Episode 868: Founding Fathers – Thomas Jefferson

The lives of these men are essential to understanding the American form of government and our ideals of liberty. The Founding Fathers all played key roles in the securing of American independence from Great Britain and in the creation of the government of the United States of America. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
On this episode of New World. The lives of these
men are essential to understand the American form of government
and our ideals of liberty. The Founding Fathers all played
key roles in securing American independence from Great Britain and
in the creation of the government of the United States
of America. And now the life of Thomas Jefferson. I

(00:38):
would argue that in many ways Jefferson personified the spirit
of freedom and had developed out of it something much
more profound than most of his colleagues. As Founding Fathers,
he deeply distrusted all governments. He didn't just deeply distrust

(00:59):
the British government, he deeply distrusted the American government. And
as a result, while he was the ambassador in Paris
as the American Constitution was being developed, he wrote his
very very close friend James Madison and said that he
would oppose the adoption of the Constitution unless they added

(01:25):
a Bill of Rights. And the whole fabric of American
life has revolved around these ten amendments that came to
define our rights. And remember this is always one of
the most difficult things to get across, because it's counterintuitive.
The Bill of Rights are designed to limit government, not

(01:46):
to limit people. The Bill of Rights came out of
a belief that in fact, virtue resides in the people,
but the government was always dangerous. Now. Jefferson at the
time was the ambassador of France as the French monarchy
was collapsing and as they were inexorably moving towards the
French Revolution, which is a classic case study of a

(02:10):
system that can't control itself. The American Revolution was a
fight over who would govern in America, and it was
between basically Americans who saw themselves as successful independent standing
on their own achievement, and Americans who still were comfortable
operating within the framework of the British king and the

(02:33):
British government. And that fight ultimately was very controlled. If
you go back and you look when the Founding Fathers won,
they were very cautious about what they were trying to
set up, and they had a lot of experience. Remember
their thirteen colonies, which means there are thirteen constitutions. In
several of the colonies, the constitutions fail, so they write

(02:54):
more constitutions. By the time they get to Philadelphia to
write the Constitution of the United States, these folks that
had more experience at writing constitutions than any generation in history,
and all of them was aimed at a very core
principle because they understood a world different than we do.
They knew that the world was dangerous. It was dangerous

(03:16):
to their west because Native Americans were still independent, armed
and capable of causing enormous casualties in the constant struggle
over who was going to dominate. And remember the west
in this period is around Pittsburgh. We're not talking about
the west of Cheyenne, Wyoming. So they're looking at one
direction at Native Americans, many of them armed both by

(03:39):
the British and the French, and the British, of course
loved to subsidize the arming of the Native Americans, so
they would harass and torment the new United States. At
the same time, they were vividly aware of the great
power struggle that was underway to see who would dominate Europe.
So they knew that between the French, the Spanish, the British,

(04:02):
the Prussians, the Dutch, that there was this ongoing, very
deep and very powerful struggle of systems much bigger than
the current American the military of the current American Navy,
so on the one hand, in order to protect our freedom,
they wanted a government strong enough to offset these dangerous countries.

(04:25):
On the other hand, in order to protect our freedom,
they want to make sure that the government that was
strong enough to protect our country couldn't then take over
and control us. And in this effort to find a
path between the two the future of domination by foreigners
and the future of domination by bureaucracy and government at home,

(04:48):
Jefferson was one of the leaders in trying to find
a way to have us be a genuinely free country,
which meant freedom for the individual, not just freedom for
the king or the president. Presidents basically are just temporarily
elected kings. And it's the House and the Senate that
make America so much different from the European monarchies. But

(05:10):
Jefferson himself had spent a long and really quite curious life.
I'm an amateur paleontologist, and when you visit Monticello, you
will find, for example, teeth from mastodons and mammoths. You'll
find part of the skeleton of a giant sloth that
had gone extinct sometime in the place to see you'll

(05:31):
find that Jefferson is collecting everything. He's fascinated by the world,
and that you know, I always tell people I'm willing
to be a Jeffersonian, by which I mean that I
will not buy more than half a continent at any
one time. So think of that as limited government. And
I won't do more than send the Marines to Tripoli
without telling the Congress. And by the way, when he

(05:52):
bought half a continent, he bought it and then told
the Congress. One of the reasons I find Jefferson so
complicated to talk about is that he's this massive contradictions.
On the one hand, he wants limited government, unless he
decides he wants unlimited government, in which case he briefly
deviates buys the whole area that is the Mississippi River basin,

(06:15):
then he reverts back to wanting limited government. He vetos
a bridge over the Potomac as not the business of
government because he's frugal, But then he spends millions buying
the West from the French. You try to fit all
this into one personality of being to realize that if
he'd been your uncle, he would have been a very
complicated uncle. He also was a polymath, in the sense

(06:37):
that he learned everything in every direction. On one of
his trips to Europe. Remember back then, if you say
I think I'll go to Europe, it was a long
voyage by sailing ship. On one of his trips to Europe,
he taught himself Spanish by reading Spanish novels. And you
said this image of Jefferson wrapped up in a blanket,
sitting on the deck of the ship, gradually going east

(07:01):
towards Europe and trying to literally teach himself Spanish. She
already had French. He also was a person who had
a very complicated vision of religion. Jefferson had written at
one point that there should be a wall between government
and religion. Now people that interpreted that to mean the

(07:23):
government should be anti religious. That's not what Jefferson said.
Jefferson was living in an era when the Church of
England was paid for by the government, when the Catholic
Church in France was getting government money, and what he
was saying was that no religion should get money from
the government. But he did not intend in any way

