#1586 Ten Things on Margaret Bayard Smith

What does it say that we still don't know much about these people like Margaret Bayard Smith, that she's still sort of almost a footnote in history? We mine her letters and her diaries for material, but we don't really focus on what a remarkable human being she was.

So I think that that's part of it and that, you know, we're still sort of catching up in some ways, trying to know more about people who just were a little bit more on the outskirts or even just sort of in the background of some of these big events. The second piece is a lot of it is source based. So you know, Margaret Barrett Smith is relatively remarkable as 19th and early, or as 18th and early 19th century women go, and that we actually have a pretty extraordinary paper record about what she was up to and what she was doing and what she was thinking. For a lot of women and a lot of people of color and a lot of lower class white people. at the time, they either were illiterate or their papers were not preserved.

And so we just don't have that much to try and document their life. I mean, and even now, if you think about our lives, we write so many emails, we put so much out on social media, we, you know, do all of these things. But think about how much that takes place that isn't recorded. Your conversations, your thoughts, unless you're writing a diary, which most people don't do now, there's just a lot that is not captured. And that was even more so back then.

We have a photograph of it. And so I looked it up and then she was, she was a model. She was on the cover of Vogue. She was a beautiful model and was in many photo shoots. She was the lover of Man Ray, the great photographer, and his muse.

She did this extraordinary reporting and photojournalism during the war. And I had never heard of her. Now that's just maybe a sign of my ignorance, but you've never heard of her either. And then there's Leni Riefenstahl, the great propaganda filmmaker. You've heard of her.

that did Triumph of the Will. And Hannah Reich was a female pilot who came in at the last hours of Hitler's life and landed in the middle of the rubble of Berlin to try to take him away, to get him out from Berlin and to save him for another, maybe another fight on the, on the Bavarian, in the Bavarian Alps. And these are just three women that we should all know about. And how different. Hannah Reich, who's an ardent Nazi, but a great female pilot.

Leni Riefenstahl, one of the greatest documentary filmmakers of all time. And then Lee Miller, whom I've literally never heard of. And I thought, I mean, A, what else don't I know? But that's like shooting ducks in the bathtub. But what don't we know?

Why don't we know? Why are these things surprises to us, when I know a lot about the men around Hitler in Berlin in World War II. We all do. There's just been a way in which there's so much catching up to do that. it's really inspiring.

And I could see you writing, I know you have your next projects in mind, but a book on Margaret Bayard Smith would be a superb book.

And so, you know, what that means is, and so, you know, I'm, I'm so guilty of this that, you know, until like, I remember, you know, early on when I was writing the cabinet and I did my best to include wives and spouses when I could, but people basically said like, where are the women? I'm like, they're not in the cabinet.

Thank you, Lindsay. We'll talk again. This was a really, a great program. See you shortly. All right, everyone.

That was Lindsay Juravinski, my dear friend. We've become really good friends. It's just a wonderful thing. You know, I read her book, The Cabinet, which I very much liked, of course.

And then David Swenson and I invited her to come on the program. She came on. We, we just really liked her. She's so refreshing. She, she has a sense of humor.

She has a sense of, of selfie facing humor and she's kind of anti-Jefferson in some important respects, but it's a lot of it's done and fun. And my goal is, is, when we're done with this, after 10 years, or whenever, you know, whenever we stop recording things together, my goal is that she will say, Mr. Jenkinson, I have to say, you have changed my view of Thomas Jefferson. You have made me realize the greatness, the beauty, the vision of Mr. Jefferson.

And that may or may not happen, but so it goes. I love our conversations together and there will be many more, I can assure you. And if you have thoughts about 10 things, you know, I was thinking of 10 women that every American should know about. that we don't know about, that would be a good program. We're going to do a program, Elizabeth Warren, who wrote a history, an interminably long history of the revolution, which really upset John Adams.

There's just so much more. I will be leaving around May 1st, sometime in the first week of May, traveling the country for a few months, but I'll come back to North Dakota to regroup and do laundry. And then I will be, once I finish the Travels, with Charlie John Steinbeck tour, which will occur within this calendar year or just beyond, then I'll regroup and there will be a second tour of maybe, the Lewis Clark Trail from Monticello all the way to Astoria and back again, and Theodore Roosevelt's footprint in America, Alexis de Tocqueville's America. I plan to go to all the national monuments that I can, to many of the national parks, although I'm not a checklister in that way. Certainly I want to go to all the presidential libraries.

I find them utterly fascinating, to historic sites, to battlefields, to the great national forests, to BLM lands, to places that are just out in the middle of the middle of the middle of nowhere. I want to travel the back highways of this country. I can't wait to go through the Redwoods with my Airstream and find a beautiful spot in the National Forest to stop and camp for the night.

