Thomas Jefferson with Christa Dierkshielde & Nicholas Guyatt

Summary

This Guy Sucked: Thomas Jefferson with Christa Dierksheide & Nicholas Guyatt

Podcast: This Guy Sucked
Host: Dr. Claire Aubin (A)
Guests: Prof. Christa Dierksheide (C), Prof. Nicholas Guyatt (B)
Date: July 28, 2026
Episode Theme: Rethinking Thomas Jefferson's Legacy – From “Paradox” to “Racial Exclusionist”
Book Discussed: Jefferson’s Wolf: A Founding Father’s Troubling Answer to the Problem of Slavery

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Episode Overview

This episode brings two leading Jefferson scholars, Christa Dierksheide and Nicholas Guyatt, onto the show to discuss their new book, Jefferson’s Wolf, and to critically reframe Thomas Jefferson’s legacy. Rather than rehashing familiar stories or dismissing Jefferson as simply a “paradox,” the conversation robustly investigates his deep commitment to white supremacy, his lifelong advocacy of racial exclusion, and the persistent American mythologies that excuse or obscure these facts. The discussion seeks to move beyond vague accusations of hypocrisy and instead unpacks the logic, context, and impact of Jefferson’s ideas—especially his fixation on “removal,” or the forced expulsion of Black Americans from the nation.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. How We Remember Jefferson

• Common Understandings (08:20):

  • Most know Jefferson as author of the Declaration of Independence & third president, but often with blurry details (many confuse him with the author of the Constitution).
  • Few know the specific, troubling aspects of his views and actions on slavery and race.

• Paradox Debunked (09:42):

  • Guyatt: “A lot of the listeners... are gonna be like, oh, Thomas Jefferson sucks. Tell me something I don't know. ...We’re gonna tell you some new ways in which he sucked... The guy isn’t paradoxical... You can make a lot of sense of apparently contradictory positions... if you actually do a little more digging and figure out what he actually thought about Black people, what he actually thought about equality, and crucially, what he thought would be the outcome... after slavery.”

2. Rejecting Hagiography: Jefferson as Just ‘Some Guy’

• Understanding Historical Figures (12:24, 13:16):

  • Dierksheide: The myth of Jefferson’s “unknowability” props up hagiography (“he’s this almost godlike figure... mere mortals can’t know him”), when in fact historians’ job is to put such figures “under a microscope.”
  • Aubin: “Approaching historical figures as just some guy... their motivations are in fact, able to be deciphered...”

• Talking to & About Others (14:08, 16:45):

  • Guyatt tells the JFK “most brilliant dinner” anecdote to illustrate how we “freeze” certain figures out of historical conversations, undermining the context of their failures as well as successes.

3. Jefferson’s Relationships, Family, and Presence

• Neglect of ‘Surrounding’ People (17:37, 18:54):

  • Dierksheide highlights how standard works discuss Jefferson-and-slavery as if he was “speaking to himself in an empty room,” ignoring hundreds of enslaved people he lived among.
  • Aubin: On Washington, Billy Lee, the valet always by his side (“...wild to me that in paintings... he’s supposed to be in, but... just imagined to not have had an impact... Seems insane.”)

• Jefferson’s Own Family (19:40):

  • Dierksheide: “He never acknowledged his children with Sally Hemings... We haven’t included them in the same frame with Jefferson... he’s cordoned himself off from his African American family... I think that kind of thing really needs to be changed.”

4. Jefferson’s Life and Perspective

• Two Crucial Traits (22:10, 27:27):

  • Long-Lived: Born 1743, died 1826, Jefferson was a British subject for over 30 years (22:18). He witnessed the Haitian Revolution, War of 1812, rise of domestic slave trade, etc.
  • Provincialism: Though famous as a cosmopolitan, he was mostly tethered to Virginia; never ventured west, limited firsthand understanding of expanding slavery outside Virginia (“He can only imagine it. And that lack of real knowledge... really inhibits him...” - C, 27:40).

• No ‘Abolitionist Arc’ (23:38-27:22):

  • Aubin notes misconception: Did Jefferson become more enlightened? No—if anything, he “backslides.” He never embraces Black inclusion, and over time becomes more draconian (“...willing to amend some of his earlier prescriptions... willing to simply deport people.” - C, 24:32).

5. The Wolf: Jefferson’s Guiding Metaphor

• What is “Jefferson’s Wolf”? (30:00–34:53)

  • Guyatt explains three strategies for ending slavery: (1) immediate emancipation, (2) gradual emancipation, (3) emancipation with “colonization” (forced removal)—Jefferson is the “OG” of the third.
  • Dierksheide: Title “Jefferson’s Wolf” references his metaphor: “We have the wolf by the ear, we can neither hold him nor safely let him go.” For Jefferson, the “wolf” represents the security threat he sees in Black people: both enslaved and especially freed. The metaphor reveals that for Jefferson, the problem isn’t the injustice of slavery, but the supposed threat Black people pose if free.

  “The security issue... is what frames the issue of slavery for him... He doesn’t think about it [only] in moral terms... the security dilemma, the threat not just to white enslavers’ lives, but to the nation... is the most critical.” – C, 33:44

  • Aubin interjects: Jefferson’s metaphor is not original—drawn from Suetonius on Tiberius (“he is putting himself in conversation with other ‘great men’”).

• Letting Go of the Wolf (34:53–37:17):

  • Guyatt: Unlike Jefferson, many contemporaries favored “letting the wolf go” (better the ‘danger’ of free Black people than holding onto slavery). Jefferson insisted both were equally dangerous, justifying his paralysis and his program of removal.

6. Removal: Jefferson’s Program for Racial Exclusion

• Removal as the ‘Solution’ (40:47–48:50):

  • Guyatt: Plan (articulated in Notes on the State of Virginia, 1785) was to free enslaved people (upon adulthood), educate them, and ship them elsewhere—probably Africa or the Caribbean.

  • Aubin compares to global examples: “There are... people... whose idea for solving... a racial problem... is: let’s just send them somewhere else.... The kind of uniting force here is... just racism... but it is interesting to be like, yeah, Thomas Jefferson also thinks this way.” (43:04)

  • Guyatt clarifies: “Not all advocates... would style themselves as racist... But for Thomas Jefferson, he... has a pretty heavy and involved description of black racial inferiority... Then the mad part is... They’ve got to be smart enough... to be able to set up their own colony...” (44:03)

• Population Logistics & Replacement (45:49–52:00):

  • Dierksheide: Removal envisioned as a “reversal of the transatlantic slave trade.”
  • “Part of the plan: send the ships to Europe to pick up laborers to fill the labor vacuum.” (46:55, C)
  • Guyatt: “Jefferson is a replacement theorist... his plan is to replace half a million black people with half a million white Europeans.” (49:58)
  • As slave trade expanded rapidly in Jefferson’s era, he regarded large population movement as plausible—even as logistics made it absurd; yet, “he carried on believing in it for another 25 years” after its clear impracticality.

7. Wolf by the Ear as Alibi—Why Jefferson Does Not Deserve Excuse

• The Suffering ‘Paradox’ Argument (52:35–55:04):

  • The “wolf by the ear” phrase is often used by apologists to paint Jefferson as tragic, trapped, or forced by circumstance.
  • Guyatt: “Jefferson had no vision of inclusion that he was desperately trying to make work... Exclusion was the goal for him... If we can recognize him for what he wanted and what he tried to make happen, rather than assume that everyone who's trying to end slavery... would have black citizenship... we’ll understand the founding much, much better.”

• What About the Good Founders? (55:04–57:55):

  • Dierksheide: “There was no promise. Right. Because they didn’t imagine [Black people] as belonging to the nation they just founded.”
  • Other Founders, like John Adams, made different choices. The idea that all Founders were equally trapped is absurd—regional and personal differences were (and are) real. Lemuel Haynes, a Black activist, rebutted the Declaration in 1776, imagining a truly universal definition of American citizenship (56:42).