(07:44):
to have government be hostile to religion. In fact, while
Jefferson was president, he signed a bill to send missionaries
to the Indians. He allowed the Treasury Building to be
used as a church because there were no very large
buildings in Washington at that time. And the week that
he signed the letter explaining that there would be a
wall of separation between church and state, that week he

(08:05):
got into a carriage and went up to the Capitol,
where the Capitol was actually used as a church until
the eighteen forties. So it's a little hard to say
that he wanted total separation. What he did want is
for people to be able to worship freely. He was
very open to people finding God in their own way,
and he wanted to make sure that the government wouldn't

(08:26):
put its thumb on the scales in one direction or another.
One of the places I go when I want to
think about the founding Fathers, they are really in my
mind three great centers. One is to go to Boston
and look at the Adams family, Samuel and John and others,
and think about what that whole experience was like there.
The second is to go to Philadelphia and to stand

(08:47):
in the shadow of Benjamin Franklin. The third is to
go to Williamsburg. The Rockefeller Foundation rebuilt Williamsburg in the
nineteen thirties. I find every time I go there that
the historic part of my soul gets renewed and refreshed.
They've done an amazing job. And you can imagine yourself
walking down the street where mister Jefferson is studying and

(09:10):
reading law under mister Wyath, who's one of the great
lawyers of that generation, and then going down to one
of the taverns which are still there, and having a
libation and talking about the law, and talking about what's
going on in Europe, and talking about the theoretical principles
on which freedom should be based. And you have this

(09:31):
whole notion that Jefferson was capable of talking about almost anything. Jefferson,
first of all, is a reader. He loved to read
so much that he actually built a movable desk so
that he could if he was going to go, say
to Philadelphia, which back then was a long trip, he
had a desk that he could put in the carriage

(09:54):
so that he could work both reading and writing while
he traveled. Since he was constantly trying to improve things,
he was constantly looking can I do it better? Can
I do it faster? And Jefferson, I've always thought was
very happy learning and very happy thinking. And if he

(10:15):
also had to deal with people. That was all right,
but that was not his primary focus. Jefferson had grown

(10:40):
up in what then was sort of the western part
of Virginia. If you look at a map, we were
talking about central Virginia today, but back then, Unlike Washington,
who had grown up in the planter part of the state,
with large homes and elegant dances and people who wore
fancy clothes, Jefferson was much closer to the frontier, and

(11:01):
he loved the frontier. He loved farmers as a group,
and he really felt that virtue was to be found
in small towns in many ways. I think that you
would find that in eighteen ninety six when William Jennings
Bryan gave his speech about mankind being crucified on the
Cross of Gold, he was in a sense channeling Jefferson.

(11:22):
Part of the reason that the bitterness between Jefferson and
Alexander Hamilton is that Hamilton represents the cities, the moneyed class, bankers,
and Jefferson represents all the people who owe money to
the cities, the banker class, etc. So there's a deep
sense in Jefferson's mind that virtue comes from being close
to the land, and that a nation made up of

(11:45):
farmers would by definition be freer and more virtuous than
a nation that was made up of manufacturers, or of bankers,
or of big cities. Jefferson learned enormously fast. He went
to school in English at five, he went in Latin
at nine. He really constantly was learning, and he learned

(12:10):
basically from a tutor, a mister Douglas, who was a
clergyman from Scotland. He learned every day, He read constantly.
He built a huge library. In fact, the base of
the Library of Congress was Jefferson's library, about four thousand
volumes at the time, which was a huge library back then.
Being Jefferson, of course he sold it to the Congress.

(12:33):
It wasn't an act of civic good will. He was
trying to pay off some debts and so he sold
the library, which tragically was burned later. But it was
the base of having a Library of Congress, which is
today the largest library in the world. So it's come
a long way from Jefferson's first four thousand volumes. In
that era, colleges were being formed, law schools are being formed.

(12:54):
But he really was largely taught directly by tutors, and
then he went to George with and George With's law
office still exists at Williamsburg. And you can imagine in
the morning Jefferson getting up, having a cup of tea
or coffee, maybe a small piece of bread, going in

(13:15):
and literally, back then they called it reading the law
because that's what they were doing. This is before you
got law schools and tenured professors and high tuition costs.
So Jefferson is living in Williamsburg, which was the center
of politics in that period for Virginia. So when the
House of Burgesses, which was their legislature, when it was

(13:36):
in session, people came from all over the state. And
if you were a young person studying under George with
With knew everybody, and so you inevitably would end up
at dinner surrounded by the whole state. Over the course
of time, Jefferson came naturally to him to be engaged
in politics, and in seventeen sixty eight he's elected to

(13:57):
the House of Burgesses. Now he also began, and this
is very typically Jeffersonian, he began to level a mountaintop
at Monticella. I mean, this is a guy who dreamed big,
thought big, built big and was permanently in debt because
of all the things he wanted to do, And by
seventeen eighty he began building Monticella, which is one of

(14:20):
the most remarkable buildings of the eighteenth century, and if
you have never been there, it is really worth your
while to go and to look at what he designed,
how it was built, the degree to which it was
at that time a remarkably advanced building. And also little
side things you'll notice when you tour. For example, Jefferson

(14:43):
tended to sleep sitting up. People thought it was better
for you because if you lay down, you could get
water in your lungs, and so it was really sort
of a norm. Now, Jefferson himself was very tall, so
you have this tall guy in a long bed sitting up.
Jefferson finally gets really and inherits eleven thousand acres of

(15:03):
land and one hundred and thirty five slaves, which means,
of course, he quit practicing law. Unlike some people who
loved practicing law, Jefferson had earned a living. Now he
didn't have to earn a living, so he didn't. It's
interesting the Jefferson in that very same time period wrote
an article called a summary view of the rights of

(15:23):
British America. So seventeen seventy four, the same year he's
inheriting Land, and he says, resolved that it'd be an
instruction to the Deputies, when assembled in General Congress, with
the deputies in other states of British America, to propose
to the said Congress that an humble and dutiful address
be presented to His Majesty, begging leave to lay before him,

(15:47):
as Chief Magistrate of the British Empire, the united complaints
of His Majesty's subjects in America, complaints which are excited
by many unwarrantable encroachments and usurpations attempted to be made
by the la legislature of one part of the Empire
upon those rights which God and the Laws have given
equally an independently a law. Now, notice the forerunner of

(16:09):
the declaration, where did the rights come from? Those rights
which God and the laws? And Jefferson would have argued,
as would most of the founding fathers, that the law
was in fact the systemic implementation of God's will, and
therefore that the rule of law was central to the
rule of freedom, but that they were both based on God.