This is really going to be a very extraordinary journey, and I want you to be part of it. We're putting all of the infrastructure in place for this, and it will begin in May of 2024.. So what a day with Dr. Lindsey Chervinsky on 10 things about Margaret Bayard Smith. If you can help us in any way as we go on this great journey, we will deeply appreciate it.

Of course, it's all tax deductible and so on and so forth. So go to the website ltamerica.org, sign up for our newsletter, tell your friends, and keep listening. Thank you, everyone.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to this special edition of Listening to America. My friend, Dr. Lindsey Chervinsky is across the country from me, but we are virtually together on a Zoom technology. And today, 10 things about Margaret Bayard Smith. Margaret Bayard Smith was a prominent woman in Washington, D.C.

during the early national period. She first moved there in 1800 with her husband, Samuel Harrison Smith. He was the editor of the National Intelligencer, the newspaper that was in some sense a house organ of the Jefferson administration. And she became a really extraordinary diarist and letter writer, and her writings were published after her life as The First Forty Years of Washington Society, a really remarkable book, one of the best windows we have on the new federal capital in the age of Jefferson, all the way through the age of Andrew Jackson. So welcome, Lindsey.

She had a very serious crush on Jefferson. She was happily married and there was no shenanigans of any sort, but she sort of adored him. And she made it her business to be someone who provided unlimited affection and support to the third president, who was, as you know, a widower, and his daughters, for the most part, remained back in Charlottesville during his two terms as president. So I know that's an unfair term, Lindsey, but you know she had this crush on Mr. J.

that is in, I mean, at one point I was like, are you kidding me? Because it's so ridiculous.

A treasury building is being built. The White House is unfinished. The Capitol is unfinished. Pennsylvania Avenue is all mud. And Jefferson comes calling at the Smith residence, and at this time, the manners were very formal.

And so she brushes into the drawing room or wherever he's waiting for Samuel Harrison Smith and sees this stranger, thinks nothing of it. Her husband walks in and says, oh, Mr. Jefferson, may I congratulate you on your ascent to the presidency? And she has this kind of meltdown. So she starts to blush and everything.

And she says, this is what she says in her famous account. And is this the violent Democrat, the vulgar demagogue, the bold, atheist and profligate man I had so often heard, denounced by the Federalists? Can this man, so meek and mild, yet dignified in his manners, with a voice so soft and low, with a countenance, so benignant and intelligent, can he be that daring leader of a faction, that disturber of the peace, that enemy of all rank and order? Think of what she had been sort of told by the Fox News of her time. Jefferson is this crazy leftist radical who's going to tear down the government.

He's a demagogue. He's a vulgarian.

And so even you can appreciate this moment, right? That this must have been some moment.

But it certainly is a great story. And it starts a very, actually what I think is actually probably a very sweet friendship. I think that they probably had a sort of eternal bond. It was probably quite lovely.

And then, for the next eight years, they had many, many encounters in the White House and in her house. And when Alexander von Humboldt came to visit the president on his way back from his extraordinary explorations in South America, she served as a kind of hostess to him. Humboldt was able to kind of come and go in the White House with no security, and Jefferson greatly admired Alexander von Humboldt, but he needed some help. And so Dolly Madison provided some of it, and Margaret Bayard Smith provided other parts of the hospitality regimen that was needed for this distinguished German polymath and explorer. So she has this relationship with Jefferson.

And in her books and letters, her book is really a set of letters and diary entries, but she talks about several really interesting things. First of all, Jefferson had a mockingbird named Dick that he used to allow to hop around and fly around freely in the White House, and it would sit on his fingers and eat crumbs from his lips. And Jefferson just loved this bird. She said Jefferson cannot live without something to love. Jefferson has to love things, and this bird was one of them.

And then she also talks about trees with Jefferson, Lindsay, and strangely, she said that Jefferson believed that any time a tree was cut down unnecessarily, it was a kind of murder, that it was a terrible thing to cut down a tree unnecessarily.

was laid out ahead of time. Cities tended to kind of crop up organically and then expand organically, and space was at a premium, and so you cut down trees because you needed firewood for your fire, and you needed space for people. And so one of the things that was so important to Jefferson about the design of Washington, D.C. was that it had green space, and that's why so many of the roads and the circles have built-in parks as part of this important preservation. But the people around town didn't necessarily have...

It's not like the trees on federal land were protected by the National Park Service like they are today, and so he was horrified when these beautiful native trees were cut down.

But Jefferson said we can thus pastoralize the city. We can redeem the city as healthy space by having green things growing and a place for people to leave the congestion of Congress or the congestion of their homes and go out into parkland. So this makes him a very modern, sort of forward-thinking person. Back to Mrs. Smith.

