This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. All Nations are built on stories. India will awake tonight for freedom. In Swagavada, there are stories about ideals.
In Finidavas sense. The values around which people state their identity. King Korna. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing ground.
That's what it means to be Australian. The Einstein is the same. Let me be done right. Let's have it.
Bye, thank you. Often these stories contain contradictions. Some so profound that most of us simply look the other way. The United States has its own set of founding myths and its own set of contradictions.
One of the most striking unfolded in 1776 at a house on the southwest corner of 7th and Market Streets in Philadelphia. That summer, 33-year-old Thomas Jefferson rented rooms at this house. While he was there, he wrote the document that would formalize America's split from Britain, the Declaration of Independence. It says, 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. And the pursuit of happiness. And yet, even as he was writing these inspiring words.
That to secure these rights, Jefferson was attended on by a slave. He was a 14-year-old boy named Robert Hemings. Jefferson, in fact, owned hundreds of slaves. He fathered six children with an enslaved woman.
Today, we take a deep dive into history as a window into psychology. We look closely at the life and beliefs of a man who shaped the modern United States, and ask how his complexities and contradictions have echoes in our own lives. How our minds justify our choices. This week on Hidden Brain.
Thomas Jefferson is remembered as a founding father of the United States, but historian, Annette Gordon-Read, looks at his life beyond the writing of the Declaration of Independence. She and her co-author, Peter Onuf, explore Jefferson's inner life in their book, Most Blessed of the Patriarchs, Thomas Jefferson, and the Empire of the Imagination. Annette, welcome to Hidden Brain. Glad to be here.
Thank you for asking. The story of Jefferson and the story of slavery in the United States are deeply intertwined. I understand that Jefferson's earliest memory involved a slave. Yes, he told his grandchildren that his earliest memory was of being handed up on a pillow to an enslaved person, as his family was making a move from his boyhood home of Shadwell to Tuckahoe Plantation.
And so making this journey with his siblings and his parents. Jefferson was carried by an enslaved person, and so he says that that was his first memory. And of course, slavery continued to play an important part in his life throughout his childhood. When he turned 21, he inherited 5,000 acres and a number of slaves.
About a decade later, following his marriage, he received another two plantations and even more slaves. What did he do with all this land and human property? Well, he basically lived the life of a planter. Enslaved people planted tobacco at first and then later wheat.
They served in his household. They were the source of his wealth. He was a lawyer by trade, but being a plantation owner was the sort of basic understanding of himself, the basic part of his life. Even as he became a slaveholder, Jefferson also thought of himself as being an educated and cultured man.
He read voraciously, he loved music. He considered himself to be a man of science and reason. And much of his learning taught him that slavery was a terrible institution, but slavery was also, as we've discovered, essential to his way of life. What do Jefferson's early writings tell us about his views about this contradiction?
Well, he thought of himself as I indicated, a progressive person. And you have to remember that a lot of people who would be considered cultured and educated people were slave owners, but the difference between them and Jefferson is that they never came to the conclusion that slavery was wrong. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this and learn to imitate it.
For man is an imitative animal. The interesting thing about him is that as a young man, he saw himself as a part of or an adherent to the notion of the Enlightenment. And being anti-slaved trade, anti-slavery was one of the tenets that many people thought was a part of all of that. So I think he saw it as something that would gradually, and that's the thing that trips us up, gradually end, as people became more enlightened and learned more, that they would realize that slavery was a backwards institution, an institution from ancient times.
I think he thought it was just as we learned new scientific thoughts, just as we learned ways to make machines that are better, that the machinery of society would change as well. And Jefferson was a great believer in progress and things being better in the future than they were in the present. Absolutely. And that's part of, that's a strength and a weakness.
Some people say the optimism was almost too great, but he definitely thought that mankind and society would get better and better. Jefferson tried to push America in the direction of this better society. As he was writing the Declaration of Independence, he accused Britain's King George of perpetuating the international slave trade what Jefferson called Exacribal Commerce. This reference to a detestable practice was removed from the final version of the declaration.
In the movie 1776, there's a scene that shows Jefferson debating this issue with Edward Rutledge, a member of the Continental Congress, from South Carolina. I can't tell you the rights of human nature are deeply wounded by this infamous practice. I've seen your own wounds, Mr. Jefferson, for you are our practitioner.