(16:31):
This is a radical statement. Hard to recognize today how
radical it is, because it's saying that the rights don't
come from the King, the rights come from God. And
it is the forerunner of what he will write two
years later. So support and remember you have this sudden
explosion of energy in the late seventeen sixties early seventeen seventies,

(16:53):
partially brought about because in winning the Seven Years War,
or as we called it in the New World, the
French and Indian War, the French were eliminated as a
threat and now not having to be afraid of the French,
the Americans looked up and said, well, if we don't
have to be afraid of the French, why are we
paying all this money to the British Crown. And the

(17:16):
British Crown basically said, well, because we own you. And
the Americans said, actually you don't. Our patriotism comes from God,
not from the court, and we repudiate the idea that
you owe us. There's a great statement. A man who
was quite elderly by that point, i think in his
early eighties, who had fought in the American Revolution, and

(17:39):
somebody came to him and said, why did you fight?
Was it the Tax Act? Was it the Stamp Act?
Was it the imposition of taxes? Why did you end
up fighting? And he said, young man, we intended to
be free, and they intended for us not to be free,
and so we fought, and now we're free. And I

(18:03):
think it was this sense which you see suddenly coalesce
between seventeen seventy and seventeen seventy six in ways that
are amazing. You could not predict in seventeen seventy that
six short years later they would be passing the Decoration Independence. Now,
Jefferson was a little bit shy, and he understood that

(18:26):
his great strength was not as a debater or an arguer.
He was not a courtier. He was not a man
who to go around and win over. And in fact,
John Adams said that he was silent for his entire
first year. He was elected in seventeen seventy five to
the Continental Congress. And this is what Adams wrote in
his autobiography. Mister Jefferson had now been about a year

(18:49):
a member of Congress, but had attended his duty in
the House but a very small part of the time,
and when there had never spoken in public and during
the whole time I sat with him in Congress, I
never heard him utterer. Three sentences together, The most of
a speech he ever made in my hearing was a
gross insult on religion in one or two sentences, for

(19:11):
which I immediately gave him the reprehension which he richly merited.
So you have the sense of Jefferson being taciturn quiet, watching, learning, thinking.
And then in seventeen seventy six he is asked to
help write the Declaration of Independence, and there is no
question that he developed the core language of that declaration.

(19:34):
He's also elected in seventeen seventy six to the Virginia
House of Delegates, where he's appointed to revise Virginia law. Remember,
all thirteen of the colonies are going through the same process.
He helped create the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and
this is extraordinarily important because it moves from just a
political argument to a profound argument about liberty and a

(19:57):
profound argument about the very nature of your relationship to
the King and your relationship to God. The General Assembly
in Virginia appointed five men to a committee of revisers
to review the law and to redraft them for the
independent state. Three of the five men were primarily responsible.

(20:18):
They included Thomas Jefferson, George W. And Edmund Pendleton. Jefferson
drafted the majority of the bills, So while he was quiet,
he was busy. But his strength was in the written word,
where he had time to think, and where he could
write with extraordinary elegance in a way that very few
people have been able to equal. In seventeen seventy nine,

(20:40):
when Jefferson had been elected governor of Virginia, the one
hundred and twenty six bills that the committee he served
and had drafted were presented to the General Assembly. Most
of them were not adopted or even seriously considered. However,
Bill eighty two, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which
called for a separation of church and state, was considered

(21:01):
and finally adopted in seventeen eighty six. Notice, by the way,
that sometimes these wave effects take time. You have to
think of them as a video rather than a snapshot.
And what isn't possible in frame one may be overwhelmingly
possible by frame thirty. And that's what's happening in this period.
This famous bill, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, adopted

(21:24):
in seventeen eighty six, although it had been drafted initially
a decade earlier. It says, we, the General Assembly of Virginia,
do an act that no man shall be compelled to
frequent or support any religious worship place or ministry whatsoever,
nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burdened but in

(21:45):
his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account
of his religious opinions or belief But that all men
shall be free to profess, and by argument, to maintain
their opinions and matters of religion. And that the same
shall of no wives diminish and large or affect their
civil capacities. Now think about that, You and I live

(22:05):
in a time when there are many countries where you
can be put to death for believing the wrong things.
We live in a time when there are many countries
when you can be put in jail for believing the
wrong things. And yet here they are, in the late
eighteenth century, laying out a frame of reference that liberates
people from government and says, your religious beliefs are up

(22:26):
to you, and you will not be punished, You will
not be fine, you will not be sent to jail
because you are protected in your right to approach God
as you see fit. When Jefferson learned that the bill
had passed finally after all those years, he had it
translated into French and Italian and distributed as widely as possible,
because he thought that religious liberty was one of his

(22:48):
greatest achievements. James Madison, his close friend, later wrote that
the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom quote is a true
standard of religious liberty. Its principle the great barrier against
usurpations on the rights of conscience. As long as it
is respected and no longer these will be safe. And
as we go through some of our current fights, and

(23:11):
we watched the government encroach upon religious liberty, and we
watch the woke left trying to impose their radical values
on people of religion, you can understand how truly central
Jefferson was in helping develop a very very different approach. Now,

(23:58):
Jefferson was and much more than just religious liberty. He
actually believed that's something which I wish we could get
back into the current political environment. He actually believed that
knowledge mattered, and he actually believed that education mattered. In
seventeen seventy eight, he drafted a bill in education entitled
quote a Bill for more general diffusion of Knowledge. Now,

(24:21):
this is one of Jefferson's great passions. Here's what Jefferson
himself wrote. Whereas it appears that, however, certain forms of
government are better calculated than others to protect individuals in
the free exercise of their natural rights, and are at
the same time themselves better guarded against degeneracy. Yet experience

(24:42):
has shown that even under the best forms, those entrusted
with power have, in time and by slow operations, perverted
it into tyranny. Let me repeat this because it sort
of fits the world recurrent to living in. Even under
the best forms, those entrusted with power have, in time
and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny. Jefferson goes

(25:05):
on to say, and it is believed that the most
effectual means of preventing this would be to eliminate, as
far as practical, the minds of the people at large,
and more especially, to give them knowledge of those facts
which history exhibiteth that possess Thereby of the experience of
other ages and countries, they may be enabled to know
ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their

(25:28):
natural powers to defeat its purposes. And whereas it is
generally true that people will be happiest whose laws are
best and are best administered, and the laws will be
wisely formed and honestly administered, in proportion as those who
form and administer them are wise and honest. Whence it
becomes expedient for promoting the public happiness that those person

(25:51):
whom nature hath endowed with genius and virtue should be
rendered by liberal education, worthy to receive and able to
guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of
their fellow citizens, And that they should be called to
that charge without regard to wealth, birth, or other accidental
condition or circumstance, but the indigence of the greater number

(26:12):
disabling them from so educating at their own expense, those
of their children whom nature hath fitly formed and disposed
to become useful instruments for the public. It is better
that such should be sought for and educated at the
common expense of all, than that the happiness of all
should be confided to the weak or the wicked. Now,

(26:32):
if you go back and reread that, and you realize
that our current situation schools that don't teach teachers that
don't educate, total avoidance of history, dumbing down of mathematics,
giving people passing grades so they feel good even if
they know nothing. You can sense that we have arrived
at a counter Jeffersonian moment when everything Jefferson feared in

(26:56):
terms of ignorant people giving up their freedoms are far
too close to giving a reality. And it's why Jefferson
is always worth revisiting and thinking about. Jefferson himself, by
the way, guests to be elected governor and a terrible governor.
He doesn't like power, always brilliant at using it when
he has to, and when he's president he's brilliant at

(27:16):
using power. But in the period of seventeen seventy nine
to seventeen eighty one, the British Army was rampaging through Virginia.
There was an effort to crush the rebellion, and Jefferson
is really put in an awkward position. He's not an
effective wartime governor. It's not his strength and as a result,
I think he would say that his governorship was one

(27:38):
of the least impressive of his activities. However, being Jefferson,
he's done to stop. While he's governor. He also writes
his only book, Notes on the State of Virginia. He
didn't intend to write or publish it, and he actually
worried that their publication would do more harm or good.
But he says things he really deeply believes in. And

(27:59):
again he goes back to freedom of religion. In Query
seventeen Religion, Jefferson defended separation of church and states, saying
it does me no injury for my neighbor to say
there are twenty gods or no guid It neither picks
my pocket nor breaks my leg. Again, he's arguing that
you have freedom, and that you shouldn't be taxed to

(28:19):
pay for their beliefs, but that they should therefore be
allowed to have their beliefs without the government interfering. He
actually took the manuscript to his book to Paris, and
he contracted a printer who printed two hundred copies. Jefferson's
little book on Notes in State of Virginia was sufficiently
controversial that James Madison and George with put copies in

(28:39):
the college library rather than giving them to students, saying
such an indiscriminate gift might offend some narrow minded parents
in Paris, Jefferson gave a few copies to close friends
and confidential persons, writing in each copy a restraint against
publishing it. However, a copy fell into the hands of
a bookseller, who, according to Jefferson, employed a hirelying translator

(29:02):
and was about publishing it in the most injurious form possible.
To keep that from happening, Jefferson entered into agreement for
the translation into French with the highly respected writer Abbe Morlais. Unfortunately,
Jefferson and Morley had different ideas as to what the
translation meant. Jefferson wanted the translation of his strict word
for word translation of his text. Morlay, however, believed that

(29:24):
the translated job was to be an active collaborator, and
ended up changing the work. Jefferson was very displeased. Jefferson
then turned to John Stockdale, an English publisher, agreed to
print the work, but told Jefferson, I know there is
some bitter pills relative to our country. After all, this
was shortly after we had defeated the British and earned
our independence. On August fourteenth, seventeen eighty seven, Jefferson wrote

(29:49):
to Stockdale that he'd received the initial copies. In all
this period, Jefferson remains active. He is elected delegate to
Congress in seventeen eighty three. Between seventeen eighty four and
seventy nine, and he serves in France as the Commissioner
and US Minister. In seventeen eighty seventy, he wrote to
a good friend, Francis Hopkinson, his desire for this position

(30:09):
to be silent and to be out of the limelight.
And this gives you a flavor of Jefferson. This is
so oddly contradictory. He says, My great wish is to
go on in a strict but silent performance of my duty,
to avoid attracting notice, and to keep my name out
of newspapers, because I find the pain of a little censure,
even when it is unfounded, is more acute than the

(30:31):
pleasure of much praise. Now, so, hey, you have this
guy who, on the one hand, really is secretive and
really doesn't want to be noticed. On the other hand,
he is active in politics. He's governor of the state.
He's ultimately going to be Secretary of State and vice
president then president United States. And that sort of captures Jefferson.
He is a very complicated person. Of enormous willpower, great

(30:56):
patience and discipline, enormous capacity for work, and he's just
really really smart. You could probably argue that he and
Benjamin Franklin were the too smartest of the Founding fathers.
They were both able to learn almost everything, and they
both made major contributions to knowledge. To give an example
of Jefferson's genuinely diverse interests, in seventeen ninety one, he

(31:21):
and his friend James Madison made a botanical tour of
the Northern Lakes, and his most lengthy journal entries was
on the Fly. But final report was never presented anybody,
but it still exists. So again, here's the guy who
has written a decreation independence, served in the Congress, served
as governor, served as a bessitor, and he's off writing

(31:41):
a discourse on the nature of the fly. Jefferson also
served on a committee referred in the Society's Minutes of
June sixteenth, seventeen ninety seven as the Bone Committee, whose
priority was to procure one or more entire skeletons of

(32:03):
the mammoth. In eighteen oh seven, when Jefferson financed the
dig conducted by William Clark at Big Bone, Lick, Kentucky.
Of the over three hundred bones that Clark sent back,
Jefferson offered the society any of the fossils that were
not already in their collection. On March third, seventeen ninety seven,
Jefferson became president of the American Philosophical Society. The day

(32:27):
before he became Vice President of the United States. He
served as president of the Philosophical Society for the next
eighteen years. He offered three letters of resignation when the
government moved to Washington, d c. When he retired to Monticello,
but the society refused to allow his resignation. They finally
accepted his resignation on January twentieth, eighteen fifteen. And so

(32:54):
you can see that Jefferson's a complex person with an
enormous range of interests. And in the next the part,
I'm want to talk about Jefferson as president and the
extraordinary complex nature of his presidency and of what he
did after that. So I hope you'll listen also to
Jefferson as an American immortal in Part two on Newt's World.

(33:25):
On the one hand, Jefferson was a very idealistic person.
On the other hand, he's a very sophisticated, subtle, and
often duplicitous politician, and both are somehow captured in the
same person. He's a man of great principles, but on
the other hand, as you'll see as president, he sometimes
broke those principles in amazing ways. The term Jeffersonian Democrat

(33:50):
for a very long time meant somebody who was for
limited government, was for lower expenses, and was essentially very
very specious of power in Washington. But at the same time,
as you'll see, this is a guy who bought half
a continent. He's a person who sent the Marines in
the Navy to the shores of Tripoli without telling Congress,

(34:13):
and so on the one hand, he was sort of
for limited government unless he wasn't for limited government. And
it's this kind of complexity that makes Jefferson so fascinating.
He was also not only extraordinarily smart, one of the
three or four smartest of our presidents, but he was,
in addition, a person of extraordinarily wide eclectic interests. Jefferson

(34:36):
read widely, taught himself Spanish while on a ship going
to Europe by reading Don Quixote, re studied fossils, collected them,
If you go to Monticello, his home, you'll see some
of the fossils that were collected. While he was president,
he sponsored an expedition which was almost the equivalent of
going to Mars, and Lewis and Clark crossed the continent

(34:59):
to explore the territory that Jefferson had just bought from France.
Napoleon very cleverly sold it because he realized with the
Royal Navy controlling the ocean, that the French would not
be able in the long run to keep the western
part of the United States. So he sold the entire
Mississippi Valley to Jefferson, and Mississippi, through its tributary, the

(35:19):
Missouri really goes an amazing distance west, and so they
ended up more than doubling the size the United States
in this one purchase. All of these are things by
a president who claimed to be for extraordinarily limited government.
In order to win, he actually had to invent a
political party. So Jefferson had risen and ultimately had become

(35:42):
the Secretary of State. Because he had served in France,
he had a pretty good bit of diplomatic experience, and
I think Washington thought that he was the right person
to try to represent the United States in foreign policy.
He very difficultly coexisted, if that's the right thame term
with Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton represented the commercial interests, had worked

(36:07):
out how to borrow a huge amount of money from
the Dutch, and was able to stabilize the American debt,
was able to create in the first Report on Manufacturers,
probably the best single statement ever written about why there
are times when a country with a brand new small
industry should protect itself as a remarkable statement in favor

(36:29):
of tariffs, and Hamilton himself was clearly brilliant. I would
say that if you look at Hamilton, Franklin, and Jefferson,
you're looking at three of the brightest people ever to
be involved in American government. But Hamilton's interest in his
vision of the world was remarkably different from Jefferson. Jefferson
really represented a rural, agrarian world. He would have set

(36:50):
a world of small farmers, although the truth was that
he owned slaves and basically had a plantation. But Jefferson
was capable of envision this world of limited government and
representing the interests of rural America, which at that time
was the dominant part of America, and Virginia at that
time was the biggest state in the country. On the

(37:12):
other hand, Hamilton had this vision of a manufacturing and
commercial future, of an America which would grow strong enough
to defend itself, in an America which would find its
ultimate source of wealth and big cities and in factories,
things which Jefferson found abhorrent. Jefferson wanted a much more

(37:33):
rural lifestyle, would claim to want a more galitarian world,
although the truth of Jefferson himself was clearly aristocratic and
not particularly a galitarian. In order to seize power, Jefferson
and his sidekick James Madison, also of Virginia and the
author of the Bill of Rights, invented the Democratic Party.

