Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On Most Blessed Of Th

Many of the events are open to the public. Look for them to in the future on book tv, on cspan2. Welcome to the free library of philadelphia. I am representative jim roadblock, i am certainly very happy to be here this evening. H i am a native philadelphia, graduated from central highhmy a school. [applause]. My particular focus tonight is on the fact that i went to First College at Virginia University in richmond, from which i received a history degree of honors and then i did my masters and phd at the university of virginia in charlottesville. So i am a wahoo as they say. Subsequent to that, i taught history at Drexel University for more years than i would like to think about, hitting all the right points here. I worked briefly in the Mayors Office as an assistant to mayor wilson good and i was elected to the state legislature where i still serve and im currently the minority, or or democratic chair of the house education committee. Fr the Free Libraries dedicated to advancing literacy, guiding learning, and inspiring curiosity. From its Award Winning author event series to its thoughtprovoking programs like of the upcoming american president ial series which will present compelling programs through the president ial election season. It is now my pleasure and honor to introduce the preeminent g scholars annette ward and reever who will be the presenters for this evening. Annette is a professor at harvard, both in the University Law school. She received the 2008 National Book award in the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in history for the hemmings of monticello. Umanitied her other multitudes of honor include the National Humanities medal, a good in time fellowship in the humanities, and a make author fellowship. Peter is one of americans leading jefferson scholars serving as the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor Emeritus at the university of virginia and the Senior Research historian at the Robert H Smith Institutional Center for jefferson studies. His books include the mind of in the Thomas Jefferson was put in them news book, Thomas Jefferson her and the empire imagination, they present a revealing character study, the man for monticello who we thought we knew. President ial historian john praises and i quote, withight characteristic insight and intellectual rigor. Annette has produced a powerful and lasting portrait of the mind of Thomas Jefferson. This is an essential and brilliant book by two of the nations foremost scholars. A book that will, like its its protagonist, endured. We are so pleased to have them here with us this evening, ladies and gentlemen please join me in welcoming annette and peter to the free library [applause]. About thank you very much. It is wonderful to be here and to be here with one of my very best friends, annette. I annette. S i just like to start by talking about our friendship. The theha secret is, i would not have done this book if it had not been for a net inviting me and then an opportunity to spend time with her. Thats what a serious scholar i am. [laughter] people ask how we came to do this and when this book began. The idea of redoing it, and i say it began sometime at the end of the 1990s when i had written a manuscript aboututat Thomas Jefferson. It looked at the way historians had treated the story of Jefferson Hemmings and i wanted to find people who would be skeptical of the story because i think its always better to have people who tell you what you do wrong as opposed to people who will agree with you with whatever your say. So i called them up and i said i have this manuscript that i worked on and i called him because he was the Thomas Jefferson memorial and he was a success to Merrill Peterson to do bull malone. And and so i figured he would be hostile to what i was saying and he read it and to my surprise he liked it. He actually not only liked it but he wanted to use University Press of virginia, to publish the book. I had an offer from another trade publisher and i decided that i wanted to go with virginia because it was Jefferson University and some Academic Press. Because of the nature of what i was was doing, i thought it would be better to have academics know that this was a book that was abetted by other academics. Usually when you submit it book to an Academic Press at least two, sometimes three scholars are asked to review it before they decide to publish it. I thought it was better to go with virginia, and i did. Ever since then we have been really good friends. Weve been on this journey together. Peter has been writing about jefferson from the standpoint of a human intellectual historian so he writes about of jeffersons writing, what he read and how it influenced his life. I am more social history, i do i write about jefferson and slavery, his private life, some of the politics as well, so this is an opportunity for two people who have been looking from a different perspective to come together and see what we could see. Until jefferson came into my life i did not write about people. Dead people did did not interest me particular. Er im interested in ideas. And of jefferson, until annette was all about people. She is a social historian. It was a thrill for me, as an we old guy to find out that i could do the kind of history that we were doing together but the Common Ground we had is that we are trying to this guy out. We start with the premise that we can figure him out. He he did not want us to understand him. And now you are the first readers of World History to understand Thomas Jefferson. [laughter]out jefferson the other thing is we have been having these conversationsn about jefferson all of these years. As he alluded to there is this notion that he is a screw the boat person that he is so contradictory, so mysterious, that it cant