686. Jefferson: The Betrayal of Liberty (Part 4)

24:20Dominic Sandbrook:Oh, completely. Yeah. He's a very, very effective figure, a dominant figure as a president. Well, the tradition of Jeffersonian democracy, The idea of small government, that the United States is ultimately a country of yeoman farmers, the tradition of the slightly nostalgic view of the South, I mean that's all bound up with Jeffersonianism I think.

24:42Tom Holland:Yeah, and this reflects the fact that Jefferson, as well as obtaining power, is very good at using it. So it's Jefferson more than any other president who makes possible the emergence of the United States, not just as an Atlantic power but as a continental power. and his most striking and celebrated achievement. And there is a case, I think, for saying it's perhaps the most consequential act made by any US president is the purchase in 1803 of Louisiana from Napoleon. And kind of typically, this is actually illegal under the constitution. You know, it doesn't say anything about the right of the federal government to purchase foreign territory but Jefferson goes ahead and does it anyway because ultimately I think when self-interest is up against ideals Jefferson is a good enough politician to lay down his principles in favor of of the end result that he wants and and you can absolutely see why he would have um seized every opportunity to obtain Louisiana because it's much much a block of territory It's much larger than the current state.

25:47Tom Holland:So it's about 16 times. It's basically the whole of Middle America. It's the flyover states.

25:52Dominic Sandbrook:I'm looking at a map. I mean, it's not just Louisiana. It's Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, much of Colorado, Wyoming, Montana. I mean, it's basically the middle third of the United States. Well, it's basically doubling the size of the United States when the Louisiana Purchase goes through. So it adds over 800 ,000 square miles to the US. So that is an incredible achievement.

26:13Tom Holland:But even with the Louisiana Purchase, Jefferson's gaze is fixed even further westwards. And so one year after the Louisiana Purchase, he commissions an expedition to explore not just this new territory that the United States has upturned, but to go even further west as far as the Pacific. And this is the Lewis and Clark expedition named after the two men who led it. And it's an incredible, you know, it's a kind of key moment in establishing Americans' sense of what the continent is that their state has been founded on. So in part, it's a scientific expedition. It brings back lots of new plants and flowers.

26:55Tom Holland:And Jefferson's a great gardener. He adds lots of these to his flower beds. Also brings back some fossils, which I love. And Jefferson, again, keeps some of these. And in fact, Jefferson's only real disappointment is that they don't find mastodons. So these kind of prehistoric elephants that Jefferson had been hoping were roaming the grasslands of California, but they're not found. So it's a scientific expedition. But, you know, Jefferson is always about power as well as about kind of intellectual exploration. So it is an expedition in large part to scout out the possibility of a westwards expansion towards the Pacific.

27:31Tom Holland:And Jefferson calls this an empire of liberty. I mean, whether the Native Americans would see it in quite those terms is a moot point. But as you said, his vision is a United States populated by yeoman farmers rather than kind of, I don't know, an urban proletariat. And his feeling is that this is what will keep the US virtuous. And if the American people are to expand and keep their farms, then they need land. and if they need land then they have to go basically go and grab California. That's the logic. So it's simultaneously virtuous and self-aggrandizing. That's Jefferson. Yeah. Very very Jeffersonian.

28:12And although Jefferson's sense that America's destiny is that of a commonwealth

28:18Tom Holland:of yeoman farmers I mean this obviously doesn't turn out America Hamilton is right America's future is capitalist it is industrial yeah on the other hand jefferson is effectively the godfather of the notion of manifest destiny a phrase that is coined decades later but this this sense that americans have a god-given right to expand westwards and to claim this land this also is part of jefferson's legacy and it's why in the 1930s when the carvings of on mount rushmore were begun jefferson was chosen to be one of the four presidents represented on Mount Rushmore with Washington and Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.

28:57Jefferson serves on Mount Rushmore as the symbol of American expansion. It's an amazing thought.

29:04Tom Holland:I remember reading a book years ago about what would imagine humans does vanish in the blink of an eye, what would remain of the workings of humanity over the course of the centuries and the millennia that follow. Apparently Mount Rushmore is the work of human art that would survive the longest. Really? The granite is so hard. It's been estimated that Jefferson's face will endure for seven million years. Oh my god. Wow. So there's a thought. You would say, I guess, if you're an American historian in the 20th century, that Jefferson's reputation as one of the most, not just most consequential, but admirable men in US history would be kind of similarly enduring.

29:48Tom Holland:Because this is, you know, he's written the Declaration of Independence. He's this great hero of the Enlightenment, the universal man, as Kenneth Clark called him, the godfather of the American West. And this is never better articulated than by John F. Kennedy in 1962, who hosted a dinner at the White House for all the living recipients of the Nobel Prize. and he welcomed them by saying i think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent of human knowledge that has ever been gathered together at the white house with the possible

30:20Dominic Sandbrook:exception of when thomas jefferson dined alone oh cheesy this is the great hero on the nickel this is the great hero on the uh the two dollar bill which uh you want to get rid of um but today dominic what would you say his reputation is well this is an interesting thing so since i would say certainly the 1990s, Jefferson's reputation has become a little bit. It's not exactly tarnished, but it's contested, isn't it? So to many people in America, including I would imagine a large proportion of our own American listeners, he remains a great hero for all the reasons that you've described. And yet there are others, including perhaps some people who may listen to the show, who say, no, actually the way we should look at Thomas Jefferson is as the personification of the greatest blot on America's record.