Are you not? I asked him whether the scene is historically accurate. Was Jefferson prevented from getting anti-slavery language into the Declaration of Independence, because he himself was personally compromised as a slaveholder? Well, I don't think he was prevented because of his involvement in slavery.
He was, it was taken out because people thought it was too incendiary. It offended members of the deeth south, in the person of South of the South Carolinian. It wasn't about Jefferson's ownership of slaves that made them excise this. It was that people thought it was not the thing to do at this moment, that it was too incendiary, that it was a mark against people who were slaveholders, all slaveholders.
So better to just leave that passage out. They took it out and he was very angry about that and other changes that they made to the draft. So when Jefferson and folks like him were angry was part of their reasoning, we really want this in, but it's more important for us to all hold together, because we're actually fighting this revolutionary war, and that's the more important goal that has to be accomplished first, before we can get to this secondary goal of basically abolishing slavery. Yes, I think so.
That was it. They wanted a mobilization to have an army of people committed to the idea of leaving the British Empire, and that was the primary focus that they had, and then later again in the Constitution, putting the country together as a nation was the primary focus. You're right at one point. Jefferson was a lifetime participant in an ancient system that made him the master of hundreds of people over whom he had near absolute power.
He could buy and sell human beings. If hostility to tyranny was at the heart of his politics and plan for the United States of America, that sentiment had no real currency on his mountain. At the same time, he well understood the basic problem with his way of life and wrote damning and insightful criticisms of the institution that made it possible. It's not unreasonable to look at that paragraph and say, Jefferson was just a hypocrite.
Well, I think you could say that, but I think he was hypocritical in the way that many people are hypocritical, and that all of us are hypocritical when we have an intellectual belief about something, but we don't have the will to act upon those beliefs. Jefferson did not know what to do about slavery. Slavery was not just an economic system, it was a system of social control. What do you do with Black Virginians when they are emancipated?
How do they fit into society? I just don't think he could see what a sort of real plan, a realistic plan for what to do about it. And that's something that we grapple with in lots of areas, believing one thing, but not having the strength to do something about it, or to actually make that idea come to fruition if you have the shot. This ambivalence to what slavery became even more difficult to navigate after Jefferson went to Paris in 1784 on behalf of the new U.S.
government. When Jefferson went to Paris, he took a man named James Hemings, who was a teenager, 18, 19 years old at the time, and he took James with him to have James trained as a chef, a French chef. So there was some tension here because France, of course, at the time was resounding with the cries of liberty and equality, and Jefferson in some ways embraced French revolutionary fervor, but how did he manage that embrace of the revolution where the slaves he had in his own household? Well, the way he handled enslaved people, or James Hemings when he was in France, had much more to do with French law, which at the time was on the side of the enslaved person.
I mean, people who petitioned for freedom in France, people who had been brought from the colonies and so forth, or other enslaved people who were brought there from other places, who petitioned for freedom, had those petitions granted routinely. So when he's there with James Hemings, he knows that it's possible that James might at some point petition for his freedom. So he handles this, I think, although he doesn't say this, but this is the time when he begins to pay James Hemings regular wages. James becomes the chef de cuisine at the Hotel de L'Ogioque, Jefferson's residence, and Jefferson puts him on wages as he does the other servants at the plantation.
Before he had been giving James spending money, or gratuities, but once James takes over the role as the chef de cuisine, he begins to pay him. So I think he handles it by treating James as if he were a regular servant, and instead of an enslaved person. Jefferson's wife had died by the time he got to France. At one point, a young slave was brought over from the United States.
She was actually the sister of Robert Hemings, who was by his side as he drafted the Declaration of Independence. Who was she, and what did she become to Jefferson? Well, Sally Hemings, Sarah, nicknamed Sally, was sister to Robert and James. She had been something of a companion to Jefferson's daughter, so she went along, and she was 14.
Sally Hemings crossed the ocean, and while she was there, we don't know when, she became Jefferson's and their son says, concubine is the term that he uses, and she became pregnant by Jefferson. And she wanted to stay in France. And by the time Jefferson thinks that he wanted to come home, she wanted to stay. And actually, all of the young people in the Hotel de Nogiaq wanted to stay in France.
Nobody wanted to go home. But Jefferson promised her that if she came back with him, she would have a good life at Montecello, and their children would be freed when they were 21 years old. So she agreed to that. She was 16 years old at the time, and she came back to Virginia with Jefferson.
