no equal. Jefferson with the spoken word, he was no Churchill. That's to put it lightly. So he had a slight stammer of some sort and a high-pitched and reedy voice. So nothing like my voice, I'm afraid. And he gave as few speeches in the course of his life as possible. First of all, I didn't think that speechifying was a very good thing because you always oversimplify and you play to the crowd and you you know you wind yourself up into into statements that you probably would pull back a little on if

you could so the most famous example is his first inaugural address march 4th 1801 contested election first president to be inaugurated in the new capitol in washington in the unfinished capitol building he's staying at a boarding house not so far away. He strolls without a military escort, without bands and a carriage and so on. He strolls over to the Capitol, and there he delivers his first inaugural address, one of the two or three masterpieces of that genre. But he mumbled, and he was so quiet and soft-spoken that people were leaning forward. There were about a thousand people there and they wanted to know because he regarded this as the second American revolution. So they wanted to know what's this guy going to bring to us?

You know, how many radical changes is he promoting? Because a lot of people had fears that Jefferson was too radical, spent too much time in France. And so Jefferson reads out this magnificent inaugural address in which he says, every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We are all Republicans. We are all Democrats, all Federalists, he said. It's amazing. But he mumbled and no one could hear it. And so people went out afterwards and bought printed copies on the street. And that was it. He gave a second inaugural address in 1805. But other than that, no State of the Union messages, no stump speaking. When he left the presidency voluntarily in March of 1890, he went home to Monticello and he never left its environs

for the last 17 years of his life. He's not one of us. He's not Chris Christie. He's not Donald Trump. He's not Bill Clinton. So before he gets to the presidency, because I think that the run for president is very interesting in his case and how I've heard and read you discussing how contentious it was and ugly. You know, we think that we live in the ugliest political times ever. We got to read some history to know it's been ugly for a long time. But before all that, talk about the American Revolution. You mentioned he was part of the Continental Congress, this American group that was helping advise on the war while it took place from 1774 plus four years. And he was part of that. So how did he get pulled into that? Was it because of the treaty that you mentioned? Or what was the name of the paper that got published against his will? He got pulled in because of his capacity as a thinker and a writer. And then he became the governor of Virginia during the darkest period of the war. He had a good war and a bad war, but mostly a bad war.

He's not a warrior. He's not Washington. He's not even James Monroe. He's a philosopher and he's a thinker. And he's a little bit, he's so refined that it's hard to imagine him with a musket in his hand. You can't imagine him at Valley Forge because he's a creature of enormous comfort. So he's sort of a penman of the revolution. He became governor.

Just at that time, the war went sour and the British invaded the South, invaded Virginia. Jefferson handled it pretty not well, let's say. And in fact, he was investigated for malfeasance because the British invaded all the way up to the capital at Richmond and scattered the government. And eventually, Bannister Tarleton brought some dragoons up the hill to Monticello and Jefferson fled into the woods, which I suppose was a rational thing to do. But he never lived that down. He never was able to live that down.

He was found guilty of cowardice? And so Theodore Roosevelt, for example, couldn't stand Jefferson because Roosevelt goes where the trouble is. Roosevelt jumps right into the fire, right into the battle, right onto the grenade. And he thought Jefferson was the kind of person who slips away. And it's a little bit true. And so at the end of the war, Jefferson's career was in disarray. His wife had died at the age of 33. He had almost what we would call a

nervous breakdown over that, I think. And it looked as if he was done. You know, he'd live out his life on his plantation, but in kind of disgrace. But Madison got him sent over to France to serve as the American minister there, and Jefferson recovered, and he came back, and things, of course, went from strength to strength with Jefferson. But the nadir of his career was being governor of Virginia. And here's what the takeaway from that is. He learned a lesson. He was such a small R Republican that he read his job description in the most minimalist way. When the people really wanted a strong leader, even maybe a temporary dictator at that point, save us, save the state. Jefferson didn't have it in him,

both philosophically or in his character set. But when he became president, he did not make the mistake, Megan, of undervaluing his power. He behaved more like a Hamiltonian as president than at any other time in his life. And he knew that when you have power, you don't duck it. You need to use it carefully and within the limits of the Constitution, but you must be willing to assert power or you can't be an important leader. Or you can't be entrusted with it. So, okay. So that's fascinating because I did, I did read, he was investigated for cowardice in connection with the fleeing while governor of Virginia, but you raise a good point. He saved his life and he knew

he wasn't a fighter. Like he, he kind of knew himself pretty well. This wasn't going to go well for him if he stayed and fought. So he lived to fight another day, you might say, and in a different way. And then he gets the idea to run for president. When he won, was it the first time he had run? No. So let me clarify one piece there. He would say, I'm not sure we have to believe him, he would say he never wanted to be the president of the United States. He looked on it as sort of his jury duty, that he was called upon by the American people, that he would rather be home with his rutabagas and his landscape gardening and his books. And maybe that's true. You know, they were all pretending to be Cincinnatus out of the world of Plutarch. But Jefferson always said he would rather not have had the presidency. He called it splendid misery. And when he left voluntarily after two terms, and he certainly would have been reelected because of

the Louisiana Purchase, among other things, he said, never has a prisoner released from his shackles felt more relief than I do upon this occasion. I have no more desire to govern men than to ride my horse through a storm. Well, maybe. He's no Bill Clinton who wanted to be president from 16. And maybe Jefferson is putting it on a little thick, but he stood for the presidency reluctantly in 1796, pushed forward by others. He came in second. And under the electoral college system, then he became vice president, which meant we had a Federalist president and a Republican vice president. In 1800, he sort of did want to be president for this reason. He wanted to throw the rascals out. He felt that the Federalists, Washington, Adams, and particularly Colonel

Hamilton, were taking the country towards aristocracy and monarchy and a strong central government, and that this was really a violation of the principles of the revolution. And so he stood to restore the country and he called it when he won America's second revolution, that he had brought us back to the true principles of the thing. So, you know, you have to unpack that with ambition and rhetoric and posturing, but I do think he was a very reluctant political figure and he certainly would have been reelected in 1808 and chose to retire. And he said that the precedent set by George Washington of two terms is essential to the health of a republic. When was he sent over to France? Was he our ambassador to France? 1784 to 1789, he was called technically our American minister to France.

But that was right after the debacle of the revolution and the death of his wife. And he went to France and he did recover. He fell in love with French high culture, the sculpture, the painting, the music. He said, if there's one thing I covet in violation of the Ten Commandments, it's European music. He fell in love in Paris with a British-Italian woman named Maria Cosway, the last love, I think, of his life. She was married, and sort of what happens in Paris isn't going to really work very well back in Virginia. But he lost control of his head, which almost never happened with Jefferson. He went into northern Italy, doing so with a map to try to figure out how Hannibal had come over the Alps with his elephants. You know, Jefferson

was one of the most curious men who ever lived on earth. And so he had a great five years in France and he toured wine country and he became America's first true wine connoisseur and the wine advisor to the other four of the first five presidents because of his mastery. Everything Jefferson touched, he mastered. And the one definition of genius, Megan, is it's an infinite capacity for taking pains. And if ever that were true, that's Jefferson. Now, this woman you mentioned in France was not his first love. You mentioned his wife, Martha, right? I think he had a Martha too, in addition to the most famous Martha, Washington. So he fell in love with Martha.

