WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - The WRFH Interview: Cara Rogers Stevens

Episode Date: March 4, 2025

Cara Rogers Stevens, associate professor of history at Ashland University, sits down with WRFH's Lauren Bixler to discuss her book, Thomas Jefferson and the Fight against SlaveryFrom 03/04/25.

This is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Lauren Bixler. With me today is Kara Roger Stevens, an associate professor of history at Ashland University, where she also co-directs the Ashbrook Scholar Program. She has a master's degree in history from the University of Texas at Dallas and a PhD from Rice University. Her research, which focuses on race, slavery, and freedom in the Jeffersonian Age, has been published by the Journal of Southern History and American Political Thought, and she has also written for the Journal of the Early Republic and Law and Liberty. She won the American Political Science Association's Award for Best Article in American Political Thought in 2022. Her first book, Thomas Jefferson and the fight against slavery, examines what Jefferson did and did not do to end slavery and bring

equality to America. Dr. Stephen. Thank you for joining us today. It's my pleasure to be here. So you just put out a book recently or how recent was this book? Oh, goodness. I should know the answer to that. I believe it was last January that the book came out. Okay.

And so what are kind of before we jump into the big issue of, I mean, slavery, which I think is present in a lot of people's minds, especially looking back into American history and can be, you know, a wart that we account for with American history. Yeah. Just to maybe start on a lighter note, what was Jefferson's character like throughout his life? What do we know about him through the writings of his or what others wrote about him? Like, give us an image of who Jefferson is.

Okay. I was just actually discussing Jefferson with a group of other scholars. And I was asked a similar question about how an actor portrayed Jefferson in the John Adams HBO miniseries. And I said I liked how that actor portrayed Jefferson because he reminded me of a cat. He's always observing kind of on the outskirts of the room. Jefferson, I think, was actually much more friendly in person once you got to know him than the typical cat is.

He was definitely introverted. I've heard some people speculate he was perhaps on the spectrum. But he was somebody who, once you had a one-on-one conversation, he was somebody who, once you had a one-on-one conversation with him. Most people found him very likable, very charming. He didn't pursue conflict the way that somebody like John Adams maybe did. And that's what made him a very good writer, rather than making political enemies by debating them face to face, say, in the Continental Congress, Jefferson hung back, he observed, and that meant that he was able to write the original draft of the Declaration of Independence and have a lot of support for his writing.

because everybody respected him as a smart young man who kind of stayed in the background. And I think Jefferson, over time, became either loved or hated. So he's somebody who has a lot of intense fans, people who really look up to him, people who worshipped him as the party leader or as the nation's third president. And then there are a lot of people who intensely dislike Jefferson. And maybe that's because they don't like his personal ideas. I think it's also because he represents America to so many people. And so he represents good things if you are happy with the direction that the country is going.

But if you are unhappy with the direction of the country or you are upset about a particular issue that Jefferson seems to have supported, it's easy to kind of blame him. He stands in for America for a lot of us. Would you say that is he's more divisive in the time of early America, especially because it is early America. and the ideas of perhaps like a republic are so new. And there's, of course, the heated debate of the time with federalizing versus not. I even know that came slightly before him, but he was still involved. And there's just a lot of tension perhaps going in. Could that have affected the way he was perceived?

Yeah, Jefferson became the leader of one of the first two political parties. So after George Washington's presidency, which was very, unifying time. John Adams became the president, and as the leader of the Federalist Party, he came to represent a certain set of ideas about what America could be. Jefferson was the opposition, and he came to represent a different set of ideas. And I think, unfortunately, as so often happens during times of partisanship, those two parties misunderstood one another, and they feared one another. Each side thought that the other would destroy America. So if you look at the election of 1800 and the rhetoric of that election. The federalists really thought that

Jefferson's party, the Democratic Republicans, were going to ally themselves with the French. They were going to burn Bibles. They were going to destroy religion. They were going to completely secularize and radicalize the American experiment. Jefferson looked at Adams and the federalists and thought Adams is trying to make himself king. Hamilton wants to make himself king. They are going to tie us too closely to England. Neither side was entirely right. about the intentions of the other. But the fear that people have about the future of the nation, I think, causes them to misunderstand and perhaps have stronger feelings than are really necessary.

Yeah. I mean, of course, tension. Mm-hmm. It just adds to the way people are perceived. This is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Lauren Bixler, and I'm talking with Kara Rogers Stevens, a professor of history at Ashland University. We are discussing her book, Thomas Jefferson and the Fight Against Slavery.

So next, as we're kind of thinking about the elephant of the room, which is slavery, how should we think about Jefferson and his relationship with slavery? Is it hypocritical to write that all men are created equal and yet own slaves? I know, especially in the modern age, there's kind of this push towards, progression away from the founding and the founding and America is inherently racist. And people like Jefferson can add fodder to the fire by their example. So how should we kind of think about Jefferson in that light or deal with maybe that tension? Well, it's a very complicated question. As I'm sure you know, it's, I wrote a book trying to

understand this and work it out. I've spent a long time. thinking, is Jefferson a hypocrite? Because how do you reconcile the idea that he could write such stirring words about all men being created equal and having these natural rights and also owning so many other human beings and seemingly not doing a whole heck of a lot to try to help them or free them? At the end of his life, he only freed a few individuals in his will. So I always think it's helpful to start by understanding the world into which Jefferson was born. He was born in 1743 in the backwoods of Virginia. At the time, slavery was not that controversial.