So for us at least with a vantage of history, this seems almost incomprehensible as a decision. Why would you give up, essentially, freedom in France to come back and be a slave in Virginia? I thought about that quite a bit when I wrote my first book. That was sort of a point of mystery for me about Sally Hemings.
But when I started writing the Hemings as a Montecello and working on that, and I realized how important family was, or I began to think about how important family would have been to someone like that. A 16-year-old female raised to believe that she had some special connection to family in a way, to think about family, think about your mother is back in Virginia, her sisters and brothers were there. So that would be an impetus. That would sort of a dilemma that many enslaved people faced.
Do you run away and have freedom by yourself, or do you stay and stick it out with your family? The other thing to consider is that Jefferson treated Sally Hemings and her sisters and brothers very differently than he did the other slaves on the mountain. She had seen him, let her brothers sort of wander and go off and hire their own time, work for themselves, make keep their own money. The enslaved women on the plantation, all but the Hemings, is had to go to the fields at harvest time.
The Hemings sisters did not do that. They were constructed in a different way. I might have a different view of Jefferson. I have a particular view of Jefferson from this particular time, and seeing him as, for lack of a better term, an enemy of these people.
But it's not clear to me that she would have seen it in exactly the same way that I did. That's one of the things you have to do when you're writing history is whatever you want people to do, they may not think about things in the same way. So family and her history with Jefferson, not just the two of them, but his relations with her mother and her brothers and all of these people, likely colored the way she considered making this decision. And of course she was still a child.
Yes, well, she was by our light, she was a child. She was 16. The age of consent in Virginia at the time was 10. So a 16 year old person to us is like a baby, but a 16 year old person at that time would not have been thought of as a child.
So once they're back in Monticello, the estate in Virginia, which was Jefferson's home, he went on to father six children with Sally Hemings, but at the same time he also had a white family that was also a part of his life. How did he navigate having these two separate families under the same roof? Well, because he was the patriarch of Monticello, and in those days it was much more than father knows best, what he said would go because he was the head of the household. I think it's also important to remember that Jefferson had two surviving daughters with his wife, who died in 1782.
So I think he handled it by being the boss, and it was the kind of thing that people would not question. So he had basically the freedom to impose a kind of order on this place that everybody went along with. Plus, you have to remember, I think we have to remember that he wasn't married. And the idea that a man would have a mistress or a companion or that he would have a set up like this was normal in Virginia.
It was not considered crazy. One of Jefferson's friends said that it was a common practice for widowed or bachelor slave owners to take an enslaved woman as, and he uses the phrase, a substitute for a wife. Obviously she couldn't be a wife because they couldn't marry. Black people and white people could not get married.
Well, I'm told 1967 in Virginia. So that was out of the question. But this was something that happened in slavery. It's hard for us to wrap our minds around, just as it might be hard for us to wrap our minds around slavery in general.
But mixed children, these kinds of connections from rape to sort of long-term liaisons, however you want to call them, were a part of slave societies. And they have been in every slave society that has ever existed. It's interesting, isn't it? Because I think when most of us, at least, people think about the institution of slavery.
You think about it in economic terms or political terms. You don't really think about it in terms of these family relationships, which may have been every bit as important in keeping the system intact as the economic and political advantages that slavery conferred on some people. Yes, but it also shows in some ways the deep horror of the institution because you think of family relations as biological connections, we could say, as something that would foster a sense of, well, a sense of connection. And there is a sense of connection among some people, at least it was for the Hemings and Jefferson.
But it warps everything. Because how can you have a true relationship? How can you have the kind of connection that we typically associate with family under these circumstances? But people did.
As I said, most people, they didn't care about the family connection at all. They sold children, they gave them away. But this was a very strange attempt to create something or to maintain something that is just very difficult for us to understand. When we come back, did Jefferson see the contradictions in his own life?
Stay with us. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shaka Revitantam. This is NPR. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shaka Revitantam.
We're talking with Anad Gauden Reed, a professor of legal history at Harvard University. Her 2008 book, The Hemings List of Monticello, won the Pulitzer Prize. Anad Thomas Jefferson saw himself as one of the fathers of the nation, but also the patriarch of his own little patch of paradise, the estate of Monticello in Virginia. You write that Jefferson felt a sense of obligation to his slaves.
