The Rest Is History - 686. Jefferson: The Betrayal of Liberty (Part 4)

Episode Date: July 8, 2026

What part did Thomads Jefferson play in writing the American Declaration of Independence? Where did he come from, and how did it shape his attitude to the future of the U.S.A? And, why was he such a contentious figure? Join Tom and Dominic as they reach the epic conclusion of their series delving into the lives of the men who made America, and end with the most controversial figure of them all: Thomas Jefferson.  _______Lloyds. 250 years on and still backing the nation's aspirations. Join The Rest Is History Club: Unlock the full experience of the show – with exclusive bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to every series and live show tickets, a members-only newsletter, discounted books from the show, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at the⁠restishistory.com⁠ To read our new newsletter, sign up at: therestishistory.com/newsletters Advertise with us: [e-mail] _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Video Editors: Jack Meek, Harry Swan + Adam Thornton   Social Producer: Harry Balden  Producers: Tabby Syrett & Aaliyah Akude  Senior Producer: Callum Hill  Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by the Lloyd's 5K House Deposit, and this is something that was last seen in 1996. Yeah, so the 1990s looks now like a lost golden age of prosperity and positivity, doesn't it? Think of the sort of the advent of the Blair administration in 1997, all the enthusiasm and excitement that surrounded that, the economic growth at the time, the technological developments, the sort of sense of an endless golden summer where everybody is listening to Blair and Oasis and looking forward to, to buying their first houses, and that, of course, takes us to mortgages. Now, the good news is that in a nod to the 1990s, Lloyds are offering 5K deposit mortgages to first-time buyers. So search 5K first-time buyer. 1996 average first-time buyer deposits are based on ONS data. Subject to status, your home may be repossessed if you don't keep up repayments and conditions apply.

This episode is sponsored by Ancestry. The First World War doesn't just survive in monuments and history books. It survives in smaller things too. Forms, ledgers, service numbers and addresses. Those are the details that can make family history feel less distant. A surname you recognise, a regiment, the detail that brings a family story, into focus. More than 5 million men served in the British Armed Forces during the First World War. And for many British families, that war is just a few generations away. July marks the 110th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme.

It is a time not just to look at the scale of that story, but the individual lives behind it. Visit Ancestry.com.uk. and search First World War military records to discover your family's role in the First World War. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they're endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it's the right of the people to alter or to abolish it,

and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organising its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness. So that was the Declaration of Independence. Now, at those words, our American listeners, many of them will have started crying with pride and joy, because this is, of course, the most celebrated document in all American history. Americans learn in school, though they're told in school, that it's one of the great masterpieces of English prose.

they regarded as a statement of principles that's a symbol of the country and a testament to the power of the American dream, even though, of course, as Samuel Johnson pointed out at the time, many of the people who were endorsing the Declaration of Independence themselves owned other human beings. But of course, we won't go into that, Tom, just yet. So this is one of the landmark documents in all human history. We have been marking its 250th anniversary and the anniversary of the tax revolt for which it was a press release, by looking at the lives of four of the most notable founding fathers. And today, we turn our attention to the man who wrote those words. And that man is, of course, Thomas Jefferson. It is. And that is the document for which he is

best known, a document which, as you said, is one of the very few documents to have changed history. But I think his status as the author of the Declaration of Independence kind of very best. barely scratches the surface of his remarkable range of achievements. So you can see from the Declaration itself, which he wrote when he was only 33, that this is a man of remarkable intellectual gifts. Kenneth Clark in Civilization, the landmark BBC series, in the episode on The Revolutionary Era, he described Jefferson as the emblematic genius of the age. he described him as a universal man.

And when you look at the range of Jefferson's accomplishments, you can see what Clark was on about. So Jefferson was a scholar who's learning embraced classical scholarship. He was a brilliant classical scholar. He was fascinated in history and natural history, in agriculture, in philosophy, in architecture. Very enthusiastic architect. Music, philosophy, law, meteorology, palae, and so, I mean, basically, there is no limit to the range of his interests. He knew Latin, he knew Greek, he knew Italian, he knew French, he knew Spanish. He was also a very keen gardener.

He was a pioneer in the culture of the tomato. Wow. Which at this time, Americans viewed the tomato with great suspicion. And as far as I know, he's the only founding father to have written down a recipe for ice cream. Surely Aaron Burr had an excellent ice cream recipe. Now, this mention of ice cream, may prompt listeners who've heard our episode on George Washington. Yeah. To wonder what Jefferson's teeth were like. American teeth, poor. And Dominic, you've been using the terrible state of his teeth as a bit of a metaphor, haven't you? Yeah.

So it'll delight you to know that Jefferson's teeth are excellent. So even in old age, he could boast that his gnashes were in a superb condition. He'd only lost one tooth, he said, with the rest continuing sound. He had the teeth of a horse. No? And indeed, he resembled. He looked like a horse. Like a surplus horse, he had. no flesh is one of the comments on him. So he's a very lean, ranging man. Yeah, equine. Yes, a kind of aquiline as well, a kind of horse eagle, I guess you could get kind of a fusion. Right. And this is because, as well as being a devotee of ice cream, he's a very firm believer in a brisk fitness regime, which again is kind of very American, isn't it? In America, it seems to me, you're either

guzzling ice cream or you're obsessively fit. Jefferson is the embodiment of both. So he wrote to friend in 1786, if the body be feeble, the mind will not be strong. The sovereign invigorator of the body is exercise and of all the exercises walking is best. And he is not wrong. Do you know what, Tom? I know you're trying to rehabilitate Jefferson because, of course, in Britain and in much of the world, Jefferson is regarded as one of history's great villains. But so far, you're not doing a great job because he sounds awful. He sounds, I mean, he's, I hate him far more. You hate him more? All his fitness. It's just so performative. All right. This is so performative, wittering on about gardens, talking about meteorites, learning Italian.

Come on. Pipe down and watch TV or something. Okay. Let's see if this makes him more appealing to you. Yeah. Because you do love a canny, a hard-nosed political operator. I do. I love it.

And I think there is no one in American history who has more brilliantly combined the kind of deep learning that you despise with the various arts required to obtain, to maintain. to utilize power. So obviously he's massively consequential as the author of the Declaration of Independence, but he is also a key player, perhaps the key player in shaping the American Republic in the first decades of its existence. And if you think of every plum post that you could have as a politician in the early years of the American Republic, Jefferson holds it. So first of all, he is the ambassador to France. So he arrives there in 1718. in succession to Benjamin Franklin, who we did in a previous episode. And he, when he's in France, he becomes a massive Francophile.

He thinks France is great. And I can see your face clouding at these. France is where he gets his recipe for ice cream. Yeah, fair. Okay. He, and he leaves in September 1789, by which point, of course, the French Revolution has kicked off. And Jefferson is a big fan of the French Revolution, and he sees it as a passing of the torch of liberty from America across the Atlantic to France. And he's a great pal of someone else you really admire, which is Lafayette.

Lafayette and Jefferson have been absolute mates throughout the 1580s. And Jefferson advises Lafayette on the drafting of the rights of man and the citizen. And even when he gets back to America, and he discusses. others that enthusiasm there for the French Revolution is slightly muted by the tendency of the French Revolution to go around guillotining everyone. Jefferson still sticks up for the revolution. So he says we are not to expect to be translated from despotism into liberty in a feather bed. Problem for you this, Tom, because you're a big fan of Marion Twennett. So you have divided loyalties here. I evaluate everyone in their own terms, Dominic.

Okay, fine. Well, I don't actually admire Marianne. I think she was, I mean, she was hopeless. And what was she thinking? Wow, you've changed. You've changed. She was good as a queen in Versailles. She was terrible as someone who had to negotiate with revolution. You're not wrong. That's my take on her.