• Federal vs. State Approaches (57:55–59:51):

  • The struggle over slavery was deeply shaped by state-level demographics and priorities.

8. Jefferson’s Legacy: He Lost

• Guyatt’s Closing Point (60:59):

  “Thomas Jefferson didn’t win... he didn’t win partly because he couldn’t persuade even the black people he enslaved to agree with the idea that they should leave the United States on being freed. ...He loses. This argument is really important.”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the “Paradox” Myth:

  “He wasn’t a sphinx, and the guy isn’t paradoxical. You can make a lot of sense of apparently contradictory positions…[if you see that] he was a racial exclusionist and a white supremacist.” – Guyatt, 09:42

• On Jefferson’s Hero Worship:

  “He’s this almost godlike figure who we just can’t touch, you know, mere mortals can’t know him.” – Dierksheide, 12:24

• Declining Enlightenment:

  “It seems like his evolution is not like that… it seems to me that in some cases 1760s and set through 1780s, Jefferson… is more antislavery than like 1810s Jefferson. So he has like some backsliding…” – Aubin, 23:38

• Wolf by the Ear:

  “We have the wolf by the ear. We can neither hold him nor safely let him go.” – Dierksheide, 33:01 (quoting Jefferson)

• Parallel to Modern “Replacement Theory”:

  “Jefferson is a replacement theorist... his plan is to replace half a million black people with half a million white Europeans.” – Guyatt, 49:58

• On Complicity and Choices:

  “Other people he's talking to, he clearly thinks are worthy of conversation. We should also think of them as people that are worth thinking about...” – Aubin, 15:35

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Important Timestamps

• 00:00–07:20 – Icebreaker, 4th of July talk, and context for Jefferson scholarship
• 08:20–13:16 – What most people know (and don’t) about Jefferson; problems with “paradox” thinking
• 13:16–19:40 – “Approaching historical figures as just some guy”; reframing Jefferson through those around him, including the enslaved & his own (unacknowledged) family
• 22:10–27:40 – Jefferson’s life as British subject, lack of typical “abolition arc,” and his provincial, Virginia-centered worldview
• 30:00–37:17 – "Jefferson’s Wolf” explained: origins, metaphor, limits of the “security” argument
• 40:47–52:00 – The logic, logistics, and racism behind “removal”; Jefferson’s exclusion—his real solution
• 53:14–57:46 – Why the “paradox” argument is wrong; the unfulfilled promise of Declaration’s equality; the need to celebrate (and recognize) those who had a wider moral vision
• 60:59 – Jefferson lost: He could not realize his plan, and even those he enslaved refused it

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Episode Takeaways

• Jefferson’s “Paradox” is no paradox:—His beliefs and actions followed a knowable, consistent (if deeply racist) logic of exclusion, not tortured contradiction.
• His ultimate solution was not emancipation with inclusion, but removal and replacement, underpinned by white supremacist thinking.
• The “wolf by the ear” metaphor reveals a core commitment to white security, not a troubled conscience.
• Jefferson’s vision lost. The voices of those he excluded (including Black activists of his era) deserve central attention in rethinking the Founding.
• The episode reminds us to discard myths of unique Founders’ virtue or enlightenment, and to see them—and those they spoke with and over—as comprehensible, fallible, and deeply consequential “guys.”

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For further discussion, check out Jefferson's Wolf (linked in the show description) or reach out to the authors via academia or social media as noted on the show.

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End of Summary

Transcript

[A]

A list of sensitive themes and topics included in this episode can be found in the episode description. Welcome to this Guy Sucked, the show where we prove that it's never too late to have haters and you can't libel the dead. I'm. I'm your host, Dr. Claire Aubin, and I'm a historian, writer, and most importantly, as we all know, certified hater. On this show, we talk about people from throughout history with legacies that need a little updating. Whether it's because of their politics, their behavior, or their impact on society and culture, these guys actually kind of sucked. And we bring in a new scholar, or in this case, scholars every week to tell us why. With me today are Christa Dierksheide, who is a professor of history and director of the center for the Study of the Age of Jefferson. Wow. Long title at the University of Virginia, and Nicholas, aka, I'm told, Nick Guyett, who is a professor of North American history at the University of Cambridge. They have both written a bunch of very important history books that I encourage you to go check out. And too many for me to list, I think, here. But they are here with me today because they have co authored a new book which has just come out and which I finished last night and we were talking about when you all couldn't hear it. Jefferson's a founding father's troubling answer to the problem of slavery. And that's a little bit of a spoiler for. For the episode, but welcome to the show, Krista and Nick.

[B]

Hi, Claire.

[C]

Thanks so much for having us.

[A]

Thanks. I always start with a little bit of a patter question to ease us in. And I think it's only fitting, given the timing and the topic to ask how did you all spend the fourth of July, which was three days ago when we are recording this.

[C]

Do you wanna go first, Nick?

[B]

I think, I mean, you're actually in the United States. I'm here in the uk. Like, you need to take this one.

[C]

Yeah. So I was in Charlottesville, Virginia, not to let the cat out of the bag, but right where Jefferson lived most of his life. And I spent the 4th of July doing 4th of July stuff in that town.

[B]

Yeah, that sounds abstemious. Relatively speaking. I mean, I can tell you a week ago, Claire, a week ago I was at the U.S. ambassador's 250th July 4th party headlined by Tim McGraw. But here's the nuts thing, because it was Bren. Like, nobody knew who he was.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

So it was crazy because I don't know if he played Taylor Swift's Wedding this past weekend, although everyone said he was about to. But, yeah, literally all these kind of, like, guys from, I don't know, palantir or BP or whatever walking past with drinks. Tim McGraw is playing the hit. So, like, who is that guy? So that was my 250th moment, and

[A]

you're like, you don't know anything about America, and if you did, this would be a much crazier experience for.

[B]

I felt like it was polite to listen to the guy. Right. But then, you know, I wasn't one of these corporate people, so. Yeah.

[A]

Well, I'm glad to hear nobody was, like, in D.C. getting heat stroke or exploded by 150,000 tons of fireworks or whatever it was they did.

[B]

I think the stage was unsafe, wasn't it?

[C]

Yeah. Yeah. I'm in D.C. right now, and the place is like, there's no one here. I mean, people have really left in a hurry. I think once the storm came. And they were like, we're not going to see Donald Trump. They sort of exited en masse.

[B]

So did you go to the state fair yet? Krista? Have you been over to the state fair area?

[C]

I saw it from a distance. From an Uber. That's as close as I could get, Nick. That's as close as I could get.

[B]

Seriously, where is your commitment?

[C]

I grew up in Washington, D.C. to see that the lawn of the White House turned into to, like, a UFC fight cage match. To see, like, half of the White House, like, on the ground crumbled. To see the National Mall taken over by the Great American Fair. I mean, it's pretty heartbreaking if this is your hometown.

[A]

Yeah, okay.

[B]

Fair.

[A]

I was gonna say. I feel like there's sort of an anthropological thing that would happen for me where I'd be like, I have to see this just to, like, witness what's happening here. But I also could understand if this happened in, like, Portland, where I'm from, I would be horrified. And to be fair, I was in D.C. in June for a PHC, American Political History Conference. People and a lot of us went to go see the building of the cage, and we went to see the reflecting pool. I will also add, we went and saw it. There was a little group of us. We all stood there and looked at it, and we said, I thought it was supposed to be really blue. And this was before the green allegations had dropped. But we were like, that's not that blue. It's kind of green. And then it was really green right afterwards.

[C]

Yeah. And then the Ducks were dying. Yeah.

[A]

Oh, yeah. It was pretty grim. Vibes were very off in D.C. when we were there. Everyone was kind of like, we're all political historians. I'm not, but I got to go to talk about the podcast. So I had a fun reason to be there because I didn't have to do any. Anything else. But, yeah, D.C. was very strange in June.

[C]

It was interesting the number of people who interpreted the, like, mammoth storm on Fourth of July as this, like, providential intervention. Like the storm shut Donald Trump down or, like, prevented him from. From sort of taking over. And everyone's like, thank God, an intervention. They stopped Donald Trump and the endless fireworks. So it's. It's funny that people are like, I believe in God again.

[B]

I was going to say Claire. We had a big event over here at the end of May in Cambridge around a theme of whether the Declaration, independence still matters. And we got some people over from the us so Jamelle Bouie came over and Heather Thompson, a whole bunch of other cool people. And it was weird, right? Because usually you think those kinds of conversations are happening in the US and people feel kind of, like, super free to talk about that stuff, and whether it's in a university or in a public space. But it was just really interesting talking to Americans who are coming over to the uk feeling like actually it's kind of easier to talk about some of that stuff, like, in Cambridge, England, than it would be in New York or in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And that really freaked me out a bit, because I've been coming to the US for 30 years, lived there for nearly. There's a lot of stuff I've taken for granted about the way we talk and think about the founding, which I think now is kind of coming apart a bit in terms of the political climate and the way it's making its way into universities. So there's a certain weird privilege about being able to think about 250 from where I'm sitting here in Cambridge, England. One last thing I say, got a ton of calls on Friday from around the world from people that wanted media people talk about 250. And it really inflated my ego. I was like, wow, I've really arrived as a founding historian. And I realized it's because everyone in the US had taken the day off, so they were trying to call these famous people in a Rolodex. And in the end, it was just me, right? So it was probably about 12 hours in which I thought I'd become quite important.

[A]

But no, they were like, we won't Rest until we hear Nick Gyatt's thoughts.

[B]

We need to find someone who's going to pick up the phone. And in England, they're not celebrating the fourth we've discovered.

[C]

Yeah, someone who didn't take the long weekend. Nick.

[B]

Yeah, exactly right.

[A]

Hey, look, a win is a win. We take him where we can get him.

[B]

Oh, yeah.

[A]

We should probably talk about the person we're all here for. But I don't think it will come as a surprise to anyone to learn who it is. Who have you proposed as your guy who sucked for today?

[C]

Thomas Jefferson.

[A]

I'm shocked. Two Thomas Jefferson scholars with a book called Jefferson's Wolf are here to talk about Thomas Jefferson.

[C]

I know it's a weird concept.

[A]

What would you. I mean, I feel like of the people we've had or talked about on the show, the landscape of Jefferson knowledge is probably, probably higher than, you know, like some random 19th century senator or something. Can you give a sort of general overview of what you think is the common understanding or foundational understanding of who Thomas Jefferson was and what impacts he had on the US and the world? I know that compared to a lot of people, this is a large one, but what do you think is the sort of foundational level of understanding most people would have of him?

[C]

Yeah, well, I can go ahead and take a start and I'm sure Nick will have great things to add and I'll maybe answer this question from the position of having worked at Monticello as a historian and curator for decades and really witnessing, you know, what visitors to that space thought they knew about tj. So the vast majority of people knew that he wrote the Declaration of Independence, that he was the president. If you're not sure when a lot of people thought that he was the author of the Constitution, which is not

[A]

true, to be clear.

[C]

No, I mean, it's surprising, you know, how little a lot of people do know about, like, he's. Obviously everyone knows who he is, but when you sort of push for details, it was really interesting how little people actually knew about this guy. Although today, of course, he has become the kind of lightning rod for figure that he is, because we know he owned more than 600 people in his lifetime. And he, of course, also authored the iconic words in the Declaration. So the fact that he kind of represents the kind of great American contradiction of slavery and freedom, I think is what has seared him in people's imaginations today. But I think if you ask people for like a short bio, people are going to come up with surprisingly little which is interesting.

[B]

Yeah. And I mean, I will add to that briefly, which is that I think a lot of the listeners to your podcast, Clare, are gonna be like, oh, Thomas Jefferson sucks. Tell me something I don't know. So I think the proposition we're gonna make to your listeners is we're gonna tell you some new ways in which he sucked that you weren't aware of before, and that might actually help you resolve some of what we describe in the book as being the kind of complacency surrounding this notion. The guy was a paradox. I mean, it drives me crazy. I mean, a book called something like American Sphinx. Right. He wasn't a sphinx, and the guy isn't paradoxical. You can make a lot of sense of apparently contradictory positions that he took, for example, on All Men are Created Equal, and then also being an enslaver, if you actually do a little bit more digging and figure out what he actually thought about black people, what he actually thought about equality, and crucially, what he thought would be the outcome, the kind of future for America after slavery. So in the book, we try and get into basically all of that, and I hope we can actually make some of this paradoxical stuff, which I think is just kind of COVID for Jefferson, actually disappear. And you can kind of see the guy for what he really was, which is a racial exclusionist and a white supremacist, which is a really, really important thing to understand about him.

[A]

Yeah. And I think the book does a great job of explaining this. Obviously, the whole book is that it's important that often we have people on the show where we say, yeah, you know, he sucks. But I want to add some dimension to this or explain it in a way that you maybe hadn't considered it in part because as you've kind of, I think, gestured towards part of the job of being a historian, particularly if you're working with a small group of people or just one person, or their legacy is you have to believe that that person is knowable. Right. Like, you have to believe that it is possible to understand and interpret them and saying someone is a paradox or just a hypocrite or whatever, in order to avoid actually really interpreting and understanding and knowing that, it's kind of doing a disservice to everybody. I've been thinking a lot about this for my new book, but, like, thinking about, do I personally, within my research, care what a Founding Father thought? No. That being said, like, because it's not material to what I'm working on, but it does help when you think about something like what you're talking about in your book. It does help us to understand and reframe this thought has allowed the legacy of this person to be shaped in such a way that lets them off the hook for things. And I don't like that, if that makes sense. So the task of saying this person is knowable and I'm going to put in the work of knowing them is also vitally important, I think.

[C]

Yeah. And to your point, you know, the unknowability, the idea that we can never quite understand Jefferson actually lies at the core of the kind of hagiography that was produced for so long about him. Right. I mean, it's part of the veneration, as, you know, he's this almost godlike figure who we just can't touch, you know, mere mortals can't know him.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And instead, this is a human being. Right. He's a historical figure. He has ideas that have a certain logic to them, but you have to approach them from that vantage. Not, here's this guy in the sky who's, you know, so venerated and so important as a family, the sort of founder to the US that we can't possibly put him under a microscope. And in fact, that's precisely what we need to do as historians, is to put them under a microscope and ask new questions about them that haven't been asked before.

[A]

Yeah. I think there is an approach to history that. That I take clearly from the podcast and that I think more historians are beginning to take in a way that I find very comforting, which is approaching historical figures as just some guy. Like, yes, the person and what they do is very consequential for the world. But you also have to believe that they're just some guy that therefore, you know, their motivations are, in fact, able to be deciphered and their thought processes can be deciphered. And like, to say he is this, as you've sort of said, this guy in the sky who's unreachable and therefore, like, better than us and greater than us and smarter and all of these things. Okay. But that actually doesn't do anything for us. It's actually not helpful.

[B]

But also, Claire, like, it's putting him back in conversation with people. Right. So I think it was like JFK had a dinner in the White House once. I want to say it's like, about a year before he was killed where there are, like, 50 people who've won the Nobel Prize, and he comes out with this, like, crazy speech where he's like, this is the most brilliant gathering of minds in the White House since when Thomas Jefferson dined here alone. And it's like total horseshit. Right? Like this idea of like one single Jefferson dining alone being more brilliant than 50 Nobel laureates. But what I think that that story trolley problem. Well, yeah, so exactly. But it freezes a historical figure in a space where they're not in conversation. And so in the book, one of the first things we wanted to do was put Jefferson back into conversation with all kinds of different people. The people that he enslaved with, you know, wealthy, rich, clever French people, British people, politicians, his proteges Madison and Monroe. Get him back in all these conversations and actually show that many times times he got owned by other people. Particularly when it came to stuff like all men are created equal. Right. There are many moments at which your idea that Jefferson, if you went mano a mano with someone at a letter or whatever, he would win. That's absolutely not the case. So without denying the guy's genius or brilliance or whatever else, having any historical figure back in conversation and capturing them not frozen in amber and isolated, but in this much broader correspondence and engagement and interaction, that should be the job of every historian. And that's what we really. We geeked out about that in the book because it's so important to understanding the failure as well as the success of Jefferson's vision.

[A]

Yeah, I think a lot about the job of redeeming the milieu or the people who are around great men with the podcast with this book, whatever. There are people who are having conversations with Jefferson who he clearly thinks of as equals or as worthy of conversation. And I think we often mistake consequence as in having power and decisions being made as a result of your thoughts with like importance and being worthy of study. The other people he's talking to, he clearly thinks are worthy of conversation. We should also think of them as people that are worth thinking about. And like, I know, Christa, you've written on people around Jefferson not just so like you've written about other family members, the Hemings, like all of these other people who inform his life too. And so it is. There's a lot of work that I think needs to be done and that I'm trying to do and a lot of other historians are trying to do to convey the general public that it's worth thinking about everybody else because they are part of the conversation about the one person you imagine to be at the center of it.

[C]

Yeah, well, they. I mean, they shape his ideas. I mean, on a fundamental level. And I Used to joke with Nick and some other friends, you know, that most books or articles about Jefferson and slavery, and I even count myself among these sort of offenders early in my career, wrote about the topic as if Jefferson was speaking to himself in an empty room. You know, like he was not in conversation with anyone but himself and never was he in conversation with the hundreds of enslaved people who were literally surrounding him on his plantation at Monticello. And that struck me, especially when we had the opportunity to write this book is not only reframe the argument along the lines of racial exclusion, but also to populate its pages with other people, other people who shaped those thoughts about race and slavery, which I think is crucial.

[A]

Yeah, I think about obviously, because for this book, as I said before, I'm writing in part about Washington. One of the things that's been really useful for framing him and things like slavery for me is thinking about the fact that he has this enslaved valet named William Lee or Billy Lee, who, and I have a lot of beef with how he's been talked about in previous writing. Like, for example, in one McCullough book, Washington's name shows up 780something times and Lee's name shows up twice. At every moment of Washington's life, Lee is present with him. He's his Vella. He's also his like, groom. At every battle, he's there. At every moment of his life, he's there. He's like his body man. And it is wild to me that in paintings of Washington we have two, possibly three that he's supposed to be in, but in every room that he's in, there is another man who's there with him and is just imagined to not have had an impact on his life and thinking like that. Like somehow magically this person who was present at every moment of his life for years had no impact on that. Seems insane to me that like, that we have just like washed this out.

[C]

That's happened for sure. I mean, in Jefferson's case in Monticello. And Nick can jump in too on this, but I think in particular because he never acknowledged his children with Sally Hemings. Right. He had six children with Sally Hemings, four of whom survived to adulthood. They lived in the part of the mansion they lived in proximity. They were always there, Right. Part of their father's life, albeit far removed. And yet we haven't included them in the same frame with Jefferson. It's like he's really cordoned himself off from his African American family because he refused to acknowledge them. And his paternity and I think that kind of thing really needs to be changed. I think that's in the spirit of what you're saying.

[B]

So yeah. But also, I think, Krista, I mean, you could say more about this. Maybe one of the things the book explores is just the extent to which he is present in the lives and in the kind of management of enslaved people at Monticello. I mean, there's no way in which he is this guy who's kind of like off in Europe the whole time or in a library the whole time. Or I mean, a guy is like actively at a kind of granular level, involved in all kinds of stuff, both in terms of the regular kind of routines, but also a lot of thinking about how he can kind of change up and innovate within this space of owning and working other human beings and whatever about his family and the kind of forms of sort of compartmentalizing he does, particularly the kind of hardness, the kind of emotional coldness that one of his children reports in a memoir that he writes later in his life. Despite that, in terms of the actual presence of Thomas Jefferson, apart from the time he's in France, he's really very, very actively in the lives of these people and understanding that his ideas for them, he's not getting the feedback from them that suggests that they actually agree with or are giving affirmation to some of his more kind of wild and outlandish plans for ending slavery.

[A]

Read. Hi, it's Claire. I'm here to quickly say that this episode is free for everybody, but the next one won't be. That's because we switch off between free weeks and Patreon weeks. So if you're a fan of public history made by actual experts, consider supporting our Patreon. It's only one tier, which means everyone who subscribes gets access to the same perks across the board. Because we're not trying to get rich, we're just trying to make good history that is engaging and accessible at the same time. For the price of a fancy muffin, you'll get access to a new episode every week instead of just the bi weekly free ones. And they'll all be ad free for you. You'll also get access to the full episode archive, bonus content, early access to merch, and lots of other fun Patreon exclusives to sweeten the deal. Just head over to patreon.com thisguysucked and join the Honorary Haters club. Speaking of that, I think this is a good way. Well, first, actually, first thing we need to do. We've established what the general public. You think their understanding of him is. Is there anything before we talk about what the rest of the episode will be, which I imagine, which is what you're discussing in your book. Is there anything that you want to make sure people know about Jefferson and his life and his impacts that you feel like are often kind of missed in understandings of him beyond slavery?

[B]

Two things. He lived a really long time, and he was kind of a provincial dude. Do you want to say something about either of those, Christa? And I'll say something about the other one.

[C]

Yeah, he lived a really long life. I'll pick up on that one first. And I think one of the interventions or things that we want to emphasize and underscore for the general public here is that Jefferson was born in 1743. May not care about that date, but what that means is that Jefferson was a loyal subject of the British empire for over 30 years of his life. He thought about slavery and race within the context of that empire. So he did not spend his entire life thinking about, quote, the problem of slavery within the context of the United States. He was thinking about it in an entirely different one for 30 years before that. I think that's an important intervention to make and also to say that the world around Jefferson changed tremendously over the course of his life. Right. He had lasted 83 years. He died in 1826. You know, he witnessed not just the founding of the United States, but incredible upheaval, you know, in the form of the Haitian Revolution, the War of 1812 with Britain, the expansion of the cotton empire, the rise of the domestic slave trade. All these things happened on Jefferson's watch. And I think it's important that that is the kind of background that really influences and shapes his ideas about slavery over time.

[A]

And I actually have a question about this because I feel like often with the Founding Fathers, the founding fathers, capital Fs on this, you'll see. Or the imagined version of them is that they become more enlightened the longer they're alive. Like, Franklin has an abolitionist arc later in life, et cetera. What I came across with Jefferson when I was researching him for this episode, and please do tell me if this is wrong. It seems like his evolution is not like that, where it's like, ah. And then he gets so much better over time on this. And then at the end of his life, he's like, oops, I've like. It seems to me that in some cases 1760s and set through 1780s, Jefferson like 69 is more anti slavery than like 1810s Jefferson. So he has like some backsliding that happens on this. He doesn't have this clear sort of. Is that right, or is that a reasonable interpretation?

[C]

I think we'd say that he remains anti slavery his whole life. I think what is different, maybe what you're. You're pointing to, what changes a bit, is how he imagines that anti slavery culminating in racial removal and the. The kind of draconian ends he's willing to follow to ensure that that happens. And maybe Nick can talk about this more like the wolf. Right. Which symbolizes not just the danger of enslaved people, but the danger of not removing freed enslaved people from the United States. Right. Causing a race war that's going to destroy the country. That fear becomes so proximate in the midst of the Missouri crisis that he's willing to amend some of his earlier prescriptions about anti slavery exclusion and actually simply deport people. So, Nick, I don't know if you want to pick up on that.

[B]

Yeah, no, I mean, yeah, we should definitely get into the wolf in a minute. But I mean, you know, like, people often talk about Lincoln dying when he does and being assassinated. And like, what if Lincoln had lived? It's a cliche, but it's kind of true that death is kind of a good career move in some ways, just in terms of the fact that you aren't hanging around then to screw stuff up. Right. I mean, who knows what a Lincoln kind of directed reconstruction beyond 1865 might have looked like? But for Jefferson, I think it's less that he became less anti slavery. It's more that some of the more outlandish prescriptions that he drew up for his vision of how to end slavery get exposed. And yet the guy carries on, either beating the same drum or as Christa was just suggesting, becoming even more draconian. For example, by saying, we're not gonna ask black people anymore if they're happy with my solution. We're just gonna tell them that they have to accept it. So a guy who lives to. Yeah. 50 years beyond the Declaration of Independence. Exactly. Another weird coincidence about Jefferson that he dies literally on the 50th anniversary, 4th of July, 1826, just before Adams. Yeah, exactly.

[A]

Hours.

[B]

So you can get away with saying shit about how you're gonna end slavery in 1785, which you just can't get away with in 1805 or 1825. And yet Jefferson is still basically saying the broad outline of what he is suggesting to end slavery remains the same. So in that sense, I think, yeah, he became a kind of anachronism, I guess, as an anti slavery activist in a way that could have been predicted. But since he was still alive, he had a whole bunch of younger people being like, dude, why are you still coming up with this crazy idea that you have? Let's try something new. And then he'd be like, oh, well, you younger people should be doing that. They're like, no, no, no. Franklin, he had a hero arc. Franklin is the guy who became more anti. Just what you said, Claire. And then he just stops writing back. Jefferson.

[C]

Right?

[B]

He's like, nope, slam and close that window. So I think it's that that changes, as it were. The idea is the same, but the circumstances, the sort of context, all of that stuff has changed radically by 1826.

[A]

So the first thing that you had was that he lived a long time. And what was the second one again?

[B]

Oh, just he was a provincial guy. And I mean, Krista, do you want to talk about. I mean, I feel like saying he's a Virginian in a big way. Like, given the fact that you're in Charlottesville, I could be getting into hot water here very quickly. So maybe I'll get Krista to handle this sensitively.

[C]

Well, I think, you know, a lot of people make a big deal about Jefferson as the sort of cosmopolitan founding father, which on one hand is hilarious, given that when he arrived in France as this diplomat in 1784, everybody's jaws dropped in disappointment because this guy wasn't Franklin and he didn't speak French, at least not a type of French that they could understand. Part of his legacy has become this erudite, cosmopolitan guy, friend of France. Right. Kind of big Francophile, big consumer of wine, a real oenophile, a foodie. Right. But part of what we want to emphasize in this book is that that may have been the case. Like, Jefferson spent a lot of his childhood even just imagining himself as a person connected beyond Virginia to the world, this sort of cosmopolitan vision. And yet he remains firmly tethered, anchored in Virginia for his whole life. Life. Right. So he does make this trip to Europe in the 1780s. He makes some brief forays into New York. Right. And of course, Washington, D.C. as president. He doesn't really go anywhere else. He doesn't go west of the Appalachian Mountains. Right. So part of what we want to emphasize here, I guess, is that the problem of slavery in Virginia and even at his plantation at Monticello really informs his grasp on the larger problem of slavery. In the United States. And that is a problem that points back to what Nick was just talking about. Like, how can this guy maintain this anti slavery exclusion stance while we know full well that the cotton empire is expanding and that slavery is expanding with it, and yet he's never been there, he's never seen the cotton empire. He can only imagine it. And I think that lack of real knowledge, that lack of, you know, really moving geographically beyond his birthplace really inhibits him and shapes this kind of fairly provincial view of slavery and race into the 19th century.

[A]

Thank you for that. I think this is a perfect time to talk about the wolf and what you guys are explaining here. So you've made reference to the wolf.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

But I think a lot of people who are listening will not know what the fuck you're talking about when you say that if they have not, for example, thought a lot about Jefferson and slavery. Can you explain to me what Jefferson's not just the book Jefferson's wolf, but what Jefferson's wolf is and why this is relevant?

[B]

What is Jefferson's wolf?

[A]

What is the wolf?

[B]

Yeah, can I take a very, very quick stab at this? But maybe first by giving you, like a bit of context? So if you want to end slavery in the founding period and a who bunch of people, including a lot of enslavers, for reasons we can get into, which are not all moral, are kind of Christian or enlightened, a whole bunch of people think that slavery might not be suited to the new United States. It might even be dangerous. And that's where the wolf comes in. But the ways of getting rid of it, if you decide it should be gotten rid of, there are some people, a very, very small number, that think the way to get rid of it is simply to pass laws freeing black people. So a place like Massachusetts, which has like a tiny, tiny black population, that's what happens. There's. Then you have people and indeed states which believe that the way that you end slavery is through gradual emancipation. So in effect, you pass a bill through your assembly. This happens in Pennsylvania in 1780. And what you do is announce that all children born after that date who are enslaved will eventually be freed when they reach a particular age, say 28 years old for male enslaved people. So the earliest people are going to be freed is going to be like 1808. The final suggestion for how you get rid of slavery, which actually in many ways is the one that most moderates, and I'm putting that in scare quotes, believe in, is that you free enslaved people and you get them out of the US So you try and find a place that you can send them, which means that the social consequences of emancipation are going to be visited somewhere beyond the new American nation. So if you think for a second that those three different strategies for ending slavery, the one we all think we know is the first one.

[C]

One.

[B]

So we just assume that, oh, yeah, people that want to end slavery, they're obviously in favor of giving black people equality. Nothing could be further from the truth. For the founding period, gradual emancipation, with this idea of postponing people being freed, is very much more popular than immediate emancipation and colonization, as it's called. Removing people outside the United States. Exclusion, that's the most popular of all. And Jefferson, he's the OG of excluding people, of colonization, of removing black people from the United States and from the American Revolution until the end of his life in 1826. Jefferson is the kind of hero, the kind of banner figure for removing people as a condition of emancipating them. Okay, I've not talked about the wolf, but. Christa, do you want to jump in there? Did I miss anything?

[C]

Sure. No, no, no, that's great. Just so we make sure that everybody's sort of on the same page with us, the title, which I will give full credit to Nick for conceptualizing, it's a good title.

[B]

It's very trashy. It's very trashy.

[C]

It's a good title, right? Yeah, it's a good title. It's a reference to this very famous quote that Jefferson launches in 1820 in the midst of the Missouri crisis. And he says, we have the wolf by the ear. We can neither hold him nor safely let him go. Right. So the idea is that. That this is such a precarious thing. You have this dangerous animal that you're holding by the ear, and you are sort of in a bind. Right. You can't free him. You can't hold him. And this becomes the great metaphor for Jefferson, for the problem of slavery in the United States.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

There is a previous book by a historian called John chester Reid from 1978. Right, Nick?

[B]

John Chester Miller.

[C]

John Chester Miller, sorry, Called the wolf by the ears. So part of the riff on this title is that we want to update that very outdated book, I think now, but also to directly reference that really critical quote from Jefferson, because we think that the security issue that he's really getting at in that quote is what frames the issue of slavery for him. It's not that. It's. He doesn't think about it in moral terms as well, but for him, the security dilemma, the threat not just to white enslavers lives, but to the nation that he helped found, is the most critical. And that shapes his response to dealing with slavery after the revolution. So one of the big thrusts of this book is to use the wolf, to use that metaphor, to reframe the question of slavery around security rather than morality. Again, not to say that, that it's not there, but to try to get folks to think about slavery as a constant threat, as a source of potential war that could destroy white people, their property, and even the country they live in.