How did that shape the way he felt about them? Well, this notion of being a patriarch, which is kind of problematic for us these days, for Jefferson, it was not simply about the power he exercised over people. It would be about his sense of responsibility. And that, of course, greats with us, because he's talking about responsibility over grown men and women.
You know, and you think, hey, they could be responsible for themselves. But his experience is in France with the Hemingses, with James and Sally Hemings. They were the face of slavery for him. And he saw himself acting as a slaveholder through his relationships with them.
And he is treating them differently. He sees himself buying clothes for James, paying James a full salary in France, and continuing to do so when they come back to the United States, treating them in a different sort of way. He sees himself as a good, quote unquote, good and benevolent master. And we balk at that, and rightfully so, but he saw himself as doing slavery in the right way, if it had to be done.
And once you start to acquiesce or think of yourself as a good slave owner, I think the urgency about ending slavery dissipates. I have my house to build my fields to form and to watch for the happiness of those who labor for mine. Can you talk a moment about how Jefferson related to the slaves that he owned in terms of the violence that he and his overseers perpetrated on them? Well, there's no record of Jefferson ever beating anybody, but overseers that Monticello and his other plantations did use the whip.
The whip was a ubiquitous part of control on plantations, but Jefferson developed the idea that using incentives would be a better way to get people to do things than to whip them. It would destroy their value in my estimation to degrade them in their own eyes by the whip. This, therefore, must not be resorted to, but in extremities. And while he was thinking about this, he read a number of books about changes in prison, the way that people dealt with prisoners in penitentiaries, and the idea was incentives worked better than after the fact punishments.
So in the 1790s, when he sets up a nail factory run by boys, typically, and older teenagers, he institutes a regime of incentives that they would get extra rations for food, they would get extra clothes. Sometimes they would get money, they were paid gratuities. So this notion of incentives versus punishment or whipping was something that became a part of his way of making himself a quote-unquote, better slaveholder, and that's the thing he tried to foster, which made him more comfortable in his role as a master. Do you see the steps that Jefferson was taking as indeed some courageous effort to overcome or to go beyond what others were doing around him?
Or do you see it really as a type of step that was really a mask over the horror of the institution itself? Well, I think he was trying to make himself feel better about it. I think Jefferson was not losing sleep every night. Oh, I'm a slave owner with his head in his hands or whatever like that.
As we again, looking at this, we say, how can you do this? But I do think that these efforts, this is how he did it. He did it by trying to restrain himself, from refrained from using the most ultimate power that his slaveholders had. He could say to himself, hey, I'm not doing what this person down the road is doing.
You know, whipping people all the time and letting my overseers abuse people. Otherwise, I said, when they needed to use the whip, they did. But he tried to restrain him. The fact that he says, I'm not doing these things.
I think to him is the clearest way that he justified to himself being a slave owner. That I'm not like those other people who are using rampant abuse against enslaved people. But that is something that makes him comfortable, more comfortable in the world than it would have been if he'd been out there with the whip himself. So it's a double-edged sword here.
You don't want people whipped, right? I'm not saying that he should have, that you go ahead and do the whole thing, go hog on it. But by restraining himself in that way, by taking, exercising the option of not doing that, he made himself feel better about being a slave owner. In many ways, I think it's hard to read your book without at least reading into it the possibility that Jefferson had, at least in his own mind, something approaching an intimate relationship with Sally Hemmings.
That it was not just Master and Slave. Of course, a lot of people have criticized you for this. She was a slave. She could not have given consent.
How have you come to understand the relationship between Jefferson and Sally Hemmings? I go back and forth on this. I don't believe that every relationship between an enslaved woman and a master was exactly the same. I talk in the book about Sally Hemmings' sister Mary, who lives with a man named Thomas Bell on Main Street.
And she asks Jefferson, she had been enslaved at Marticello to sell her to Bell. So she could live with him and they lived together and have kids. And when he died, he left the property to them, to the family, and she takes his last name. And of course, she was an enslaved woman.
She never freed her. But I can't think that her relationship was just like a woman who ends up with a house and property and takes the man's last name, and is known by the people in the community as his common-law wife. That that's the same as a person running through the plantation raping slave women, which people did. I think there were different types of connections.
And Jefferson, to me, shows signs of having been attached to Sally Hemmings. I have no problem saying that because there are no stories about him with any other woman when he comes back from France, you know, ever, but her. We don't know about her because once she gets back here, she is totally under his power. But if you look at the kinds of male-female relationships they would have known at that time, a wife, a white wife, would have been under the control of her husband, too.