She died at a young age. And I always joke with my husband, Doug, I'll say, honey, God forbid anything should happen to me. And after a suitable time, you meet a nice young woman and you fall in love and you want to get remarried. you must never do it. Never. I will haunt you from the grave. Never. I will haunt you. This woman actually kind of said that, and that was the deal that was struck before she died. That's the family tradition, that as Martha was dying at the age of 33 from complications of birthing her sixth child, she was almost continuously pregnant. No birth control in those days. She is said to have brought the family in and Jefferson by her side at her death

bed. And she said, I want you never to remarry. I want you to pledge not to because she had been, in her mind, the victim of a stepmother. And so that's the family story. Whether it's 100% true, we can't know, but probably it's true. Jefferson never did remarry, as you know, although he found other ways of fulfilling his sexual and romantic life. We know that now. The French gal was just one example. We'll get to the others. Yeah. So you remind me when you talk about your husband, Doug. Theodore Roosevelt's first wife died. She was just 23 of Bright's disease.

And he was a Victorian, so he was never going to remarry. Well, he did. He married his childhood sweetheart, Edith. And thank goodness he did, because it really was the making of his greatness, I think. But he said to his sister, Bami, when she found out that he was engaged, he said, you have to hope there's no heaven. Because if in heaven we meet all those that we loved in life, this is going to be awkward. That's amazing.

Unless it turns out that we're just these recognizable souls who know and love each other without that identity on us. I know, like I love the theory that you travel through this world with the same sort of set of souls who are important to you and they may come back in different forms. It could be your wife in the next life. It could be your child in this one. You know, I, I don't know who the heck knows, but it's fun to think about sort of, and then it's kind of depressing. Um, okay. So he's heartbroken. He goes over to France. He finds a woman, uh, with whom to spend some time. She's married. She's French. It's not going to work out. But a soothing bomb, nonetheless. He moves back to America and bam, things start happening for him on a great and next level. Sometimes when you, you know, you mentioned the Nader when he was governor of Virginia. Boy, oh boy, who knew? Like if he could have just been shown the crystal ball then of how life would work out and how revered he would become, that he would be the president of the United States. Little did he know. So he runs for president, doesn't make it the first time, becomes vice president. And then he runs after Adams. And that that run was ugly.

That was really ugly. Tell us about it. Well, first of all, the 1790s were a depressing crisis decade in America because the revolution was over. The new constitution was in place, largely the work of James Madison and secondarily Alexander Hamilton. Now the question was, Megan, we have our independence. How shall we interpret it? Who are we? How much government do we need? What's the relationship between state government and the national government? Should the president have powers beyond strictly enumerated powers in Article II of the Constitution, etc.? All these questions. Really, it amounts to what is the meaning of the American Revolution. And on the Hamilton side, and he was enormously powerful and much more active than Jefferson ever was. Jefferson always had to play the languid aristocrat and it was above all this. Hamilton would get right down in the mud and Hamilton wanted a high tone central government. And he thought that war and militarism were glorious things. And he wanted a national bank, and he wanted to give special incentives to infant industries and to have a mixed economy. And on the other hand, here's Jefferson, who wants an agrarian culture, you know, those who labor in the earth of the chosen people of God.

And he wants a limited government and state government to be more powerful than the national and to be a nation uniquely dedicated to peace and so on. And so they're at each other's throats in the cabinet of George Washington. And Jefferson finally leaves because he can't stand the sheer political intensity of it. You know, he's a harmony obsessive, which is a problem in a political figure. So anyway, he stands against Adams, loses, becomes his vice president, stands a little bit more willingly in 1800 and wins. But the election was contested because under the rules of the electoral college at the time, the person with the most number of votes becomes president and the person with the

second most number of votes becomes vice president. It doesn't have anything to do with parties. And so when Jefferson stood for the presidency in 1800, he got 73 electoral votes. He defeated John Adams. But his vice president, Aaron Burr, also got 73 electoral votes. And the Constitution doesn't know how to understand this. All it saw was a tie. You know, everyone knew Jefferson was president and Burr was vice president, but the Constitution didn't know how to understand this. All it saw was a tie. You know, everyone knew Jefferson was president and Burr was vice president, but the Constitution didn't know that. And so, as you know, that puts it into the House of Representatives. The House of Representatives votes by state, one vote per state, not by individuals. And this was the outgoing federalist House of

Representatives filled with people who either loathed Jefferson or worried that he was too radical. And so they tried to make an accommodation with Burr to put him in the presidential chair and oust Jefferson, which they were within their constitutional rights to do, by the way. The House has enormous power in such situations, and we may see it again. But this got so intense, it took 36 ballots in the House of Representatives before the Federalists finally gave up and let Jefferson be installed. And during that time, there was talk of civil war, and Jefferson's protege, James Monroe, down in Virginia, the governor, actually began contingency planning for a militia that would invade the District of Columbia to take the government back for Jefferson if necessary. And Federalists were doing something similar.

On the other side, Jefferson predicted that the country might collapse if he were not installed as president. And so when we think that we live in a crazy time, think of January 6th or think of the election of 2020. This blows doors on that. This blows doors on January 6th. This is actual potential insurrection being planned. There's some story about Jefferson paying off the media to do hit pieces on fur. Like, I think about it from my business because, you business because the media gets used today in very different ways that are objectionable. Not a new thing. Well, Megan, I'm going to quibble with you just slightly. You're basically right. Jefferson paid an unscrupulous journalist,

if you can call him that, named James Callender, to write negative things about the Adams administration. Callender went way too far and got very personal and ugly, and it actually spoiled Jefferson's relationship with Abigail Adams and nearly destroyed his relationship with John Adams, and Jefferson was guilty. He was paying this guy. And then when it was found out, this is the less admirable side of Jefferson. When this became clear, he said, oh no, I was just giving him grocery money. I no more suspected he would write ugly things about Adams than the man in the moon. No, I mean, he was a poor man. I wanted to encourage him. I'm not responsible for the stuff he wrote. And everyone who knew Jefferson lost respect for him over this. It's one thing to do this. It's another thing to fake it and to pretend otherwise. And Jefferson

had a habit when he was caught in a compromising political situation of lying instead of just saying, you know what? It's hardball, folks. Sometimes you just have to do this stuff. And so Adams got over it. His son, John Quincy, never did. And Abigail was nip and tuck for about 15 years. Not like GW. He would have told the truth. Well, so we're told, right? Right. Maybe he just has better biographers from the start who never let the narrative get out of control. But to me, it's heartening hard to know. The narrative is all important. But it's heartening to know in a way that dirty tricks, dirty politics,

dirty media have been around since the founding and that perhaps we're not the most disgusting journalists who ever lived. Perhaps there were even more disgusting. Hate to think you're at the lowest of the low. I'll tell you one thing they had that we don't, and I don't want to go into this because I'm sure you're sick to death of it, but the vulgarity of our time, the personal innuendo and the name calling and the deliberate undermining of people's basic integrity and professionalism is new. And it's out of control.

And I do think that it's a clear and present danger to the future of the republic. And that, yes, we've had some rollicking elections, and the election of 1800 was certainly one of them, and there was name-calling and so on. I think Callender called John Adams a hermaphrodite and i don't even think he knew what he was saying but but we are now in a period recently of intense guttering and jefferson would he would walk away i mean jefferson would walk away from that sort of thing because he could he couldn't take it. And I don't know how anyone takes it, frankly.