[A]

So I will also add, because a sort of common through line in the show and in my own work is that these great men, when they're thinking about themselves, are often putting themselves in conversation with other great men that they've thought about previously. Wolf by the ears is also a phrase used by, allegedly by Tiberius. Suetonius uses it to describe Tiberius's fears of threats and danger. So, like, if he's using this phrase, I think that Suetonius says that Tiberius is holding a wolf by the ears in his writing, like his biography of Tiberius. And also, obviously you know this way better than I do, but this is just something that I've been thinking about. If he using that terminology, it means he's probably getting it from there. And that is being framed as about danger and threat.

[B]

Oh, yeah, yeah. He also had like some rando who wrote to him in 1815 as well and used the phrase. And I've been wondering whether the rando is the person that may have planted it. But you're right, in terms of, like, his literacy, Suetonius is the obvious place he would get it. But just one tiny gloss on what Christa said, which is what always weirded me out, was that it was possible for Jefferson to imagine that the security threat, which Krista is totally right. That's how we should think of it. The security threat of the wolf was the same for black people in slavery or black people in freedom. And that, I think, is why this wolf metaphor is like, very often people have talked about it without actually thinking so much about the weirdness of that. Why would you imagine that black people in freedom were as dangerous as black people in slavery? And Jefferson actually does feel the need to theorize a lot about this, especially in the one book he wrote in his life in 1785, the notes on the State of Virginia. But I just wanted to say, Claire, a whole bunch of people who were his contemporaries did not see those two dangers as equal and saw slavery as a much greater danger than having black people be free and living amongst white people. And if in a way there's a paralysis here, you begin to get people saying to Jefferson, look, let the wolf go. If the option is holding onto this fucking thing or letting it go, let it go. Because the danger of holding onto it is greater than the danger of letting it go. So it was Jefferson who insisted on the equivalency, which became a kind of license for that paralysis of doing nothing. And that's really key to understanding the kind of, I don't know, the sort of swamp that he ends up in as someone who actually gets anything done on slavery, which in a way he doesn't.

[A]

Yeah. Or if he's saying, well it's a security threat, either way it's a wolf no matter what, then people are saying, well then the danger is that now if no matter what it's a threat to you, it is immoral. So that should add the extra layer that makes you say it's better to let go than to hold on like there is, then fine. If you think morality shouldn't be a mitigating factor in the, your previous conception of this. Now if you're saying that these are equal to each other in terms of potential threat, well, this added layer then should help you decide what's to be done. And if he's saying, I don't know that's a problem.

[C]

Well, I mean, in a way he has to, he's kind of dug, dug himself into a hole by maintaining this metaphor. Right, sure. Because the only way to continue to argue for emancipation paired with racial removal of all black people from the United States is to continue to insist that slavery is a wolf. And what you get, yes, is some abolitionists, black activists of course, who refute this for many reasons. But there is an emerging voice among enslavers saying actually slavery is not a wolf, it's not a threat. In fact, we've quote, domesticated it and it's more like a lap dog so we don't have anything to fear from it. But to sort of follow that logic that then nullifies the need for any removal project after the end of slavery. So Jefferson in a way has to continue to insist this, that slavery is this security threat, this immense danger to the United States, if people are going to be convinced that removal has to be the ultimate goal here.

[A]

Hi gang, it's Claire with my usual quick mid episode shout out to tell you about other multitude shows I think you might enjoy listening to this time though. It's for something called the Multi Crew. This is Multitude's special membership program where all of the Multitude hosts hosts including me, release cool kind of experimental podcasts every week with new combinations of hosts. We also share behind the scenes details on making our shows and have exclusive monthly hangout sessions and live streams with Multitude members where I mostly just bully Matt Gabriel about being old and Brandon Gruel for being bald. So if you love Multitude as a network and want to support the company that helps indie shows like TGS to exist, consider joining the Multicrest. You'll get exclusive access to stuff like the entire backlog of Multitudes, friendly debate show Head, Heart, Gut, rewatch podcasts about shows like the Pit and Love island, immersive medieval ASMR episodes, and even me playing TTRPGS badly. And now if you're like, wow, it's very annoying to sign up for new accounts. Great news. You can enjoy bonus Multi Crew podcasts right in Apple Podcasts or check out some free episodes through Spotify. Just search for the Multicrew podcast today. Okay, bye. Can you tell me, now that we have arrived, about the removal His I'm not like, as always, I'm not laughing because it's funny. I'm laughing because it's so wild to me, his thoughts around removal and what his imagined plans or what you think his plans were. Obviously. Again, I've read the book, so I, I already know this, but for people

[B]

who have not, well, just in the interest of time, I mean, without giving you blow by blow of everything that he has to say about it, I mean, the idea really crystallizes during the American Revolution. So the American Revolution confirms to Thomas Jefferson that a new American nation is not going to be a place in which black people can be equal to white people. So all men are created equal. Does not for Thomas Jefferson mean black people can be equal to white people within the United States. In terms of the practical kind of measures of this, what I think has really crystallized his thinking is that sight of black people in uniform. So as you know, one of my previous rulers here in Britain, George iii, we love all our kings, as you know, had offered freedom in 1775 to enslaved people of patriots who'd be willing to cross the lines and fight for Britain. And you know, tens of thousands do, more than a couple of dozen do from Monticello, from Jefferson's own enslaved population. So Christa can tell you more about the spark that this maybe lights under Jefferson or the ways in which it freaks him out. But what it means is in the 1780s, when he puts together his published kind of formal proposal for getting rid of black people. In this book, Notes on the State of Virginia, which he publishes in Paris in 1785, he comes out and says the plan is that the state of Virginia is going to pass a law which will free enslaved people again when they become adults during their childhood at the expense of the state of Virginia. They will be educated, they will be given training that will enable them then to leave the United States and go somewhere else. He doesn't say where. It's kind of assumed that it's Africa, but maybe it's the Caribbean. We don't know for sure. And then they will found a new civilization, a new society, a new settlement there. They'll be protected again, it's implied, by the state of Virginia for a quarter century or so. They'll be supplied in kind of provision for a bit, too. So in a sense, America, even before it's really become a new nation, is immediately going to have its own colony somewhere else. And that vision for ending slavery through getting black people to set up a society somewhere else. You're right, Clare, it's outlandish because even at that point, there are half a million black people in slavery in the United States. So the plan would be all of those people will be gradually freed and sent somewhere else.

[A]

I mean, I think it also. It makes me think of your book Bind Us Apart, where you're thinking about segregation and even things like race science and early thoughts on this. Like, there are some uniting factors that. That happen, I think, historically and obviously because I'm a historian of the 20th century. But there are often frequently people whose idea for solving whatever they see as a racial problem in their state, either in the us, in other parts of the world, in Germany, famously, where they're sort of like, well, let's just send them somewhere else. Let's. In the case of Hitler, it's like Madagascar, like, can we not just get the people? I don't the. That I see as a threat. Why don't I just ship them elsewhere? And that will solve the problem. And it is interesting because the kind of uniting force here is of course, just racism, like the idea that is sort of unifying here. But it is also interesting to be like, yeah, Thomas Jefferson also thinks this way, which a lot of people are not aware of.