In fact, most people accepted it as a fact of life, at least in the new world, where different forms of indentured labor or enslaved labor had been used pretty much since the beginning. Jefferson was born and 14 years later his father died and Jefferson inherited several dozen human beings as a 14-year-old. And again, that was considered normal. There was no anti-slavery movement. There were no abolitionists. There were no states in the new world that had yet abolished slavery. And Jefferson, what's amazing about him is that he started to question the system.

As early as during his college years at the College of William and Mary, he started. writing about natural rights and about the fact that there was no real basis for owning another human being, even in his understanding of English common law. And he tried right from the time that he was a young legislator, first to make it possible, even to just free a slave, was impossible in Virginia when Jefferson was a young man. You had to petition the government for special permission to free an individual slave. Jefferson tried to stop that and make it possible to free as many slaves as you wanted if you were a slave owner. That measure failed. Then he tried to pass a law ending the slave trade into Virginia. That one eventually worked.

He tried to write an anti-slavery constitution for Virginia. That one failed. He tried writing a book to persuade young men that slavery was wrong. That book's called Notes on the State of Virginia. It sort of helped. There's several people who later on wrote that that book convinced them that slavery was bad and was wrong. But unfortunately, as time went on, Jefferson was very disappointed that younger Americans didn't embrace liberty as much as he thought they would. During the revolutionary years, he really had hope that the spirit of liberty would change people's mindsets about slavery.

And it did, for some. We see Vermont ending slavery in 1777. By 1804, all the northern states had abolished slavery, but the southern states had become more attached to it. And Jefferson died deeply disappointed by this change in morality, this acceptance of slavery that he saw. He also died deeply in debt, and the law in Virginia said you could not free your slaves if you were in debt. Those people were property, they were collateral for your debts. So that's part of the reason why Jefferson seems to be a hypocrite, that he sees. to not have done more to live up to his own ideas.

But I also think a hypocrite is a pretender. It's somebody who says one thing, but they're just pretending, and they really believe something else. I don't think that Jefferson meets that criteria because there's so many times in his life where he wasn't pretending when he said, all men are created equal, when he tried to get these different laws and measures passed. As president, he ended the slave trade for America internationally.

He tried to end slavery in all territories with his Northwest ordinance of 1784. So there's all these different moments where he's trying to do different things. And yes, he failed in some ways, but he also gave us this document that inspired generations of abolitionists to come. And I think we owe him a debt for that, for the things that he did do. And then maybe we learned some hard lessons about what is and isn't possible to achieve. politically or culturally, or even maybe he had some personal failures. But I don't think I would call him a hypocrite. This is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM.

I'm Lauren Bixler and I'm talking with Kara Rogers Stevens, a professor of history at Ashland University. We are discussing her book, Thomas Jefferson and the fight against slavery. So kind of with all those factors in mind, like where does the story of Jefferson fit into our, lives today as Americans and where should we move forward considering the purpose of the founding and how can they help propel us into the future as we look at the issues we face today? Yeah. I think if you want to understand how Thomas Jefferson relates to America,

you have to study the Civil War because there was a whole group of people in the 1850s and 60s who completely rejected Jefferson and other founders and said, either these men, you know, they wrote the Declaration of Independence, but there's no way they could have meant it. Or by the time of the 1860s, more popularly, southern leaders were saying, Jefferson really did mean it. He wrote the declaration. He said all men were equal, but boy, was he wrong. And we, the Confederacy, have discovered the truth. And we're going to build a nation built on white supremacy.

and that's how God always intended it to be. I mean, there's literally documents like the Cornerstone Address by Alex Dander Stevens, the vice president of the Confederacy, that repudiate the founding, that repudiate the declaration, and that specifically say Jefferson was wrong. We're rejecting him. We're doing something better. I live in an America. I choose to believe and to hope that thinks that Jefferson was right, that all men are created equal,

and that we can create a community of social. self-governing individuals where the government's job is to protect our rights. I believe in the vision for America that is laid out in the Declaration of Independence, and I think there's still something valuable there for every new generation of Americans to look back and to aspire to, to reach for a more perfect union. In some ways, Jefferson failed, absolutely. In some ways, he wasn't perfect, absolutely. I think there's maybe a lesson there about how you shouldn't make a hero out of your

politics, your politicians, the leaders that you admire, sure admire them, but nobody's perfect. And there's a lot of flaws and failures even in our favorite founders. But we can look back and find inspiration at what that generation of men were able to do. And they had big dreams for us that we can still aspire to and we can still live up to. And, I mean, something to kind of bolster that point is we're all human. And none of us are perfect. And I think making an idol out of anyone can just lead to maybe false hopes or expectations. I think we need to take everyone for who they are and recognize Jefferson, you know, as you said, had, I mean, at the time, these were very, you know, quote, modern ideas.

This was new the way people thought about government and freedom and slavery as, something that slavery doesn't have to be a part of our lives. That's not what we're called to as humans. So I do very much agree with that message and I think more people need to hear it. I think an important question to close with is if we progress from freedom, then what do we have? Well, that's a really interesting question. We always have to evaluate where are our new ideas going to take us. What are the unintended consequences of some of our new ideas? Are there things that we can cling to from the past that are actually quite good and stable. And as I said, there's always room to try to continue to live up to.

I think Jefferson would himself admit he did not create an equal society or achieve justice for enslaved individuals. And I hope and I believe he would be very proud of the strides that have been made and he would recognize that there's still work to be done. Well, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your message about Thomas Jefferson. and how he's a more complicated person than we thought, which makes this kind of discussion of him more complicated and less satisfying. But thank you for helping tease those ideas out for us. Our guest has been Kara Rogers Stevens, and I'm Lauren Bixler on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM.