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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm Caleb Zakrin, CEO and publisher of the New Books Network. Today I'm speaking with Professor Annette Gordon Reed. Carl M. Loeb, University professor at Harvard University. Professor Gordon Reed's Pulitzer Prize winning history, the Hemingses of Monticello, An American Family chronicled the family of people who descended from Thomas Jefferson and the woman he enslaved, Sally Hemings. Professor Gordon Reed's work has upended and altered the legacy of Thomas Jefferson, pointing to the deep chasm between his words, all men are created equal and his actions enslaving human beings. For Princeton University Press, Professor Gordon Reed has assembled a reader titled Jefferson on Race. This volume brings together various documents written by and to Thomas Jefferson on the subjects of slavery and race, lifting the veil on a man who viewed himself as a progressive thinker leading America in an age of enlightenment. As we look towards the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, a document covered with Jefferson's intellectual fingerprints, it's crucial that we understand what he believed and thought beyond those idealistic words that mark the nation's creation. Jefferson is a window into the paradox of America's founding. Professor Gordon Reed is the absolute perfect guide for all us perplexed. Professor Gordon Reed, thanks so much for joining me today on the Princeton University Press Ideas podcast on the New Books Network.
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B
I'm glad to be here. Please call me Annette.
- [01:25]
A
Of course. Yeah. Thank you so much for being on. It's really such an honor to get the chance to speak with you. You've written so much about this general topic, not only related to Jefferson, but just related to this period of time in America that I think we're all, everyone in the US at least, is starting to think a lot about America's founding, America's history. With the 250th anniversary approaching, and I was wondering for you if you could just introduce yourself a little to those who don't, who aren't familiar with your work. And what brought you to studying America's history?
- [02:02]
B
Well, as you mentioned, I'm a professor at Harvard University. I'm in the law school and in the history department, but as a university professor, I'm supposed to be able to teach anywhere. Haven't done that yet, but maybe in the future I will. I a native of Texas. I grew up in Texas, went away to college in the east of Dartmouth and then went to Harvard Law School and then moved to New York. I practiced law and got into writing about Jefferson and Monticello, which was a long standing Interest of mine. I really became interested in Monticello as a child reading a biography of Jefferson, a child's biography of Jefferson. But while an adult, I wrote my first book in response to some of the criticisms that arose around a film called Jefferson in Paris, which was a story about Jefferson as minister to France. And it treated the story that he had started a relationship or whatever. We can talk about that later with Sally Hemings, when she came over with his daughter. And Sally Hemings being an enslaved woman, slave girl at the time at the plantation Monticello. And historians were saying that there was no evidence that this was true. And I knew that there was evidence. Maybe not proof, but evidence. And I really did not like the way they dismissed the words of African American people who talked about life at Monticello. So that's how I got into specifically writing about Jefferson and Monticello and slavery. I'd been reading about it on my own, just without any thought that I would ever, you know, leave practice of law and then become a historian, certainly. But that that whole episode with the movie and the response to the movie prompted me to write my first book. And after my book came out in which I suggested that the story that Jefferson had children with Sally Hemings was likely true, and the Jefferson family official story about why her children looked just like him, they were the children of his nephews, that. That was likely not true. And the following year when the book came out, there was DNA testing on descendants which corroborated what I said. So I came to being a historian and writing about all of this in kind of a quirky way. You know, I didn't go and get a PhD and work with a graduate advisor to help me with a topic and come to something. I just wrote a book. And the kind of unusual circumstances with the DNA made the book different. You know, it was something that doesn't typically happen with a historical topic. So that's how I got into writing about all this. But it's the product of a very, very longstanding interest in the subject of slavery and American history and, you know, sort of a window into trying to figure out why the country had its very complicated racial situation for when I was growing up in Texas as a black person and being an adult and experiencing the things that I experienced as an African American person living in the country. So it's been a way to try to discover America, in a sense, what this has all been about.
- [05:26]
A
Yeah, absolutely. And by the time I went to school, it was already in the wake of your work. And I'm curious what the perception, the general perception was of Jefferson, his legacy among historians, but also just his legacy among the general public before you started your work on him.
- [05:43]
B
Well, I would say there's sort of a split. Historians had already begun the process of kind of taking him off of a pedestal. To extent he'd been on a pedestal. There's a famous Atlantic cover with someone knocking Jefferson off the pedestal. And the someone was Connor Cruz o', Brien, the great Irish statesman and writer who wrote a book, the Long Affair, about Jefferson and the French Revolution. And he was knocking him off the pedestal because of his attitude about race, but also for his long support of the French Revolution, long after people had started to get killed and people whom he knew. So there was a reassessment of Jefferson going on already when I wrote my book, and it largely was in academe. I would say that members of the general public still revere Jefferson, most of them and most of them still do. But there was already a crack in academia. And the story about Sally Hemings, there was also a split because most of the general public, my impression, has been believe the story. There was a novel written by Barbara Chase Raboo called Sally Hemings that became an international bestseller. Fawn Brody's biography of Jefferson, which was the first biography to treat the story as true, was vilified by many historians, but members of the public loved it. So there was a kind of split between an academic response to him in general, but also to this specific topic about Sally Hemings. That's where we were when I wrote my first book. And things changed because of the book, but also because of the DNA. And I would say that academics kind of moved over to where the public had been on this, saying that this story was likely true. So there's been a schizophrenia about him. But that's. In all honesty, it's been that way from the very beginning. I mean, there were always people who hated Jefferson from the. From the very beginning. I mean, I mean the 18th century, 19th century, well into he's. He's a contra. He's a polarizing figure because he dominated politics. There hasn't been any president, I think, or any person who's influence lasted for so long between his election in 1800 with the broken chain of JQA, John Quincy Adams, at some point, his acolytes, his mentees or his acolytes. And Jackson thought of himself as the Jeffersonian. Nobody's amassed that kind of influence for that long a period of time. And you can't do that without making enemies. So. So he's always been a polarizing figure with most people admiring him, if not him personally admiring the breadth of his interests and the breadth of his contributions. I mean, he's sort of everywhere in the early American republic, in science and politics and just all kinds of things. He's influenced Louisiana, Lewis and Clark, you just name it, he's there. So the polarizing figure, that sort of personality, that Persona has been there from the very, very beginning and still exists today.
- [09:21]
A
Absolutely. And I think that's completely right as far as my perception of Jefferson being taught as this figure, unlike almost any other Founding Father, with just this incredible influence that lasted far beyond the founding. And part of the reason why I feel like there's interest or why it's important to discuss him right now is because of the 250th anniversary and he is seen as the primary author of the Declaration of Independence. And the words written in the Declaration of Independence are so idealistic. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about some of the source material that you were looking at, because obviously we have things like the Declaration of Independence, we have writings about him by other people. We have. You've assembled letters. How did you go about gathering information about Jefferson to actually get a hold on what he believed, what he thought of things just beyond the phrases that most Americans know him for?
- [10:23]
B
Well, I thought of dividing the book up into three sections. One, self image. What did Jefferson think that he was doing? We've spent a lot of time, I think, in recent years in particular, talking about what we think he ought to have been doing or what we think he was doing. And I wanted to try to key in on what he thought he was doing, his image of himself. So that section contains letters where we see him acting the part of the progressive, enlightened figure. He's doing things that fit with this notion of himself as this forward thinking person. Then we have section two, which is theories, where he's actually writing about race, pontificating about race, trying to be scientific, in some ways, pseudo scientific, but trying to be scientific, present himself as scientifically looking at the question of race. And that's the part that trips him up. And in notes in the state of Virginia, where he talks about African American people, Native American people and white people, European American people, and essentially is supportive of the idea of assimilation with Native Americans. They were supposed to be assimilated out that they were supposed to become white essentially and become one group of people. And African Americans whom he says we can't do that with. And he gives his reasons why we can't do that, namely among them, that he ventures it as a suspicion. He says that African American people, African people of African descent are less. Are intellectually inferior to white people. And he says it's a suspicion, but it's more than a suspicion. He had the prejudices of his time and today actually among a lot of people. And he also says that there will be conflict because whites and blacks, you know, are not going to like each other. Black people will never forgive whites for what they did, and whites will never give up their prejudices. So here he's talking openly about race and his theories. And then the last section is Actions and Interactions. And this is his actual. What he does. Not. Not just what he says, not things based upon his theory, but how he acts when he has to have things done at Monticello, when he wants to accomplish things, he can't stick. He doesn't always stick to those theories about, say, black inferiority because he has blacks doing things that require reason, require things that he says in the notes that they're incapable of doing. But he has to get stuff done, so he has to rely on them. And so his actions show a different give. A give a different picture of what is going on. Also, some of the actions are not in line with his image of himself as this benevolent person. So some of the documents could go back and forth, and between them, you know, there are no clear demarcations. But this is the best that I could do in a way of separating out, to sort of give people a shot at looking at what are his. What are all of his dealings with the question of race, even when he's not doing it explicitly corresponding with an African American person, Does he give. What kind of salutations does he give? How does he respond to them? Is he courteous in response to them? What. Or is he harsh? Whatever. It's a way of give. I would like for people to read these documents and maybe come away with their own understanding of where he is. Do you buy the fact that he thinks of himself as a progressive? Is he so far off the mark from other human beings, from all of us who have a set of intellectual beliefs that we don't, that we're emotionally unequipped to carry forward? Is he unusual? Is he really as compartmentalized as people make him out to be, that there are these huge separations? Or when we're maybe just describing a human tendency, human tendencies to have these splits in our understandings between what we say and what we do, what we think and how deeply we feel them. So I'm trying to give a. I don't necessarily want people to end up where I end up and viewing him, but to try to pull together this person who's talked about quite a bit in his attitudes about race, to pull together not everything, because you can't put all of it. And there are things that I could just kick myself and say, why isn't there. You intended to put that there, but I wanted to give as round a picture as possible so that people could try to figure out who this person was and how different was he from us other than he was. All these different roles that nobody will ever be able to do again. But in his real Persona, his basic personality, is he more like us than. Than not?
- [15:38]
A
You write in the. In the preface and the introduction a little bit about his life and his interactions with. With black people in terms of. You suggest that there's. There's no concrete evidence for it, but that he was probably first nursed by an enslaved woman and that the very. The people that he probably interacted with with enslaved people at the very. At the end of his life, too, probably some of the last people that he met. So his life really, you know, he spent a lot of time interacting with black people. And I was wondering if you could talk about some of this experience, his life experience, living on Monticello, living where he did in his life, how that sort of comes together, what we know. And then we'll get into a little bit of the letters and actual materials that he's written about.
- [16:30]
B
Well, for most of his life, Jefferson as a young person and, you know, as a boy. But then certainly, as at the head of Monticello is surrounded by upwards of 200 people of African descent all the time. And when he's not away, if the president's. The president's house or when he's in France, you know, he's obviously not, because they're not there. But when he's in Monticello, he's surrounded by black people. And one of the things that's interesting, may be interesting to Americans to think about, is that we live in a very segregated society. We are integrated, ostensibly, and people work together and sometimes go to school together. But for the most part, we socialize intraracially and we don't. We live in separate neighborhoods and so forth. And so it might be odd for people to think about a white man who is in this place surrounded by people of color, essentially, and he dominates the place because he's the legal owner and he's culturally, he's the owner. But they, the their values, their way of speech, their walking, music, all of those things are suffusing this place that he's a part of. And so they live closer white. He would have lived closer to black people and known more black people than the average white person today. How he knows them is significant because as I said, he occupies a position of power over them. But there's, you know, there's the. In the sort of day to day exchanges when he is. Madison Hemings, his son, says that he spent most of his time at Monticello, a good part of his time when he's not writing, spends most of his time is writing. But when he's out, he's among his workmen. And what that means is the people who were building the house, and those were predominantly African American people mixed with some whites. So he would have had. He would learn to deal with them on a day to day basis with a proximity that people would, not just people would experience today. And so I think he got to know people and their personalities he had for his version of affection for some of them. There's a story that's told by one of his granddaughters who said that. He talks about Jefferson's response when his manservant, a man named Burl Colbert, who was one of the closest people to him, fell ill. And his granddaughter Ellen talks about how nervous and upset Jefferson was. She was stunned. She said, I've never seen him like this, this upset. She said, I knew he felt close to Burl, but I didn't know that it was like this. And he said, what's going to happen if we wake up and Burl is dead? What's he going to do? And later on, he's at his popular. His retreat, Popular Forest. He writes back to his daughter Ellen's mother saying, Burl has been sick, but he's fine now. I mean, just from that letter, his letter, you would not know that he's been going crazy for a week about this, another person observing him. And so you can't. It's very hard to get at this kind of story just from him because he's hiding his feelings and he doesn't. Maybe that's an 18th century guy thing. You don't show emotion. You don't show how upset you are about stuff. But you get a picture of it from a granddaughter who says he was distraught this whole time. And so that gives you a glimpse of how the capacity for closeness to those people around him. Now, it doesn't say anything about the people down the mountain, but I mean the people closest to him who are the face of slavery for him, really how he saw himself as an enslaver, a benevolent. He would say person because of his connection to Burle, but you wouldn't on paper, he shouldn't be acting like that on paper. The gulf between them is too large for him to make that kind of connection. But in reality, the reality of the human interaction meant that he did respond that way. And so you get a chance to see that. And what do we make of this? The capacity for intimacy in some ways, but not enough to say, well, when he dies, he does free burrow and gives him money and a house. But before then, you would say, if you really felt that, why couldn't you free burrow? And we would say, free him and have him work for you and pay him, whatever. But in that society, he works that emotions out within the confines of this institution of slavery, which is wholly unsatisfactory to us. But that's the way he lived. And you see it just in the little things like that, that feeling of connection that somebody else observes and talks about and that he doesn't really go into himself.
- [21:58]
A
I think it's a very interesting point that you point out about how he might not express emotion, certain emotions in his own writings. I mean, you mentioned that he doesn't keep a diary. At least we don't know of a diary that he kept. So we're getting information from other people, from his letters, or having to kind of almost figure out by reading the tea leaves a bit of what he was saying. And I'm curious how Jefferson, the early, the young Jefferson, as he was sort of forming his own perspectives on the world, perspectives, Enlightenment inflected perspectives. What was influencing him? What was kind of shaping his views that would then eventually lead him to become a leader in the American Revolution?
- [22:53]
B
Well, you know, he said that Francis Bacon, Sir Isaac Newton and John Locke were his trio, the greatest men who ever lived. He lived in books. You think of somebody in the middle of Virginia, not in an urban area. He's not in London, he's not in Paris or Edinburgh. He's in a backwater, in a way. And his father had a pretty good library for somebody at that time period. And he began creating his own library as a young man, which unfortunately was destroyed. This is one of the reasons we don't know as much about Jefferson, the younger person, because his house burned down. And so letters and books were lost during that time period. Most of them were lost. But he's getting his view of the world and from books. And this is something that I don't have an answer to. And it's sort of hard to figure. I think it will be impossible to figure out because you can't figure it out with people who are alive today. Almost. It's like, how does somebody decide that they're going to be a progressive person? How does somebody decide that they're a conservative? You know, is that something that's innate? Tendencies that are innate, that get switched on in some fashion? But for whatever reason, from his readings, he accepts the idea that progress is inevitable and that he was going to be on the side of progress. Now, as we see, he was not. It was only so far he was able to go on all those things. But there were certain things that went into being a progressive person. One of them was skepticism about religion, of organized religion, because they. He thought that it promoted monkish, he would say superstition, which was anti science, which was the other thing you're supposed to be pro science. Scientific change was evidence of progress. And that's what every society should aim for, anti slavery, particularly anti slave trade, which is not the same as anti slavery. But he was an opponent of slavery. He considered himself to be an opponent of slavery. And this is the thing that people can't wrap their heads around. How are you a slave owner if you're opposed to slavery? But there are people who have this idea that they know that slavery is wrong. And he sees himself as anti slavery. So once he goes away to college, he. He meets professors who continue this tendency, you know, sort of nurture this idea of enlightenment, the importance of the Enlightenment, that this is the way it's going to go. And it's almost because he looked at the world through its scientific lens. Progress is inevitable. You should be on board. And if you're not, you're going to be left behind. And so when the revolution, when the period comes for with the conflict with Great Britain, he is firmly considering himself to be a British subject. They didn't start out saying, we're going to leave the empire. They wanted the empire to live up to what they thought was the British constitution, which he saw as progressive and that it contained the seeds for further progress. But when he determines that that's not likely, he really turns on Great Britain. And only somebody who had loved it could hate it as much as he seemed to after the conflict. And once he makes that determination, he links up this notion of Progress. With what was happening in the American Revolution, the Americans were going to be the vanguard for progress. Europe was the past. The New World was going to be. Was the hope for the future. And so it isn't just becoming a republic that's going to create their own country and their own society and go forward. It's going to be a beacon to the entire world. It's the avatar for this notion of freedom and liberty. So all of this comes together. He sees the United States as a progressive enterprise essentially and that he was going to be part of it. And that's why, as I was saying before, his hands are all everything. His fingers are in every pie, you know, that could be in. Because he wanted to see this prophecy is not the word, but his prediction about the course of progress in the world come true and he was going to help do it. So. Yeah. Why do you. I couldn't say. Well, maybe easier for me to say why I might consider myself to be a progressive person or why other people become conservative. But that's the. There's no one thing. But the notion of being on the cutting edge of science and the cutting edge of the future was very appealing to him. He tried to live that way, even though in many ways he wasn't. Certainly wasn't. He was equipped to do the religion thing, he was equipped to do the science thing, but not equipped to do the anti slavery thing beyond. Beyond rhetoric. He wasn't going to give up the institution on his own.
- [28:28]
A
And that's quite similar to the person that you talk about being his mentor, George Wythe. What impact did Wythe have on Jefferson?
- [28:37]
B
Oh, huge import. He said he was this teacher. Ancient. Ancient mentor. Ancient teacher. My dear friend. They were at. He studied law. His name is With George With. He studied law under with longer than most people. Jefferson was there for like five years and for some people it could be a few months or a year or so. So he had a huge influence on him and he helped create the first professorship in law for with later on, you know, in Virginia at William and Mar. They corresponded up until with death and he was just an enormous influence on him. But with was similar like although with did free his slaves but with never didn't have a big plantation or anything like that. But he did have individual enslaved people whom he freed. So he was able to. He did that. He followed through on his anti slavery rhetoric. But with very definitely influenced Jefferson on that score.
- [29:41]
A
Other section that you have in this book are correspondences with Benjamin Banneker. If I'm pronouncing that correctly, who is Banneker and what was the relationship that he had with Jefferson? And what does it sort of reveal further about Jefferson's interactions?
- [30:01]
B
Well, Banneker was a free black man. He was half white, his mother was white, and he was an astronomer. He wrote an almanac. And the almanac is the occasion for his correspondence with Jefferson in the beginning of the 1790s, where he writes to Jefferson, who's Secretary of State, and says, here's my, you know, my almanac, sort of proof of essentially the proof of the talents of African people, people of African descent. And he talks to Jefferson about the institution of slavery, and he uses the Declaration of Independence to make an argument against slavery. And he quotes Jefferson's words back to him and says, the Americans, they've gotten freedom for themselves, and now they should turn to the institution of slavery and end that as well. And here's my almanac. Jefferson writes back to him, thanks him for the almanac, and basically says, well, I like to see black people doing stuff, you know, the sort of polite response to him, and signs it your most obedient and humble servant, which was the normal sign out. It doesn't mean anything any more than yours truly or, you know, sincerely. And when the correspondence is made public, which was always intended, Banneker and Andrew Ellicott, who was a sponsor of his, always wanted this to be public when the letters were made public, some people are really critical of Jefferson for signing off in that way, saying, you're my most obedient, humble servant, and criticizing him for actually believing that Banneker had. Banneker had actually prepared the almanac himself instead of somebody else and put his name on it. And so he's excoriated for that. He does arrange to have Banneker work on the Capitol, got a job working on the new Capitol, which would be in Washington, moving from Philadelphia. And in later years, when people ask him about Banneker, he kind of backtracks and basically says, well, it's possible that somebody else did, you know, somebody else actually did the almanac. So I think that's really interesting that in a moment of trying to make himself to ingratiate himself with Banneker, he compliments Banneker and acts as if he believes it. But the moment he gets criticism on it, about it, the criticism stung and he. And he offers up, well, maybe he didn't do it on his own, but that was part of the criticism, the insistent criticism he got when the letters became public. So I think that's an insight to him, into him, into him as well, because he's very, very attuned and very solicitous of the feelings of his neighbors, of people in Virginia and people around. That's why he was a popular politician. But I think that's one of the reasons that he did not go as far as he could have gone, certainly in fighting against slavery because he knew, in fighting against slavery or also particularly fighting against slavery because he knew that there was such opposition to it. He was very, very keen on. On not losing support from people. And so it shows you in a way he was weak in that sense when people, you know, if there were things that he really, really believed and he was adamant about, he could hold firm. But on the question of race and on the question of slavery, he understood his cohort and he listened to them more than we wish he had because it led him not to be as firm on these questions as he could have been.
- [34:12]
A
The section actions and interactions is really interesting because it shows, I mean, much like the conversation with Banneker, it shows him in a more day to day light. And there's so many conversations that he has with various, various members of the Hemings family. I'm wondering if you talk a little bit about some of these letters and what you found particularly interesting in them. You know, like some of the. He has lots of conversations, you know, back and forth with, you know, James Hemings, for example. What did you find in some of these interactions with the Hemings family?
- [34:57]
B
Well, particularly with John Hemings the carpenter who is very. Spent a lot of his time out at Poplar Forest, Jefferson's retreat from Monticello. Jefferson left Monticello in retirement. He had so many people were coming to visit that he basically established a second home to get away from all of these people and in order to prepare the place, John Hemings and Madison Hemings and Esten and Beverly Hemings, the. The sons who were apprenticed to John Hemings would go to Poplar Forest and work on the house. What I found interesting about that and the sort of complexity of relationships and it makes you think about, made me think about my understandings about slavery and my reactions to people is there's one letters where John Hemings is complaining about another enslaved man who is stealing vegetables from the kitchen garden. And he tells on. He writes to Jefferson to say, you know, Nace is. He is stealing these vegetables. And I remember when I was reading that the first time I read that many years ago, I was really angry at John Hemings upon reading and Think, why are you ratting out your. Your fellow enslaved person here? What. What is going on here? You know, why are you telling. Why are you running? And tell Jeff telling on this man to. To Thomas Jefferson? And then I thought about it more and I thought, well, the vegetables are for John Hemings and other people there, and what is he supposed to do? He obviously tried at some level to deal with the perpetrator on his own, and it wasn't working. So, you know, it's easy for me to say from my position in 2008 or 2006 or 2007 when I'm writing this, what difference do the vegetables make? But for this person, this is their food and they're supposed to be for them as well. My idea of solidarity isn't the same. They didn't have the same sense of solidarity that I have. But I also am not in that position. So it made me sort of illuminating to really try to put yourself into the shoes of the people who are there, not just me grafting my understanding about all of this onto them. You know, what would it be like to be a person who is at their within with somebody stealing things? Do you not try to stop it or do you sacrifice? What do you do? Some people might say, well, yeah, you do sacrifice. But the point is, the question is raised, that correspondence made me think about things in a different sort of way. So you get a sense of the loyalty that John Hemings felt to Jefferson in the sense that he was going to help solve this particular problem. And that's just difficult to take. I mean, as an African American person, seeing this person respond this way wasn't easy. But I also have to be realistic about people who are in situations that are almost unimaginable for me. And to say how he should have responded to that is, you know, doesn't really take into account the world that they're actually living in. So that kind of correspondence, you see a level of trust and a sense of responsibility on the part of Jefferson and John Hemings. That is sort of a glimpse into their connection. But at the same time, it makes you think. It also opens up how awful slavery is in another way, because they should have been able to. To connect to each other without the institution of slavery. I mean, he could have been getting paid regular wages for his working, being a free man and all that could have been there. But slavery taints all of. Makes you suspicious of the connection, and it has to be tainted because of the fact that it was an inhumane institution. So you feel sorry For John Hemings, for being put in that kind of situation.
- [39:39]
A
Another Hemings, James Hemings, who had served as the cook for Jefferson and traveled with him extensively. There's letters referencing his suicide.
- [39:50]
B
Oh, yeah.
- [39:51]
A
And I was wondering what those letters reveal because it seems that, you know, obviously, you know, he was in quite a bad state, but also, you know, he had a kind of a conflicting and complicated, very complicated relationship with Jefferson. Obviously. James Hemmings is, I believe, almost credited for introducing fine French cooking into the. Into America.
- [40:20]
B
Yeah, it's a sad story. James Hemings is, you know, for people who read the Hemings is a Monticello. Many of them say that James is their favorite person because he's such a tragic figure. He was Sally Hemings brother. He was the son of John Wales, Jefferson's father in law. Because Sally Hemings and James Hemings were Jefferson's wife's siblings. They had the same father, something that happened in slavery quite often. And James Hemings, you know, he had. He was trained, he was literate. We have a cop copies of his list of all of the kitchen utensils that he brought back that were brought back from France when they came back from France in 1789. Very nice handwriting and nice spelling and so forth. So he was literate. And he and Jefferson kind of ended on not great terms because Jefferson frees him. But when Jefferson became president, he won. And he was going to come back to the White House, he wanted James Hemings to join him at the White House as the cook. And he writes, he designated a person to go out and find the household staff. And this person writes to James Hemings and contacts him and tells him that President Jefferson wants you to come back and work. And James Hemings says that he will not come back. He wants Jefferson to write to him and ask and not send through a third party. And Jefferson just doesn't respond to that. And he actually ends up just hiring somebody else to be the chef. They make up in some way because this is in the spring, just before Jefferson is supposed to go and take office, Go to become president. Hemings comes back to work at Monticello for a few months before this. So after the tiff about coming, not writing to him, he comes back to Monticello and works as a chef for time. And then he kills himself not long after that. He drank. Apparently he was an alcoholic. That seemed to be sort of figure into his circumstances. I've tried to find out what I could more about the suicide. There's a letter that explains all of this. That is no longer extant. Jefferson hired to ask somebody. Hired somebody to go and find out what happened. And evidently the report on all of that was given was. Was created, but it's. It's missing. And we don't know whether it was just lost or was deliberately destroyed or whatever. But that's. That's a mystery that hopefully, maybe one day we might be. You can't say never, but doesn't seem likely to be. To be solved. But it's a very. It's a tough situation. He'd known James Hemings the first since he was a little boy. The first references to him are in Jefferson's memorandum books, where he talks about paying James Hemings money to buy it to catch mockingbirds. Jefferson liked mockingbirds with his favorite pets, and so he would have James, as a little boy, catch them and pay him for it. So this is somebody that he had watched grow up and become this talented person who goes off to France with him, comes to France with him, becomes a great chef. And we have some of his recipes left. And when he comes back and he's showcased. His cooking is showcased in Philadelphia when Jefferson's Secretary of State, he's the chef there, and he introduces people to a particular kind of French cuisine and teaches people in Monticello that as well. And it becomes very, very well known for the kinds of dinners that were put on there. So a complicated character. He would make a wonderful play. And he always. When people do fictionalized accounts of this story, and there are many, he always figures prominently because of his unusual circumstances, the circumstances of his life, going to France and becoming a chef and then think of coming back to the United States where black men have no, you know, real shot at any kind of being treated with dignity. And you can see how that could cause him to fall into alcoholism and to fall into depression as well.
- [45:11]
A
Yeah, certain, certainly. And that a. A. It is quite tragic to, you know, to read those. Those letters about his suicide. And, you know, the only document that pertains directly to Sally Hemings is a passport issued to her. There's no record of letters. I'm, you know, assume she. She couldn't. Couldn't write, read or write. And just seeing. Seeing sort of Sally missing from here is really, I feel like almost says something. The sight, the sort of the silence of the archive is.
- [45:51]
B
Oh, absolutely.
- [45:53]
A
Very loud.
- [45:54]
B
Yeah. Because if you think about it, I mean, the brothers are talked about quite a bit. You know, there are references to them, even her sisters in some way. There are references, but she is Jefferson's daughter's companion and she disappears from. From, you know, records. She's not in the records anymore. She's not written about. And you get a sense that the family buries. The intention always was to bury this story. So you don't talk about them very much and don't talk about, you know, her in any way that could allow people to connect dots. And it is, you know, that's the frustrating thing. So we will never. We won't know what it was like. I do know that some years ago, just a few years ago, some people, I think it was in Kentucky or Tennessee, some descendants, legal descendants of Jefferson wrote to Monticello or contacted them and said, you know, we have all these notes, letters from Patsy Jefferson, Jefferson's older daughter, to some of her friends when they were. When she was in boarding school in France. And this was just a few years ago. So they had all of these letters, these notes that girls sent to each other. You know, they fold them up, the paper up quite a bit and they were in Tupperware, and they said, do you want these? And they're like, yeah, yeah, we want them. And there are all these letters in French and there were all kinds of things that they found out that they didn't know that had just been mentioned in these letters. So there's always possible that there's something out there somewhere that people haven't given over yet. And historians always hope for that. But you can't hold our breath on that one. But it's not impossible that there might not be something somewhere that there could be references because he corresponded with Robert Hemings, one of James and Sally's other brother, oldest brother, and those letters are gone. Jefferson kept a record, a summary journal of letters, the SJL of every letter that he sent out and every letter that came in. So we know that they're letters. There's correspondence between Jefferson and Robert Hemings, but it's no longer extant. And so you gotta think in that they took place in different years. It's not like they were all in one section and that section got lost. So I have a suspicion, though I can't prove it, that there might have been some culling going on when grandchildren went through his letters to prepare them for publication. Things that might be, if not, yeah, might be too revealing in a way. I wonder if that did not happen because I. I do think it's suspicious that all of those letters are gone. But I would have, obviously would have loved to had that. That's the. That would have made this Volume, you know, even better if I had access to those kinds of things. But we, you never know. Maybe they might turn up someday.
- [49:14]
A
Yeah, I mean, I didn't, I didn't count the number of letters and documents in this collection. I think there, I mean there are. Seems like easily over 200, 300 documents. So, you know, it's certainly there's a lot of material here, but you know, it's this sort of thing where it's almost like, you know, with these letters, you, those, there'll be references to certain things or certain occurrences and then you'll have the follow up letter. But then there's, there's like almost a gap where you have to either fill in the gaps or you just have to, you know, we're left wondering what happened or what was said. And, and then, and you do get like the little, you know, sort of like tastes of Jefferson, the person throughout and the people that, that he was spending time with. You, in addition to, to looking at Jefferson's views on slavery, you, you, you also feature documents that are, you know, that explore his perspective on Native Americans. You know, there are letters with Meriwether Lewis. So if you just share a little bit about what some of these documents reveal about his ideas.
- [50:21]
B
Well, they show that he, as I may have indicated a little bit earlier, that he had a very different attitude about Native Americans. He romanticized Native Americans. He considered themselves, he considered them to be at. He followed Scottish stadial theory that their stages of development, you know, from, you know, hunter gatherers to, you know, pastoral stage to farming to industrialization, and they were at a particular stage and eventually they would catch up to Europeans. And he had no qualms about the idea of intermarriage. And that was going to be the solution. They were going to be assimilated or they would be exterminated. That was his understanding about it. Because Europeans were going to come and the settlers were not going to stop and the government wouldn't be able to stop them even if they tried. So they were either going to have to get with the program, which would be farming, give up hunting and give up the hunt and start farming land. And then they could marry and intermarry and eventually they would disappear. Well, of course, Native peoples didn't want to disappear. That was not a bargain that they really wanted. But he had this romanticization of them. He was very, very upset by a theory by Count de Buffon, who was a naturalist, who said that everything in the New World deteriorated. I was smaller and would deteriorate and that meant not just plants, but animals and which would include Native Americans. So for Jefferson, in some ways, he's defending America by defending Native Americans to say, look at them, they're attractive people, they are up and coming people, and they live. They're natural to this place. And they are not degenerating. As a matter of fact, they're getting better and we're going to help them get better and so forth. So blacks and Native Americans were very different. And so you see him romanticizing them, but at the same level, at the same time saying, they're gonna go because they'll be bred out. And so there's this dual understanding about admiring them in the state now, but wanting them to be something else because he didn't see how they could continue living the hunter gatherer kind of lifestyle in the face of settlers coming over. So we see him dealing with Native Americans as president, talking to his friends. Well, John Adams, in one letter, after they had started corresponding again after being estranged, talking about the way he felt about them as a young man, that he'd always admired them and so forth. But there's also the Jefferson who is talking about trying to get land from them, you know, to basically however you could do it, you know, if they, obviously, if they resist, if they fight us, then we're going to fight back diligently with it, or we're going to take over the land that way, or we'll purchase it from them. But it was clear that their way of life had to go and it would either be through assimilation. We will become Americans, our blood will be. Will mix, and we will all be. We shall be Americans, is the phrase he uses. And he didn't, he couldn't say that about African American people, even though he did mix blood and other people whom he knew, members of his family did. But that took place under slavery and, and under conditions that were shameful.
- [54:18]
A
The pattern with Jefferson seems to be that in aspects of his writing and aspects of his ideals and even aspects of his emotional life, he comes across to modern readers as a person with sympathy that was more, more enlightened than, than his, than his other, you know, fellow slaveholders. But then, of course, there's always that, but with him, there's that but of just his actions and what then the other, you know, his, then his almost walking back, you know, his fear of, of being criticized and his desire to try and position his arguments of slavery as more palatable to the people around him.
- [55:11]
B
It is, it's interesting that I was talking to somebody the other day about how he's playing to an audience. Right. And I think it ties into his notion of progress and his desires about his legacy. I think he clearly thinks that one day in the future people are going to understand that slavery was wrong and that he wanted to be seen as a person who knew that. So he's playing to. And this exasperates people. People say that, well, that means he didn't really mean it. I don't think that's true. I think it means he knew that it was wrong. He didn't have the emotional capacity to do stuff about it in his lifetime. But he wants us. He thinks that in the future there's going to be. People will look back and say who was on the right side. I don't think history has a side of history, but it has a right side or wrong side. I think he thought that there was a right side of history and he wanted people to think he was on it. Even though he wasn't capable of doing everything that was needed in order to be on the right side of history. He just said these things. And at the end of his life, when he makes out a will to and he frees the five people that he ends up freeing, he asks the legislature to allow them to remain in the state because you had to do that or else they would be re enslaved after a year. Because. And he says this is. Because this is where their families and their connections are. So it's like the people, you know, they get to stay in America. They get to stay. You understand that their connection to this place is real and you care about their connection to this place. Well, you could say that about all African American people and other people who had the same kind of connections to blacks that he did. So again, he's a politician working through a community, working to be satisfactory to the community that he relied on for his power and, and for his, well, sense of belonging. But at the same time, he's trying to signal to us to a future that he was thinking about things in the right way. And it's. No, it's just not satisfactory to people. I mean, it's exasperating to care about your legacy. But again, most people said didn't do that kind of playing. They just said, I think slavery's fine, or I'm not, I'm not playing to. To a future. I do think he thought there was going to be progress and he wanted to be seen as a person who pushed it forward.
- [58:01]
A
Yeah, I do feel that, you know, the, the kind of the contradictions of his. How he thought. How he thought about slavery and how he thought about race, I think is extremely revealing, you know, of how. I mean, I think you're. Like you said, just how people are in general. Like, obviously, slavery is an extreme. Is a very extreme case of oppression. But I, you know, I do feel that this, this. This kind of tension of wanting to be perceived as good and on the right side, and then also, you know, you know, today, participating in aspects of, you know, everything from, you know, sweatshop labor to. To other forms of oppression, there's almost similarities that I feel like make us similar to Jefferson in a way.
- [58:57]
B
We figure out some way to bridge that gap between thoughts and actions and beliefs and actions. And most people don't go far from the community that they metaphorically or actually in the community that raised them. I mean, it's very hard to leave all of that stuff behind. Not an excuse, but it's just. It's an observation that that's what human beings really have to. To fight, to be courageous in lots of ways, and it doesn't always work.
- [59:28]
A
So with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, you know, Jefferson, we're going to be thinking about Jefferson's words, we're going to be thinking about his ideals. And, you know, you've also done a lot of work not just on Jefferson's words and his ideals, but also Jefferson the man. And I'm wondering, you know, if you almost have a message to listeners about how they can approach this anniversary when talking with people about how they might think about it and also how they might interact with this reader that you've put together, what type of work you see as being valuable that people can do with it to move it forward to improve our understanding of America's legacy.
- [60:15]
B
Well, a couple of things I think, and I've said this before, I probably think more about Jefferson's words in the grievances this year than the beginning. I mean, the preamble, the one that everybody focuses on, remain important, and I'll talk about that in a second. But the grievances, what compelled people to rebel against what they thought was overreaching by a government and overreaching by a king, I think is very meaningful for this particular moment. The list of things that are wrong, that are mentioned there that have resonance for today, we're questioning whether or not the American republic will continue and in what form will it continue. Will it be competitive or authoritarianism or whatever they call it? Would it be a Republican in the sense that we've had it or tried to make it, because it doesn't really become a democratic, fully democratic society until 1965 with the voting Rights act. And now we're kind of backtracking on that. But would we continue this notion of trying to open up America to everybody and other marginalized groups within society? Or we'll go to something like Hungary, which has turned its back on the trajectory it was on so far. It has. So that's a real question is if republican, we keep it. That was supposed to be Benjamin Franklin's answer to the woman who asked. Apocryphal, maybe or not. But it illustrates the point that republics are fragile. And I think the grievances in the Declaration should be looked at now on that particular point. How do you keep a republic? How do you keep authoritarianism out of the mix here for a society that rejected monarchy and decided that they wanted to do something different? The reader is important because it talks about race and the attitude that Jefferson had about race, which I think as painful as it could be for people and as deplorable as some people find it is realistic. It really gets at the question, how do you deal with a group of people who were forced here, who didn't ask to come here, who were forced here, but who nevertheless have families and connections here? Because we've been here longer than many of the people who. Certainly the people who arrived at the end of the 19th century, in the beginning of the 20th century, as image during the great wave of immigration. Most African American people's families have been here since the 1730s. So there's no other homeland for us. We are. James Baldwin said, if the Negro is not an American, there is no such thing as an American. But nevertheless, because we are a racial minority, how do we get assimilated into this society? And at what level does that take place? So I think the first part of it, I think who we are as Americans is very much a function of how we understand race and how it should be played out in American society. So I think we'll be thinking about. It should be thinking about the preamble. All men are created equal. What black people, gay people, women, all people have made, who felt marginalized, have used to make a place for themselves in the United States. And we should think about the grievances, the political nature of a republic, what are citizens responsibilities, how do we rein in too much power? So I think the whole thing is up for grabs in ways that it hasn't been in years past. Something for us to think about, the grievances and the preamble.
- [64:19]
A
I think that's such fantastic advice. You know, I. I certainly feel. I can't remember the last time I actually, like, really sat down and studied the Declaration of Independence. It's almost like sometimes it's like, with these docu. These historical documents, it's like you read it once and then you kind of think you know it, and it's just like. It's almost like wallpaper. You forget. You forget what it's actually about, what the. What the essence is. And, I mean, what's interesting, too, is you have, you know, there's the markings of the, you know, drafts in here as well, and the. The thoughts that were going into it. And I. I think that, you know, like you said, like, people have been able to use the Declaration for hundreds of years to further that the mission of. Of equality, even if the person who wrote it believed it, but also didn't exactly believe it. So it's. It's an interesting. It's just a fascinating paradox, I think, at the heart, and I think that this is a fantastic reader. I think anyone interested in American history will find it very valuable. Anyone interested in Jefferson and the Hemingses will find it extremely valuable. And what's revealed to me, too, based on talking with you and just reading this, is that there's still so much work to be done on this topic, and there's. Sometimes it feels like, you know, where American history as a field is. Is almost dying in a way that it's not that there. Obviously, there are amazing historians still working, but in. In a way, it's.
- [65:48]
B
You know, it's under attack.
- [65:50]
A
It's deeply under attack. And it's. It's being. It's. It's become deeply. It's politicized. It's everything. Everything about it. It's hard to. To engage with it, but it's. So it makes it more important than ever, I think, to engage in it, too. And I really think you, you know, your career is a testament to that. So. Yeah. So, Professor Gordon Reed, it was really absolutely fantastic to get the opportunity to speak with you about this book. And thank you so much for being a guest.
- [66:14]
B
Oh, thanks for inviting me. This is such a great idea.