[B]

Not all of the advocates of this would style themselves as racist. So what they would say is, black people are different from us, they're not necessarily inferior from us, and therefore they'll be happier somewhere else or crazier still. They'll be like, listen, poor people are really mean to black people. And I'm not a poor person and I'm not really mean to black people. But probably on balance, it's best if we send black people somewhere else. So there are kind of more liberal variants of this. But for Thomas Jefferson, he, more than almost anyone else who advocates this idea, has a pretty heavy and involved description of black racial inferiority. So physical and mental inferiority that he uses to kind of license this. But then the mad part is like, they've got to be kind of smart enough and dependable enough to be able to set up their own colony, right? So it's actually quite hard to have this inferiority language alongside the notion that the black people who are freed and removed will also be able to run their own nation. So there is a little bit of slippage, I think, in Jefferson thinking between black people in slavery in the United States who are kind of abject inferior to white people. Imitate, they don't innovate. All of that stuff he tells us about in the notes in the state of Virginia versus black people running a colony somewhere else. And this is a reason he gets really excited by the Haitian Revolution, because he's like, hey, there's a black republic in the Caribbean. Maybe they can take all these black people and they can take on the job of looking after and protecting them and the state of Virginia or the US can wash its hands of them the moment that it frees them.

[A]

It is also interesting because there are a lot of Americans who see the Haitian revolution are like, oh, I mean, for him, right, this is a sign that this is possible and there are capabilities here. But for other people, they see that and they're like, oh, this means this is possible and there are capabilities here that we do not like or do not want to acknowledge. Krista, I think you were, you were going to say something.

[C]

Well, I mean, I know it, you know, it seems obviously ludicrous to us, this idea of removing basically, you know, a fifth of the population. If we're talking about the sort of era of the American Revolution. And yet Jefferson imagines racial removal as a kind of reversal of the transatlantic slave trade. To him, it's not far fetched logic to think there was this massive forced migration of people over the course of centuries from Africa to the New World. Why can't we simply reverse that? So again, it seems highly implausible to us. But if you think of it the way Jefferson did, which is as a reversal of the slave trade. Again, the logistics are fuzzy. In a lot of his plans, I think it becomes a little bit clearer. An added layer to that is that Jefferson imagines if we can enact this removal to Africa or the Caribbean, we can then send the same ships to Europe and pick up laborers who will fill the labor vacuum that was just created in the United States.

[A]

Easy.

[C]

So migration is really kind of at the heart of this story about slavery in many ways, which I think really resonates with our current political moment. The question of forced migration, the question of, you know, what's voluntary and what's not, is very much at the heart of Jefferson's thinking about removal. And I just wanted to say that, yes, this book is about racial removal, but for us, the key moment is 1776. So one of the reasons we devote so much time to the 33 years that he was a loyal subject of the British Empire is that as a lawyer and as an enslaver, when he thought about the freedom of black people in Virginia, he never paired that freedom with removal. He was very content to have people of color living in this sort of composite empire and not being deported elsewhere. What flips is in 1776 when we have this transition from empire to nation. And he does not think that this republic can endure if it has black people who are, you know, he envisions as a threat to the nation. So we want to kind of reframe that. The legacy of 1776, not along the lines of inequality, which I think is what a lot of people think about when they think about the Declaration and Jefferson, he imagined black people as second class citizens. Right. But our point is that there's a much darker legacy, and that is that he couldn't imagine people of African descent as Americans. And that legacy of exclusion is actually really important to capturing an accurate depiction of the founding. So sort of judge singing this trope of inequality and trying to put exclusion back at the heart of the founding. And particularly with the Declaration in 1776.

[A]

Yeah, it's not even necessarily that he thinks. I mean, he does, but like that it's about them being lesser in some way. But it's also that they should not even be present here to solve the problem. Yeah, you're right. That's a much darker way of viewing this, I think. And I mean, it is also interesting when you think about the sort of saying, yeah, it feels ludicrous or totally implausible. But also if you add the logic of a period in which colonization is popular, people are going all over the place, just being like, this space is my space now and I'm gonna. I mean, in Jefferson's lifetime, for examp, things like the Louisiana Purchase happen. The idea that one can just acquire new spaces, new in quotations, can acquire new spaces, move people there, do whatever they want with them, is not strange to him at this moment in time.

[C]

Right. Massive mobilization of people is part of that world. You're absolutely right.

[A]

Yeah. That is a very normal thing then. And it's still, I mean, to some extent, in some spaces normal now. But it's just for people in like the UK or America, we're kind of like we're done with that for the most part. You know, we've mostly given up.

[B]

We should get into this question of replacement theory because, you know, I mean, in some ways Jefferson is a replacement theorist. And like we're now told by Elon Musk that replacement theory is a big. George Soros promoted conspiracy. This idea that you're bringing all these migrants in and they're swamping or destroying the kind of American born, honest, kind of like whatever kind of citizen. But actually that's exactly. Jefferson's plan is to replace. Replace half a million black people with half a million white Europeans. And just to amplify Christa's point about reversing the slave trade, it's worth remembering. And again, this might surprise people, but the slave trade, the Atlantic slave trade, gets worse across the 18th century. So we sometimes imagine that because this is the moment where there is the beginnings from the 1750s and 1760s of reorganized opposition to the slave trade, that actually it's like on its last legs. That's not true. The slave trade actually increases in terms of the volume of people that are brought across the Atlantic in the final decades of the 18th century. And by the 1780s you're talking about 80,000 people per year. So from Thomas Jefferson's perspective, if he's trying to get rid of 500,000 black people, in a way, you're looking at six, seven years of reversing the slave trade. Now the mad part about this, Jefferson's clearly not a logistics guy. He'd have been a shitty management consultant. It doesn't take very much thinking to see that the motives that are driving people being brought from Africa to the Caribbean and the American mainland and to South America are not the same motive as the one that might be impelling freed people back the other way. This is not a simple one for one exchange, but just in terms of the volume of people moving around Exactly. As Krista suggested, this is the moment where large scale population shifts are basically a reality. They're an everyday life kind of thing. The thing is that once it becomes clear, clear after five years and 10 years and 15 years that this movement is not happening, the fact that Jefferson carries on believing in it for another 25 years becomes a bit more problematic and makes you think, you know, is he going to keep banging his head against this wall or is he going to realize, you know, this isn't working?

[C]

And again, that's where the security issue comes in. Because Jefferson, to Nick's point, is aware that the forced migration that brought people of African descent into the now United States, it's much right, it's capitalism. So what's the only thing that's going to rank above that? And for him it's fear, right? It's fear of destruction. And so that's why the wolf becomes for him the only kind of leverage or tool of persuasion that he has at his disposal to argue for this anti slavery exclusion.

[A]

So one of the ways that I have seen this wolf by the ear quote explained or used as sort of this alibi for Jefferson is by basically the interpretation that he's opposed to slavery, but he's also totally trapped by it. And he's neither an egalitarian sort of anti racist clearly, nor an entirely pro slavery apologist guy. And it's fascinating, I think, the job that you've done here of saying, yeah, it is neither of those things. He's an early advocate for complete racial segregation or exclusion. And, and that solves the problem for you, basically.

[B]

This guy that Krista mentioned earlier, John Chester Miller, who wrote this kind of last full scale book about Jefferson and slavery, he has this mad beer at the end of the. And we should say, I mean, he's not some kind of like rando. He basically was the big Jefferson scholar or one of the big Jefferson scholars of his era. And he wrote this book towards the end of his life. It was supposed to come out for the bicentennial. I think it came out a little bit later. So he didn't make the deadline that we made. That was unfortunate for him.

[A]

Yeah, I was gonna say unlike some.