So she's 22 years old. when she meets Jefferson. He's a lot older than she is. And he would never have engaged in an illicit relationship with her, but he was quite happy to have this sort of platonic light romance, let's call it. And her husband understood this and was not at all threatened by it, in fact,

Back to the theme of her life as a writer, she not only kept these diaries and sent these letters to her sister and sisters-in-law, but she also wrote a couple of novels. Interestingly enough, I've read them. One is called A Winter in Washington, or Memoirs of the Seymour Family.

That was 1824, so Jefferson's an old man back at Monticello by now. The second one is What is Gentility? from 1825.. And then she wrote several biographical, she often wrote for her husband's newspaper, sometimes under her own byline, but more often anonymously, which was much more common in those days. She also wrote for the National Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Americans in 1836, profile of her friend Dolly Madison.

We need to take a break, Lindsay. When we come back, I want to ask you about Margaret Bayard Smith's friendship with First Lady Dolly Madison. We'll be back in just a moment.

Welcome back to 10 Things about Margaret Bayard Smith with my friend and guest, Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky. Lindsay, this is a really remarkable woman, and she deserves to be better remembered than she was, I think. She was a friend of Dolly Madison. Talk about that, please.

She apparently wrote later in her life that she wanted to plunge into the daring enterprises of life. A man's fear was unlimited, but I am a woman and society says thus far and no further shall thou come. Why, then, has nature given me a mind so active and inquiring? She certainly shows it in her letter. She's just delightful.

But in terms of her friendship with Dolly Madison, these were both warm and, from all accounts, quite lively and vivacious women. There weren't that many women who actually lived permanently in D.C. because a lot of the came in for the season and did not bring their families. So the wives of the executive department secretaries and the president and the vice president tended to spend time together and tended to spend time with the more permanent families in Washington, D.C., of which Margaret was one. And so they became friends.

They were, I think, fairly close in age and had known each other for a really long time. And so by the time Margaret wrote this sort of interview or feature on Dolly, she had known Dolly for decades and so really had a very clear sense of who she was and her strengths, but of course also her weaknesses and her flaws. And by the time she wrote it, they were in pretty bad financial straits, largely because of Dolly's son, who was kind of a waste roll. She wrote this feature of Dolly and was very flattering. She did not say any of the bad things and Dolly was very pleased.

This was published in 1836.

. So, just to give you a sense of timing. And apparently Margaret wrote to her sister, all I say about Dolly is true, but I have

You can't read that without a pang of sorrow for the patriarchy that prevented women from achieving their potential. It has a certain echo of Mary Wollstonecraft's writings and a certain echo of Abigail Adams. But, Lindsay, if you think of all the women of history who have been straightjacketed by patriarchal social norms, who might have done extraordinary things and even did against all the odds in their lives, it's both heartbreaking.

I don't like being told what to do ever. And so I can't imagine what that felt like. I think about. there are amazing women who have done incredible things, like Marie Curie. I think about how many of those types of people we didn't know about because they weren't allowed to go to school and they weren't allowed to be educated in a way that would allow their talents to really shine.

How many people like that have we lost to history because they weren't allowed to exercise?

at this time. A president's daughter couldn't really do anything, except maybe volunteer with the Red Cross in a time of danger or something, but she couldn't be a teacher. She couldn't be a nurse. She couldn't be a writer. And what she became then was a rebel.

Which I suppose you would have done too. I mean she was so... she doesn't talk about this much, but it's all there. That the world was holding her back and putting her in a very narrow box and instead of using her to her really extraordinary talents, even T.R. couldn't find a role for her.

And that comes out there for in a kind of anger and aggression in her character, which could have been put to extraordinary use. And this story happens again and again, and again and again.

And he conforms to this model, doesn't he? Yeah. So there are a couple of issues I think at hand.

And James Madison either couldn't or wouldn't, because he was a stepfather in this situation. And there was also, to a certain extent, that, I mean, we still have this today, but it was so much more acute then that, you know, like young men will be wild and they'll go out and they'll sow their oats and they'll do wild and crazy things and cause trouble, but then they'll mature and be responsible adults. And sometimes that's true. And sometimes it's not. And I think the permission for that sort of behavior, especially for wealthy, aristocratic men who often went to school and were fairly unsupervised at university at a time when they were often younger than we go to school now, it could be a very poor combination for certain characters.

And that was certainly.

She was able to overcome his introversion and shyness and be a more public figure. During Jefferson's two terms, his daughters came up only for very short visits, mostly his eldest daughter, Martha. And so he was alone. He wrote a letter saying that he and Meriwether Lewis were as lonely as two church mice in the White House. Lewis living in the East Room, Jefferson, in his own private quarters.

During his White House time, he needed a hostess at times. And it was frequently Dolly Madison who would come and handle the lubrication of the social event and be the, but sometimes Margaret Baird Smith played that role too. And so Jefferson was deeply grateful for these women. And he had a capacity for friendship with women. that, I think, indicates that he was not a predatory man.