Whereas Jefferson is a man who can accommodate himself to changing political circumstances, which is what he does when he gets back to America, where Washington appoints him as America's first secretary of state. And so he takes that office up in 1790. And of course, this brings him into massive conflict with the hero of our previous episode, Alexander Hamilton. So Hamilton is in charge of finance. Jefferson is in charge of foreign affairs. And they are polar opposites.

So as we heard in our previous episode, Hamilton, he's a federalist. He thinks that there should be a strong centre. Banks, yeah. He loves a bank. He loves a banker. He loves the national debt. He loves Britain. He hates anarchy.

These are his principles. Jefferson is almost the polar opposite. So he sees a strong federal state as an enemy of the liberty of the individual states. He loves a farmer, not a banker. He sees bankers as vampires sucking out the blood of hardworking, noble American farmers. He doesn't approve of national debts. He loves France, as we heard. and his great guiding principle is his hatred of tyranny.

And so both men, Hamilton and Jefferson, see the other one, you know, not just as a political opponent, but pretty much as a kind of threat to the liberty of the infant American republic. Yeah. And Jefferson's own take on their relationship in Washington's cabinet is that they were daily pitted in the cabinet like two cocks. Listeners can make of that one what they will. And there is so much cockfighting going on between them. in the end Jefferson resigns he resigns in 1793 because he recognises that the disagreements between them can't be reconciled within the one government so by now we have as we were talking about last time the beginnings of the first party system so Jefferson is effectively the standard bearer

isn't he of the America's first opposition party yes so the democratic republicans is they're called in opposition to hamilton's federalists yeah and throughout this period Washington as you said in the previous episode tries to stay above the fray in a kind of Olympian manner, but it is obvious that throughout his presidency, a two-party system is kind of evolving. And that isn't something that the Constitution had ever envisaged. That was never kind of part of the plan. And on one side, we have the Federalists, so Hamilton, but also John Adams, an old friend of Jefferson's. Jefferson had hung out in France with John Adams and his remarkable wife, Abigail. So John Adams, Boston lawyer.

this fantastically smart wife, and he ends up as Washington's vice president. And then on the other, we have effectively the first kind of mass popular party in history, really. And Jefferson stands at its head. But I guess the real creator of it, the guy who kind of operates the nuts and bolts, is James Madison. Yeah. So key figure in drafting the Constitution will be president when our brave boys burn the White House and send Dolly Madison, his wife, fleeing. And Madison is busy kind of constructing the mechanics of a party system.

And Jefferson plays the role of the enlightened philosopher. So again, a bit like Washington, looking as though he's above the fray, but actually he isn't at all. And I think you could say that Madison and Jefferson's partnership is easily the most effective political partnership in early American history. Surely. Yeah. I mean, it's incredibly creative. And so this puts Jefferson in a very good position in 1796, when Washington was.

stands down and it's clear there's going to be another president. And so he is running effectively against John Adams. I mean, there are other other contenders as well. And it is Adams who is elected. Jefferson comes second. And by the conventions of the time, that means that he automatically becomes vice president. Adams has won, but it's not by a massive amount. So Adams has had 71 votes to Jefferson 68. And Jefferson is pretty chuffed by this. So he he wrote that he sort of his tally is the index of the place I hold in the esteem of my fellow citizens. And he's not wrong. Jefferson is clearly a potential election winner. This has not dashed his hopes of becoming president. He's in poll position probably to run in the next election. But having said that,

the four years that he spends as vice president are very frustrating for him. Because effectively, as John Adams himself had found, being vice president is simply, you have nothing to do. It was a guy called John Nance Garner who said it's not worth a pitcher of warm piss. Yes. So I think this, Jefferson wouldn't put it quite like that. Yeah. Put it in slightly more Ciceronian tones. But I think that's his perspective.

But an additional problem, he doesn't just feel impotent. He feels aggravated by Adams' policies. So he strongly disagrees with a lot of the policies that his old friend John Adams is pursuing. And in fact, he ends up convinced that Adams' administration is threatening the end of American liberty, he sees Adams and Hamilton as kind of monarchical figures, people who want to reimpose the kind of British constitution by the back door. And so unsurprisingly, his kind of old friendship with John and Abigail Adams completely crashes at tanks. I mean, this is one of the things obviously we talked about last time, the extent to which the founding fathers,

as they call, they're kind of splintered by factionalism. And they all come to believe, don't they? Because they've basically spent far too much time reading, doing Latin. They come to believe that, you know, like the Roman Republic, their system is doomed to atrophy into despotism. Yeah. And that sort of shadow hangs over the whole story. There's a lot of Roman cosplaying. Yeah. And that means that if you're casting yourself as the hero in a Roman drama,

there are all kinds of villains, as we will see. But Jefferson sits it out. He doesn't resign. He doesn't flounce off in a half because the whole way through he's playing this kind of waiting game. He has his eyes fixed on the big prize, which is the presidency. And to win it, of course, he will have to depose John Adams, who is his old friend, sitting president. And so this is the first presidential rematch in American history.

And when the campaign begins all along, Jefferson is the slight but definite favorite. Yeah. And Adams meets with Jefferson in Philadelphia before the election has actually been announced. And already, Adams is basically saying, oh, I've lost. their conversation is recorded as thus. Adams, well, I understand that you are to beat me in this contest and I will only say that I will be as faithful a subject as any you will have. Jefferson, Mr. Adams, this is no personal contest between you and me.

So it's very stirring, it's very founding fathers, it's the kind of thing that you might get to translate in a passage of Latin prose. You know, it's, again, they're absolutely cosplaying here. But actually, the presidential contest, the second one, between Jefferson and, Adams, it's much more Trump against Biden. Right. Than it is, something from the early years of the Roman Republic. Because of the bitterness, the sheer depths of the bitterness between federalists and

democratic Republicans, exactly. It's a party contest as well. So it's completely fortuporative. And Jefferson's opponents, so Adams, Hamilton, all of that crew, they go all in trying to blacken Jefferson's name. They accuse him of being an atheist, of being a Jacques. So the kind of person who, if he wins, will set about guillotining his opponents. You know, they are casting Jefferson as a threat to the Republic.

But Jefferson is going in equally hard. You know, it says Adams is a kind of crypto monarchist. He's a British stooge. He wants to reintroduce monarchical flummery and all this kind of thing. And Jefferson's campaign works. And so already by December, he's confident that he has the election in the bag. but there is a twist and Dominic you hinted at this twist in the previous episode. So listeners may recall that in the previous election, Adams and Jefferson had run on individual

tickets and that's how Jefferson ended up vice president to Adams. Yeah. And they are political opponents and so it's a kind of very awkward cohabitation. In the 1800 election, this isn't going to happen because both the candidates for the presidency, Adams and Jefferson are running on a kind of. joint ticket. They have selected someone who will run with them who is slated to serve as their vice president should they win the election. And the man on Jefferson's ticket to serve as vice president is a lawyer from New York who earlier in the year had shown himself such a whiz

at electioneering that he had basically delivered the state to Jefferson. And the name of this man is Aaron Burr. Brilliant to have. him back on the show. So this is the guy who's going to go on to shoot Hamilton. Yeah. But four years before he guns down Alexander Hamilton, he very nearly guns down the presidential hopes of Thomas Jefferson. And this is because when the votes from the Electoral College are formally delivered on the 11th of February 1801, that's an absolute disaster for Jefferson's handlers because Jefferson and Burr turn out to have the same number. So it's a tie. And this was not meant to happen. Yeah, because basically, they've elected the Electoral College. And one of the people in the Electoral College, one of the

Democratic Republican electors, was meant to have cast his vote for Jefferson, but not for Burr. And forgets. Yeah, he basically, no one really knows exactly why this happened. But Jefferson and Burr end up with the same number of votes, 73, 73, instead of 73, 72, which was the plan. So it's not clear which one of them is going to be president. And as we said last time, if Burr had been almost anybody else but himself, he would have stepped aside and said, well, obviously, there's been a, something's gone wrong. And Jefferson's meant to be president. That's fine. Instead, Burr being, he's like, brilliant. I can be president now. Well, he said, he says of it, I've got, you know, he's gone into politics for fun and honor and profit. Which is very upfront. Yeah.