She could not refuse consent to sex any more than an enslaved woman could. He could not sell his wife, but that would be about the only thing that he couldn't do. So we look at this and there's this sharp difference between male-female relationships. We see the difference between obviously a white woman has more power than an enslaved woman, but those people, Sally Hemmings, would not have thought that as a woman, she would have freedom to do whatever she wanted, because not many women, if certainly not any married women, got to do whatever they wanted.
So it's complicated. We may not know how Sally Hemmings felt, but we do know what Jefferson's critics had to say at the time. And that says Jefferson was rebuked by people who told him he had no business falling in love with a woman who wasn't white. The newspaper reports in when Jefferson is president were saying, we're castigating him for saying, you know, why have you not found, I'm paraphrasing here, but why have you not found a worthy woman of your own color?
So what people objected to was not that he had a child with her, but it seemed to be a continuing thing. And that put it too much like marriage, and that put it too much like the kinds of connections that white men had with white women. And so back at his time, that was the real objection. I understand that at the end of his life, Jefferson, in effect, freed Sally Hemmings, but didn't do it in a way that just simply said, you know, you are now free.
He did it in a more complicated fashion. Can you talk about what he did? Well, Sally Hemmings was never formally freed. She left Monticello with her sons, who were formally freed, the two youngest ones, the two eldest children, went to live as white people and did not want freedom papers, because that would indicate that they were enslaved, and meaning that they were part black.
So she is not formally freed. She's given her time, and that's the phrase that they used. And a possible reason for this, possible reasons, is that in order to free her, he would have had to put her name in his will and request that the legislature allow her to remain in Virginia. And 1806 law said that if you were freed, you had to leave the state within a year unless you had permission from the government to stay.
So he probably would not have wanted to do that. Second, she was over 45, and you could not free an enslaved person below 21 or over 45 unless you explained how you were going to provide for their care for the rest of their lives. And so he would have had to, in addition to put her name in the will to ask for permission, he would have had to say, and here's the money that I'm going to give to support Sally Hemmings. And that would have been an admission, and he was not going to do that.
So the community takes this notion that she is free and treats her as a free person, which I think talks a little bit about law and how law exists on the books and how you're supposed to formally do things, but if the community decides that you're a free person, she was treated as a free person. When we come back, the enduring legacy of Thomas Jefferson's contradictions and what his story tells us about the contradictions in our own lives. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. This is NPR.
In 1824, Thomas Jefferson welcomed an old friend to his home at Monticello. The friend was escorted by a crowd, a procession of cavalrymen and ordinary citizens. His approach was announced by a bugle. The name of Jefferson's friend was Marie-Joseph Paul-Eve-Roz-Gillbert-O-Motea.
His history remembers him as a Marquis de Lafayette. My dear Marquis, Mr. President, I am very glad to see you my friend. Lafayette was a French aristocrat who was inspired by the American Revolution.
He fought with the Americans and convinced France to provide crucial support to the American cause. Decades after the Revolution, Lafayette returned to the United States in 1824 for a now famous tour of the nation, including a visit at Thomas Jefferson's home in Virginia. 35 years of separation is too long indeed. I trust that your journey has been brought to you.
The two men had a lot to talk about on their visit, and then Gordon Reed says we know about the details of their conversation because of an enslaved man named Israel Gillette Jefferson, who was their carriage driver. He overhears his conversation. The conversation turned upon the condition of the colored people, the slaves. Lafayette always encouraged Jefferson, sort of, needle Jefferson about this issue of slavery and emancipation.
I feel I must express my continued concerns about the issue of Negro slavery. Lafayette remarked that no man could rightfully hold ownership in his brother-man, that instead of all being free, a portion were held in bondage, which seemed to grieve his noble heart. I feel I must continue to press upon you how much I desire to see this plague cured before my death. Mr.
Jefferson replied that he thought that time would come when the slaves would be free. In my dear Lafayette, you know where I stand on this issue. But he did not indicate when, or in what manner, they would get their freedom. I am not apt to despair, yet I see not how our generation is to disengage itself from this deplorable entanglement.
He seemed to think that the time had not then arrived. There's something deeply ironic about this, isn't it? I mean, you have these two people who are speaking about high ideals and about the importance of equality, and they've been driven around by somebody who's a slave. And you look at this and you say, how can you not see what is happening?