be figured out and we think we can figure him out to the extent that you can figure anybody out, so we are all very complicated people. The best approach was to look at him as an inner and to take them as his word. That caveat was to when he says that when his intentions are as what he believes, what he thinks is going to happen. We have have come to the conclusion that jefferson scholarship and his personal life and understanding as a man had run into a ditch. To be exemplified by one word, hypocrisy. Even the headlights. Is the last of the word will be margin. Even the headlines forie writing about the book, book in which we say that her progress google r he is not the proper lens in which to view jefferson use the word hypocrisy because it is so calming, it rolls off of peoples tongs when thinking about him without thinking about the hypocrisy of the other members of the founding generation. He cornered the market on that. It was sorta the way to say that i knew something about him by saying hypocrite. That could see two thirds of the way. We wanted to move beyond that and sayy look, theres much more tohi writing about him and thinking about him than this sort of trope of hypocrisy is the thing that defines him. I think the first clue on jefferson is that he erected a wall around himself. Youve heard of this wall of separation between church and state. We. We think that metaphor applies to jefferson and the rest of the world. He insisted on his privacy in his sanctum sanctorum in hisis no house. He would be all alone and nobody would penetrate that space. That very insistence on the distinction between private and public, between his life within his family, among his friends, with the slaves, and his life as a statesman and leader. His assistance that they are why distinctive domains is the first clue and understanding him. Why does he insist so much on this. This is where i think we get to the title of the book because the keyword, youll get youll get it right here in the title and you can tell the book by its title but not because of the beautiful art, the pitcher jefferson but because that onene word. Patriarch. So help these people, people, this is an astonishing a concept. This is an astonishing idea that the great icon of democracy, the man who wrote the words that then led to the creation of this that i am now wearing, i do you use this audiovisual kind of stuff, that he could call himself a patriarch which has a sort of a ring of the archaic. The predemocratic, you might even said the antidemocratic. Absolutely. He uses the phrase in a letter he writes to angelica church, Angelica Schuyler church, people have seen the play hamilton it is the woman who is one of the schuyler sisters who is looking for minded work she says of the song. Jefferson and she knew each other, met each other when he was in france and they had something of a flirtation. People people mainly think of jefferson in relationship to mariah causeway in france. But angelica was another woman in which he flirted and have a highly charged relationship. In 1793 he writes to her at the eno of his tenure as secretary of state in washingtons cabinet. He has been beat up by alexander hamilton, angelicas georg brotherinlaw who he sort of in competition with hamilton for the favor of george washington. Hamilton wins this battle and jefferson is going on. He writes to her and says, he doesnt mention the sort of wars with hamilton but he knows, he knew what she knew all about the stuff because they were close. He writes to her and says im going back to monticello. One of the lines as he talk about having to go home to his fields, farms, and books and to watch for the happiness of those who labor for mines in other words the enslaved people on his plantation. He talks about his daughters and he says they come live next to me and are married often do well then i will be the most blessed of the patriarchs. I will come myself as a blessed and as peter said, that is such a strange word to use it to describe a person he saw himself as a republic democratic republican. A champion of the common man. A person who person who believed in the power of an people. Some the common people, a patriarch is an autocrat. Patriarch is someone who rules over his domain, his his family, sometimes enslaved people. You think about ancient times. In another letter he describes himself as living like an antediluvian patriarch among his farming family. We s so what we wanted to do is say how can these things exist together. We see this as contradiction but it made sense to jefferson. Its much more than a contradiction. Think think of jeffersons association with rights. He is the president who defines the rights, hes hes the one who articulates the natural rights. T one of the rights that seems most natural to him is to have complete control over the domestic domain. If if anybodye else is exercising influence in his Household Economy and the Little Society of his mountaintop plantation, then this control would be subvertedo if he is not secure in his, then he cannot be truly independent. That word independence is resonant both for the country as a whole and for Thomas Jefferson and other american men. Theyre independent so that they can form a government based on consents with each other. We make the further move that the people in the family should be equal to. That is what he says, all, all men and he means including women, are equal in some fundamental human sense, but the family unit itself is natural. That is the key to understanding this like that we are exploring between the private and the public. The families not just a refuge, way to get away from alexander hamilton. You can understand that. Jefferson says he hates politics, but he is lying. So we do call him out occasionally. Thats not a progress he. Everybody has to say that. You have to say particularly in the