31:10Dominic Sandbrook:In fact, to go further, he is the embodiment of America's founding sin, its original sin that has tainted our experiment since the very first. And he's been the center, hasn't he, of what can only be described as a culture war that has raged for at least 30 years and probably is not going away anytime soon. yeah of all the founding fathers i think he is now the most controversial the the great lightning rod for so many of the debates about american history and so we will we'll be looking at those when we come back after the break

31:50Tom Holland:hello everybody now as those of you who are good children will know here in britain on the 21st of

31:58Dominic Sandbrook:June. It's Father's Day. But not just here in Britain. It's also Father's Day on the 21st of June in the United States, in Canada, and in the Republic of Ireland. So those are four countries that are united by dads who love to listen to The Rest is History. And that is why we are offering

32:19Tom Holland:an amazing 25 % Father's Day discount on the subscription price to the Rest is History Club because we are all heart.

32:32Dominic Sandbrook:So treat the Peter the Great in your own life this Father's Day to early access to full series. You get, say, early access, that you get that with a membership. You get bonus episodes. You get ad-free listening. You get access to tickets for live shows. basically you get an entire host of supplementary benefits and that I think is what a lot of patriarchs want isn't it it absolutely is because I think nothing says happy father's day quite like

33:01Tom Holland:the chance to listen to six solid hours ad-free about the first world war yeah that's what most

33:09Dominic Sandbrook:fathers want. So head to therestishistory.com and click on the word GIFTS and that gift, membership of our much-loved Rest Is History Club, will land straight in your father's inbox on Father's Day itself.

33:28Tom Holland:So if you want to give the best Father's Day gift there's ever been in history, ever, and we say this as the presenters of the rest of this history, you know what to do.

33:47Dominic Sandbrook:It's well known that the man whom it delighteth the people to honour, keeps, and for many years past, has kept as his concubine one of his own slaves. Her name is Sally. The name of her eldest son as Tom. His features are said to bear a striking, although sable, resemblance to those of the president himself. So this is a shocking story, and it appeared on the 1st of September 1802 in the Richmond Recorder, and it was written, as you can obviously tell, by a Scottish emigre, a journalist called James Callender. Now, Callender, you could argue, was very party pre, Tom, because the recorder was a Federalist paper, wasn't it?

34:34Dominic Sandbrook:And Callender had originally been a kind of Jeffersonian attack dog, but then he'd been turned down for a job that he was hoping to get and he had turned on Jefferson and basically become a Federalist, a vituperative Federalist writer instead. So what's going on with this story? Is this just tittle-tattle, rumour mongering, or is it something more serious? Well, for a long time it's been presented as a kind of fabricated attack on the author of the Declaration of Independence. This is the work of an embittered, acid-tongued hack. And this was how Jefferson himself responded to it. So he, I mean when I say responded, he never actually responded to the allegation personally.

35:21As ever he played the role of philosopher above the fray. it's not worth not going to dignify such tittle tattle by even engaging with it um and so he leaves it to uh people lower down the jeffersonian food chain to kind of launch a campaign of um defamation against calendar to cast him as a kind of miserable wretched drunk and actually you know

35:46Tom Holland:calendar clearly did have problems with drink and one year after he ran that story about this mysterious woman sally he was seen staggering through the streets of richmond in virginia and then later that evening he was found drowned in three feet of water in the james river this is this is very murky this is very jfk well so there was an inquest a very hurried inquest and it definitively discovered that there was no evidence of foul play okay well that's a massive red flag so case closed you know was it was it just kind of fabrication and i think the answer to that is no um because calendar in that article was simply making public rumors that had been circulating among those in the know for several years and would continue to circulate long after calendar had drowned or been drowned i mean depending on your perspective here is he's writing many many years later after jefferson's death i think so just before the outbreak of the civil war and it's a guy who'd known jefferson well he would like jefferson he was a virginian planter um but this guy was an abolitionist and so not as favorable to jefferson as most virginian planters tended to be and it was a guy called john hartwell cock and he wrote all bachelors or a large majority at least, keep as a substitute for a wife some individual of their own slaves.

37:13Tom Holland:In Virginia, this damnable practice prevails as much as anywhere, and probably more, as Mr. Jefferson's example can be pleaded for its defense. He is taking that allegation absolutely for granted, and he's situating it in a kind of very specific cultural milieu, which are the tobacco plantations of Virginia, on which slavery, you know, it's not just common, it is completely taken for granted. And Jefferson had grown up on exactly such an estate. And it's an estate that was called Shadwell after the London parish in the East End, where his mother had been christened before she came to America.

37:51Dominic Sandbrook:So this takes us back to Jefferson's boyhood.

37:54Tom Holland:Yes.

37:55Dominic Sandbrook:And the context of 1750s, 1760s, Virginia. And it takes us to the heart of this whole question about Jefferson's slavery so i mean an obvious example of jefferson's relationship with slavery as a little boy he was

38:09Tom Holland:he had his own personal slave didn't he whom typically he calls jupiter right so a kind of classical reference there um and his father dies in 1757 when jefferson is 14 and jefferson inherits the slaves as well as the land and he keeps both of them for the for the whole of his his life and the house that he comes to build on the Shadwell estate is his great pride, his great joy. And he began building it in 1767 when he was 24. And it's a mansion on the summit of what Jefferson described as a steep and savage hill. So it's kind of 900 feet. So rises quite high. And because of this, he called it Monticello, a little mountain in Italian.

38:57Tom Holland:And it He loves it. He spends all his life building, rebuilding, renovating, tinkering with it. And it is a great neoclassical architectural masterpiece. It's Palladian, so deriving from the neoclassicism in Italy, but perfectly fused with the new world. So in architectural terms, it is the first great fusion of European architectural style with something that is recognizably American. And even Kenneth Clark in Civilization, when he's talking about Jefferson, I mean, he's a bit sniffy about it because Clark is a massive snob and a specialist in the Renaissance. But he says it's not bad. I mean, he says, you know, Jefferson's done pretty well here.