So he's not going to lay down. And so the election goes to the House of Representatives. And there are now 16 states, so three new states. And each of those have an individual vote. And there is massive scope for kind of anti-Jefferson mischief here. People can see that Burr is not ideal presidential material. But at the same time, it is precisely the fact that Jefferson is so obviously brilliant and such a kind of incredibly effective political operator, which means that Hamilton and Adams and the Federalists,

you know, they don't want anything to do with him. And so the federalists vote against Jefferson and in favor of Burr again and again and again. And these votes are being held in the capital, in Washington, and there are snowstorms raging outside. People have to be kind of brought in on stretches. It's incredible drama. And day after day, the ballots are tied. The day slipped by. There's no result. And then finally, on the 16th, of February, there have been 35 tied ballots. At last, the deadlock is broken and it's broken spectacularly. Jefferson wins the 36th ballot 10-4. Two states obtain. So it has always been a presumption then as now that there was a deal. I mean, it's pretty clear that there must have

been the details of it remain murky. But I think also it does come down to principle because at the end of the day, as you said in the last episode, even Alexander Hamilton has to acknowledge that Jefferson is the better candidate. So Hamilton said of Jefferson, there is no doubt, but that upon every virtuous and prudent calculation, Jefferson is to be preferred. He is by far not so dangerous a man and he has pretensions to character. Potensions to character. I love that. Damning with faint praise. So Thomas Jefferson becomes the third president of the United States. And it's a key moment in the history, not just of America, but of democracy more generally, because it demonstrates that a peaceful transfer of power from one party to another is possible. So it is, I think, a great moment in the history of democracy.

And Jefferson does not set about guillotining his enemies. You know, he doesn't raise a gibbet. A gibbet, yes, in Washington. And at his inauguration, he affirms what is a kind of, I think, think fundamental principle of effective functioning democracy, that politics can't be a zero-sum game. And Jefferson at his inauguration, I mean, he kind of affirms what he describes as a sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must

protect and to violate would be oppression. So you can't go full in Jacobin. You know, just because you've won, you can't guillotine everybody. Yeah, the principle of pluralism, I suppose, that the other side have a legitimate interest, which must be respected. So I think that's an admirable, admirable expression of sentiment. And he manages to repair the breach in his friendship

with John Adams, though not with Abigail Adams. And even Hamilton, after Hamilton's death, he acknowledges as a worthy rival. So in his hallway of his private residence, he has a bust of himself. That's poor. Very Jefferson. but facing it, facing it, he has a bust of Hamilton.

And so this is conventionally treated as a gesture of respect. I mean, you could perhaps see it as a gesture of triumph. It's like putting up the head of a moose that you shot or something. I don't know, it's probably both. Do you know what, though, Bonaparte had a bust of Nelson? Yes. So I think there's a kind of element of that, isn't there? Respect towards a rival, I suppose.

So Jefferson's president, and he goes on to serve two terms as Washington had done and as Adams had failed to do. And the longevity of his presidency combines with the death of Hamilton in that duel with Burr, effectively to destroy the federalists as a coherent force. And I think you could say

that if aptitude for politics is to be measured by success in the winning and the keeping of power, then Jefferson is the great political genius among the founding fathers because he serves these two terms but he then is succeeded by his great ally, James Madison, and then three of the four presidents who succeed Madison in turn

are also self-proclaimed Jeffersonians, and the only one who isn't is John Adams' son, John Quincy Adams. So there's a sense there of two rival political dynasties, but I don't think there's any question that Jefferson's is, I'm by far the most formidable. And in a sense, Jefferson as a model for presidents lasts right the way up to the Civil War, I think. Oh, completely.

He's a very, very effective figure, a dominant figure as a president. Well, the tradition of Jeffersonian democracy, the idea of small government, that the United States is ultimately a country of yeoman farmers, the tradition of the sort of the slightly nostalgic view of the South. I mean, that's all bound up with Jeffersonianism, I think. Yeah, and this reflects the fact that Jefferson, as well as obtaining power, is very good at using it. So it's Jefferson more than any other president who makes possible the emergency of the United States, not just as an Atlantic power, but as a continental power, and his most striking and celebrated achievement. And there is a case, I think, for saying it's perhaps the most

consequential act made by any US president, is the purchase in 1803 of Louisiana from Napoleon. And kind of typically, this is actually illegal under the Constitution. You know, it doesn't say anything about the right of the federal government to purchase foreign territory, but Jefferson goes ahead and does it anyway, because ultimately, I think when self-interest is up against ideals, Jefferson is a good enough politician to lay down his principles in favor of the end result that he wants. And you can absolutely see why he would have seized every opportunity to obtain Louisiana, because it's much, much, a block of territory is much larger than the current state. So it's about 16 times. It's basically the whole of middle America. It's the flyover states.

I look at a map. I mean, it's not just Louisiana. It's Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, much of Colorado, Wyoming, Montana. I mean, it's basically the middle third of the United States. Well, it's basically doubling the size of the United States. Yeah. When the Louisiana purchase goes through. So it adds over 800,000 square miles to the U.S. So that is an incredible achievement. But even with the Louisiana purchase, Jefferson's gaze, is fixed even further westwards. And so one year after the Louisiana purchase, he commissions an expedition to explore, not just that this new territory that the United States has overturned, but to go even further west as far as the Pacific. And this is the Lewis and Clark expedition

named after the two men who led it. And it's an, you know, it's a kind of key moment in establishing Americans' sense of what the continent is, that their state has been founded on. So in part, it's a scientific expedition. It brings back lots of new plants and flowers. And Jefferson's a great gardener. He adds lots of these to his flower beds.

Also brings back some fossils, which I love. And Jefferson, again, keeps some of these. And in fact, Jefferson's only real disappointment is that they don't find mastodons. So these kind of prehistoric elephants that Jefferson had been hoping were roaming the grasslands of California. but they're not found. So it's a scientific expedition, but you know, Jefferson is always about power as well as about kind of intellectual exploration.

So it is an expedition in large part to scout out the possibility of a westwards expansion towards the specific. And Jefferson calls this an empire of liberty. I mean, whether the Native Americans would see it in quite those terms is a moot point. But as you said, his vision is a United States populated by yeoman farmers rather than kind of, I don't know,

an urban proletariat. And his feeling is that this is what will keep the US virtuous. And if the American people are to expand and keep their farms, then they need land. And if they need land, then they have to go basically go and grab California. That's the logic. So it's simultaneously virtuous and self-aggrandizing.

That's Jefferson. Yeah. Very, very Jeffersonian. And although Jefferson's sense that America's destiny is that of a commonwealth of yeoman farmers, I mean, this obviously doesn't turn out. Hamilton is right. America's future is capitalist. It is industrial.

Yeah. On the other hand, Jefferson is effectively the godfather of the notion of manifest destiny, a phrase that is coined decades later. But this sense that Americans have a God-given right to expand westwards and to claim this land, This also is part of Jefferson's legacy. And it's why in the 1930s, when the carvings of on Mount Rushmore were begun, Jefferson was chosen to be one of the four presidents represented on Mount Rushmore with Washington and Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. And Jefferson serves on Mount Rushmore as the symbol of American expansion. And it's an amazing thought. I remember reading a book years ago about what would imagine humans does fantasy.

in the blink of an eye, what would remain of the workings of humanity over the course of the centuries and the millennia that follow. And apparently Mount Rushmore is the work of human art that would survive the longest. Really? The granite is so hard. It's been estimated that Jefferson's face will endure for seven million years. Oh, my word. Wow. So there's a thought. And you would say, I guess, if you're an American historian in the 20th century, that Jefferson's reputation as one of the most, not just most consequential, but admirable men in US history would be kind of similarly enduring. Because this is, you know, he's written the Declaration of Independence.

He's this great hero of the Enlightenment, the universal man, as Kenneth Clark called him, the godfather of the American West. And this is never better articulated than by John F. Kennedy in 1962, who hosted a dinner at the White House for all the living recipients of the Nobel Prize. And he welcomed them by saying, I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.

Oh, cheesy. This is the great hero on the nickel. This is the great hero on the $2 bill, which you want to get rid of. But today, Dominic, what would you say? reputation is. Well, this is the interesting thing. So since I would say certainly the 1990s, Jefferson's reputation has become a little bit. It's not exactly tarnished, but it's contested, isn't it? So to many people in America, including I would imagine a large proportion of our own

American listeners, he remains a great hero for all the reasons that you've described. And yet there are others, including perhaps some people who may listen to this show, who say, no, actually the way we should look at Thomas Jefferson is as the personification. of the greatest blot on America's record. In fact, to go further, he is the embodiment of America's founding sin. It's original sin that has tainted our experiment since the very first. And he's been the center, hasn't he, of what can only be described as a culture war that has raged for at least 30 years and probably is not going away anytime soon.

Yeah. Of all the founding fathers, I think he is now the most controversial. the great lightning rod for so many of the debates about American history. And so we will be looking at those when we come back after the break. Hey, this is Michael and Hannah from Gollhangers. The Rest is Science. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. What if your immune system could learn to recognize cancer cells? That's immunotherapy.

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there's ever been in history, ever, and we say this as the presenters of the Restes History, you know what to do. It's well known that the man whom it delighteth the people to honour keeps and for many years past has kept as his concubine one of his own slaves. Her name is Sally. The name of her eldest son is Tom. His features are said to bear a striking, although sable, resemblance to those of the president himself. So this is a shocking story and it appeared on the 1st of September. 1802 in the Richmond recorder. And it was written, as you can obviously tell, by a Scottish emigre, a journalist called James Callender.

Now, Callender, you could argue, was very party pre-Tom, because the recorder was a Federalist paper, wasn't it? And Callender had originally been a kind of Jeffersonian attack dog, but then he'd been turned down for a job that he was hoping to get, and he had turned on Jefferson and basically become a federalist, a putturative federalist. brighter instead. So what's going on with this story? Is there just titlettle, rumemongering, or is it something more serious? Well, for a long time, it's been presented as a kind of fabricated attack on the author of the Declaration of Independence. This is the work of an embittered,

acid-tonged hack. Right. And this was how Jefferson himself responded to it. So he, I mean, when I say responded, he never actually responded to the allegation personally. You know, as ever he played the role of philosopher above the fray. It's not worth, not going to dignify such titlettle by even engaging with it. And so he leaves it to people lower down the Jeffersonian food chain to kind of launch a

campaign of defamation against Callender to cast him as a kind of miserable, wretched drunk. And actually, you know, Callender clearly did have problems with drink. And one year after he ran that story about this mysterious woman, Sally, he was seen staggering through the streets of Richmond in Virginia. And then later that evening, he was found drowned in three feet of water in the James River. Oh, this is very murky. This is very JFK. Well, so there was an inquest, a very hurried inquest, and it definitively discovered that there was no evidence of foul play.

Okay, well, that's a massive red flag. So, case closed, was it just kind of fabrication? And I think the answer to that is no, because calendar in that article was simply making public rumors that had been circulating among those in the know for several years and would continue to circulate long after calendar had drowned or been drowned. I mean, depending on your perspective. Here is, he's writing many, many years later after Jefferson's death, I think. So just before the outbreak of the Civil War. And it's a guy who'd known Jefferson well.

He would, like Jefferson, he was a Virginian planter. But this guy was an abolitionist. And so not as favorable to Jefferson as most Virginia planters tended to be. And it was a guy called John Hartwell-cock. and he wrote, all bachelors, or a large majority at least, keep as a substitute for a wife, some individual of their own slaves. In Virginia, this damnable practice prevails as much as anywhere, and probably more as Mr. Jefferson's example can be pleaded for its defense. He is taking that allegation absolutely for granted, and he's situating it in a kind of very specific cultural milieu, which are the tobacco plantations of Virginia, on which slavery, you know, it's not just common,

it is completely taken for granted. And Jefferson had grown up on exactly such an estate. And it's an estate that was called Shadwell after the London parish in the East End, where his mother had been christened before she came to America. So this takes us back to Jefferson's boyhood. Yes. And the context of 1750s, 1760s, Virginia. And it takes us to the heart of this whole question about Jefferson's slavery.

So, I mean, an obvious example of Jefferson's relationship with slavery, as a little boy, he had his own personal slave, didn't he? Who typically he calls Jupiter. Right. So a kind of classical reference there. And his father dies in 1757 when Jefferson is 14. And Jefferson inherits the slaves as well as the land. And he keeps both of them for the whole of his life. And the house that he comes to build on.

the Shadwell estate is his great pride, his great joy. And he began building it in 1767 when he was 24. And it's a mansion on the summit of what Jefferson described as a steep and savage hill. So it's it's kind of 900 feet. So rises quite high. And because of this he called it Monticello, little mountain in Italian. And he loves it. He spends all his life building, rebuilding, renovating, tinkering with it. And it is a great neoclassical architectural masterpiece. It's Palladian, so deriving from the neoclassicism of in Italy, but perfectly fused with the new world. So it is, in architectural terms, it is the first great fusion of European architectural style

with something that is recognizably American. And even Kenneth Clark in civilization when he's talking about Jefferson, I mean, he's a bit sniffy about it because Clark is kind of massive snob and a specialist in the Renaissance. But he says it's not bad. I mean, he says, you know, Jefferson's done pretty well here. And this is featured on the nickel. I think it's still there, isn't it? I think.

It's one of the most celebrated American buildings of all, isn't it? But there is a dark side, right? Because it's built as a plantation house. Yes. So Clark in his documentary, which was made, I think, in 1970 or in 1969, he doesn't mention this. doesn't mention the fact that there are slaves. And this, according to calendar, so the Scottish guy who's mysteriously drowned,

this is where this mysterious concubine, Sally, was being kept. So one of the hundreds of slaves that Jefferson owned across his various properties, so Monticello wasn't his only property. And Monticello alone, I'm just looking at it up, that the plantation was about 5,000 acres, and there were about 150 African-Americans working in slavery on those plantations.

And one of these is Sally. So to quote calendar again in his article, the African Venus is said to officiate as housekeeper at Monticello. Now this seems not to have been entirely accurate. Sally seems to have served Maria, who is Jefferson's daughter living at Monticello as her maid, and then in due course to have evolved to become kind of Jefferson's personal servant taking care of his chamber and wardrobe.

So a kind of female valet. And the reason that we know this is because we have written evidence from her son, who was a slave on Jefferson's estate like his mother, Sally. And this is a guy called Madison Hemings, and he's called Madison after James Madison. So again, this kind of bizarre confluence between the high ideals, the high politics of the American Republic and the kind of squalid circumstances of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, you know, the slavery on Jefferson's estate. And Madison Hemings wrote up a history of his mother and his family more generally with the result that the details of her life and her ancestry have been preserved to a degree that is very, very unusual. Most slaves, obviously, the details of their lives have been completely lost. We know who Sally's mother was and who her grandmother was.

And you couldn't say that, I guess, of most slaves who, you know, lived in the earth. earlier years of the American Republic. So both Sally's grandmother and mother had been made pregnant by their white owners. And obviously, neither women as slaves would have had any right of refusal whatsoever. So by our standards, you would say they were the victims of rape. We don't know the name of Sally's grandmother. Madison Heming specifies that she was a full-blooded African. so had no white blood in her.

Right. And there is a obsession with blood in the American South. But he reports that the grandfather, so the owner who had forced himself on the grandmother had been an English sea captain named Hemings. So this is where the surname Hemings comes from. And they had had a daughter, Betty Hemings, and she had therefore been in the racist terminology of the time,

a mulatto, meaning half black, half white. Yeah. Betty comes into the possession of a recently widowed planter called John Wiles, who, like, the head of Goldhanger, Tony Paster, was a Lancastrian. But unlike Tony Paster, he was a very sinister man. I'm glad you made that point. Yeah, I'm making that absolutely clear. So he's not just a planter. He's also a slave trader and a debt collector.

Okay. And so that makes him a figure of dread among the planters of Virginia because, you know, huge numbers of the plantations are in debt. Yeah, of course. And so to have this guy, John Wiles turn up, I mean, it's a very, very bad sign. So we think of Washington. I mean, Washington's, you know, plantation is in debt. Yeah. Tobacco. Tobacco prices had gone into a deep decline in the 1760s, 1770s. Yeah. So this guy, Wiles, is, you know, you don't want to see him knocking at your door if you're a, a Virginia planter. And he keeps Betty as his concubine, and he fathered six children on her.

And Sally, who's born in 1773, is the last of these children. So again, just to dwell on the race of this, because this is something incredibly important to the story, she is seven parts white to one part black, which qualifies her in the language of the time as an octaroon. So an eighth black. And yet she is just as much a slave as her mother had been, just as much a slave as her. grandmother had been. And the reason for this is because Virginian law is modelled on the law of ancient Rome, which specified that the legal status of a child is determined by that of the mother rather than the father, which in turn means that any children who are born to Betty by John Wiles will end up as John Wiles' slaves. So this includes Sally, obviously.

How does Sally end up at Monticello? Does she go, do they all go to Monticello? Is that how it works? So what happens is that in 1773, Wiles dies. Right. And this means that all his slaves pass into the hands of his heir. And his heir is his only surviving legitimate child, who is a very smart, clever, sassy, very, very beautiful woman called Martha. But he's known to her friends as Patty. And Patty in 1771 had married Thomas Jefferson. Ah, okay.

And this means that when the Hemings family pass into Patty's possession, Ultimately, they pass into Jefferson's possession as well. So just to make clear what this means for the dynamics of Jefferson's marital household, Sally is the half-sister of Jefferson's wife, Patty. You know, she's decades younger, but she is the half-sister. Because they have the same father. They have the same father. John Wiles or whatever.

Yes. And so when Jefferson and Patty come to have children, they have a succession of daughters, Sally is their art. Hmm. Okay. You know, this is, it's not just about owners and slaves. This is also a kind of family matrix as well. So how does Patty feel about the Hemings is who are the family of her father's concubine?

Well, she's clearly not fond enough of them to set them free. You know, these are her half sisters. Sally's a half sister. She's not setting her free. Yeah. But what she doesn't do is break the family up and sell them on her father's. death, which she could have done. That would have been entirely within her rights. Instead, she keeps them together as a family. And when they move to Monticello, she employs them in the house,

so she doesn't send them out into the fields. Yeah. And that, by the standards of the time, it is a mercy. I mean, you would rather be employed as a slave in the house than, you know, out on the tobacco fields. Yes. She seems to have been quite close to Betty. So in 1782, two, she's kind of basically been worn out by childbirth. She's fallen very sick from TB. And Jefferson is distraught. He tends to her for months, but so also does Betty Hammings. And on the 6th of September, Patty can feel that her end is very close. She extracts an oath from Jefferson. She could not die happy if she thought her children were ever to have a stepmother brought in over them. And so Jefferson very solemnly promises not to remarry, and he does so in front of witnesses. And among these

witnesses gathered around Patty's bed to hear this oath, Betty Hemings, but also Patty's nine-year-old half-sister, the daughter of Betty Hemings, Sally Hemings. And Patty dies the same day, and Jefferson is left completely prostrated by grief. And then two years later, he leaves for France to serve there as ambassador in succession to Franklin. And he takes his elder daughter, Martha, with him, but he leaves his younger daughter, Maria, behind. And then three years after that, in 1787, when Jefferson is still in France, he sends for Maria. And Maria is only eight years old at this point. So she clearly needs an attendant. And the person who is sent Maria as her kind of maid, nanny, whatever, is her 14-year-old aunt Sally Hemings.

Let me just repeat one thing. Sally Hemings at this point is 14 years old. She is 14 years old. So first of all, they go to London where John Adams is the ambassador, the first American ambassador. Yeah. To the court of St. James. And Abigail Adams is with him. And she, so she hosts Maria and Sally and she thinks Sally is hopeless that she's an absolutely terrible kind of attendant.

She's all over the place. But she assumes that Sally is kind of 17 or 18. She's also, we're told, light-colored, and so there's a description of her, very handsome with long, straight hair down her back. And she evidently bears a family resemblance to her dead half-sister, Patty, who had been Jefferson's wife. I mean. So she looks a bit like Jefferson's wife. Yeah. And she looks slightly older than she is.

I mean, you know where this is going. Everyone knows where this is going. So Maria and Sally cross the channel. They go to Paris. They're with Jefferson. And by September 1789, when Jefferson is preparing for his return to America, Sally is pregnant. So by that point, she is what she's 16. So our source for what happens next derives exclusively from Madison Hemings, her son.

Okay. He writes up this story. And he reports that Jefferson takes for granted that he's going to be taking Sally back with him to Virginia. and that Sally, in Madison Heming's words, demurs. She's not going to go with him. She says, no, I'm not going to. And there are various reasons why she might feel able to do this. She has learned French by this point.

So it's perfectly possible that she could stay in France and flourish there. She's not alone. She has her elder brother, James, who's been taken by Jefferson to Paris to be trained as a chef. As a chef. Yeah. So, you know, she could live with James. They could run a restaurant together. or something.

But the key thing is that in France there are no slaves. So Sally is not legally a slave in France. She's free to do what she wants. There is no legal requirement for her to go back to America. Imagine, yeah, the shock of being told you had to go back to America, back to slavery. So she says, no, I'm not going to. The 16-year-old girl, and Jefferson is absolutely stunned. I mean, I don't think anyone has ever spoken to him like this before.

In the end, Sally does opt to go back. to Virginia with Jefferson. And Madison Hemings writes about this. To induce her to do so, he Jefferson promised her extraordinary privileges and made a solemn pledge that her children should be freed at the age of 21 years. You know, not just her children, his children as well, including Madison Hemings. And for Sally, you know, she's got this promise, but to go back to Virginia, she is returning to servitude.

And she will formally remain a slave until the end of her. her days. Having said that, and whether this counts as rehabilitation, I don't know, but Jefferson does keep his word to her. So by the terms of his will when he dies, her children by him are emancipated. And Sally herself, for complicated legal reasons, she can't be emancipated, but she's kind of granted an informal freedom. So effectively, she does become free herself, not legally, but effectively. De facto, but de jure. Yeah, basically. And she ends up, leaving Monticello after Jefferson's death. She lives with two of her sons in Charlottesville, which is the nearest town, about two miles away.