revolutionary. In the founding. Because if you are in politics for the sake of power and selfaggrandizement. You would be the enemy of democracy. When i supposed to have political parties, people dont run for office, they stand. You understandnd that distincti. It means means you are an upright man, people see you and they say, we we want you to represent us. So we think that as we begin to explore that connection between how jefferson lives in what he thinks, that both dimensions of his life become clear to us. But family is natural as you say and natural order in the family with a male as the head of the family and hisin understanding of natural. Jefferson was born in 1743, i will remind you of what natural was. The man is the patriarch is the head of the family over who he exercise power. The not also from whom he had responsibility. Theres this notion that jefferson has with himself as something that we think is problematic, a benevolent patriarch, a benevolent figure and thats how he thought people were supposed to rule in the family. The family be in the basic unit of the community, of the nation, you start with the family and you radiate out to the community at large, locally and then up to the National Government that it itself is sort of a model of family. What led hi that made sense to him but they gave him a particular view of could be in the nation, who who could be a part of the people. That is what let him to believe that there should be an end to slavery, but African Americans had to find their own country. He did not believe there could be a conflict free, multiracial, the way we aspire to a Multiracial Society with blacks and whites living together. Whites would never give up their against blacks, blacks would never forgive whites what they have done, theres no way, hed cannot at that time argue for, intermixed year. It was not something, not a plan that could be adopted. So it had to happen was africanamericans, black people would find their own country. They did not come to the country voluntarily, they are brought here in chains, they would have to find their place so that they could have their own country and have their own full rights. Jefferson could not have conceived of a society where there were large numbers of people were secondclass ever citizens, republican nation would have to have firstclassor citizenship for everybody. Its not the kind of world that we had after the civil war where laws were passed, where blacks and even when laws werent pass, as blacks or treat as secondclass citizens. You had to fight for citizenship. Its funny to think about jefferson and malcolm x. Malcolm x. Said, he sorted chiding king and others over its demonstrators say why do you have to fight for your freedom . If you are citizens of the country, why should you have to fight for freedom . Thats telling you something s there you have to do it. So we condemn jefferson allottes people condemn him a great deal for that statement, but its the truth. We have had sort of conflict and serious conflict among the races from the very beginning. This is is not to say that we cannot overcome them, but i thought it was naive to suggest that it was crazy when he suggested it was a possibility. When you look at history and see what is happening. It is very easily to moralize about jefferson. Word very easy to use that word a packer see us the morally compelling issue of the founding era was the definition of the American People and for us that it did not include all of ussnd then is very disturbing. The best way to understand it is not to start waking her finger and condemning jefferson as if he falls short of a standard he should have had. The best way to get a jefferson of slavery is to work through his mind. I think this is one of the ways we develop a complementarity and that has beautifully retold the story or told the first time the sum of the people who lived at monticello and that is a story that we need to hear and it is very compelling to us. What was jefferson thinking . It is important to bring up what might seem like an old, boring story to and that is, jefferson and his fellow revolutionaries that they were changing the world by attacking monarchy, aristocracy, aristocracy, privilege, established churches, all of these forms of inequality and secondclass citizenship. They were struggling against the tyranny of george the third, they were killing the king, his role have become unnatural because he was making war on his own subjects. People who, in america revered him until the imperial crisis that led to independence. Or in other words, king george was a bad father. We get back to the notion of fatherhood and a simple way to understand what mobilized a loth of men, the very independent men of virginia who thought well of themselves and still do in the first families, to think of george the third is somebody who challenged their own patriarchy, there fatherhood on their fit plantations and in the families. There fatherhood was incompatible with the wicked fatherhood of george the third. This is all about men. We have to understand this because for jefferson the difference in gender, which we take to be a social construction is the fashionable way to put ip because we are all basically a like, we keep discovering that were not, its very upsetting to me. We dont think that this difference should really matter very much. Were struggling with it. For jefferson, its nature. Its. Its supposed to be like this. A in the same way i think we can think about race in this way. Think of the idea of race, it really, really means the same thing as people. R it means the same thing as a nation. Thomas jefferson and his colleagues were Nation Builders comments on the basis of these natural connections among republican families who came together to govern themselves because they had rejected the mass of a bad father of the backing