Jefferson sketched out his own epitaph and grave marker, probably in March 1826, not long before he died.
MR. JON MEACHAM (JM): I think the epitaph that he designed—he drew the tombstone, and we still have that document—is one of the great acts of misdirection in American history. As Freud will tell you, often what you do not say is as important as what you say. I think Jefferson realized that his political career would be forever controversial, because political careers by their very nature are controversial. When you are elected, if you’re doing really well, you get 55 or 60 percent of the vote, and that’s not all that common. On your best day, 40 to 50 percent or more of the people you see are against you. I often wonder how presidents get up in the morning realizing that almost every other person they see doesn’t want them to be doing what they’re doing.
Jefferson disliked controversy, yet he was irresistibly drawn to it. That’s one of the contradictions of his life. He loved politics, he loved the arena, but he believed that being seen as the author of the document about human equality, about liberty of conscience and enlightened education, would be an achievement about which there would be less debate going forward than whether the embargo should have gone in in 1808 or what he did during his vice presidency or as secretary of state. [The Embargo Act of 1807, which took effect in 1808, embargoed British and French trade during the Napoleonic Wars, with serious negative consequences for the U.S. economy.]
DR: You’ve now spent five years of your life studying Thomas Jefferson. You’ve spent almost every waking hour learning about him, reading everything about him, and you’ve produced a best-selling book. After five years of studying him, do you admire him more than you did before, or do you see so many flaws that you say, “This is not the man I thought he was”?
JM: I admire him more because I see more flaws. Let me explain that.
You can tell I’m a southerner and a Christian, so I believe in forgiveness. I do what I do in part because for a long time I was a working journalist—for twenty years—and I started looking back at Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, Andrew Jackson and Jefferson, in part to see whether the world seemed as complicated and confounding and difficult in their time as our world does now. And the answer is yes, for in real time we never know how the American story is going to turn out. We now know how the founding of the United States turned out, we now know how the Civil War turned out, we know how the civil rights movement turned out, we know what happened at Normandy on D-Day in World War II and beyond, but they didn’t.
The reason I find biography so compelling is that when you look at great American figures, whether it’s Jefferson or, Lord knows, Jackson—Andrew Jackson’s life was sort of a combination of Advise & Consent meets Bonanza; you didn’t want to cross him because he would shoot you—Lincoln, Roosevelt, Kennedy, when you look at the great figures, their vices are almost as large as their virtues.
To me, the whole world turns on the word almost. To me, it’s remarkably inspirational that flawed, sinful human beings were able to, at moments of great crisis, transcend those limitations and leave the country a little better off than it was before. And Thomas Jefferson did that. For all his contradictions, for all his derelictions, which I’m sure we’ll talk about, the country was a better place, the world was a better place on the Fourth of July 1826, when he died, than it had been in April of 1743 when he was born.
DR: On July 4, 1826, Thomas Jefferson was eighty-three years old. It was fifty years to the day after the Declaration of Independence was approved by the Continental Congress in 1776. What happened on that day in 1826 elsewhere?
JM: Well, in Massachusetts, John Adams once again got his headline stepped on by Thomas Jefferson. Poor Adams could never get one clean news cycle. He died on the same day. One of the last things he said was, “Jefferson lives.” He was wrong in that particular moment, because Jefferson had died earlier in the day, but Adams was right on the bigger point, because Jefferson does live. He does continue to resonate. Of the early founders, he is the one who resonates the most for us.
I’d be bold enough to say I think that might be particularly true for members of Congress, because he did what you do. From 1769 until 1809, he was almost constantly holding or seeking public office. He left George Washington’s cabinet in order to do that. As John Adams put it, it’s remarkable how political plants tend to grow in the shade.
I believe that on that day in 1826, Jefferson, revered as the author of the best of the American promise in the Declaration of Independence, knew that his epitaph would stir up a deep interest. He also knew, I think we know now, and people in his own time knew, that very few people had failed so clearly in their own personal lives to realize that promise. No one ever said it better and no one ever really fell so short, and I think in that tragic distance lies an extraordinary American life.
DR: The Declaration of Independence contains a sentence that Jefferson wrote—with some editing we’ll talk about—and that some people would say is the most famous sentence in the English language. I think you all know it by heart: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” How could a man write that all men are created equal when he had two slaves with him in Philadelphia, owned sixty slaves at the time, and owned six hundred slaves during his lifetime, and there’s no evidence that he freed very many slaves when he died? How could he have said all men are created equal?
JM: He meant all white men at the time. The contradiction you point out is that tragic failing to see how the promise he articulated could apply to those other than his own kind.
Remember what was going on when he wrote that sentence. It’s a civilizational shift. This is not just American exceptionalism, it’s really remarkable. The political tradition of which you are the heirs, the operative heirs, was the clearest Western manifestation of the greatest shift in a thousand years or more.
