Thomas Jefferson, Confounding Father with Robert M. S. McDonald | BRI Scholar Talks

0:00 the idea that you know 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 i mean those principles were revolutionary and they still are and we’re still trying to figure out how to make them

0:21 real in our own time hi this is tony williams senior fellow at the bill of rights institute and we want to welcome you to another episode of scholar talks today we are very pleased to

0:41 have with us the distinguished scholar rob mcdonald and we’re discussing his fantastic book uh confounding father thomas jefferson’s image in his own time so robert mcdonald is the professor of history at the u.s military academy of west point and a special

1:01 a specialist in the american revolution and early republic he’s the author of confounding father and editor of a half dozen books including most recently revolutionary prophecies the founders and america’s future he’s a great friend of bri contributing original essays providing scholarly review for several of our curricula including our free

1:25 online textbook life liberty and the pursuit of happiness and he has presented at countless teacher programs over the years and we’re very thankful for that so rob thank you for joining us to discuss your magnificent book hey tony thanks so much for having me i appreciate it well let me just start

1:45 by saying in an age of sort of in you know incivility and and you know sometimes we’re just screaming at each other i think a discussion between a hamiltonian like me and a jeffersonian like you shows that that we can indeed bridge the divide and have civil discussions as americans

2:06 i think you’re absolutely right and i have to confess that i very much admire alexander hamilton as well as thomas jefferson and i actually had a make the original thought the other day um you know we know that jefferson and hamilton supposedly had competing and mutually exclusive visions for america hamilton wanted us to be this commercial empire this colossus

2:28 straddling the globe jefferson was oriented toward the west and he wanted to see us expand across the continent is this you know nation of um kind of like the the little guy was the big guy and you know in the messy reality of american history it struck me that both of their visions came true you know they both won much to our great benefit right

2:48 right all good good uh good point and and i am an admirer of thomas jefferson as well so as well as hamilton’s though all right well confounding father is really a remarkable book that that examines a lot of different contemporary perspectives on thomas jefferson in fact you call him a the

3:09 symbol of an age but you also call our most controversial and confounding father uh you know founder so why is he such a lightning rod for the american founding at the time i think it goes really gets down to the fact that thomas jefferson emerged as the

3:30 leader of the opposition during the administration of president george washington um of course he was a member of the administration of president george washington he was washington’s secretary of state but alexander hamilton’s financial plan and other issues really divided americans and thomas jefferson and of course james

3:52 madison who was his key political ally came to believe that alexander hamilton’s plan for the national bank was unconstitutional that hamilton was expanding government beyond the bounds um that the constitution envisioned and that the states envisioned when they ratified the constitution um the federalists and

4:14 the republicans began to disagree over foreign policy um i think you know the republicans had a strong aversion to uh great britain with which we had just fought a war for independence but quite reasonably the federalists had a strong aversion to revolutionary france where they were chopping off people’s heads

4:35 and i think maybe most fundamentally they didn’t envision that there would be a two-party system and that wasn’t part of the plan and and so i think that hamilton and the federalists viewed the jeffersonian republicans not as a legitimate opposition but as subversives and even as people

4:56 sometimes describe jefferson um french revolutionaries not authentic american revolutionaries and and meanwhile you know the republicans had the same sorts of thoughts about the federalists they didn’t view them as authentic american revolutionaries but i think they saw them as counter revolutionaries people who wanted to undo many of the gains of

5:17 the american revolution so the stakes were high right kind of calling each other there’s even patriotism in the question uh very interesting absolutely so how does how does jefferson’s authorship of the the declaration of independence contribute to the the start of him being considered as you call him a a confounding father you know it’s an

5:39 interesting story so um when jefferson wrote the declaration of independence he wasn’t widely known as its author or its draftsman um remember that he was writing this as a member of a committee um you know he is responsible for the draft i mean 95 97 of the words are his

6:00 um but the declaration of independence was a statement for the continental congress it wasn’t meant to be jefferson’s statement and when he signed the parchment copy his name was one of many um and in the 18th century there was generally a tradition that political speech was oftentimes not

6:20 signed with the name of the author you know think about hamilton and madison and jay writing the federalist papers as publius for example um and so no one really thought to ask well who who wrote this thing who wrote the declaration of independence the first mention of it was in 1783 when ezra styles the president of yale

6:41 um mentioned in a sermon that thomas jefferson had poured the soul of the continent into the declaration of independence but really until the election of 1796 um the general public was not aware of his role and you know what you mentioned just a moment ago about how the federalists and republicans questioned

7:01 each other’s patriotism is very true and what a useful tool that the republicans had in their back pocket in the presidential election of 1796 when washington had announced his retirement vice president john adams is put forth as the federalist candidate for the presidency jefferson is put forth as the republican candidate

7:22 for the presidency when the federalists claim that jefferson’s an inauthentic american revolutionary um that he’s unamerican that he lacks patriotism what a wonderful response the republicans had in their hip pocket they could pull out the declaration of independence and say oh really our guy wrote america’s statement of

7:43 purpose our guy wrote these magic words yeah that’s pretty good card to have in your back pocket absolutely so so in the 1790s the as you mentioned the political parties are forming and jefferson helps lead this this opposition which as you said was was not necessarily considered

8:03 a legitimate opposition to to the federalists to to the administration and they’re particularly worried about hamilton centralizing policies uh as as you also mentioned earlier you know jefferson shies away on the other hand from from personal confrontation from political confrontation he doesn’t like that kind of thing

8:23 so so how does this party conflict help shape jefferson’s image yeah that’s a great question i mean in some ways jefferson’s personality works to his advantage um i think you’re right to say that he shied away from controversy and that he you know didn’t enjoy um getting involved personally in heated debates um

8:44 when he was retired people would sometimes write to him and ask do you have any advice for our children and so he had a sort of a standard list of ten pieces of advice and one of the bits of advice was if annoyed count 10 before you speak if very annoyed count 100 before you speak um but to his advantage the political

9:05 culture of the 18th century um didn’t really encourage politicians to speech to speak um you know if you were an office holder the idea was um you know you should do your duty um keep your head down um and not promote yourself to stand on a

9:27 soapbox and give a political speech or worst of all to say if you vote for me i will do this thing for you i will pass this popular program or what have you i mean that was considered the height of corruption so i mentioned before you know adams was put forth as the federalist candidate he didn’t campaign he didn’t run

9:49 jefferson was put forth as the republican candidate he didn’t campaign he didn’t run other people wrote in his behalf in newspapers and you know in the presidential election of 1796 by this point jefferson had retired as secretary of state he spent the year with his head down at monticello he claimed that he didn’t

10:10 subscribe to any newspapers madison didn’t visit him for a year and i think this provided jefferson to use our terminology with plausible deniability um of any involvement while madison of course was kind of his lead campaign manager um and together with uh pennsylvania republican named john beckley

10:32 you know they were really the people who um made this campaign work and so thomas uh jefferson as president really purposefully introduces a several republican reforms as you just described in the book um he sort of simplifies the office of the presidency

10:52 he he cuts national spending and taxes uh and but however his his federalist opponents criticize his actions for actually seeming to increase the power of the executive and and of the national government especially with the louisiana purchase and with the trade embargo of britain and france and so how does

11:13 this contribute to the idea of jefferson being confounding right i mean it’s it’s interesting i mean the historian henry adams uh in the late 19th century um said that there was no better federalist president than thomas jefferson himself kind of a backhanded compliment i suppose um i mean i think first of all we should

11:34 we should realize that as you point out um jefferson was very effective in carrying through um you know his his key um promises uh you know in his first inaugural address um he said you know we have all these amazing advantages in america um what remains to close the circle of our felicities and then he said one

11:56 thing more my fellow fellow citizens a wise and frugal government um that will allow people um to pursue their own industry and improvement shall prevent people from injuring one another but shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned this he said is the sum of good government and um he repeals all internal taxes

12:18 including the dreaded whiskey tax he cuts government spending he and his treasury secretary albert gallatin are so effective at this that at the end of jefferson’s two terms 37 of the national debt had been paid off um even though there was as you point out a somewhat big splurge the purchase of louisiana which doubled

12:39 the size of the united states but um i think you’re right to suggest and i think jefferson would agree that you’re right to suggest that louisiana is definitely a complicated consideration it provided us with some great advantages to be sure not only all that new territory not only

13:00 room for americans to farm for jefferson once said 100 generations another time maybe after drinking a bottle of wine or two he said a thousand generations um so we would have you know room to grow and space to expand um maybe even more importantly it would prevent the french from possessing louisiana with france to

13:20 our west and british canada to our north i mean those nations were perpetually at war it seemed um so that would compromise our diplomatic neutrality jefferson the supposed francophile said that if france possesses louisiana we will have to marry ourselves to the british fleet um so certainly um those are important

13:41 considerations but unfortunately there’s nothing in the constitution specifically empowering the national government to add new territory and that’s not a trivial point now albert gallatin and james madison um tried to talk jefferson into seeing a constitutional

14:01 way through purchasing louisiana obviously the states couldn’t engage in treaty-making powers with other nations um so so it’s not like they could buy louisiana and if they couldn’t buy louisiana then then maybe by default the national government could um and you know it was purchased by a treaty

14:22 and the national government does have treaty making powers yet i mean i think jefferson understood that adding the west fundamentally changed the nature of the union um you know not to be uh too racy in our interview but i mean what was once a marriage between north and south was now kind of a weird menage a trois

14:42 with the west and you know is the west going to be more like the north or is the west going to be more like the south um and you know i think i think the writing was on the wall and people recognized both federalists and republicans that the future residents of kansas were not going to be cod fishermen like the people of massachusetts they were going to be

15:02 farmers like the people of virginia um but anyway i mean jefferson he swallowed hard he actually wrote a constitutional amendment that would have authorized the purchase of louisiana madison talked him out of it what if it doesn’t pass in time what if france backs out of the deal madison said just you know bite your lip

15:22 you know let let the congress appropriate the funds let the senate ratify the treaty and let’s do this and you know jefferson did so i i i just i’ll say i don’t think jefferson was betraying his principles i think that this is a clear case where jefferson’s principles came into conflict and he had to choose between them okay which is what prudential statesmen do

15:42 right you have to choose between between these um these goods so uh jefferson’s all often a lightning rod of controversy to even today because to visit his ownership of hundreds of slaves and his affair such as as it was with sally hemings

16:03 but you explained that it also made jefferson no less controversial which may surprise a lot of people it made them no less controversial even than zone day so can you explain that a little bit sure the slavery issue was not a huge issue in the early 19th century not in the way that it would become um you know when you get into the 1820s

16:24 with the missouri crisis or in the decades approaching the american civil war but it was sort of used as a regional issue um federalists in the south would take some of jefferson’s many anti-slavery pronouncements and highlight those and try to um cause southerners to fear that if jefferson were to become president

16:44 um he would take steps to end the institution of slavery meanwhile in the north federalists would hold up jefferson’s status as a slaveholder um and you know contrast that with his statements in the declaration of independence and elsewhere and accuse him of hypocrisy um but but it doesn’t seem as if the issue of slavery

17:06 was uh at the top of the list of things that americans at that point were concerned about um the story of sally hemmings is an interesting one um it was released to the public on the pages of richmond newspaper the richmond recorder by kind of a renegade journalist named james thompson calendar

17:27 who had spent much of the 1790s savaging the federalists he was sort of the republicans attacked and and then he turned uh he turned on the republicans and um now by 1802 um he was attacking thomas jefferson and he alleged that um you know the man whom it delighteth the people to honor thomas jefferson

17:49 keeps and for many years has kept as his concubine um one of his own slaves her name is sally and um you know we now know uh that jefferson and sally hemings probably did have a sexual relation relationship that lasted for decades i say probably

18:10 because it’s not a slam dunk it’s not 100 um but i’d say the preponderance of evidence suggests as much um jefferson was always uh present at monticello when sally hemmings became pregnant um and he frequently wasn’t present at monticello uh sally hemmings seemed to tell her own children

18:30 that thomas jefferson was their father um her children went free um that that wasn’t something that normally happened to enslaved children at at uh monticello um and then in 1998 uh there was a dna test done showing that there was a genetic link between um the mail line of the jefferson family

18:53 and the uh descendants of sally hemmings’s children so it’s possible that it was thomas jefferson’s brother or some other male relative um but when you add it all up to me if i had to quantify i’d say it’s probably 95 certain that jefferson and sally had this long-term relationship

19:13 that um i think is kind of interesting sally hemmings was jefferson’s late wife’s half-sister um she probably resembled thomas jefferson’s deceased wife jefferson could have dated or married any white woman he wanted and he could have had relationships with any enslaved woman

19:34 at monticello but he’s stuck with sally hemmings um i mean there there was something to that relationship i i don’t know exactly how to characterize it um but james thompson calendar thought he did um you know in 1802 um he characterized it as essentially jefferson transgressing the racial lines that were

19:55 supposed to divide black people and white people um calendar sort of invented a child of sally hemings and thomas jefferson named uh calendar gave him the nickname president tom president tom um was supposedly this uh light-skinned um you know

20:16 african-american kid who sauntered around uh charlottesville um being disrespectful to white people and and i think you know that sort of character created by calendar is at the heart of his um criticism of jefferson and hemming’s for this relationship that it

20:37 destabilized the system of white supremacy um that existed in the american south and and therefore you know southerners should repudiate thomas jefferson for doing this um jefferson for his own part though um knew that essentially if he responded in any way to these allegations

20:58 it would only fan the flames and perpetuate them um as he did in the face of many criticisms and many critics um he didn’t respond to them he remained silent um calendar and the other federalists ran out of stories to repeat and after a couple of months the um the story died down um

21:19 the republicans did really well in the midterm elections of 1802 and of course thomas jefferson in the election of 1804 um won just about every state except connecticut and delaware i mean he won massachusetts in the election of 1804 massachusetts was the federalist death star um so it really seems as if

21:39 the sally heming story didn’t do much to dent his popularity right right and as you say he kept silent and maybe counted to a hundred whenever that’s right okay well and so he uh jefferson leaves this uh just remarkable career of public service right going on on decades to retire as

22:02 washington said under his vine and fig tree at monticello uh sometimes popular farce um so and and he avoids politics and public life for for the most part and and yet he also can’t escape politics and controversy even in retirement right they sort of keep pulling them back in

22:22 uh as they say on the godfather so uh you know what’s his retirement like well it’s certainly busy i mean you know i think some people retire and they play golf and build birdhouses um and and things of that sort uh jefferson built the university of virginia among other things so he designed the

22:42 buildings he hired the faculty he selected books for the library he oversaw construction he really viewed it as the last major service that he could render his country and he said that he hoped that it would emerge as the bulwark of the human mind in this hemisphere you know he wanted it to be a true

23:04 university where all subjects could be studied and he very much wanted it to be a place where people can pursue any opinion and tolerate any error so long as reason was left free to combat it so i think he had a great vision for the university of virginia but of course

23:26 the creation of a new university in a state that already had existing universities um was controversial william and mary of course had its defenders and they feared that if this university were established it would diminish the relative importance of the college of william and mary other people in virginia suspected that

23:48 thomas jefferson would uh push his political or his religious views upon the students jefferson was always very quiet about his personal faith um but there were a number of members of the clergy including a presbyterian minister named john rice who essentially launched a crusade um against thomas jefferson in the

24:09 university of virginia most colleges of course were centered around a chapel um jefferson centered the the grounds of the university of virginia around the library um you know the centerpiece was a sort of half-scale model of the roman pantheon which was a temple to all the gods

24:30 jefferson wanted it to be a temple to knowledge so it is a pretty secular school especially in the context of the early 19th century um and you know that that sparked controversy as well right so last question um jefferson still seems to be that lightning rod in in modern discussions of of the founders

24:51 and and of the founding itself uh but but what do you think uh the life the political principles the the statesmanship of thomas jefferson and the controversy surrounding him what can that teach us today yeah it’s interesting i mean i think that history in some respects tells us more about our present

25:13 than it does about the past what i mean by that is um so last year i i edited a volume um that was published called thomas jefferson’s lives biographers in the battle for history and essentially a number of really terrific scholars wrote chapters on different biographies of thomas jefferson that

25:34 have been published um in the 19th and 20th centuries and you could see over time scholarly interpretations of thomas jefferson and his life shifting and evolving sometimes in response to the availability of new evidence but a lot of times in response to

25:54 the personal interests and concerns and agendas of the individual biographer um as well as in response to the concerns of the society for which the biography was was written and you know america right now we’re very concerned about race and um thomas jefferson of course is far

26:17 from being the only slave holder among the uh members of the founding generation but i think the fact that he wrote the declaration of independence um and also was a slave holder makes him a convenient point of contrast um between the ideals of the american revolution and the reality that this was a nation

26:40 that was emerging from and trying to liberate itself from a world and this was a world that had existed for thousands and thousands of years of profound inequality um where people thought that they could rule others by divine right where people thought that they could own others i mean

27:00 you know we view slavery as being exceptional and and it’s almost unimaginable to us thankfully you know because the american revolution eventually succeeded um for them it was hard to imagine a world without slavery and i think the liberation of the american revolution

27:21 the idea that you know 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 i mean those principles were revolutionary and they still are and we’re still trying to figure out how to make them

27:43 real in our own time very good rob mcdonald thank you so much for joining us uh the book is confounding father uh thank you so much for uh for joining us i had a lot of fun thanks tony uh if you liked this video please be sure to subscribe to our channel and offer your comments below

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