39:44Tom Holland:And this is featured on the Nickel. I think it's still there, isn't it? I think.

39:48Dominic Sandbrook:It's one of the most celebrated American buildings of all, isn't it? But there is a dark side, right? Because it's built as a plantation house. Yes. So Clarke in his documentary, which was made I think in 1970 or 1969, he doesn't mention this. Doesn't mention the fact that there are slaves. And this, according to Calendar,

40:07Tom Holland:so the Scottish guy who's mysteriously drowned, this is where this mysterious concubine Sally was being kept. So one of the hundreds of slaves that Jefferson owned across his various properties, so Monticello wasn't his only property.

40:22Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah. And Monticello alone, I'm just looking it up, that the plantation was about 5 ,000 acres and there were about 150 African-Americans working in slavery on those plantations.

40:34Tom Holland:And one of these is Sally. So to quote Calendar again in his article, the African Venus is said to officiate as housekeeper at Monticello. Now this seems not to have been entirely accurate. Sally seems to have served Maria, who's Jefferson's daughter, living at Monticello as her maid and then in due course to have evolved to become kind of Jefferson's personal servant taking care of his chamber and wardrobe so a kind of female valet and the reason that we know this is because we have written evidence from her son who was a slave on Jefferson's estate like his mother Sally and this is a guy called Madison Hemmings and he's called Madison after James Madison.

41:20Tom Holland:So again this kind of bizarre confluence between the high ideals, the high politics of the American Republic and the kind of squalid circumstances of the slavery on Jefferson's estate. And Madison Hemmings wrote up a history of his mother and his family more generally with the result that the details of her life and her ancestry have been preserved to a degree that is very very unusual most slaves obviously the details of their lives have been completely lost we know who sally's mother was and who her grandmother was and you couldn't say that i guess of most slaves who no lived in the early years of the uh the american republic so both sally's grandmother and mother had been made pregnant by their white owners and obviously neither women as slaves would have had any right of refusal whatsoever so by our standards you would say they were the victims of rape we don't know the name of sally's grandmother um madison hemming specifies that she was a full-blooded african so had no white blood in her right and there is this obsession with blood in the american south but he's he reports that um The grandfather, so the owner who had forced himself on the grandmother, had been an English sea captain named Hemmings.

42:46Tom Holland:So this is where the surname Hemmings comes from. And they had had a daughter, Betty Hemmings, and she had therefore been in the racist terminology of the time, a mulatto, meaning half black, half white.

42:59Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah.

43:01Tom Holland:Betty comes into the possession of a recently widowed planter called John Wiles, who, like the head of Goldhanger, Tony Pasta, was a Lancastrian. But unlike Tony Pasta, he's a very sinister man. I'm glad you made that point. Yeah, I'm making that absolutely clear. So he's not just a planter. He's also a slave trader and a debt collector. Okay. And so that makes him a figure of dread among the planters of Virginia, because huge numbers of the plantations are in debt. Yeah, of course. And so to have this guy, John Wiles, turn up, I mean, it's a very, very bad sign. So we think of Washington. I mean, Washington's plantation is in debt.

43:40Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah. Tobacco prices had gone into a deep decline in the 1760s, 1770s.

43:45Tom Holland:Yeah. So this guy, Wiles, you don't want to see him knocking at your door if you're a Virginian planter. And he keeps Betty as his concubine and he fathers six children on her. And Sally, who's born in 1773, is the last of these children. So again, just to dwell on the race of this, because this is something incredibly important to the story. She is seven parts white to one part black, which qualifies her in the language of the time as an octoroon. So an eighth black. and yet she is just as much a slave as her mother had been, just as much a slave as her grandmother had been. And the reason for this is because Virginian law is modelled on the law of ancient Rome, which specified that the legal status of a child is determined by that of the mother rather than the father, which in turn means that any children who were born to Betty by John Wiles will end up as John Wiles' slaves.

44:44Tom Holland:So this includes Sally, obviously.

44:47Dominic Sandbrook:How does Sally end up at Monticello? Does she go? Do they all go to Monticello? Is that how it works?

44:53Tom Holland:So what happens is that in 1773, Wiles dies. Right. And this means that all his slaves pass into the hands of his heir. And his heir is his only surviving legitimate child, who is a very smart, clever, sassy, very, very beautiful woman called Martha. But he's known to her friends as Patty. And Patty, in 1771, had married Thomas Jefferson.

45:18Dominic Sandbrook:Ah, okay.

45:19Tom Holland:And this means that when the Hemings family pass into Patty's possession, ultimately they pass into Jefferson's possession as well. So just to make clear what this means for the dynamics of Jefferson's marital household, Sally is the half-sister of Jefferson's wife, Patty. You know, she's decades younger, but she is the half-sister.

45:42Dominic Sandbrook:Because they have the same father?

45:44Tom Holland:They have the same father.

45:45Dominic Sandbrook:John Wells or whatever.

45:46Tom Holland:Yes. And so when Jefferson and Patty come to have children, they have a succession of daughters, Sally is their aunt. It's not just about owners and slaves. This is also a kind of family matrix as well. So how does Patty feel about the Hemingses, who are the family of her father's concubine? Well, she's clearly not fond enough of them to set them free. You know, these are her half sisters. Sally is a half sister. She's not setting her free. But what she doesn't do is break the family up and sell them on her father's death, which she could have done. That would have been entirely within her rights.

46:24Tom Holland:Instead, she keeps them together as a family. And when they move to Monticello, she employs them in the house so she doesn't send them out into the fields. And that, by the standards of the time, is a mercy. I mean, you would rather be employed as a slave in the house than, you know, out in the tobacco fields.

46:41Dominic Sandbrook:Yes.

46:42Tom Holland:she seems to have been quite close to betty so in 1782 she she's kind of basically been worn out by childbirth she's fallen very sick from tb and jefferson is distraught he tends to her for months but so also does betty hammings and on the 6th of september patty can feel that her end is very close she extracts an oath from jefferson she could not die happy if she thought her children were ever to have a stepmother brought in over them. And so Jefferson very solemnly promises not to remarry. And he does so in front of witnesses. And among these witnesses gathered around Patty's bed to hear this oath, Betty Hemmings, but also Patty's nine-year-old half-sister, the daughter of Betty Hemmings, Sally Hemmings.

47:33Tom Holland:And Patty dies the same day. And Jefferson is left completely prostrated by grief. and then two years later he leaves for france to serve there as ambassador in succession to franklin and he takes his elder daughter martha with him but he leaves his younger daughter maria behind and then three years after that in 1787 when jefferson is still in france he sends for maria and maria is only eight years old at this point so she clearly needs an attendant and the person who is sent Maria as her kind of maid, nanny, whatever, is her 14-year-old aunt Sally Hemings.

48:11Dominic Sandbrook:Let me just repeat one thing. Sally Hemings at this point is 14 years old.

48:17Tom Holland:She is 14 years old. So first of all, they go to London where John Adams is the ambassador, the first American ambassador to the court of St. James. And Abigail Adams is with him. And she, so So she hosts Maria and Sally and she thinks Sally is hopeless, that she's an absolutely terrible kind of attendant. She's all over the place. But she assumes that Sally is kind of 17 or 18. She's also, we're told, light-colored and so there's a description of her, very handsome with long straight hair down her back. And she evidently bears a family resemblance to her dead half-sister, Patty, who had been Jefferson's wife.

49:01Tom Holland:I mean... So she looks a bit like Jefferson's wife. Yeah.

49:05Dominic Sandbrook:And she looks slightly older than she is. I mean, you know where this is going. Everyone knows where this is going. Right. So Maria and Sally cross the Channel. They go to Paris. You know, they're with Jefferson. And by September 1789, when Jefferson is preparing for his return to America, Sally is pregnant.

49:23Tom Holland:So by that point, she is what? She's 16. So our source for what happens next derives exclusively from Madison Hemings, her son, who writes up this story. And he reports that Jefferson takes for granted that he's going to be taking Sally back with him to Virginia, and that Sally, in Madison Hemings' words, demurs. You know, she's not going to go with him. She says, no, I'm not going to. And there are various reasons why she might feel able to do this. She has learned French by this point, so it's perfectly possible that she could stay in France and flourish there. She's not alone. She has her elder brother James, who's been taken by Jefferson to Paris to be trained as a chef.

50:02Dominic Sandbrook:As a chef? Yeah.

50:05Tom Holland:So, you know, she could live with James. They could run a restaurant together or something. But the key thing is that in France there are no slaves. So Sally is not legally a slave in France. She's free to do what she wants. There is no legal requirement for her to go back to America. Imagine, yeah, the shock of being told you had to go back to America. back to slavery so she says no i'm not going to the 16 year old girl and jefferson is absolutely stunned i mean i don't think anyone has ever spoken to him like this before in the end sally does opt to go back to virginia with jefferson um and madison hemmings writes about this to induce her to do so he jefferson promised her extraordinary privileges and made a solemn pledge that her children should be freed at the age of 21 years you know not just her children his children as well including madison hemings and for sally you know she's she's she's got this promise but to go back to virginia she is returning to servitude and she will formally remain a slave until the end of her days having said that and whether this counts as rehabilitation i don't know but jefferson does keep his word to her so by the terms of his will when he dies Her children by him are emancipated and Sally herself, for complicated legal reasons, she can't be emancipated but she's kind of granted an informal freedom so effectively she does become free herself.

51:32Dominic Sandbrook:Not legally but effectively. De facto but not de jure basically.

51:37Tom Holland:And she ends up leaving Monticello after Jefferson's death. She lives with two of her sons in Charlottesville which is the nearest town about two miles away. And she died there in 1835. she was 62 and the site of her grave is unknown. So a very, a kind of dark and largely occluded story apart from, you know, that, that kind of reference to it in the newspapers.

52:00Dominic Sandbrook:There are only hints about what we know, right? In the, in the sources anyway, we'll come to other sources. Yeah. Just one last thing we should make clear. When Sally arrived in Paris, she was 14 years old, right? Though you say she looked a year or two older. Jefferson was 44 at that point. Yes. So quite a sizeable age gap even by the standards of the rest is history.

52:23Tom Holland:And so because it is a story that has dwelt in the shadows, there are kind of questions to be asked. So first of all, is Madison Hemmings right? Can we trust him? Was Jefferson really his father and that of Sally's other children? I mean, we can't take it for You could say, well, Madison Hemings would say this. I mean, it's much better to have Jefferson as your father than someone else.

52:45Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah, of course.

52:46Tom Holland:And throughout the 20th century, most biographers of Jefferson didn't believe it. So as a representative, let me quote Dumas Malone. He was author of a six. Don't throw that away. His name is what? It's either Dumas or Dumas. whether he was named after the author of the three musketeers and whether the s was added i'm not sure i imagine it probably was dumas malone and he wrote a six volume biography of jefferson it won the polizza prize um just for good measure so there's no question where dumas malone is coming from he was the thomas jefferson foundation professor of history at the university of virginia which had been founded by thomas jefferson he definitely doesn't have a dog in this fight So Malone, in the fourth volume of his biography, he touches on Callender's accusations, his accusations about Jefferson's relationship with Sally.

53:47And he opines, they are distinctly out of character, being virtually unthinkable in a man of Jefferson's moral standards and habitual conduct.

53:57Dominic Sandbrook:Well, that's so telling, isn't it? Virtually unthinkable. I mean, this is a point, 1970, when Jefferson's moral stature is so great that it is, I mean, to most American historians, it probably is unthinkable that Thomas Jefferson could lower himself to this depravity. Right. So what changes? Well, the key development comes in 1999 when DNA tests prove that the father of Sally's children had been a member of the Jefferson male line. Doesn't prove that it was Thomas Jefferson, but I mean, it's a very strong likelihood that it was.

54:30Tom Holland:And then there's been very detailed research by the great scholar of the Hemings family and of the relationship of Sally Hemings to Thomas Jefferson, Annette Gordon-Reed. And she did detailed analysis of the Jefferson archives, which are very copious. And she demonstrated that Jefferson had been present at Monticello nine months before the birth of every one of Sally Hemings's children. So, again, that's quite substantive evidence. And then in 2017, archaeologists working at Monticello excavated Sally's room, complete with original hearth, fireplace and floors, and it's directly adjacent to Jefferson's bedroom.

55:10Tom Holland:So there are still Jefferson scholars who doubt it. But I would say the overwhelming consensus now of historians is that Jefferson had kept Sally Hemings as his mistress, that Madison Hemings and her other children were Jefferson's children. And this has been accepted by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which runs Monticello. So that effectively, I think, is case proven.

55:37Dominic Sandbrook:So let's get into their relationship. So obviously there's so much, I mean, it's impossible to ever know the truth about anybody's relationship, I suppose, even your own. But their relationship is surely, I mean, the fact that they are, as it were, master and slave can never be separated from the reality of their relationship.

55:56Tom Holland:No, it is obviously massively coercive. I mean, Jefferson owns Sally as property. And as you said, you know, he's in his mid-40s when they begin their affair and she's, you know, in her mid-teens. So in every way, there is a colossal power imbalance there. So, I suppose the question that can't be answered, which people must be wondering, is why Sally agreed to go back with Jefferson to Virginia and to slavery. So, was it homesickness, you know, for the place that she'd grown up in, for her mother, for the rest of her family? Nervousness at starting a new life in France? I mean, maybe she'd been in France a few years, but I mean, a big ask, perhaps.

56:42Tom Holland:Yeah.

56:43Dominic Sandbrook:She's still a teenager, right? So, I mean, do many 16 year olds or whatever choose to start an entirely new life, cut off from their... I mean, we know from sports people who do that that they find it very daunting and overwhelming and that's when they have support around them. So you can imagine this is a big ask for her to stay in Paris, even though it means freedom.

57:02Tom Holland:Yeah, but to repeat, I mean, she's going back to a condition of servitude. Yeah, of course. I mean, of course. And I think, you know, you have to ask, and there may be people who feel that this is an entirely inappropriate question, but I think you can't avoid asking it. Does she have personal feelings for Jefferson, who is a man of immense charm and good looks and fame? I mean, he's one of the most famous men in the world. So, I mean, we can't know, but I would say some or all of those reasons probably offer a sufficient explanation. As for Jefferson, I think it is easier to fathom what might have motivated him in risking so much by having this affair.

57:45Tom Holland:I mean, it was so, he knew how damaging it would be if the full details of it came out.

57:51Dominic Sandbrook:One question though, actually, you say he's risking so much and he knows how damaging it would be. The allegations do come out, thanks to this guy, Calendar, but they don't stop him becoming president. Plus, you made the point yourself, you know, that, um, quite rightly, I think, that uh masters slave owners raping their slaves or sleeping with their slaves is extremely common in the american south so in other words if it came out you know people a lot lots of people might say huh jefferson's not the saint that he pretends to be but they wouldn't necessarily be surprised or shocked that this had that this had happened and it might not be well as we know it It wasn't terminal for his political career.

58:36Tom Holland:So is he risking that much? That's my question. I think he is for reasons that we will come to. Okay. I think he is risking a lot by having this affair with Sally Hemings. I mean, we will come to that in due course. Okay. But when it comes to his motivation, why might he have run this risk? I think it is because when you look at his life, it is clear that this is a man who is given to titanic and enduring erotic passions. And this, again, is something that many of his biographers in the 20th century didn't really want to acknowledge. So there is a brilliant biography of Jefferson that was published as late as 1998 by Joseph Ellis, American Sphinx.

59:14Tom Holland:I mean, it's really, really good. But Ellis doubted the Hemings affair, and he famously wrote of Jefferson that he preferred to meet his lovers in the rarefied region of his mind rather than the physical world.

59:27Dominic Sandbrook:Oh, that must be nice for them.

59:29Tom Holland:So, you know, in France, he has these kind of very elegant salon-based affairs. Right. But to give Ellis credit, when the DNA evidence came out, he changed his mind. You know, when the evidence changes, what do you do? You change your mind. He does. And I think it's clear that when you look at Jefferson's great romantic passions, which kind of mark the length of his life, he's definitely a man whose principles are capable of being overridden by his desires. So a case in point, his first great erotic obsession. He's 25 and he goes after his best friend's wife. Dominic, have you ever watched Love Actually?