You're speaking at the political level, but it's also true at a cultural level. You know, I've been railing about this. I make fun of myself a little because I'm starting to sound like that old lady who's like, young lady, put some clothes on. But it's also true that just turning on the television today, the normal television, exposes you and your family to risks that it didn't used to. You know, like the Super Bowl where you're going to see something very raunchy and inappropriate with your six-year-old unexpectedly. It's just our culture. You look around now and the, you know, just gratuitous nudity and vulgarity, it seems to be everywhere. In a way, I'm sure those guys could

never have imagined. Absolutely. I mean, I don't want to sound like that old guy either, but the fact is that if you turn on your television and surf around for a couple of hours, you feel like you need to go take a shower. The language, the sexual innuendo, the sexualization of young women in this culture, the talk of the violence, you know, the sheer amount of violence you can see on any evening of television in the United States. These things can't be good. I mean, a culture mirrors itself in its cultural constructs, its literature, its music, its poetry, its dance, in our case, television and film. And we're mirroring something that is degrading to the human spirit. And I've just been in Europe for the past few weeks.

It happens there, too, of course, but it's not like it. It's not like it there. It's more high-minded. The soundbite is longer. The respect is higher. There's talk of literature. There's talk of philosophy. There's talk of political theory. Even Boris Johnson,

for all that's wrong with him, you know, he can quote Shakespeare, scads of it. He can quote Homer in the original ancient Greek. We need to really address this. And it's He can quote Homer in the original ancient Greek. We need to really address this. And it's not the culture war that we keep talking about.

That's important too. But it's the whole culture that's descending into this swamp. And, you know, I'm a liberal, so I'm not allowed to talk about it, but we have to talk about it. We can't have an anything goes civilization and really expect to lift ourselves into the discipline that it takes to be a self-governing Republican people. Do you feel like, as an aside here, do you feel like that downward spiral is reversible? Because I don't remember any time over our history where we've gone down and then we've gone back up. We've tightened our standards. We've gotten down and then we've gone back up. You know, we've tightened our standards. We've gotten a little bit more elegant and sophisticated and kind and better read. I just feel like it's been a slow downward spiral culturally to the point now where people are

spending their day on their phone looking at triple X porn. You know, it's like how much lower can you go and but it does i do ask myself all the time is this rock bottom perhaps we're hitting the bottom and we can now go on an upward trajectory where we start reading more and we start rejecting these base instincts i what do you think maybe i think i think it's possible for our culture to reverse itself. We have renaissances and we have reformations and we have the enlightenment, but I don't see it coming, Megan. And I think we're not quite at the bottom yet, but here's the problem. Even if we got a little more civil, you know, Jefferson, if he stands for anything, stands for civility, that he would say, I disagree with what you say, but I defend to the death your right to

say it. Or he would say to you, if you and I disagree, madam, I disagree with you, but let us disagree as rational friends. Let's not take this personally. It's important that we have different points of view in a free society. It's a free marketplace of ideas and so on. So yes, we might get a little more civil. I think we're going to pull back from this brink. And I do think, I don't want to talk about Donald Trump, but I do think he was sui generis. He was a unique figure. And so that's going to be he's distorted the lens a little bit. But I think we're going to pull back thinking about him.

Of course, we're both thinking about him right now. I mean, it's like when we were talking, I was definitely thinking about him because, yes, some of his principles are Jeffersonian. He definitely wanted smaller government. He rolled back regulations. He's more isolationist than we've seen from the Republican Party or lately from the Democratic Party. But everything you said about civility, no, hard stop. Agreed. So let's say we can pull back from that brink, and I think we can a little bit. That doesn't bring Paradise Lost back. In other words, things that drop out of the system because we no longer have the critical capacity to read hard literature. We no longer have the desire to read literature.

We've dismissed a lot of it as somehow dead white males or whatever, or it's triggered some response or other. And I'm for trigger warnings, and I'm for sensitivity and expanding the canon within reason. But when you drop a great book, let's say you drop Dante's Inferno out of the curriculum, it doesn't come back 40 years from now. It never comes back because how would it under what circumstances would Chaucer be rediscovered after he fell out of the curriculum for two generations? And so we're in danger. I don't want to go too far with this because cultures are very vibrant and America is the most vibrant culture on earth, I think. But I think we are in danger of jettisoning some of the greatest works of art and literature for knuckleheaded reasons.

And that this really is a sign of a national decline. It's depressing, but it sounds right. I'm just trying to think, you know, there is no modern day politician who can compare to Jefferson, but thinking about, you know, someone who is from a farming family, loves gardening, loves the arts, though, you know, has both sort of that Midwestern sensibility, but that sophisticated appeal when it comes to the arts and culture and so on, and yet wants the government out of your business, not in your business, and yet respect for the other side. No figure is coming to mind.

I like Rand Paul's a libertarian. He wants the government out of your business. He's from Kentucky. He's got some of these things, but I don't know. It's tough to look in modern day America for any figure like this. And that's one of the reasons why we miss some of our founders and what they stood for. Let's go back to his, so he gets elected. He gets he gets in the White House. And by this point, refresh my memory, because I know the Capitol used to be New York. Then at some point it gets moved to Washington when he was president. Was it already in Washington? It was. Yes. So the District of Columbia came into its own in eighteen hundred. So the Adams,

John and Abigail, lived in what we call the White House for a few months, was completely unfinished. And the famous talk about hanging her laundry in the East Room and they still hadn't plastered all the walls and there were no steps into it. And it was mud, no landscaping. Jefferson becomes the first president inaugurated in Washington, and he does a lot of improvements to the White House, as you would expect. You know, every time he moved into any building for any length of time, he remodeled it, even rental properties in France. And he spent fortunes to remodel places he was going to only spend three or four months in. This is why, of course, he died helplessly in debt. But he improved the White House. And he's the first president, really, to make the case for Washington. You know, Albert Gallatin, the Secretary of the Treasury said, he said, every member of Congress and the cabinet detests Washington without a

single exception, because it was just mud and pigs and swamps and the miasma of a summer in Washington, D.C. Jefferson saw it as this beautiful new symbol of a new nation dedicated to new principles. And of course, he was right, but it was a rough time. So Jefferson is the president in Washington. He has a staff, Megan, of one. His only staff member at the beginning was Meriwether Lewis, who went on to be the captain of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Think of that. He lived in the White House. There were enslaved people serving, cleaning the bathrooms, baking bricks, cutting timbers, bringing firewood, cooking, et cetera. We have to face that. That's part of the story too.

But his only public servant, his only official servant during this period was a private secretary, and the first of those was Meriwether Lewis. And Jefferson wrote back to his daughter, Martha, who was back in Charlottesville and said, Mr. Lewis and I live like two mice in a church in this great house. Wow. So what was Meriwether? I love the name Meriwether.