[B]

But anyway, in that book he says that the reason that Jefferson didn't do more to end slavery was that Jefferson did the absolute maximum that he could in terms of what was possible in his historical moment. And again, this is very often a line you hear from kind of apologists for the founders, from President Trump through even some relatively liberal or self styled Liberal historians, we need to think about what was morally and politically possible in the age. And what drove us crazy about this is just total bullshit. Jefferson had no vision of inclusion that he was desperately trying to make work. And he was like, oh, well, I can't do inclusion, so I'll do exclusion. Right? Wasn't that. That was a kind of way station towards where he was trying to go. Exclusion was the goal for him. And inclusion, black citizenship, equality, that was never part of what he was trying to achieve. So if we can recognize him for what he wanted and what he tried to make happen, rather than assume that everyone who's trying to end slavery, if they had their drovers, would have black citizenship and a black president and black teachers and black sons in law. Right? Which is another anxiety in all of this. If we can get away from that romantic vision of anti slavery as being naturally egalitarian, we'll understand the founding much, much better. And we'll also learn to praise the people in the founding moment that were able to imagine a more expansive definition of equality than Jefferson. And there are a bunch, black and white, and we talk about them at the. The book.

[A]

I mean, it's also. So we did a Ben Franklin episode, like a collaborative episode with another podcast. No such thing. Shout out to them. They're the best. But it was funny that like, people like John Adams emerged as these weird heroes in that episode where we talked about what the sort of common misconceptions around the founding fathers were. And one of them was the sort of like, well, they all were enslavers and they all owned people. And, you know, that's why the only option was manumission upon death or whatever. And I kept being like, John Adams didn't. And there are a lot of there. And that's not to say that that's the average experience, but it is funny to sort of be like, pause. They actually don't have the same experience as one another. They actually don't all make the same choices. They actually don't have all the same visions of their lives. They don't all share one singular morality. They share a goal in terms of, of the building of a state or a nation, but they don't all think the same way. Jefferson's view of what happens in a world that's post slavery does not have to be the same thing that someone else is thinking. Which is to say it's also possible to have a better vision than he had and others did have a better vision than he had. So holding him up as this, like, sort of paradoxical person that's. To go back to the start of the episode, impossible to understand, also requires that you say, well, these other people's ideas are. They're less important, or they don't, you know. And so I think that's very, very interesting. And shout out to John Adams.

[C]

It also goes back to the Declaration and the way we interpret it as this kind of failed promise. Like, as if Jefferson and so many other founders wanted to promise black people equality and rights, but just couldn't. Right. Again, to go back to the earlier comments because of the strictures of the time. In fact, there was no promise. Right. Because they didn't imagine them as belonging to the nation they just founded. And that is such a fundamental distinction. The Declaration for Jefferson did not include black people. Right. And this is not to say that people at the time did not protest this. Right. Lemuel Haynes, this very prominent black activist who actually writes a kind of rebuttal to the Declaration in 1776, imagining, as Nick has been saying, a much more expansive interpretation of the Declaration as universal, as extended to black people as including them in the American nation. But for Jefferson, that could not be farther from the case.

[B]

I'm just anxious that we're saying John Adams didn't suck. I mean, I don't want to.

[A]

Oh, no, he sucks. To be clear, they're all bad. There is no. I am not a Founding Father defender.

[B]

Yeah, I would just say, like one of the. Not laying Jefferson off the hook at all. But if you think for a moment about the problem of ending slavery in the Founding era, Virginia is like 40% enslaved population. Massachusetts, what it was 1% black, 1 1/2% black. It's much easier if you're John Adams to like, declare your virtues on the slavery question than it was for Thomas Jefferson. Which again, is not to say that we should let Thomas Jefferson off the hook, but in effect, it also reveals something interesting about how the process of ending slavery is going work in the Founding period. Because we'd imagine today, okay, this is a big job. Let's get the federal government onto that job. That wasn't the way that Jefferson thought about it. And actually that wasn't the way that a whole bunch of founders would have thought about it. They'd have thought about it on a state by state basis. And then you have this big contradiction or this big tension between those states, basically North Pennsylvania and North, where slavery has a relatively small footprint, and those states to the south where slavery has a much bigger footprint. And this I think is the key to unlocking a lot of the challenges that Jefferson and other people have in scaling their visions. Because it's kind of nuts to imagine that Virginia would create a colony somewhere else. In fact, that does eventually happen. Maryland creates a colony in West Africa. The states are trying to create colonies, but it seems mad to us, and it seemed kind of mad at the time that you wouldn't harness the power of the federal government. And when eventually the US does basically create the black colony of Liberia in 1820, it's because James Monroe, one of the Virginians, who's kind of protege of Thomas Jefferson, he's a president. President. And he decides that he can bring the federal government to bear or at least get its thumb on the scale to try and get this colony founded. Jefferson, though, very much a states rights kind of guy. So he's seeing this as something that Virginia and other states have to do for themselves. So I want to throw that in there because, again, it's really important for thinking where this is going in terms of the Civil War and states rights. There's a whole states rights discourse, not just about keeping slavery, but also about plans to end.

[A]

Yeah. I will also add on the John Adams front, I have gotten in trouble on the Internet for saying that I don't like John Adams. So to be clear, me saying, Shadow Tim, it's only on this one singular front.

[B]

You do what you gotta do, Claire. Do what you gotta do. You know what?

[A]

So much of my life is me saying, to be clear, I don't like anyone involved in any of this. Like me saying, just because I like one of them a little bit more than the other. No one is like, I'm an equal opportunity hater in all of this, which. Which serves me well throughout the show, I think. I think we are out of time, unfortunately. Thank you so much for this. And I think this really does do a wonderful job of reframing all of these problems and also finding a way to actually solve some of the problems a little bit. Or say, well, there is an answer that maybe is not being considered here to them, and it's worse than you thought it was actually, which is, I mean, I think, useful if you're doing any sort of critical historical thinking to maybe the answer is actually more horrible than you imagined it being.

[B]

Although Thomas Jefferson didn't win, Claire, like, it's really important to remember that these ideas which he was so invested in, to be clear, he didn't win. And actually he didn't win partly because he couldn't persuade even the black people he enslaved to agree with the idea that they should leave the United States on being freed. And I think capturing this idea that the sage of Monticello, this great genius, actually is on the wrong end of this, he loses. This argument is really important. And I mean, Americans are still having this argument, I'm afraid to say, on some level. So it's an argument that needs to keep being waged. And there's some very good arguments against Jefferson's exclusionist position in the book from his contemporaries. So I do think it's worth reading for that reason too.

[A]

I think people should read it for many reasons, that being just one of them. Thank you both so much for coming on. If people would like to buy Jefferson's Wolf, we have it linked in our bookshop.org storefront for people who are looking for an easy link for that. It's also in the episode description. If people are looking to reach out to you on social media or anything like that, hopefully I won't send any crazy people your way. But where should they get in contact with you?

[B]

Krista's kind of hard to find, right, Krista?

[C]

Yeah, I don't have a big presence.

[A]

Yeah. So then email Krista on her UVA email.

[C]

Yes, exactly.

[B]

You can find me on Twitter and on Bluesky and I mean in other places that people shouldn't be.

[A]

Yeah, perfect. Thank you guys both again. This was really, really helpful and congratulations on the book and I hope lots of people go and buy it and learn about this.

[C]

Thanks for having us, Claire. It's been a blast.

[B]

Thanks so much.

[A]

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of this Guy Sucked. A member of the Multitude Podcast collective. This episode was Hosted by me, Dr. Claire Aubin, featuring special guests Professors Krista Dierksheidi and Nicholas Guyet, and edited by egalitarian hero Julia Sheffini. All of our theme music was written and produced by Earless Wolf Marshall Dean Williams. If you'd like to support the show and get access to all episodes, including two extra episodes per month and access to our full archive of episodes, you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts or to our [e-mail] this guy sucked. You can also, as always support TGS by giving us a five star rating to counteract all the one star ratings we get from people who like love Thomas Jefferson or Benjamin Franklin or Napoleon. Or you could give us a kind review wherever you're listening to the show. You can also just like tell a friend or two to to check the show out because more listeners is more fun for us. That would rock. See you next.