1:00:07Tom Holland:I can imagine that you never have.

1:00:09Dominic Sandbrook:I have seen Love Actually, yeah. It's the Keira Knightley thing, right? So you remember Andrew Lincoln, who will go on to a glittering career fighting zombies. He's in love with Keira Knightley, who's just married his best friend. And Andrew Lincoln turns up with a load of cue cards. Christmas. at Christmas and plays some carols on a tape recorder and proclaims his love. And then he walks away and Kira follows him and gives him a little kiss and then they run back. And that's the end of it because Andrew Lincoln is a very decent man and obviously isn't going to pester his best friend's wife. Thomas Jefferson, however, a very different story.

1:00:43He pursues this poor woman for years and he's always kind of surprising her when she's getting dressed. He's slipping love letters into the cuffs of her sleeves. Does he get anywhere? No, he doesn't. good for her she um stands firm and obviously the best friend is no longer the best friend when he

1:00:57Tom Holland:finds out no yeah there is a similar sense of kind of intense erotic emotional obsession in his marriage um so when his wife dies he you know this is the middle of the war of independence jefferson has a kind of key role he's meant to be organizing defenses he chucks them all in goes back to monticello spends months kind of nursing her mopping her fevered brow all of this and remember that oath that he'd given never to marry again I mean he keeps it he clearly sees it as a sacred pledge and I think that the the likeliest explanation for his relationship with Sally is that she is the third and the most enduring of the three great passions of his life and just to reiterate she probably looks like his dead wife yeah I mean as we say there are some very very deep waters here it's not unheard of for men in

1:01:49Dominic Sandbrook:kind of middle age to to form these obsessive attachments to much younger women after all indeed and are we not right in saying that people described at the french court and said she was very good looking very handsome woman with the hair down her back and all that kind of thing

1:02:05Tom Holland:all of that yes she's clearly very good looking and she's clearly very smart as well yeah and and very strong-willed. I mean, you know, she stood up to Jefferson, one of the most famous men in the world, when she was a 16-year-old. I mean, she's clearly a very impressive person in her own right. But there is this massive question, why does he keep her as a slave? Why doesn't he just free her? And this is a question that in turn only scratches the surface of the biggest mystery of all, which you were kind of alluding to earlier on. How could Jefferson, of all people have kept not only sally hemmings whom he clearly loved but some 130 people on the monticello estate in bondage and even more on his other estates so yes when jefferson dies he sets free his children by sally but not the other slaves they are all sold on the block families are scattered to you know different parts of of of the south i mean that that itself

1:03:00Dominic Sandbrook:the breaking up of families by being sold off is just heartbreaking.

1:03:05Tom Holland:Yeah, it's terrible. And there's a contrast there with Washington, who by the terms of his will, he wasn't able to free all his slaves because they were owned by his wife, but he laid down measures for them to be set free. Jefferson did not do this. And what makes the hypocrisy seem even more glaring, and this is why I think the story of him having Sally as his concubine would have been damaging. Jefferson, in his original draft of the declaration, had famously lambasted slavery as, and I quote, a cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberties. And the other members of the Congress, most of them from the South, and therefore from slave-owning states, had edited these passages out.

1:03:52Tom Holland:And Jefferson had been absolutely furious about this. He'd felt that this was kind of morally unconscionable. So there can be no doubting that as a young man, he had a passionate commitment to abolitionism. Nor, I think, when you look at his political career, his writings, the framing of his political principles, the ideal of liberty, I think, did absolutely serve him as the great guiding light of everything that he wanted to achieve and to do.

1:04:19Dominic Sandbrook:But can I just press you on this before? I know you want to move on, but just on this, his commitment to the ideal of liberty it's very common in american history certainly in the first let's say 100 years or 150 years or so for people to feel that they are genuinely committed to the ideal of liberty but they perceive it as having limits and that limit means you know it extends to to white men largely but not to people beyond that does is jefferson one of those people no

1:04:47Tom Holland:No. Jefferson is much more committed to an ideal of liberty such as I think we would understand it today. He is a man of his time, but he is at the cutting edge. He is a committed abolitionist. He's not just written the Declaration of Independence. He had put in huge passages saying that slavery should be abolished.

1:05:07Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah. So you're not giving him a pass, as it were, by saying, well, he's a product of 18th century Virginia, so you'd expect him to be...

1:05:13Tom Holland:No.

1:05:14Dominic Sandbrook:Okay, fine.

1:05:14Tom Holland:This is why I think it's so, for admirers of Jefferson, it's so upsetting. Because to say he's merely a hypocrite, that all along his devotion to liberty was a front, a show, isn't true. Jefferson is, you know, in his writings and in many of his political actions, he is committed to all kinds of ideals. And these ideals have many wellsprings. So he has a very idiosyncratic understanding of Jesus as a kind of non-divine moralist. But he draws from the teachings of the Gospels a sense that all human beings should be free. He's got this kind of humanist understanding of the Gospels. He's also a committed admirer of the more radical end of the Enlightenment.

1:06:05Tom Holland:He's read the philosophers of liberty. Locke, he's massively anglophobic, it has to be said, but he's a great admirer of John Locke and the English philosophers of personal liberty, many of which feed into the abolitionist arguments in Britain. and I think above all he I said he's a great classicist at the start of this show he has a passionate devotion to ancient Greece and Rome that goes far beyond that of even the other founding fathers and in particular he is devoted to the great Roman historian Tacitus whom he described as the first writer in the world without exception and Jefferson finds in Tacitus an inspiration that is moral as well as political.