What do they call him? Weather? Meri. So what are they doing? I mean, what's Meriwether Lewis doing for Thomas Jefferson before he decided to go exploring? He's an aide-de-camp, you know, so Jefferson sends a message to Congress, Lewis takes it. Jefferson's daughters came to visit, Lewis met them on the outskirts of Washington, helped them to do the shopping that they would need. Lewis, you know, handled tasks for Jefferson,

but he was meant to be Jefferson's secretary, but Jefferson wrote all of his own correspondence. You know, he prided himself on this. This will blow your mind. They only had four cabinet ministers then, a very small government, but Jefferson insisted on seeing every document from every cabinet office before it went out. Nothing could ever leave the executive branch of the government until Jefferson had had a chance to review it. He was administratively maybe one of the greatest administrative people in the history of the country. He had an enormous capacity for this sort of thing. Get up, spend seven hours at his writing desk, absorb masses of information, write three personal letters, seven public letters, review a treaty, maneuver. He had capacities that probably no other president had. The downside

of Jefferson is that he's a little bit aloof and he wants America to be sort of a second or third rank country. He wants us to be a farmer's paradise. And Hamilton's like, no, we're going to be the powerhouse of the world if we only let ourselves. But Jefferson probably was the best administrator of any president I've ever known. It's making me think of all those debates we had when Obamacare was being debated and they weren't reading it. And I remember the stack of papers was up to here. Nobody was reading it. If he could see that, he'd be horrified. So what did he do once he once he took over as president? You mentioned the Louisiana purchase. Let's go through that and the other sort of big ticket items that he's responsible for.

So above all, he balanced the budget. Jefferson believed that a national debt is a national disgrace, that it's a way of taxing our children and grandchildren without their consent. He wanted a constitutional prohibition on a national debt except in emergency situations. And he wrote a famous letter to Madison from France in which he said a national debt that goes beyond the generation that undertook it should be declared null and void under natural law. That was his famous earth belongs to the living letter. So he was a fiscal hawk and he really hamstrung his administration by devoting 73% of annual revenues to debt retirement. So think of that. 73% of the 10 million per year that came into the federal coffers, Jefferson devoted through Gallatin to debt retirement and he retired 37% of the national debt, Hamilton's gift to America, during his two terms, and Madison then went farther down that path. So that's number one. Number two, he's trying to get access to the Mississippi River and to New Orleans because everything west of the Appalachians found its

way to market down the Ohio and the Tennessee rivers into the Mississippi, into New Orleans, and so on. And so whoever controlled New Orleans controlled the economic destiny of the country, and the Westerners are very restive and demanding that he do something to keep the Mississippi River open. And so he sends James Monroe to join Robert Livingston in Paris to try to open the Mississippi, and they're prepared to spend $6 million to buy the village of New Orleans. And Napoleon, in the most extraordinary counteroffer in human history, instead of selling Jefferson a town for $6 million, And Jefferson bought, without really wanting to, 828,000 square miles and 575 million acres at three cents per acre. So it's like one of the greatest accidents in human history, but Jefferson had the good sense to accept a bargain of that sort when he saw one. And we've

carved 11 states out of the Louisiana territory. I live in one in North Dakota. I mean, this was the greatest land sale in human history. And Jefferson was smart enough to do it, although he did believe that it was technically unconstitutional. What? Why? Because the Constitution doesn't grant the federal government the power to buy land. And so he's a very strict constructionist. He's very, you know, you do what's in the Constitution and nothing more. And so he looked at it and said, no, I think this is illegal.

And so he actually, in the summer of 1803, when this was all happening, wrote two amendments to the Constitution, the proper mechanism, one to authorize the purchase and the other to authorize the incorporation of the new territory by way of new states. And Madison, who was way, you know, like shrewder than Jefferson, his Secretary of State said, are you nuts? Just do it. You will be committing the greatest crime against the future if you turn this thing down on a constitutional scruple. This doesn't happen in the world. And he said, the people will forgive you, which they did, of course. And he said, the president has to have some implicit power to do great things for the country. Come on.

And so Jefferson had that shield of Madison's greater sense, and he made the purchase and we are the i mean how many times have we paid for this thing 15.6 million dollars 15 trillion 1500 trillion why did napoleon do such a bad deal he was was he desperate for money at the time he was about to re you know there'd been a peace um in in 1802 so europe was sort of in an interlude between the Napoleonic moments. And Napoleon realized he was about to go back to war with Great Britain. He knew he had no navy, so the minute the war happened, Britain would occupy New Orleans and he would lose all that anyway. So he thought, I'll sell it to the Yanks and get some money and they can either keep it or lose it. It won't bother me because I won't be able to keep it no matter what. And so he got the money he needed to prosecute his wars. He got out from, his Vietnam, if you

want to call it that, had been in Haiti. He sent troops to put down the Black Rebellion in Haiti and they got yellow fever and malaria and they were decimated. And so he got bogged down there. If he hadn't been bogged down Napoleon in Haiti, he might have occupied New Orleans and reasserted the Louisiana territory for France. But it was just too much of a nightmare. And he wanted to wage war against Austria and Britain. And he needed ready cash. And Jefferson had it. Wow.

That's a great story. Yeah, it's very cool. And others were looking at this territory in the United States from Europe, the way, I don't know, a big NFL linebacker looks at a steak. They were interested. And then too late, it was ours. It was part of America. Now, there was something else that Jefferson did that I think is interesting, and it won't surprise the audience now having heard you. He took steps to make sure we were not looking like, becoming, acting like anything close to a monarchy. Went too far, maybe, Megan.

So he, I mean, this was his style. And maybe it was slightly a posture, but it was his style. So he greeted visitors in the White House in slippers. He wore old clothes, sometimes that were too small for his. He had long, long limbs. He was six foot, two and a half inches tall. He opened the doors to the White House himself. He didn't have valets or servants doing that.

When Anthony Mary, this very pompous British minister, and his wife, Mrs. Mary, came to dine. Jefferson kept them waiting. And then when the dinner bell rang, the Marys thought as the senior diplomats in Washington that they would have pride of place. But everyone just went and found places at these tables. And Mr. Mary was jostled around. And Jefferson took Dolly Madison's arm as his dinner date since he was a widower. And the Marys were like, they just came apart over this. And so at the end of the dinner, where they'd really been snubbed, I mean, they were right. They came up to Jefferson and said, we demand to know what is the protocol of this White House. And Jefferson said, well, my madam, it is

pell-mell. And this almost created an international incident. Anthony Murray tried to make it one. The British government said, oh, you know, these yanks. But it was Jefferson's attempt to remind all of us that we were a republic with a small r. We not aristocracy we're not monarchy there will be no kings adams had carried a ceremonial sword around you know he never he couldn't cut a watermelon with a sword he got he tripped over it and adams wanted titles of nobility for the president and other national officers and so the wits of congress began to call him his rotundity because he was pompous and fat. So Jefferson was trying to tone this thing down. And that's why he didn't give his State of the Union message in person.

He said, that's what kings do. King Charles III will open the next session of parliament by giving a great monarchical speech. We don't do that here. And so he tried to set the tone for this much more casual, informal style. I really credit him with this. You know, politics is theater, as we well know from recent events. And Jefferson used political theater to say, this is a republic, and I'm not a king. I'm maybe the first among equals here. You've called me as if on jury duty to be your president, but I'm not going to change the way I operate. I'm a farmer from Virginia, and I'm a scientist. And so- That sounds wonderful.