And she died there in 1835. She was 62, and the site of her grave is unknown. So a very, a kind of dark and largely occluded story apart from, you know, that kind of reference to it in the newspapers. There are only hints about what we know, right? In the sources, anyway, we'll come to other sources. Yeah. Just one last thing we should make clear. When Sally arrived in Paris, she was 14 years old, right?

Though you say she looked a year or two older, Jefferson was 44 at that point. So quite a sizable age gap, even by the standards of the rest is history. And so because it is a story that has dwelt in the shadows, there are kind of questions to be asked. So first of all, is Madison Hemings right? Can we trust him? was Jefferson really his father and that of Sally's other children? I mean, we can't take it for granted. You could say, well, Madison Hemings would say this.

I mean, it's much better to have Jefferson as your father than someone else. Yeah, of course. And throughout the 20th century, most biographers of Jefferson didn't believe it. So as a representative, let me quote, Dumas Malone. He was author of a six. Don't throw that away. His name is what? It's either Dumas or Dumas, whether he was named after the author of The Three Musketeers and whether the S was added, I'm not sure. I imagine it probably was. Dumas Malone.

And he wrote a six-volume biography of Jefferson. It won the Pulitzer Prize. Just for good measure, so there's no question where Dumas Malone is coming from. He was the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia, which had been founded by Thomas Jefferson. He definitely doesn't have a dog in this fight. So Malone in the fourth volume of his biography, he touches on calendar's accusations, his accusations about Jefferson's relationship with Sally.

And he opines, they are distinctly out of character, being virtually unthinkable in a man of Jefferson's morals, standards, and habitual conduct. Well, that's so telling, isn't it, virtually unthinkable? I mean, this is a point,

1970, when Jefferson's moral stature is so great that it is, I mean, to most American historians, it probably is unthinkable that Thomas Jefferson could lower himself to this depravity. Right. So what changes? Well, the key development comes in 1999 when DNA tests prove that the father of Sally's children had been a member of the Jefferson male line. Doesn't prove that it was Thomas Jefferson, but I mean, it's very strong likelihood that it was. And then there's been very detailed research by the great scholar of the Hemings family and of the relationship of Sally Hemings to Thomas Jefferson, Annette Gordon Reed. And she did detailed analysis of the Jefferson archives, which are very copious. And she demonstrated that Jefferson had been

present at Monticello nine months before the birth of every one of Sally Hemings's children. So again, that's quite substantive evidence. And then in 2017, archaeologists working at chelo excavated Sally's room complete with original half fireplace and floors and it's directly adjacent to Jefferson's bedroom right so there are still um Jefferson scholars who who doubt it but I would say the overwhelming consensus now of historians is that um Jefferson had kept Sally Hemings as his mistress that Madison Hemings and her other children were Jefferson's children and this has been accepted by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which runs Monticello. So that effectively, I think, is case-proven.

So let's get into their relationship. So obviously there's so much, I mean, it's impossible to ever know the truth about anybody's relationship, I suppose, even your own. But their relationship is surely, I mean, the fact that they are, as it were, master and slave can never be separated from the reality of their relationship. No, it is obviously massively coercive. I mean, Jefferson owns Sally as property. And as you said, you know, he's in his mid-40s when they begin their affair and she's, you know, in her mid-teens. So in every way, there is a colossal power imbalance there. So I suppose the question that can't be answered, which people must be wondering, is why Sally agreed to go back with Jefferson to Virginia and to slavery.

So was it homesickness, you know, for the place that she'd grown up in for her mother, for the rest of her family? Nervousness at starting a new life in France. I mean, maybe she'd been in France a few years, but, I mean, the big ask, perhaps. Yeah. She's still a teenager, right? So, yeah. I mean, do many 16-year-olds or whatever choose to start entirely new lives, cut off from

their, I mean, we know from sports people who do that that they find it very daunting and overwhelming, me and that's when they have support around them. So you can imagine this is a big ask for her to stay in Paris, even though it means freedom. But to repeat, I mean, she's going back to a condition of servitude. Yeah, of course. I mean, of course. And I think, you know, you have to ask, and there may be people who feel that this is an entirely inappropriate question, but I think you can't avoid asking it. Does she have personal feelings for Jefferson, who is a man of immense charm and good looks and fame. I mean, he's one of the most famous men in the world. So, I mean, we can't know, but I would say some or all of those reasons probably offer a sufficient explanation.

As for Jefferson, I think it is easier to fathom what might have motivated him in risking so much by having this affair. I mean, it was so, he knew how damaging it would be if the full details of it came out. One one question, though, actually. You say he's risking so much and he knows how damaging it would be. The allegations do come out, thanks to this guy calendar, but they don't stop him becoming president. Plus, you made the point yourself, you know, that quite rightly, I think, that masters, slave owners, raping their slaves or sleeping with their slaves is extremely common in the American South. So in other words, if it came out, you know, people, a lot of, a lot of, So lots of people might say, huh, Jefferson's not the saint that he pretends to be,

but they wouldn't necessarily be surprised or shocked that this had, that this had happened. And it might not be, well, as we know, it wasn't terminal for his political career. So is he risking that much? That's my question. I think he is for reasons that we will come to. Okay. I think he is risking a lot by having this affair with Sally Hemmings. I mean, we will come to that in due course.

Okay. But when it comes to his motivation, why might he have run this risk? I think it is because when you look at his life, it is clear that this is a man who is given to titanic and enduring erotic passions. And this, again, is something that many of his biographers in the 20th century didn't really want to acknowledge. So there is a brilliant biography of Jefferson that was published as late as 1998 by Joseph Ellis, American Sphinx. I mean, it's really, really good. But Ellis doubted the Hemings affair. and he famously wrote of Jefferson that he preferred to meet his lovers in the rarefied region of his mind rather than the physical world.

Oh, that's been nice for them. So, you know, in France, he has these kind of very elegant salon-based affairs. Right. But to give Ellis credit, when the DNA evidence came out, he changed his mind. You know, when the evidence changes, what do you do? You change your mind. He does. Yeah. And I think it's clear that when you look at Jefferson's great romantic passions, which kind of,

Mark the length of his life. He's definitely a man whose principles are capable of being overridden by his desires. So a case in point, his first great erotic obsession. He's 25 and he goes after his best friend's wife. Dominic, have you ever watched Love actually? I can imagine that you never have. I have seen them actually, yeah. It's the Kiran Knightley thing, right? So you remember Andrew Lincoln, who will go on to a glittering career fighting zombies. He's in love with Kiran Knightley, who's just married his best friend and Andrew Lincoln turns up with a load of cue cards. Christmas. Yeah. Christmas and plays some carols on a tape recorder and it proclaims his love. And then he walks away and Kira follows him and gives him a little kiss and then they run back. And that's the

end of it because Andrew Lincoln is a very decent man and obviously isn't going to pester his best friend's wife. Thomas Jefferson, however, a very different story. He pursues this poor woman for years And he's always kind of surprising her when she's getting dressed. He's slipping love letters into the cuffs of her sleeves. Does he get anywhere? No, he doesn't. Good for her. She stands firm and obviously the best friend is no longer the best friend when he finds out.

No. Yeah. There is a similar sense of kind of intense, erotic, emotional obsession in his marriage. So when his wife dies, he, you know, this is the middle of the War of Independence. Jefferson has a kind of key role. He's meant to be organizing the defenses. He chucks them all in, goes back to Montever's. Chello spends months kind of nursing her, mopping her fevered brow, all of this. And remember that

oath that he'd given never to marry again. I mean, he keeps it. He clearly sees it as a sacred pledge. And I think that the, the likeliest explanation for his relationship with Sally is that she is the third and the most enduring of the three great passions of his life. And just to reiterate, she probably looks like his dead wife. Yeah. I mean, as we say, There are some very, very deep waters here. It's not unheard of for men in middle age to form these obsessive attachments to much younger women, after all. Indeed. And are we not right in saying that people described it at the French court and said she was very good looking?