1:06:56Tom Holland:And that inspiration leads him to enshrine liberty as the great principle that should guide human beings in leading a good life. So there are two books by Tacitus in particular that influence him. And the first of these is called Germania. It's a portrait of ancient Germany, which of course hadn't been conquered by the Romans. and Tacitus, or rather Jefferson's understanding of Tacitus, Germany is the womb of liberty and Tacitus has counterpointed it to the corruption and decadence of Rome under the Caesars. And so Jefferson sees the Anglo-Saxons who come from Germany, unconquered Germany, to Britain and then the English settlers who had travelled from Britain to America as the bearers of this ancient flame of German liberty.

1:07:42Tom Holland:And in 1776, Jefferson had proposed putting Hengist and Horsa, the legendary leaders of the Anglo-Saxon settlement in Britain, putting them on the reverse of the Great Seal as illustration of this ideal that the course of liberty is heading westwards from Germany to Britain to America. And then the counterpoint to all this is um jefferson's portrayal of the lives of the caesars tiberius and through to nero and this is the monarchy that obviously um emerged amid the rubble of the roman republic and it's a murderous and tyrannical as portrayed by tacitus and this is again a huge influence on jefferson's politics and it's a massive part of what fills him with dread yeah that the american republic will succumb to a new Caesar.

1:08:31Tom Holland:And there are various kind of potential Caesars in Jefferson's demonology. And one is George III. And Jefferson's Anglophobia is founded in the sense he has of Britain as a new imperial Rome, with George III as a very improbable kind of Caligula or Nero. I mean, this kind of amiable buffoon. He's absolutely not Caligula. But Jefferson is completely sincere in seeing Britain as the kind of the new Rome.

1:08:58Dominic Sandbrook:murderous and tyrannical and that of course is what informs his hatred of the federalists

1:09:03Tom Holland:and of their what their projects right yes completely i mean it's insane as it may sound

1:09:08Dominic Sandbrook:did you think john adams was going to become a new caesar as well yes well he he sees john adams

1:09:13Tom Holland:as a potential caesar i think and he definitely sees hamilton as a new caesar and hamilton who's clearly a massive wag um jefferson he they're having dinner together and jefferson is talking about his heroes and it's all Bacon and Locke. Hamilton said, oh my hero is Julius Caesar. He was the greatest man that ever lived. Jefferson takes this completely seriously and is confirmed in his darkest views.

1:09:38Dominic Sandbrook:Does Jefferson have a great sense of humour? I don't think Jefferson had a great sense of humour, no. No, I don't.

1:09:44Tom Holland:But it is Jefferson's kind of great overriding ambition for the United States to avoid the fate of both ancient Rome and of Georgian Britain. And it's this that explains his hostility to Britain, his sympathy with Republican France, his enthusiasm for yeoman farmers. These are a kind of bulwark against the emergence of tyranny and decadence and this drive westwards, this empire of liberty. You plant an empire of liberty in the West and that will enable America to stand proof against the corrupting effects of luxury and decadence. Part of this is obviously a little bit antiquarian, but Jefferson is not primarily antiquarian.

1:10:26Tom Holland:You know, he believes in the lessons that can be drawn from the classical past, but he does kind of blend it with the ideals of the Enlightenment, which he's also committed, and to his very hard-nosed understanding of the contemporary political realities of America. And his dream essentially is a country that can serve as simultaneously an embodiment of the best of ancient Greece and Rome that can be true to the ideals of the Enlightenment and can also be something novel, something that the world has never seen before and therefore appropriate to a new world. And this ideal is evident, I think, not just in his record as president, but also in the place that he loved more than anywhere in the world.

1:11:10Tom Holland:And this, of course, is Monticello. And this is a place that is classical, but it is also where he is anticipating the future of American ingenuity by experimenting with tomatoes and installing automatic double doors and inventing a kind of a revolving chair and recording meteorological data that is so meticulously kept that it's still being used by climate scientists to this day. So all of that, it's all kind of very scientific. It's all very progressive. It's all very enlightenment. But at the same time, he does have this great love of the classics. And his dream since he was a young man is to live essentially like Cicero.

1:11:53Tom Holland:And as a young man, he had this commonplace book. He'd filled it with quotes illustrating what Cicero had called dignified leisure. And Cicero enjoys this dignified leisure on his country estate. But you can't have a country estate if you're a Roman grandee without slaves. and as it turns out nor can Jefferson because to free his slaves would have destroyed the idyll that he had created for himself at Monticello and this isn't just because he would lose the labor that the slaves provided but because Jefferson like so many of the tobacco farmers in Virginia is massively in debt and he needs the slaves as collateral against this debt and And remember that his father-in-law had been a debt collector.

1:12:41Tom Holland:And so Jefferson knows better than anyone what financial ruin might mean. You know, he will lose everything. And I think that ultimately Monticello is dearer to him than Sally, dearer to him than his ideals of liberty, dearer than, you know, his reputation even. So when he was in France, he'd visited Nîmes and he'd gazed at an incredibly well-preserved Roman temple, a great kind of gem of Roman architecture. and he wrote in a letter that he'd gazed at it like a lover at his mistress and perhaps I you know at the end of the day he loved Monticello more even than than Sally than his wife than his his best friend's wife more than his principles more even than how posterity would judge him to the extent that I can explain this you know the paradox that is Thomas Jefferson this i think is the explanation you know he is that the the president of the united states who articulated the principles of america more boldly and more stirringly and more inspirationally than any other but i think for that reason he is also the united states president who came to betray them the most grievously he knew what he was doing right you know we joke and say, Thomas Jefferson, history is a great monster.