This tone is really fun, but if you ever want to just laugh yourself silly, just read the account of Anthony Mary when he wrote back to the court of St. James how appalled he was by this Bulgarian. And Jefferson, of course, was the last person in the world to be called a Bulgarian. Oh, I will. 100%. How do I spell Mary when I look it up? I mean, R-R-Y. He was everything but.

Okay. I will. So the other thing is he didn't want any national celebration of his birthday or the president's birthday. He didn't want the president's face to go on the money, which he ultimately lost. I mean, we do have our president's faces over time, not the current president, on our money. And even Jefferson, I had to look this up, is on the nickel, but he's also on the $2 bill. He might like that because it's so poorly circulated. But he didn't like that because that's also something we do in aristocracy, like the Queen of England or now the King of England goes all over the money and so on.

You could be more right. You nailed it. So first of all, he didn't like paper money because paper is paper. And so it only has the value that's ascribed to it. So first of all, he didn't like paper money because paper is paper. And so it only has the value that's ascribed to it. And so he wanted our money, he was a little primitive economically, but he wanted our money to be stamped on precious metals because if you have a piece of gold, you can spend that in Poland or South Africa. But a dollar bill is worthless outside of the strength of the economy of the United States. And he certainly didn't want faces on our currency.

You know, he wanted the buffalo and the elk and the moose. You know, he loved the moose. And so he wanted Niagara Falls and the Natural Bridge in Virginia. Oh, I like that. I agree with him. Yeah. We would be a lot better, you know, especially now with the cancel culture mania. Who will escape whipping, Megan?

So if we have a moose on our currency, there's no controversy around a moose or an antelope or a buffalo. I never thought about that. Are the cancel warriors trying to get rid of the nickel? If you're going to cancel, we've got to cancel. If they're consistent. I collect $2 bills because they're actually pointless. But they're fun. i remember watching when i was

a little kid an episode of bewitched and uh they there was some episode in which samantha the witch had brought back george washington and um abe lincoln and george washington wanted to know why lincoln was on a bill that was worth a lot more than the bill George Washington was on. And Abe Lincoln was trying to convince him that the one was far better because it was so ubiquitous. You should feel good. Jefferson was not part of the debate. Bewitched again. All right. So small government, Louisiana Purchase, that wasn't exactly, well, I mean, it wasn't large government. It was just doubling the size of the country, which was a smart strategic move.

So after two terms, he says, I'm not running again. I'm getting on that horse. I'm going back to Virginia in my beautiful house, Monticello, and I'm going to live the life of a farmer. So he did. And that's where his story takes a turn in historical circles, because was it then that he had his relationship or was it before that? Was it all this time that that he was involved with Sally Hemings. I believe that he was, and the circumstantial evidence is huge, but it probably would not hold up in a court of law. The DNA has shown that at least one of Sally Hemings' children

was the progeny of a male Jefferson. Not necessarily this Jefferson. It could have been his uncle or his brother, but let's face it, we're pretty sure that this was Jefferson. So when did this start? Jefferson went to France in 1784, and he took with him two people, his daughter, Martha, and an enslaved man named James Hemmings, same family. While they were in Paris, Jefferson sent James to culinary school. He wanted him to learn French cuisine, typically Jefferson. Paid for this, paid for clothing and tuition and so on. And James quickly learned French,

and he did become a master chef. More on that in a moment. So meanwhile, Jefferson has two daughters back in Virginia staying with their aunt and uncle, and one of them dies of teething and whooping cough. So Jefferson gets very concerned, as you might expect, and says, I want Maria, Mary, to be sent over to join us here. I insist. And so she was sent over. He wanted an elderly black woman to be the chaperone, someone who had had smallpox. And for reasons that have never been explained, his kin sent his nine-year-old daughter with 14-year-old Sally Hemings, sister of James Hemings. So here's a 14-year-old chaperone leading a nine-year-old Virginia girl across the Atlantic Ocean to catch up with her father. They started, they got first to England

and Abigail and John Adams met them there. And when Abigail saw Sally Hemings, she thought, uh-oh, this can't be good. And maybe she just meant she's too young, but she was alarmed. So Sally Hemings, at the age of 14, comes to live with Jefferson near the Champs-Élysées in Paris. And it's thought that the relationship began there. And under some account, she was pregnant when she came back. But here's what's so interesting about this, more interesting than the salaciousness of the story, Megan. James Hemmings and Sally Hemmings at some point in France discovered that they were free, that France outlawed slavery. And under French law, if they claimed it, they would be protected because Jefferson could not own them in France. And they came to Jefferson and

confronted him and said, I'm sure you're aware of this. Why should we go back to Virginia with you? We're free. Why would we go back to be enslaved at Monticello? And according to Sally Hemings' son, who gave a report in Ohio around 1873, Jefferson said, look, here's the deal. If you come back with me, James, and teach somebody else French cuisine at Monticello, I'll free you, and I'll give you some startup money, and you can go north to wherever you might wish to go. And he did. He said to Sally Hemings, according to her son, if you come back, any children that you have, and I don't think he was presuming that they would be his, but if you come back, any children that you have, I will free when they're 21 years old.

And he did. So this bargain, odd though it might seem to us, occurred in Paris when James and Sally Hammonds confronted the third president, the future third president of the United States, and said, you don't own us anymore. And so I don't, you know, the story could have played out in a number of ways. They could have stayed in France. It's so hard to imagine that somebody being told you're free wouldn't say i'm going to stay free i'm not going back to the united states and my kids are going to be free from the moment of birth and not enslaved zero to 21 and then free thanks to you it's just such a different time and so hard to understand though we we must try he um so once again he this is post his wife's death and he's made this promise not to remarry and he has this French lover. But Sally comes over.

So, yeah. So she was Sally at the White House when he became president. Did she go to the White House? No, probably not. Not certainly. So she's back at Monticello. Jefferson makes frequent trips back to Monticello. He said he would never spend August and September in Washington. Who would? Which rational person

would? Which, before air conditioning, I can well understand. It's not like Virginia is so cool. Not great, but he's at least in the mountains in Virginia. So he went back. And so historians are unclear. And the great historian on this is Annette Gordon-Reed, who has a fabulous and important book called The Hemings Family of Monticello. But she may have been in Washington for short amounts of time, but probably not. But here's the thing. Dumas Malone, the great Jefferson biographer who's been dead now for a quarter of a century. But he was sure that the Sally Hemings story was fake news, let's say.

And he decided to prove it. So he studied Jefferson's comings and goings, and what he proved, and he published it in an appendix in one of his volumes, is that Jefferson was at Monticello nine months before each of Sally Hemings' children were born, and he wasn't at Monticello, and then she didn't get pregnant. And so his attempt to exonerate Jefferson actually locked it in to a certain degree. Yeah, in a different way. But at least he had the integrity to publish his findings. And so here's the thing to think about. So they were together for 34 years, Jefferson and Sally Hemings. That's not a very simple relationship, as I'm sure you

can appreciate. Way more complex than we probably can understand. She had access, almost sole access, to his private suite of rooms. There was a hidden door. She could come and go without being much noticed. But Jefferson's daughter, Martha, lived in Monticello for most of his years, most of his retirement, certainly. She had to know that this was going on. But here's what's so interesting. They never talked about it. It was this sort of taboo subject never to be addressed. She knew. He knew that she knew. She knew that he knew that she knew. Sally Hemings is around, and never did they have a confrontation so far as we know. And after Jefferson's death, his daughter Martha brought in her children when

she was dying and showed them some document to prove that Jefferson could not have been the father of Sally Hemings' children. So a family narrative, let's call it, I almost said cover-up, emerged early, and they fingered his nephews, Samuel and Peter Carr, as the likely impregnators of Sally Hemings, they've been exonerated by DNA. And so far as we know, the DNA points to Jefferson. So just think about that for a moment, Megan, that this whopping secret of a cross-racial relationship that can't be simple opportunism, it's something more than that, surely. It's going on for decades in a house where there are really not many places to hide. And Jefferson, because of the sheer force of his sense of himself, makes everyone around him not talk about it.