Well, you do. We do. Definitely do that. And I imagine, and this is not to minimize as I would never do, the depredations of the institution of slavery, but I imagine a hundred years from now people are going to look back at certain things that we do and say, why didn't people understand?
You know, why didn't people do something? And there are a lot of times human beings don't act according to what they know is the right thing to do. Monticello was Jefferson's place. This was his way of life.
It's what he knew. And he felt that he helped to found a country. He helped the United States come into existence, breaking with Great Britain, setting up a government. That was a pretty big deal.
And that the next generation of people had something to do as well. And that was to make the progress on the issue of slavery that he thought could be made. Now, we're not satisfied with that because we say you had the talent to do this thing. Why didn't you use the talent to do the other thing?
But that's not what he thought he was here to do. The American Revolution was the most important thing in his life. And the tragedy is he couldn't see that after the unit is formed, that the thing that was split apart would be the institution of slavery. So, you know, it's a tragic story in a lot of ways, but I think it's not surprising given human nature.
We don't always do what we think or we know is the right thing to do. You know, it's so fascinating. When you read Jefferson's story, I mean it's an extraordinary story. I mean, he helped to overthrow monarchy.
He helped to change, you know, archaic property rules. He changed the way we thought about the role of religion in politics. But when it came to slavery, you know, he didn't make as much progress as he could. And what's frustrating is not just that he had the power, but he also had the insight that slavery as an institution was not a good institution.
And I can't help but wonder, you know, all of those other cases, Jefferson really didn't stand anything to lose. I mean, he didn't stand to lose from overthrowing monarchy. He stood to gain from it. Oh, if they had lost, he would have lost his life.
I mean, that was treason against the king to sign on to that project. And they won only because the French helped them if the French hadn't done that. He could have been hanged. So he had something to lose there.
But I see what you're saying. I think that that's true in the sense that he didn't have as much to gain from fighting slavery. He had a lot to lose, however, because I think Jefferson was probably the most talented politician of his time. And he forged a party that lasted from his election through Jackson.
Jackson considered himself to be a Jeffersonian. Nobody's ever done that. Had that kind of political influence over that long a period of time. And he didn't do that by making bad political calculations.
And we like to think, oh sure, if you had just tried hard enough, you could have convinced Virginians and Southerners to vote slavery out of existence. I think he looked at that and he knew that that was not going to happen. And I think from the distance of history, we can say this could have happened and that could have happened. But I don't think realistically that could have happened.
Slavery was going to end the way it ended. No one has given me a convincing scenario how in the United States people could have just voted slavery out without a real, real fight. Sure, he could have worked for that. But if he had given his life to that, we would not be sitting here talking about him, I don't believe.
I think if he come back from France and said, you know, I'm going to work to end slavery, I don't think he would have been vice president. I don't think he would have been president. So I think for him politically, that was the choice to make to do the things that he could realistically have a success with. And the things that he quite frankly cared more about than ending slavery.
That had to be a societal thing. Now, we always think about, I think in terms of great man history, the one person who has got to come and change everything. But it's mainly people in the right moment, in the right circumstances. And he was not, I don't believe in the right moment to do that.
There may have been one person who could have, and that would have been George Washington. I think who had much more, was much more admired, much more political capital. Political capital that nobody in America has had since then. But I don't think Jefferson was the man for this.
There are people who argue that judging historical figures through the lens of modern values and morals, that it just doesn't work. That in some ways our modern notions about racism simply cannot be overlaid onto people living in the 18th and 19th century. In fact, President Trump weighed in on this recently in the context of controversy over Confederate statues. Stick a listen.
This week it's Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson's coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after?
What do you make of this, Annette? I hear what you're saying in terms of the difficulty of superimposing our current values on the past. But at the same time, that's what we have. We have our current values.
And if we don't superimpose them on the past, then the past continues to live amongst us. Well, you know, I don't adhere to the idea that you don't make moral judgments. I think history is a moral profession. We don't just look back and say, oh, and here's how they slaughter the innocence and go move on.
I mean, we do, of course, bring our lens to all of this. And we also have to think, remember, that there were people at the time who had some of the same values that we do. So I don't think it's enough to just say we can't judge people in the past because I judge maybe too strong a word. You could certainly comment on.