What had happened in the century or so before the American Revolution? The Protestant Reformation, the translation of sacred Scripture into the vernacular, the European Enlightenment, the Scottish moral enlightenment, John Locke and the idea of self-government. The world was going from being vertical to being horizontal. It was vertical for a long time—with the divine right of kings, your entire destiny was shaped by the station to which you were born, and you had no other alternative. Everything came from above.
What did Jefferson do? He gave political manifestation to this shift from a hierarchy to a democratic—lowercase d—ethos, in which suddenly human rights, or the rights of all men being created equal, came from the Creator. What did that mean? If they came from the Creator, that meant neither the hand of the king nor the hands of a mob could take them away. It was an incredibly important intellectual and political shift.
DR: As a young man, Jefferson said some things that were not favorable about slavery, but he realized he wasn’t going to get anywhere in Virginia politics if he was in favor of abolition. Was his view really that we had to tolerate slavery? What was his solution to that problem?
JM: In a very un-Jeffersonian way, he had no solution. The slavery issue is one of our central original sins. The other is the forced removal of Native Americans.
The Constitution codified our compromises on slavery. Everyone here knows that. Thomas Jefferson would not have been president of the United States—the Virginian presidential dynasty of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe would not have been possible—without the Three-Fifths Compromise. [At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, delegates agreed that three-fifths of each state’s enslaved population would count toward that state’s total population, an important number for determining how many representatives each state would get in Congress. The compromise increased the political power of the southern states.]
The purchase of Louisiana in 1803 led to the first great secessionist movement in the country,
which was not in the American South but in New England, because New England saw the country moving south and west and slave states being added that would dilute the power of New England. When I was working on the book and I was thinking about the psychology of that moment, I was reminded of when my wife and I had two children, a boy and a girl, and my wife became pregnant and we found out it was going to be a girl. My son came to me and said, “Daddy, we’re going to be outnumbered, and I don’t like our chances.”
That’s what Timothy Pickering was doing in Massachusetts. He was going to be outnumbered, and it wasn’t going to work out very well, and in fact it didn’t, because the political power of New England was diluted. [Pickering, a Massachusetts politician who served as secretary of state and in the U.S. Congress, opposed the Louisiana Purchase because he worried that New England would lose its influence if the country expanded westward.]
The reality of slavery in that era was that there were some plans for emancipation, there was some talk about expatriation [i.e., sending African Americans to Africa], but William Lloyd Garrison [the famous abolitionist crusader] was not a force in the early part of the nineteenth century. If Thomas Jefferson had fallen off a horse in 1783, he would have been a source of great tags of rhetorical flourishes for the abolitionists, because on four or five occasions as a young man—as a trial lawyer, a young legislator—he did try to take steps to reform the institution of slavery, and he lost each time.
We’re here in a room of political folks. What do political folks dislike a great deal? Losing.
So when, in the Confederation Congress in 1783–84, he had written a provision that would have banned the expansion of slavery to the west, he lost by a single vote. [The Confederation Congress ran the new country from 1781 to 1789.] A delegate from New Jersey hadn’t shown up, and Jefferson later wrote, “In that moment the voice of heaven itself was silent and the fate of millions still unborn hung in the balance.”
It’s a wonderful phrase. No president ever spoke in needlepoint-pillow terms better than Thomas Jefferson. It’s a goose-bump kind of line, but it was, in fact, simply rhetoric. At that point, he realized his political power would be diluted in direct proportion to his opposition to slavery.
He also could not imagine his own life without it. One of the first things we know about Jefferson, his first memory, is of his being handed up on a pillow to a slave on horseback to be taken on a family journey in Virginia.
One of the last things we know that happened in that summer of 1826 is that he’s lying in that alcove bed in his home at Monticello, which I’m sure many of you have seen, and he’s uncomfortable, and he’s trying to signal to his family what’s wrong, his white family, and no one gets it except an enslaved butler who reaches over and fixes the pillow and all is well again. His life was suffused and made possible and supported by slavery, and he simply could not make the imaginative leap to emancipation.
The final thing I’ll say on this is that we can put a lot of freight on Thomas Jefferson. I just gave him credit for being the great articulator of the manifestation of the Enlightenment that shaped the modern world, so you can’t let him off the hook for what he didn’t do.
But it did take a civil war and forty years after he died and six hundred thousand American casualties to abolish slavery. Those of you who come from my native region in the South know that in the lifetime of most of the people in this room, we had to have federal legislation so that poll watchers would not put a box of Tide on a voting table and say to an African American, “You can have a ballot if you can tell us how many flakes of soap are in this box.” So before we’re self-righteous about Thomas Jefferson, I think we should take a moral accounting of ourselves.
DR: One last thing relating to slavery. In recent years, a lot of discussion has occurred about his relationship with a slave, Sally Hemings. He fathered six children with her, and he appears to have been an attentive father to those children, and he more or less stayed with her until he died. How do you explain a slave owner like that having a relationship with an enslaved person? Was that common or not common, and how did he hide it? When it was made public in those days, he never denied it, really, and he never affirmed it. Lastly, based on DNA evidence or anything else, do you have any doubt that the Sally Hemings–Thomas Jefferson relationship was true?