What was the, I mean, I understand slavery was lawful back then, but what would the culture have been around that kind of a thing? You know, would it have shamed a slave owner like Jefferson for doing this kind of thing was not universal, but very nearly so. And by the way, when the story broke in 1802, it broke during Jefferson's first term. So imagine this humiliation, this extremely private man. This had to be one of the hardest periods of his entire life. And it broke, and it was debated in different state capitals and so on. But John Adams, as usual, was shrewd and wise. He said, I don't know that this is necessarily true of Jefferson. It sounds a little out of character, but he said, I'll tell you this, it follows from slavery. If you own another human being, you can buy and sell that

person. You can whip that person. Under certain circumstances, you can kill that person with impunity. You could divide families. You can do whatever you want, basically, without any intrusion by outside forces. Why would we ever think there's a line in the sand that's sexual privacy that's not going to be crossed by people who own and whip other human beings. And of course, he nailed it as always. I mean, that's exactly right. So let's say Jefferson didn't do it. Let's just assume that the DNA comes out and he's exonerated and was his uncle. The story is still true, right? Because it's universal and slavery invites every form of abuse. So there's no answer to this.

It used to be that people tried to protect Jefferson, say it couldn't have happened and so on and so forth. I have one law of life. All bets are off below the waist. There's nobody that you can know about their most intimate life for sure ever. Yeah, it's a good law. And you spoke about what what he said on his deathbed to his daughter or what Martha, his daughter, said. She said, right. Sally had a different story to her children on her deathbed,

as I understand it. Well, so her sons went to Ohio. So Sally was three-quarters white, and her children there would have been seven-eighths white, and several of them were white enough in appearance to pass as that was the word used then and jefferson allowed several of them just to sort of walk away and be absorbed into the larger world but several of them who were freed chose to live their lives as african-americans but at any rate sally hemmings late in her life

and after jeff Jefferson's death, she was allowed to walk away and live privately in a small house in Charlottesville. She was never freed, but she was allowed to walk away. Late in her life, she seems to have told her sons her truth, and that truth was what I told you about the confrontation in Paris and the fact that all of her children had indeed been freed and that Jefferson was the father. He didn't pay particular attention to these children, didn't claim them as his own. So this is a very fascinating, troubling, hard-to-understand thing.

As you said earlier, we can't get our brains around this sort of thing today. Things have changed so dramatically. How could something so heroic be so horrific at the same time? And it's just, you have to understand it through the eye of the cultural times. I mean, we can't even understand slavery. It's like, how can you understand slavery at all? It's not like nobody recognized how all it was a it's not like nobody recognized how horrible it was you know the country was extremely divided over it and what would wind up fighting a civil war in part over it um but there were lots of people who were engaged in it who had been born doing it hit like jefferson's family and who i don't know

i can't say that he didn't think there was anything wrong with it because i know weirdly at weirdly, at the same time he was exploiting it, he was also occasionally trying to end it. It seemed like he kind of knew it was wrong, but he wasn't ready to let go. I don't know if you can liken it to some sort of an addiction. It was like he recognized it was wrong, I think, but he just wouldn't stop doing it. Well, let me try to just give the tiniest answer to this because we could spend days talking about this now without probably clarifying it much, but a couple of things. First of all, what will they say of us? 200 years from now, what will they say of us? It's not going to be pretty. If I knew where my coat was made and my shirt, I'd probably have a hard time sleeping

tonight because they weren't made in Ohio, I can tell you that. And the conditions under which they're made. Or how they tested your shampoo. Exactly. So, you know, we're complicit in ways that we would rather not address. And we also, when the epitaph of America comes out, they're going to say they burned oil? I mean, this miracle carbon, they used it as a fuel? Are they nuts? So what will they, A, what will they say of us?

And you know what Hamlet says. He says, treat every man according to his desserts, and who shall escape whipping? I'm for that. Number two, it was a different era, but most of Jefferson's closest friends were abolitionists. Thomas Paine, the philosopher Condorcet in France, Lafayette came back and confronted Jefferson about this, Richard Price, Joseph Priestley. It's not as if Jefferson was surrounded by people who were complacent about slavery. The people that he loved and respected were Enlightenment figures who all understood that slavery was a terrible thing. And let me just say this much more, Megan. If Jefferson had been born in Philadelphia

or New York or Boston in a family that owned no slaves, nobody would have been a greater antagonist to slavery than Thomas Jefferson. So there's the tragedy of it. In other words, he meant it when he said all men are created equal. Jefferson's instincts are all for human liberty. He was tragically born into Virginia, and to a certain degree, he was not going to get out from under this. He could have done more than he did. There's no question about that. And he became somewhat complacent later in life. But the tragedy is that he was plopped down into the world where this was routine. And amongst the slave-owning class, he was one of the more enlightened ones. It got way more vicious of the other end. I'm not trying to defend him in any way.

I'm merely saying that Jefferson, had he been born in London or Philadelphia, would have been the greatest spokesman for abolition that existed in that era. Didn't he have something, I'm trying to rack my memory, didn't he have something in the original draft of the Declaration, perhaps, speaking to this, and he took it out because he knew that there wouldn't be support for it amongst the southern states? He didn't take it out. It was taken out. The longest paragraph, and he has this

huge indictment of george the third you know quartering troops in our houses and taking us across the atlantic for star chamber trials and you know and trying to whip up native american reprisals in the west the longest single paragraph in that indictment of of george the third says that he has waged war against human nature itself by perpetuating the slave trade. Jefferson says, we've tried from time to time to do something to restrict the slave trade. And every time we do, the British crown or the British council or the parliament vetoes it. So he's blaming, this is a little disingenuous, but he's blaming the British for the problem of slavery that had somehow been kind of imposed on us by outsiders, which is not true, but there's an element of truth in it.

And that paragraph was removed at the insistence of the Carolinas and Georgia because we needed unanimity. Then the Constitutional Convention occurs in 1787. Jefferson wasn't there. They kicked the problem of slavery down the road with the three-fifths clause and the fugitive slave clause and so on. We have kicked it down the road and we thought it was over in 1865. But as you so well know, its after effects, its implications, its ramifications are not over yet. And I think one of the things we're going to have to do as a people is we are going to have to do as a people is we are going to have to wrestle this thing to the ground. You know, Lincoln said we can't go on until we free the slaves. Fair enough. Johnson, Lyndon Johnson said we can't go on until everyone has equal

voting rights and so on, rights to transportation, to housing. We still have so much work left to do and it's going to take all of us and we're going to have to face up to this. And I know that's where a lot of the cultural wars wind up, but we are going to have to wrestle this thing to the ground in a way that produces a new national narrative and does substantial justice to this lingering poison in our national consciousness. It's so hard because it's been so politicized and, you know, it's become partisan.