1:14:09Tom Holland:He wasn't a monster. He was a man of genuine principle. But it's for that reason that his portrayal of those principles are all the more shameful, I think.

1:14:20Dominic Sandbrook:You're right, yeah, because you're sort of distinguishing. I mean, there's a difference between somebody who basically has been bred in the world of the 18th century, cannot think themselves outside it, doesn't question the established practices of the time, and therefore, you know, owns slaves, buys and sells slaves, and is completely implicated in what we would now regard as a horrendous institution. And you're effectively saying this is somebody who basically thinks it's wrong.

1:14:48Tom Holland:He knows it's wrong. To the depths of his heart, in his marrow.

1:14:51Dominic Sandbrook:Knows it's wrong, but his own pastoral, classical fantasy world, as it were, means more to him than doing what he believes to be right. And presumably he told himself, the slaves are much better living with me on my plantation and working for me.

1:15:11Tom Holland:I think he probably did tell himself that, but I don't think that's a justification that he would have accepted.

1:15:15Dominic Sandbrook:Right.

1:15:15Tom Holland:You know, and that's why I think if he were alive now, he would accept the force of the arguments made by his critics. He would be on their side in his gut in saying that he did wrong. And I think that if the definition of a tragedy is that, you know, someone who is destroyed by their own best qualities, Jefferson is the great tragic president.

1:15:42Dominic Sandbrook:Because the very thing that people admire that millions of tourists go to see every year, which is Monticello, you're arguing, is the thing that basically subverts his moral compass.

1:15:52Tom Holland:Monticello is the architectural embodiment of all Jefferson's ideals. You know, his love of ancient Greece and Rome, his commitment to enlightenment principles, his investment in all the kind of incredible ingenuity that will be characteristic of America over the course of her existence. And that's why Americans instinctively feel this. It's why it's one of the great kind of monuments, great centers of pilgrimage in the United States. But ultimately, that house could not have functioned without slaves. And had Jefferson sold his slaves, he would have lost the house, he would have lost the estate he would have been ruined yeah and he couldn't bring himself to do it

1:16:31Dominic Sandbrook:he couldn't bear to do it okay well fascinating story brilliantly told um thank you tom so that brings to an end our founding fathers series but jefferson himself will be delighted to hear because he loved greece and rome that we're actually returning next week with a proper classical subject because of course christopher nolan's film the odyssey is about to hit the cinemas and we will be venturing back to Homeric Greece to the world of gods and monsters to dig deep into the Odyssey and tease out what it's all about and what it means and those episodes will be out for Rest is History Club members on Monday so if you want to hear both episodes straight away go to the restishistory.com sign up and Tom I believe there's all kinds of other benefits aren't there?

1:17:17Dominic Sandbrook:Oh massive supplementary benefits. Supplementary benefits I think is the technical tell incredible supplementary benefits you only get them if you sign up at the website and of course there is our super sore away newsletter every friday which will have loads more about all of this kind of stuff so i advise people to sign up for the newsletter and um yeah thank you very much tom and we will return uh next week with the odyssey bye-bye bye-bye

1:17:49Dominic Sandbrook:hi everybody it's dominic here from the rest is history i just wanted to let you all know that on our sister podcast the book club we have just released an episode digging deep into george rr martin's a game of thrones the first book in his song of ice and fire sequence uh we go deep into the history behind Game of Thrones. So we go into the Wars of the Roses, Hadrian's Wall. We talk about the influence of J.R.R. Tolkien in comparisons with The Lord of the Rings. We talk about the violence of the books. But Tabby, we also talk, don't we, about George R.R. Martin's apparent stagnation and whether he's actually ever going to finish the books.

1:18:28We investigate why it is that he has battled to finish them at all and whether he will ever be able to. If you want to hear lots more about the history behind some of the greatest novels of all time, fear not, because coming up on the book club, we have The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa, which is all about Italian unification. We talk about Circe, where we delve into a particular part of the Odyssey. And then after that, we are doing The 39 Steps, which is, I know, Dominic, you chose and you love.

1:19:01Dominic Sandbrook:Please join us at the book club. It's loads of fun and you will never find a better way to spend your life. Bye-bye. Bye.

1:19:10Dominic, since it's the summer, I've obviously been thinking a lot about cricket. However, I am aware that the World Cup is on as well. And so occasionally football intrudes on my mind as well. And so I've been thinking about what my historical dream football teams would be. And who would be in your historical dream team? I've numbered it down to four, what I think would be the classics. and they are of course the Aztecs the Royal Navy we've got to have the Royal Navy Austro-Hungary

1:19:43Dominic Sandbrook:and of course ancient Rome I mean it's an amazing coincidence because the rest is history have just launched football shirts for those very teams so if there are people out there who want to know what Kwauteimok would have worn during the siege of Tenochtitlan or Nelson this is your chance to find out. And how would one, I'll put it bluntly, me, how would I get my hands on one, two, three, or perhaps all of these bespoke kits? You would want to head as quickly as possible to the rest is history.com and you go to the merch tab, then you would be able to pre-order one of these fantastic limited edition shirts.

1:20:27Dominic Sandbrook:Would there be a way of personalising these shirts? I'm going to make you so happy now because actually there would each shirt can be personalized with the choice of historical figures um the big names from that particular team so for example the royal navy you can go for horatio nelson or emma hamilton you can go for franz ferdinand or sophie for the austro-hungarian empire for the aztecs you can go for cuau tamoc montezuma or malinche okay they sound absolutely brilliant um the perfect way for our beloved listeners to celebrate the World Cup and I will certainly be heading to the website and clicking on the merch page on restishistory.com.

1:21:12I simply cannot wait.