JM: To take them in reverse order, I do not have any doubt. Even in the absence of the DNA evidence, which is 99.9 percent convincing, I do not believe that a man so driven by appetite for power, for books, for food, for wine, for art, for knowledge, could at the age of forty, after his wife died, simply stop short of indulging the most sensuous appetite of all.
If you disbelieve the Sally Hemings story, then you are disbelieving a perennially coherent, oral history tradition from the African American community, and you are ascribing to Jefferson a kind of discipline that is almost superhuman. I do believe that it happened. It was common.
There was an old line of Mary Boykin Chesnut [a South Carolina writer and the wife of a plantation owner], who wrote a diary of a trip through the Carolinas a few years after Jefferson’s death. She pointed out that white women on plantations could tell you with great precision the parentage of any mixed-race children on every plantation in the county except their own, where apparently the children simply descended like manna from heaven. So there was a culture of desire and denial in my native region that was extraordinary. It was extraordinarily pervasive. It’s very hard to put ourselves back there.
It is one of the many hypocrisies of Jefferson’s life. His children by Sally Hemings were the only slaves he freed. Let me just take a second about how the Jefferson-Hemings relationship began.
It began in Paris. Sally Hemings was his wife’s half sister. Let me say that again. Sally Hemings was his wife’s half sister, so the Hemings family itself, in the odd world of slavery, was—and a white southerner really hesitates to use this word—but they were a privileged slave family, as horribly ironic as that statement is. They were to be taken very good care of and overseers were not to give them orders. If I may, they were family. And so when Sally Hemings arrives in Paris, when Jefferson is the American minister there from 1785 to 1789, the relationship begins.
A study in contradictions: the author of the Declaration of Independence was also a lifelong slave owner.
DR: She was fourteen?
JM: No, she was sixteen. Before we go into that, we should point out quickly that James Madison wooed a fifteen-year-old daughter of a congressman from New York. Lock up your daughters. John Marshall married a girl when she was fifteen or sixteen. The age of consent in Virginia in 1800 or so was twelve. Let’s not be anachronistic. We have to put ourselves back in that world, in that time.
In what I find one of the most moving and courageous moments in the whole Jefferson saga, here’s this woman—this girl, as you say—Sally Hemings. She is in Paris, she has become pregnant by the man who owns her, who totally controls her fate, and he wants her to go back with him when he returns home to become the first secretary of state.
If she stays in France, all she has to do is go down to the Paris City Hall and declare that she is a slave being held in France, and she will be free. Her brother is there, he can help her with it.
In what I find to be one of the most compelling moments, she negotiates with one of the most powerful men in the world, and she bends him to her will. She says, “I will go back with you if any children we have are freed at the age of their majority.”
I have friends who are lawyers who say they could have gotten her a much better deal, but I think, in context, her courage, her savvy in some ways, to make the best of what was, I think for everyone in this room, a virtually unimaginably difficult and tragic situation, is a testament to her courage and a remarkable character about which we know almost nothing. But that relationship did last until the day Jefferson died forty years later.
Let me quickly say something about the press—I know, a big favorite of everyone here. Jefferson
dealt with this regarding the story of Hemings, beginning in September 1801. He had not been president for a year when the story—almost entirely accurate, with just two little mistakes—appeared in a Richmond newspaper, written by an alienated former ally of his. He denied it. It’s a little unclear what he was denying, but this was very much part of his political life.
There were political cartoons in the newspapers during his presidency with his head on a rooster’s body that called him a philosophic cock, with “dusky Sally,” as she was known, in the background as a hen. I know a lot of you all want to think that cable TV just made this a lot worse, but it’s been a perennial problem.
DR: When Jefferson was at the White House, did Sally Hemings ever visit?
JM: No, no. He was very much embarrassed by his slave-owner status whenever he left Albemarle County. He took slaves to Philadelphia for the Continental Congress, but with the Adamses, who were opposed to slavery, he was very careful about it. He did not want the people in Washington to see him as a southern politician. He wanted them to see him as a national politician.
DR: Let’s move on to the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson writes it in more or less four days. He had seventeen days, but like many people he said, “I’m busy, I waited until the last moment,” and so he spends four days on it. Why was he picked to write this important document? He was only thirty-three years old, relatively young. Who edited it, who else was on the committee with him, and how did that get to be so important?
JM: Well, thirty-three is a good age. Jesus did a lot that year. I don’t think that joke violates the wall of separation between church and state, does it?
Jefferson showed up in Philadelphia in 1775 with, as John Adams put it, “the Reputation of a masterly Pen.” He had written A Summary View of the Rights of British America in 1774. It had gotten wide circulation in the colonies. Nothing like Thomas Paine’s famous pamphlet Common Sense later in 1776, but it was a document that showed, as Adams again put it, a certain “felicity of expression,” and we have to put ourselves back in June 1776.
The American Story Page 7