It's no longer, oh, this is a stain on the nation with which we all must deal. It's more like you're in your camp. It's become a political football and you resort to your political corners. So I don't feel particularly hopeful about that particular, quote, courageous conversation. I hope I'm wrong. Let's move to the second chapter of his relationship with John Adams. They were frenemies, as you pointed out, but there was a new horizon. The rainbow came out. Well, I shouldn't say the rainbow. I don't mean to suggest anything romantic that has a different meaning in today's day and age. But they did find each other via correspondence and form a truly close lifelong connection. You're absolutely right. And this is almost the best of all Jefferson stories. So they were friends. Then they were enemies around 1799 through 1804, let's say.

Then they were frenemies, but they agreed. Jefferson wins the election of 1800. He goes to see John Adams. They have a kind of an intense moment. Adams slams his fist down and says, you have put me out, Mr. Jefferson. You have put me out. And they never see each other again, ever. You know, it's an age of very

weak transportation infrastructure, among other things. Adams goes back up to Quincy, Massachusetts, near Boston. Jefferson retires to Monticello. It looks like they're never going to communicate again. And neither one of them is willing to take that risk because so much has happened and maybe just let it go. But Benjamin Rush, the famous Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, signer of the Declaration of Independence, the medical advisor to Lewis and Clark and father of dream psychology in the United States, the hero of the yellow fever crisis in Philadelphia in 1793, he decides he's going to reconcile them. So he writes to each one

of them saying, you know, you should do this, and they keep resisting. And finally, he writes to each one, Jefferson's now retired, saying that the other one is eager for reconciliation. So with this ruse, he gets John Adams to write a letter. John Adams, on the first day of January 1812, writes this very, very, very tight and little careful letter to Jefferson, sending him a book that his son had written. And Jefferson then responds with a very careful and wary response. And Adams warms up a little, and Jefferson warms up a little. And then suddenly, the sluice gates of their ancient love and affection open, and they exchange 144 letters during the last 14 years of their lives, and they are magnificent letters. I urge you and everybody who hears this

to get a copy. They exist in a number of forms, and read the correspondence because it's thrilling. They talk about religion. They talk about Native Americans. They talk about the meaning of the American Revolution. They talk about Napoleon and the life of Jesus. They talk about the origins of Native American languages. They talk about their favorite Greek and Latin classics. And they dispute a few things. Adams still wants to pick a few fights. But in his fifth or sixth letter, Adams writes to Jefferson and says, one of the great things ever written in a letter, he says, my friend, we must not die until we have explained ourselves to each other. And they did. And they died simultaneously, as you know, on the 4th of July, 1826. But the reconciliation is an amazing thing. And I have to say two things about it in closing. One is that

Adams did the heavy lifting. Jefferson is like Muhammad Ali and Zaire, bobbing and weaving and avoiding conflict. Adams was the heavy lifter in this correspondence, and he wrote three or so letters to everyone that Jefferson wrote. And secondly, Adams loved Jefferson. So your rainbow metaphor is not so far away. He actually loved Jefferson. Jefferson esteemed John Adams, but Adams had a huge capacity for love, and he was willing to overcome the deep bitterness he felt that he was right about the way Jefferson had

treated him in those difficult years. And so it ends beautifully, and that correspondence is, every time I'm depressed about this country, I read the Jefferson Adams correspondence and cheer up. Wow. I love all that. And I do want to read it. I've never read it. I would be amazing if there was any sort of anything close to a petty moment, like, can you believe George's hair? What's he doing? I don't know how it would go, but just to see that there were petty moments and they were all from Adams. There were petty moments and he went, Adams envied everybody. He thought Washington was overrated. He thought Jefferson was overrated. He thought everybody was overrated because no one, he didn't get enough of, you know, he didn't never got what he,

he was like the Rodney Dangerfield of the founding generation. And when Paul Giamatti played him in the miniseries, it was exactly right. So everyone was overrated except for himself. And the one thing about Adams, too, that we know is he was anything but afraid of confrontation. So I'm not surprised to learn he was more in the lead on sending the correspondence and repairing the relationship. There was nothing he was afraid to do. He was afraid to drive Jefferson away. That was the only thing he was afraid of.

And Jefferson, to his credit, took some body blows in that correspondence. And chiefly, Adam said, you know what? I was right about the French Revolution. You were wrong. I knew you were wrong. You knew you were wrong. You were stubborn. You said it was going to end happily. It didn't. I want you to admit you were wrong. And Jefferson says, okay, okay, you know, you're right on that one. You are certainly right. That's a big one. That's amazing. I do want to, is there one book that's got it all? You sort of have to piece it together through various- I've got your producer's address. I'm going to send you a copy and you have to promise to read it.

Okay, I will. I look forward to reading it. And then they died. They died not only on the same day, but they died 50 years to the day from the signing of the Declaration of Independence, which is just, I mean, you got to believe in some sort of higher power. I don't know what the higher power is for any particular individual, but whether it's a combination of God, the American spirit, the Holy Spirit, there's something going on there. You know, Jefferson probably would disagree with you, but I won't. So they died within four hours of each other. Adams was 91. Jefferson was 83. Jefferson died of prostate cancer and a urinary tract infection. He was starting to come apart. And Adams died of basically sheer old age. And Jefferson died first. He died around noon on the 4th of July. He had been hanging on for a couple of days. He wanted to reach that milestone, as people often

do. And his last words were, is it the 4th? He's coming in and out of a coma. And John Adams, then a few hours later up in Massachusetts, his wife is long since dead. He died. And his last words, Megan, were Thomas Jefferson still survives. He was wrong as always, but you can see that he couldn't let it go, that Jefferson mattered to him. And I don't think that was said with envy. I think it was like Jefferson, you know, there was a beauty in this. And then John Quincy Adams was president. He said what you said. He said, this is no coincidence. long lives given no antibiotics and no penicillin, like so many things that will get us through today? You've asked such great questions, and this is another one. So I was once asked by a fifth grader, if Jefferson came to our world, what would he want to take back with him? And so I thought about it, you know, and I said penicillin

because four of his six children died before their sixth birthday. His children would have lived today. You know, obstetrics was barbaric. Jefferson once said whenever he saw two doctors in a row, he looked up to see whether there were turkey vultures flying overhead. Medicine was bleeding and purging, and it was barbarism. And so if you're a woman, or if you're anyone, but especially if you're a woman, you want to live now of all the moments in the history of the planet. And so, yes, but Jefferson was a vegetarian more

or less, not entirely, but essentially. He said he wanted meat to serve as sauce to his vegetables and not the other way around. And one of his personal Ten Commandments is no man ever regretted having eaten too little. Adams was like a John Bull Englishman eating pork and beef and mashed potatoes and so on. He just had good genes, apparently. But here's the one thing you should remember. The death age was in the 40s at this era, Megan. But if you got through your first 15 years, you could live a full life. You're three score and 10.