Very handsome woman with the hair down her back and all that kind of thing. All of that. Yes, she's clearly very good looking. She's clearly very smart as well. Yeah. And very strong will. I mean, you know, she stood up to Jefferson, one of the most famous men in the world when she was a 16-year-old. I mean, she's clearly a very impressive person in her own right. But there is this

massive question. Why does he keep her as a slave? Why doesn't he just free her? And this is a question that in turn only scratches the surface of the biggest mystery of all, which you were, you were kind of alluding to earlier on. How could Jefferson, of all people, have kept not only Sally Hemings, whom he clearly loved, but some 130 people on the Monticello estate in bondage, and even more on his other estates. So yes, when Jefferson dies, he sets free his children by Sally, but not the other slaves. They are all sold on the block. Families are scattered to, you know, different parts of the south.

I mean, that itself, the breaking up a family is by that being sold off is just unheartbreaking. Yeah, it's terrible. And there's a contrast there with Washington, who by the terms of his will, he wasn't able to free all his slaves because they were, you know, owned by his wife, but he laid down measures for them to be set free. Jefferson did not do this. And what makes the hypocrisy seem even more glaring. And this is why I think the story of him having Sally as his inverted commas, concubine, would have been damaging. Jefferson, in his original draft of the declaration, had famously lambasted slavery as, and I quote, a cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberties. And the other members of the

Congress, most of them from the South and therefore from slave-owning states, had edited these passages out. And Jefferson had been absolutely furious about this. He'd felt that this was kind of morally unconscionable. So there can be no doubting that as a young man, he had a passionate commitment to abolitionism, nor, I think, when you look at his political career, his writings, the framing of his political principles, the ideal of liberty, I think, did absolutely serve him as the great guiding light of everything that he wanted to achieve and to do. But can I just press you on this before? I know you want to move on, but just on this, his commitment to the ideal of liberty,

it's very common in American history, certainly in the first, let's say, 100 years or 150 years or so, for people to feel that they are genuinely committed to the ideal of liberty, but they perceive it as having limits and that limit means you know it extends to white men largely but not to people beyond that does just is Jefferson one of those people no Jefferson is much more committed

to an ideal of liberty such as I think we would understand it today okay he is a man of his time but he is at the cutting edge he is a committed abolitionist he's not just written the the Declaration of Independence he had put in huge passages saying that slavery should be abolished. Yeah.

So you're not giving him a pass, as it were, by saying, well, he's a product of 18th century, Virginia, so you'd expect him to be... No. Okay, fine. This is why I think it's so for admirers of Jefferson. It's so upsetting because to say he's merely a hypocrite that all along his devotion to liberty was a front, a show, isn't true. Jefferson is, you know, in his writings and in his... many of his political actions, he is committed to all kinds of ideals, and these ideals have many wellsprings. So he has a very idiosyncratic understanding of Jesus as a kind of non-divine moralist,

but he draws from the teachings of the Gospels a sense that all human beings should be free. Yeah. You know, he's got this kind of humanist understanding of the Gospels. He's also a committed admirer of the more radical end of the Enlightenment. So he, you know, he's read the philosophers of liberty. He's, you know, Locke, he's, he's massively anglophobic, it has to be said. But he's a great admirer of John Locke and the kind of, you know, the English philosophers of personal liberty, many of which feed into the kind of abolitionist arguments in Britain. And I think above all, he, I said he's a great classicist at the start of this show.

he has a passionate devotion to ancient Greece and Rome that goes far beyond that of even the other founding fathers. And in particular, he is devoted to the great Roman historian Tacitus, whom he described as the first writer in the world without exception. And Jefferson finds in Tacitus an inspiration that is moral as well as political. And that inspiration leads him to enshrine liberty as the great principle that should guide human beings in leading a good life. So there are two books by Tacitus in particular that influence him. And the first of these is called Germania. It's a portrait of ancient Germany, which of course hadn't been conquered by the Romans. And Tacitus, or rather Jefferson's understanding of Tacitus, Germany is the womb of liberty.

And Tacitus has counterpointed it to the corruption and decadence of Rome under the Caesars. And so Jefferson sees the Anglo-Saxons who come from Germany, unconquered Germany, to Britain, and then the English settlers who had travelled from Britain to America as the bearers of this ancient flame of German liberty. And in 1776, Jefferson had proposed putting Hengist and Horsa, the legendary leaders of the Anglo-Saxon settlement in Britain, putting them on the reverse of the Great Seal, as the illustration of this ideal that the course of liberty is heading westwards from Germany to Britain

to America. And then the counterpoint to all this is Jefferson's portrayal of the lives of the Caesars, Tiberius and through to Nero. And this is the monarchy that obviously emerged

amid the rubble of the Roman Republic and it's a murderous and tyrannical as portrayed by Tacitus. And this is again a huge influence on Jefferson's politics. And it's a massive part of what fills him with dread that the American Republic will succumb to a new Caesar. And he, you know, there are various kind of potential

Caesars in Jefferson's demonology. And one is George the third. And Jefferson's anglophobia is founded in the sense he has of Britain as a new imperial Rome with George the third as a very improbable kind of colligula or Nero. I mean, this kind of amiable buffoon. He's absolutely not colligula. But Jefferson is completely sincere in seeing Britain as the kind of the new Rome murderous and tyrannical. And that of course is what informs his hatred

of the Federalists and of their projects, right? Yes, completely. I mean, as insane as it may sound, did he think John Adams was going to become a new Caesar as well? Yes. Well, he sees John Adams as a potential Caesar, I think, and he definitely sees Hamilton as a new Caesar. And Hamilton,

who's clearly a massive wag, Jefferson, they're having dinner together and Jefferson is talking about his heroes and it's all, you know, bacon and Locke and Hamilton said, oh, my hero is Julius Caesar. He was the greatest man that's ever lived. Jefferson takes this completely seriously and it's confirmed in his darkest views. Does Jefferson have a great sense of humor? I don't think Jefferson had a great sense of human, no. No, I don't. But it is Jefferson's kind of great overriding ambition for the United States to avoid the fate of both ancient Rome and. and of Georgian Britain. And it's this that explains his, you know, his hostility to Britain, his sympathy with Republican France, his enthusiasm for yeoman farmers. You know, these are a kind of bulwark against the emergence of tyranny and decadence. And this drive westwards, you know, this empire of liberty. You plant an empire of liberty in the West, and that will enable America to stand proof against the corrupting effects of luxury and decadence. Part of this is obviously a little bit antiquarian, but Jefferson is not primarily antiquarian.

He believes in the lessons that can be drawn from the classical past, but he does kind of blend it with the ideals of the Enlightenment to which he's also committed and to his very hard-nosed understanding of the contemporary political realities of America. And his dream essentially is a country that can serve as simultaneously in an embodiment of the best of ancient Greece and Rome that can be true. to the ideals of the Enlightenment and can also be something novel, something that the world has never seen before and therefore appropriate to a new world. And this ideal is evident, I think, not just in his record as president, but also in the place that he loved more than anywhere in

the world. And this, of course, is Monticello. And this is a place that is classical, but it is also where he is anticipating the future of American ingenuity by experimenting with tomatoes and installing automatic double doors and inventing a kind of a revolving chair and recording meteorological data that is so meticulously kept that it's still being used by climate scientists to this day. So all of that, it's all kind of very scientific, it's all very progressive, it's all very enlightenment. But at the same time, you know, he does have this great love of the classics. And his dream, since he was a young man, is to live essentially like Cicero. And as a young man, he had filled, he had this commonplace book, he'd filled it

with quotes illustrating what Cicero had called dignified leisure. And Cicero enjoys this dignified leisure on his country estate. But you can't have a country estate if you're a Roman grandee without slaves. And as it turns out, Norcan Jefferson. Because to free his slave, would have destroyed the idyll that he had created for himself at Monticello. And this isn't just because he would lose the labour that the slaves provided, but because Jefferson, like so many of the tobacco farmers in Virginia, is massively in debt. And he needs the slaves as collateral against this debt.