(37:57):
As John F. Kennedy used to say, he was out
gathering butterflies, because the excuse that Jefferson and Madison used
for going to New York to meet with Aaron Burr
was that they were collecting butterflies. In fact, what they
were doing was plotting with Burr to create a party
in order to win an election. Jefferson had won the

(38:18):
vice presidency in seventeen ninety six, with John Adams, the
former vice president under Washington, becoming President but Adams represented
a New England and New York vision of the world
and was really pretty close to an aristocratic rather than
the egalitarian sense of how America should develop. Jefferson represented

(38:42):
an upsurge of populism and was a brilliant political plotter
maintained through correspondence and network across the whole country. Aroused
people to an affect. Petition against what Adams wanted to do.
Got Adams so angry that he passed the Ellen and
Sedition Acts, which would have punished people for criticizing the government,

(39:06):
and those were then thrown out as unconstitutional. They were
wildly unpopular. Jefferson came along and really was an open rebellion.
It was the last time that they would have a
president and vice president of opposite parties. It was a
totally unwieldy project, and Adams unfortunately totally changed American history

(39:26):
because Adams and his sidekick Alexander Hamilton, who represented the
New York Federalists, hated each other and the result was
their party was totally split. Well, faced with a split
and decaying Federalist party really representing New York and North
Jefferson was able to mobilize rural America, and as I

(39:47):
said earlier, he had the largest state in Virginia, and
Jefferson won a sweeping election in eighteen hundred and it's
really the first peaceful transfer of power between two clearly
opposed sides, and it created a sense of stability for
the Republic. Jefferson would then govern, as seen by modern liberals,

(40:11):
in an idealistic way, although since Jefferson on slaves, he's
now out of fashion with the modern left, but for
a very long time he was kind of their model.
But in fact what he was doing was very methodically
destroying the Federalist Party, and by about eighteen twelve, the
Federalists disappear, and for a brief period of time, what

(40:32):
would called the Democratic Republican Party was the only major
political force in the United States until it broke down
with the populist insurgency of Andrew Jackson, who was a Democrat,
and that led to the formation of the Whigs as
the opposing party. But that doesn't occur until the late
eighteen twenties, so there's about a twenty year period where

(40:54):
the Jeffersonians are totally dominant. You get three presidents in
a row from Virginia in Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe. And
remember that the first president, George Washington, was also from Virginia.
So four of the five initial presidents the United States
all come from Virginia, which was the dominant state, and
Virginia represented an agrarian interest remarkably different from the commercial

(41:19):
and banking and manufacturing interest of people like Alexander Hamilton.
Jefferson ends up in a very strange situation in eighteen
hundred because they had not quite figured out that if
you had the same Electoral College votes for both the
president and vice president, they would be tied. Now, everybody

(41:43):
had agreed that Jefferson was the candidate for president and
Burr was the candidate for vice president. But Burr, who
is a remarkably despicable and dishonest figure, a man who
came very close to treason later on in his life,
and the man who shot and killed Exer Hamilton, and
a duel. I mean, I always remind people, and they
worry about how intense and how difficult our political process

(42:07):
occasionally gets that we have not had a former Secretary
of the Treasury killed by a former vice president for
over two hundred years. So these guys understood a level
of toughness, so we fortunately have not had repeated But
Jefferson and Burr each had seventy three electoral votes. Well,
there was no provision at the time for breaking the tie.

(42:29):
Everybody agreed as a gentleman's agreement that Jefferson will be president,
but there was no real proof of what would happen,
and it actually took thirty six ballots. They started meeting
on February the ninth, eighteen oh one, and finally on
February seventeenth, on the thirty sixth vote, Jefferson was elected

(42:49):
outside the capital. By the way, there were over one
hundred thousand people who had gathered as a gigantic crowd.
It was just an amazing moment. Jefferson then is sworn

(43:29):
in and on March fourth, eighteen oh one. This is
all changed after FDR becomes president in the nineteen thirties
and they realize that there's just too long a period
between an election in November and the taking of power
in March, and they bring it up to January twentieth,
which has been ever since. But notice that in the
earlier era, when everything is done without a telegraph, without radio,

(43:53):
by people riding horses. They had allowed a great deal
of time for the election to occur, the electors to
get other, and finally the president to be sworn in.
So in March fourth, eighteen oh one, Jefferson delivered his
inaugural address, and he said, in part quote, let us, then,
fellow citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let

(44:15):
us restore to social intercourse, that harmony and affection, without
which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things.
We have called by different names, brethren of the same principle.
We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists. Now he
didn't actually mean that. What he really meant was, as

(44:36):
democratic Republicans, we are going to wipe out the Federalists.
And in fact, they were very aggressive in exerting their power. Jefferson,
of course, was not a great public speaker, and he
knew it, but he was a great writer. So when
it came time to address the Congress, Jefferson decided that

(44:56):
he would write it and send up his written address,
having his secretary Meriwether Lewis, who'd become famous later for
the Lewis and Clark Expedition, having him deliver the address
and throughout his eight years as president, Jefferson never addressed
Congress in person, instead opting to write it to the Congress,

(45:17):
so they got written addresses that continued just as a
tradition until Woodrow Wilson appeared. And Woodrow Wilson, who had
been a college professor at Princeton, liked to give speeches,
saw himself as a great orator, and so in nineteen
thirteen Wilson appeared in person to deliver the State of

(45:37):
the Union. But from the time Jefferson sent up a
written version until nineteen thirteen, it had always been done
in writing. For example, Lincoln's amazing addresses to the Congress,
which were among the greatest writing in American presidential history,
were all just delivered in writing. They weren't delivered by
Lincoln himself. Jefferson argued that it wasn't that he didn't

(46:01):
like to speak in public. Instead, he wrote to Benjamin
Rush under Summer twentieth eighteen, ooh one quote our winter campaign.
The winter session of Congress has opened with more good
humor than I expected. By sending a message instead of
making a speech at the opening of the session, I
have prevented the bloody conflicts to which the making an

(46:21):
answer would have committed them. They consequently were able to
set into real business at once without losing ten or
twelve days in combating an answer. In other words, Jefferson
figured if he showed up in person, he would so
irritate some of the members of Congress that they would
feel compelled to spend their time attacking him, and instead,
he thought that he had diffused the emotional tension by

(46:43):
sending the document up. In writing, he also defended not
doing it when he wrote John Wales EPs on January first,
eighteen oh two, quote, Congress have not yet done anything
or passed a vote which has produced a party division.
The sending a message instead of making a speech to
be answered is acknowledged to have had the best effect
toward preserving harmony. So I think it's fair to say

(47:07):
that from Jefferson's perspective, he's always thinking strategically. Now that
he has power, he's concerned with relaxing and consolidating the power.
And he knows that the less he fights with the Federalists,
and the more he allows them to just atrophy and
gradually disappear, the less friction there is, the less fighting
there is, the better off he is because he's president,

(47:30):
he already has all the power of the presidency. The
fact is that he also wasn't a great public speaker,
and in fact, when he gave his second inaugural address
on March fourth, eighteen oh five, a lot of people
in the room couldn't even hear him. So the address
was sent in advance to the newspapers, and the newspapers
could publish them even if you couldn't hear them. Now,
Jefferson had moved west, and it's hard to believe nowadays

(47:54):
because you don't think of Charlottesville as all that far west.
But in fact, the tie Water farmers, the great planters,
the government that had been in Williamsburg, all those things
from Jefferson's perspective were behind him, and his focus was
to the west. His father, Peter Jefferson, was one of
the founding members of the Loyal Company, created to ask

(48:16):
for grants of land west of the Alleghany Mountains. And remember,
back then the frontier is the Alleghany Mountains. Nowadays we
think of that just as eastern, and if anything, you
might think of the Rockies as the frontier. Interestingly, Lewis Meriwether,
his father had been a member with Peter Jefferson in

(48:37):
founding the Loyal Company, which was trying to open up
the West and asking for land in the West. Now,
when you look at that period, Jefferson is fascinated with
the West, but frankly, he personally don't know that much
time to go do things. If anything, he's spending time
in France where he's the minister, He's spending time in Philadelphia,

(48:59):
and he's helping other people go west, but he is
not himself able to go west. And in a funny way,
Washington was more of a frontiersman than Jefferson. Washington really
was physically very very active. Washington goes west both as
a surveyor. He surveys places like Little Washington in Virginia.

(49:20):
He goes west as a head of the Virginia Militia
and helped start the French and Indian War what became
called the Seven Years War in Europe. So Washington was
a genuine frontiersman and understood a great deal about the frontier.
Jefferson's really a gentleman, farmer and an intellectual who's fascinated
with the West as an idea, and interestingly, at one

(49:42):
point he's subsidizes. When he's a minister to France, he
subsidizes a guy named John Ledyard who's an American explorer,
and their idea is that the way they will explore
the west is he will go east across Siberia and
travel to the western coast of North America. However, when
he tried to do that, he was arrested by the

(50:02):
Russians and sent back to Europe, so that failed. In
seventeen ninety three, Jefferson enlisted members of the American Philosophy Society,
which at that time was the leading kind of intellectual
gathering in America, and he got a group of them
to sponsor Andre Micheaux, a French botanist, to quote find
the shortest and most convenient route of communication between the

(50:24):
US and the Pacific Ocean. But it didn't get very
far and didn't have anything accomplished. In eighteen oh five,
the Territorial governor of Louisiana, General James Wilkinson, persuaded President
Jefferson to authorize an expedition to explore the beginning of
the Mississippi. Now, interestingly, by the way, I always find
this fascinating. The Mississippi itself starts in Minnesota, but the

(50:49):
great source of water is the Missouri, which starts much
further west and pours into the Mississippi at Saint Louis
and has dramatically more water than the Mississippi, but is
subordinated and named the Mississippi when they joined. So they're
looking for the origin of the Mississippi, when in fact,
far more important is to find the origin of the Missouri.

(51:12):
Jefferson did agree with General James Wilkinson, the territorial governor
of Louisiana, and Lieutenant Zebulen Pike, for whom Pike's Peak
is named, was appointed to lead the party to negotiate
peace treaties with the Indian tribes they encountered, but they
reached the present day Canadian border and then turned back.
A year later, Pike was appointed to lead an expedition

(51:34):
to explore the red in Arkansas Rivers. He entered Colorado
unsuccessfully attempted to scale the mountain that today is called
Pike's Peak. After entering Spanish controlled New Mexico, he was
captured and sent back, but Jefferson still had not abandoned
the idea. On January eighteenth, eighteen o three, Jefferson sent

(51:55):
a letter to Congress asking for twenty five hundred dollars
to fund an expedition of the Pacific Ocean. They approved it,
and by the way, the expedition, as often happens with
government projects, turned out to cost far more than twenty
five hundred dollars. A year later, about forty five men,
headed by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, left on what

(52:17):
became a very very famous expedition. There is a remarkable
book called Undaunted Courage, which I recommend to everybody. It
captures day by day this extraordinary expedition, which, as I
said earlier, is in many ways that era is equivalent
of going to Mars. I mean, these guys are leaving

(52:38):
Saint Louis, They're paddling their way up the Missouri, they
are crossing over around Yellowstone, they are going down the Columbia.
They are encountering all sorts of Native American tribes. They
are encountering grizzly bears and generally roughing. It really an
expedition that just took a level of personal endurance and

(53:01):
personal courage that is absolutely astonishing. And if you go
to Philadelphia, the Academy of Natural Sciences, which became the
repository for the American Philosophical Society, actually has the material
that Lewis and Clark brought back, and so you can
actually go and see what it was they were gathering up.