It's those first 15 that were the great scythe that cut down people in that era. Wow. My God, that's so depressing. All these children dying. And yeah, we didn't even touch on the fact that, wasn't it five of his six children ultimately who would die and pre-seize him? The last one was Maria. The younger daughter died in April of 1804 while he was serving his first term, and it

shattered him, as you might expect. And he said, others may give of their abundance, but I of my want have now lost half of all that I have. My evening prospects now hang on the slender thread of a single life. And that single life was his daughter, Martha, who did survive him. Thank God. Right. She lived the rest of his life with him. So now here we are today in 2022. And in the wake of George Floyd and the push for cancellations, Thomas Jefferson has just been marred beyond belief. That name has been just absolutely marred. And that's not to undo any of the discussion we just had about slavery and his support of it and his being born into it on the wrongdoing side. And I wonder what you think of it, because now it's crossed over. I'll just give the audience a couple of examples. All right. He started the University of Virginia. That's another's another thing we didn't get to. But he he started UVA and now their student newspaper just this past August calling to remove his name from the campus. It's his university. OK, so they want his name gone. Not even right post George Floyd. I mean, that was when the fever was very hot.

July 2022, Monticello going woke, trashing Thomas Jefferson's legacy in the process. They, let's see, it's the, I'm trying to find exactly who did it. But, oh, now they're talking about how it offers a lecture on the horrors of slavery as soon as you get there that um one of the visitors or somebody who's runs another institute said the whole thing has the feel of propaganda and manipulation people on the tour now seem sad and demoralized uh placards with conversation starters on the topic of civil rights festoon a patio outside the snack shop according to the new york post is all men are created equal being lived up to in our country today one reads when will we know when it is it continues supplying a negative answer to the first question ibram x kendi tanahisi coats are in the visitors center shop only a single biography of thomas jefferson exists there and then finally uh you've got new york city hall removing the

thomas jefferson statue that just happened last november of 2021 on and on it goes two of his descendants want his dc memorial replaced i just it it's like it reminds me of the winston churchill whatever foundation they get together every year and and now it's turned into just an annual winston churchill bash fest we're we're unable to separate the misdeeds from the man. And I realize they're all part of the same thing, but in the minds of these people, they overtake and out overshadow all the good people like Jefferson or in the case of Churchill that they did. What do you make of it? There's a lot there, Megan. I'll start this way. He's going to survive this. In other words, he's not going to be erased. Some wish to do that. This won't happen. Min was quoting the Declaration of Independence. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton used it as the model for their own Declaration of Rights in Seneca Falls. So Jefferson's legacy is

secure. He himself is taking some very severe body blows. You know, there's talk of the Jefferson Memorial. There's even talk of Mount Rushmore. I think he will survive this. I take the whole man theory, Megan, that we have to balance this out. Yes, it's very, very bad. And I'll tell you why it's so bad, because he's the one who said all men are created equal. You know, Washington didn't say that. Madison didn't say that. Monroe didn't say that. Jefferson said it. And so he's like the poster child for this thing because it's so obviously impossible to square these two things about Jefferson. So he's really taking it. And part of this is reaction because for so many decades, he was kind of given a pass on this question that among slaveholders, he was sort of the best of them. And if you had to be a slave, you know, Monticello,

and that he was reluctant and so on. And that's not really true. So part of this is a corrective to a long period of white narrative that has not faced the unpleasant truth about this thing. So I think the pendulum has swung dangerously, and Jefferson is just part of a much larger movement, as you know, I think it will swing a little bit back, and I think he will survive this. But here's my point, and I'll see if you agree with this. You mentioned UVA. A, I think it's ridiculous for UVA students to apply to that university, to accept a position at one of the world's great universities, and when they get there, to trash the man who built it.

But that's another question. I think that's a form of presentism that's kind of disturbing. But certainly, this is what I would say, that you can't talk about the University of Virginia without an asterisk that says the lands were leveled by enslaved people, the bricks were baked by enslaved people, the timbers were cut by enslaved people. All the buildings were built by them. When the university opened, they were the janitors. They were cleaning up people's waste materials. They were the cooks. So fair enough. When I went to Vanderbilt in my first year in the early 1970s, they boasted of having nine African-American students. We have a long, really troubled history in this way. And yet every janitor at Vanderbilt at that time

was an African-American. So we have to face this. But I think Jefferson will survive because he's Leonardo da Vinci with a very, very, very serious problem at the center of his life and his moral character. And I think he's taken a permanent hit. I think that permanent hit is just. But I think he's taken a permanent hit. I think that permanent

hit is just, but I think we have to be careful here, not to use the cliche of the baby in the bathwater, but we have to be careful not to just pretend we can sweep American history clean and then feel better about it. The facts of American history don't go away if you remove Jefferson's statue. In fact, in some ways it becomes harder to talk about the facts and the complexities and the paradoxes of American history once you erase too much. That's right. And also, you kind of erase the hope amongst children that if they sin, they could still be remembered as someone great.

They could still achieve greatness in their life and be remembered for their goodness instead of their worst mistakes. Jefferson's a more extreme case of it. But typically in our American past, we've gone for grace. We've allowed it. We've been largely a Christian country that's believed in grace and forgiveness and redemption. Only now have we turned on that in a way that you're only about your worst sin. Let's end it on a positive note because that is what makes us feel good about him and his contribution to our past.

I read that you said, we have to know about Jefferson because he's the man who found the language to express the greatest aspirations that humanity has. Oh, that's exactly right. He found the words to say the thing we know on an inherent level, but maybe never recognized until we read it from his pen. Absolutely. I'm glad I wrote that because I believe it 100%, Megan. I think Jefferson articulated the aspiration of a free people. Okay, the asterisk is there. We grant that. But he understood America better than anybody else, that this was going to be the land of dreams, of aspirations, that we were going to be an idealistic nation, that we were going to try to be an exceptional nation. He wouldn't have used the shining city on the hill because he's a secularist, but you get the point. He pitched us very, very, very high.

And when we're at our best, as we occasionally are, we are Jefferson's people. When we are at our best, we are that people, an enlightened, thoughtful, evidence-gathering, rational people who work by majority rule. When we're not at our best, it's not because we're bad people. It's because he pitched us so high. And in fact, he pitched us so high that he himself gets a C minus or a D along the levels of ideals that he promoted. And I say this, thank God we had a dreamer in the beginning of this thing. Hamilton was a more brilliant financier. Madison was a better political theorist. But only Jefferson could say this, that humans have rights

to human happiness if they figure out how to pursue it. Without Jefferson, America is just a country,, there is so much that's right with us, and we are a self-correcting people, and we're not going to give up till we do justice for everybody and everything. And that's Jefferson, not alone, but more than any other figure in our history, with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln. Wow. Well said. Clay, thank you so much for all of your insights and your research and bringing it to us in such an easy to understand way. It's been an absolute pleasure. It's been a delight for me to have this conversation with you. And I thank you for your respectful and really interesting questions. So let's talk again. Yes, it's a date. All the best to you. Thanks to all of you for joining us today and all week on History Week on this show. Really enjoyed it. I hope you did too. I found it fun and enlightening. I learned

something and I love history, but I feel like I don't know enough about it. So hopefully you're with me. You enjoyed it. And hopefully you're also like me off tomorrow and getting ready to have a very, very Merry Christmas and holiday season. All my best to all of you. And we will see you again live very soon. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.