And remember that his father-in-law had been a debt collector. And so Jefferson knows better than anyone what financial ruin might. might mean, you know, he will lose everything. And I think that ultimately Monticello is dearer to him than Sally, dearer to him than his ideals of liberty, dearer than, you know, his reputation even. So when he was in France, he'd visited Niem. And he'd gazed at an incredibly well-preserved Roman temple,

great kind of gem of Roman architecture. And he wrote in a letter that he'd gazed at it like a lover at his mistress. And perhaps I, you know, at the end of the day, he loved Monticello more even than Sally, than his wife, than his best friend's wife, more than his principles, more even than how posterity would judge him. To the extent that I can explain this, you know, the paradox that is Thomas Jefferson, this I think is the explanation. You know, he is that the president of the United States.

States who articulated the principles of America more boldly and more stirringly and more inspirationally than any other but I think for that reason he is also the United States president who came to betray them the most grievously he knew what he was doing right you know we joke and say Thomas Jefferson who's you know history's great monster he wasn't a monster he was a man of genuine principle but it's for that reason that his portrayal of those principles are all the more shameful, I think. You're right, yeah, because you're sort of distinguishing.

I mean, there's a difference between somebody who basically has been bred in the world of the 18th century. Right. Cannot think themselves outside it. Doesn't question the established practices at the time. And therefore, you know, owns slaves, buys and sells slaves, and it's completely implicated in what we would now regard as a horrendous institution. And you're effectively saying this is somebody who basically thinks it's wrong.

He knows it's wrong. To the depths of his heart in his marrow. Knows it's wrong, but his own pastoral, classical fantasy world, as it were, means more to him than doing what he believes to be right. And presumably he told himself, the slaves are much better living with me on my plantation and working for me. I think he probably did tell himself that, but I don't think that's a justification that he would have accepted. Right.

You know, and that's why I think if he were alive now, he would accept the force of the arguments made by his critics. He would be on their side in his gut. Yeah. In saying that he did wrong. And I think that if the definition of a tragedy is that, you know, someone who is destroyed by their own best qualities,

Jefferson is the great tragic president. Because the very thing that people admire that millions of tourists go to sea every year, which is Monticello, you're arguing, is the thing that basically subverts his moral compass. Monticello is the architectural embodiment of all Jefferson's ideals. You know, his love of ancient Greece and Rome, his commitment to enlightenment principles, his investment in all the kind of incredible ingenuity that will be character. of America over the course of her existence. And that's why Americans instinctively feel this. It's why it's one of the great kind of monuments, great centers of pilgrimage in the United States. But ultimately, that house could not have functioned without slaves. And had Jefferson sold his slaves, he would have lost the house, he would have lost the estate, he would have been ruined.

Yeah. And he couldn't bring himself to do it. He couldn't bear to do it. Okay. Well, fascinating story, brilliantly told. Thank you, Tom. So that brings to an end of our founding father's series, but Jefferson himself will be delighted to hear because he loved Greece and Rome, that we're actually returning next week with a proper classical subject. Because of course, Christopher Nolan's film, The Odyssey, is about to hit the cinemas. And we will be venturing back to Homeric Greece, to the world of gods and monsters to dig deep into the Odyssey and tease out what it's all about and what it means. And those episodes will be out for rest of, History Club members on Monday.

So if you want to hear both episodes straight away, go to the rest is history.com and sign up. And Tom, I believe there's all kinds of other benefits, aren't there? Oh, massive supplementary benefits. Supplementary benefits, I think is the technical term. Incredible supplementary benefits. You only get them if you sign up at the website. And of course, there is our super sawaway newsletter every Friday,

which will have loads more about all of this kind of stuff. So I advise people to sign up for the newsletter. And yeah, thank you very much, Tom. And we will return next week with The Odyssey. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Hi, everybody. It's Dominic here from The Restis History. I just wanted to let you all know that on our sister podcast, The Book Club, we have just released an episode digging deep into George R.R. Martins,

a Game of Thrones. The first book in his Song of Ice and Fire sequence. We go deep into the history behind Game of Thrones. So we go into the Wars of the Roses, Hadrian's Wall. We talk about the influence of Jera Tolkien and in comparisons with the the Lord of the Rings. We talk about the violence of the books. But Tabby, we also talk, don't we, about George R.R. Martin's apparent stagnation and whether he's actually ever going to finish the books. We investigate why it is that he has battled to finish them at all and whether he will ever be able to. If you want to hear lots more about the history behind some of the greatest novels of all time,

fear not. Because coming up on the book club, we have The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa, which is all about Italian unification. We talk about Circe, where we delve into a particular part of the Odyssey. And then after that, we are doing the 39 steps, which is, I know Dominic, you chose and you love. Please join us at the book club. It's loads of fun,

and you will never find a better way to spend your life. Bye-bye. Bye. Dominic, since it's the summer, I've obviously been thinking a lot about cricket. However, I am aware that the World Cup is on as well. And so occasionally, football intrudes on my mind as well. And so I've been thinking about what my historical dream football teams would be. And who would be in your historical dream

team? I've numbered it down to four what I think would be the classics. And they are, of course, the Aztecs, the Royal Navy. We've got to have the Royal Navy. Ostrohungary. And of course, ancient Rome. I mean, it's an amazing coincidence. the rest is history have just launched football shirts for those very teams. So if there are people out there who want to know what Quauteimok would have worn during the seat of Tenochtitlan or Nelson, this is your chance to find out. And how would one, put it bluntly, me, how would I get my hands on one, two, three, or perhaps all of these bespoke kits? You would want to head as quickly as possible to the rest is history.com and you go to the merch tab, then you would be able to pre-order one of these fantastic limited edition shirts.

Would there be a way of personalising these shirts? I'm going to make you so happy now because actually there would. Each shirt can be personalized with a choice of historical figures, the big names from that particular team. So, for example, the Royal Navy, you can go over. for Horatio Nelson or Emma Hamilton. You can go for Franz Ferdinand or Sophie for the Austro-Hungarian Empire. For the Aztecs, you can go for Quahtamok, Montezuma or Malinche.

Okay, these sound absolutely brilliant. The perfect way for our beloved listeners to celebrate the World Cup. And I will certainly be heading to the website and clicking on the merch page on restishistory.com. I simply cannot wait. Hello there. It's Al Murray here and James Holland there. hosts of the Second World War Pod. We have ways of making you talk. Al and I have been on The Rest Is History a few times now, talking all things World War II with Tom and Dominic. If you've enjoyed their recent topics on 20th century history, then we have good news for you.

Yes, that's right, Jim. We have our own show, all about the fascinating history of World War II. Every Tuesday and Thursday, WW2 Pod, we have ways of making you talk, discusses the fascinating people, amazing innovations. and terrible tragedies of this most pivotal period in human history. Yeah, and the bottom line is, other history has absolutely nothing on this. This past year alone, we've done series on visionary US presidents like FDR and Truman, HMS Hood v Bismarck, and Japan's Road to War. We've also explored daring night raids behind enemy lines like Brunovol and the nerve-wracking Atlantic convoys.

And right now, we're doing the truly Titanic Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi German invasion of the Soviet Union in the South. summer of 1941. So now is a great time to subscribe and get into the action. Search, We Have Ways, wherever you get your podcasts. That's we have ways wherever you get your podcasts.