You could certainly point out the contradictions. You could point out the differences, the vast distance between what people in the past thought and what we think. As for, you know, Washington and Jefferson and Monium, I've talked about this before, I would draw a clear line between the Confederates and the Confederacy and members of the founding generation. I think there's every difference between people who help to create the United States versus people who tried to destroy the United States.
I don't think that just because they're both in the past, we have to think of them as the same because they're not the same. They don't bear the same relation to us. I mean, Jefferson has ideals. Not all of Jefferson's ideals do we adhere to, but Jefferson through the Declaration and other of his writings, created a set of ideals that we still adhere to that still have meaning for us.
I don't know what the Confederacy means to us. So I draw a distinction between those people, the people, Stonewall Jackson and those people, and people like Washington and Jefferson. As a child of the net, you were the first African-American to integrate your school. And in some ways you have personally experienced our nation's struggle to discuss the legacy of slavery.
I'm wondering, in studying the life of Thomas Jefferson, do you see echoes in the contradictions that he had in the present day to some of the contradictions that he struggled with and perhaps ignored or rationalized? Are they still alive with us today? Oh, I think they're very much alive. The fascinating thing about Jefferson is that in some ways he embodies the country.
I mean, the struggles that were within him, and that's when you go to Monticello, you get to see the best and the worst of America. And they're embodied in this person who was idealistic, but in some areas did not live up to that. And certainly the idea of First Class citizenship for African-American people has not come to pass. I don't believe there are still issues there.
But yet we hold ourselves out as a melting pot. So yes, a lot of Jefferson's contradictions are alive in us. I don't think there's anybody in the founding generation who embodies that so well, or shows this so well. And that's what makes him a subject that we can't really, I think, do without, and we can't push to the side because it's too much a window into us, into who we are as Americans.
So it's fascinating because you spent so many years immersed in the life of this man. And clearly he was a man of great accomplishment, profound impact. He was also a man, I think, who had deeply troubled relationship with this institution of slavery. And I'm wondering, when you look at the totality of his life, how do you personally feel about him?
How do I personally feel about him? Well, there are moments when I'm vastly admiring of him and there are other times when I'm angry at him. It goes back and forth. But overall, the sense is of being impressed with somebody who decided that he wanted to operate on the world stage and actually managed to do that.
It's really hard to do. As I get to be older, I realize it's hard to do anything, to do anything or see things through to the end. And he did so much in a lifetime. Now he had the leisure time to do that.
He had the talent to do that. But I would say that he's a fascinating figure to me. I don't always like him. I don't always hate him.
But he is fascinating. And I think there's so much of the world and so much about the United States of America that you can learn through studying his life. And that's why it's been interesting for me. I'm wondering, do you ever think about Jefferson's life and the contradictions he embodies?
And think about your own life and perhaps the contradictions that you might embody yourself that 200 years from now, people are going to look back and say, how could she possibly not see what's obvious to us? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, I think about climate change and I get on my plane every week to fly back and forth between New York City and Cambridge.
What am I doing to stop trafficking in people, sex trafficking in people that I know is something that's a problem? I'm a lawyer. Why am I doing more about that? There are just lots of things.
Now nothing is on the grand scale of Jefferson, as you mentioned before, but I'm not living on the scale. He was living. I'm not the president. I don't have that kind of power.
But yeah, yeah. I think in all of us. There are things that we know are wrong. And because of our other preoccupations, we say, well, that thing will take care of itself.
Somebody else will figure that out. That's for someone else to deal with. Even though we know that we could make a contribution. So yeah, looking at him makes you think about yourself as well.
Annette Gordon-Reed is a historian and law professor at Harvard University. We've been talking today about her book co-authored with Peter Onuf, most lesser to the patriarchs, Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination. Annette, thank you for joining us today on Hidden Break. Oh, thank you for asking me.
This week's show was produced and edited by Tara Boyle, Part Shah and Kemela Vargas-Dostrepo. Our team includes Jenny Schmidt, Raina Cohen, Thomas Liu and Laura Quarell. Today's show included performances by Sean Casey as Thomas Jefferson, Didier de Vank as the Marquis de Lafayette and Jason Fuller as Israel Gillette Jefferson. Special thanks to Leticia Brock and Brian Dunn.
For more Hidden Brain, please follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. And if you know a friend who would like to hear our show, please tell them about Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vidantam. See you next week.