(53:22):
And they were gathering things about plants and animals, they
were taking notes about geography. They were reporting on all
sorts of meetings with different Native tribes, and it is
one of the great romantic expeditions in American history. They're
also helped dramatically by a Native American woman who both
helps some talk with tribes and helps them survive. They

(53:44):
have an African American as part of the expedition who
has a vote, and they said, look, he deserved the
vote because his life was at risk too. So when
they got to certain big decision points, they would all
talk it out and it was kind of like a
traveling democracy. Jefferson had a very busy presidency, was involved

(54:21):
in reshaping the judiciary. The Jeffersonians hated the Federalists judges.
They saw judges as instruments of government to oppress the people,
and they very much favored a much more popular society
in which juries played a bigger role and judges were
very limited. Lawyers will all cite Marlbori versus Madison, which

(54:42):
was a major decision involving the grant of a certificate
to a person who had been appointed to a job
by the Federalists and who, now that the Jeffersonians were
taking over, was not going to get that job. If
you actually read the case carefully, what you find is
that the new Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Justice Marshall,

(55:06):
is very aware that the Jeffersonians hate the Court, and
he knows that if he takes Jefferson head on immediately
after Jefferson having won control of the Presidency and control
the House and Senate, that they'll simply abolish him. And
so he maneuvers to maintain the independence of the Court
without infuriating Jefferson. And it's actually not some key moment

(55:31):
where the Court stands up boldly, but rather a brilliant
maneuver to preserve the independence of the Court by not
standing up boldly. And it's worth your studying because it
both tells you how lawyers sort of aggrandize their role
in life, and it tells you that the Court has
always been inherently political. That's the nature of a Supreme Court.

(55:53):
In a free society, they have to pay some attention
to deep popular interests. Jefferson, having succeed did in eight years,
and he did an amazing amount. I mean, as I
said earlier, you know, buying half a continent, sending the
Marines in the Navy to Tripoli to defeat the Barbary pirates,
organizing the dominant majority Party, which is still today the

(56:14):
Democratic Party is the longest serving political organization on the planet.
It's outlasted the Nazis, the Communists, the fascist It's outlasted
most monarchies. And it's a remarkable institution. And Jefferson was,
in fact, along with Madison, at the very center of organizing.
In eighteen oh nine, Jefferson goes home, he leaves the presidency,

(56:38):
he leaves public life, and he helps found the University
of Virginia. He was then Central College, but it becomes
the University of Virginia. Jefferson plays a major role when
in February fourteenth, eighteen sixteen, the Virginia General Assembly established
a charter for Central College, which becomes the University of Virginia.
Jefferson was elected to the college's Board of Visitors and

(57:00):
rector of the college. Jefferson also designed the college, and
again as an example of his intellectual reach. Remember that
Jefferson is an architect. He designs Monticello, he designs other
public buildings. He's also a bibliophile. The original Library of
Congress is Jefferson's personal library, about four thousand volumes, although

(57:20):
it might be pointed out he sold them to the
government because he needed the money for his entire life.
Jefferson is short of money and is constantly trying to
find sources of additional revenue. He's not a particularly great farmer,
doesn't focus on farming, doesn't make a huge amount of money.
Very different, by the way, from George Washington, who is
a great businessman, a great farmer, and was generally competent

(57:42):
at everything he touched. I think it's fair to say
that Jefferson had a deep passionate interest in education. Jefferson
was not anti religious. Jefferson did write a letter to
the Baptist in Connecticut saying that there should be a
wall of separate between church and state. But what Jefferson

(58:02):
was saying was in a world where the Anglican Church
got paid tax money that he did not think any
church should get government money. However, he was not for
an anti religious position. In fact, Jefferson allowed the Treasury
building to be used as a church. He himself went
up to the Capitol, which was a church up until

(58:24):
the mid eighteen forties. Jefferson signed a bill to send
missionaries to the Indians. So the whole notion that he
was in any way anti religion is just wrong. And
in fact, if you go to the Jefferson memorial, you'll
see a great quote from Jefferson where he has sworn
eternal hostility against all forms of tyranny over the minds

(58:45):
of man. And I think that that's the heart of Jefferson.
He really was committed. And to give you a sense
of the depth of his commitment on education and the
depth of his commitment on religious liberty, he wrote out
for his own doombstone. Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author
of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of

(59:07):
Virginia for religious Freedom, and father of the University of Virginia.
Born April second, seventeen forty three, old style, died July fourth,
eighteen twenty six. He thought those were the three things
he wanted to be remembered for not president, not vice president,
not foreign minister, not ambassador of France, author of the

(59:27):
Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for
religious freedom, and father of the University of Virginia. And
he gives you a flavor of what he had dedicated
his life to. Symbolically, he died on exactly the same day,
the fourth of July, as John Adams, his great rival

(59:49):
in developing political power. They had gotten to write each
other and sort of reconciled over the years, and there
was something symbolic that on July fourth, the date when
Jefferson and Adams had helped author the Decoration Independence, they
both passed away. He is an immortal. There's no question
that to understand America, you have to spend some time

(01:00:12):
trying to understand Thomas Jefferson. And there's no question that
that time will be well spent because he was a
remarkable person. Thank you for listening to Founding Father's Week
on Newtsworld. You can learn more about Thomas Jefferson on
our show page at newtsworld dot com. Newsworld is produced

(01:00:33):
by Gingrish three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is
Guernsey Sloan and our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork
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(01:00:53):
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