But there's something kind of charming and beautiful about this story. And Margaret Baird Smith provides many of the anecdotes we have of the Jefferson presidency. And then, of course, those who followed him too, that she sort of writes down these little incidents that we otherwise would not know, had it not been for her. For example, the day of the inauguration. I want to go to that because it's just such a magnificent story.

So this is March 4, 1801.

. And she wrote a letter to her sister, Susan B. Smith, that is one of the great letters of American history. And I want to just quote to you the first section. She says, Let me write to you, my dear Susan, ere.

that glow of enthusiasm has fled, which now animates my feelings. Let me congratulate not only you, but all my fellow citizens on an event which will have so auspicious an influence on their political welfare. And now this. I have this morning witnessed one of the most interesting scenes a free people can ever witness. The changes of administration which, in every government and in every age, have most generally been epochs of confusion, villainy, and bloodshed.

In this our happy country, take place without any species of distraction or disorder. You can't hear that, Lindsay, today without a kind of spasm of angst over what happened in 2020.. That she's talking about the fragility of a republic. If you have frequent elections and one party's out and another is in, one president is out, another is. in, her sense is, and she's a good student of history, that this usually involves confusion, villainy, and bloodshed.

But in this, our happy country, she saw the transfer of power in a beautiful and graceful way. Now John Adams had skipped out, but that's another question. It's an incredible statement. It's an incredible statement that she makes, isn't it?

And they had awe and respect and just admiration for the fact that they were able to do this thing. that doesn't usually happen. I think that we, as Americans, kind of forgot that these things do take intention and they are fragile and they're not guaranteed. And Lord knows, that's one of the themes that I've been talking about a lot lately, but also we'll be talking a lot with my forthcoming book, because I think we just got used to it. We just assumed that that would always be so until we saw how much, very not, so it can go on January 6th, 2021..

We just kind of took it for granted.

Jefferson actually said, maybe we dissolve the Constitution here and start over so we can get something that is less volatile. So this was an extremely tense moment in American history. And the question was, this was the first time that one party, let's call them the Federalists, Washington and John Adams, were leaving power and a new party, we'll call them the Jefferson Republicans, were entering power. And the question was, will this go without chaos? And nobody could be entirely sure right up until the end.

And then, when she says that it did happen in the right way, a norm was established. And it's so interesting, her use of language here. She says, in this, our happy country, the transfer takes place without any species. So she's already established it as a norm. She didn't say it took place last, this morning, in this way.

She said, this is the way we're going to do things in the United States. And I so agree with you that we fell asleep, didn't we? We thought it would always be this way. And suddenly, in 2020, we had a disrupter as the incumbent president who refused to accept the results of the election and planned an actual coup d'etat, which led to an insurrection on Capitol Hill on the 6th of January, 2021.. And I think every one of us, I remember exactly where I was when the news came, I'm sure you do too.

And we all thought, this doesn't happen in America. This can't happen in America. And then we realized there are no guarantees. This is all about norms and values. There's no enforcement of the peaceful transfer of power.

And what I think that we sometimes forget is we think our institutions are so powerful, the guardrails we hold and all of this stuff, but all of those things are powerful because we trust in them and we uphold them. And they require civil participation constantly, because we generally, most of our society, is not enforced through military might. Most of it is enforced through acquiescence by the civilian population. And norms and precedents are the epitome of that. They are us saying, this is what we expect people to do.

And we will uphold those expectations. And if we stop upholding them, then there isn't really a whole lot to prevent them from falling apart. Your man, John Adams, did skulk out of.

m. and avoided the inauguration. And I know that he was mourning over the death of his son, Charles. There are many good reasons for him just to want to slip away. But Jefferson regarded it as a double fault.

First, that it was ungentlemanly. A friend ought to be there. This is what gentlemen do for each other. And secondly, that the Constitution really needs this visual symbol of the transfer of power from one person to another. Is there?

And in fact, there was not a tradition of a president who had lost staying for an inauguration until the 1850s. So this was not a precedent that had been established. Most important point is actually this. The election had been such a debacle, had been such a scene, had been such a circus. And it had been so unclear what the outcome was actually going to be, whether it was going to be Jefferson or it was going to be Burr.

And you're right. And I hope that, you know, I think we kind of downplay the seriousness with which people felt everything could go to, you know, to Huey in one minute. And the threat of violence has been really underreported in history books, because I think that they kind of tried to tamp down that later and pretend like it didn't really happen. I think that Adams worried that his presence would be a distraction. It would add to the sense that this was a sort of a circus.

He worried that it would detract from the moment. And he genuinely wanted... Now, it's not to say he wasn't also bitter about losing and he wasn't upset about his son. Those things are true. And he wanted to get to Baltimore that first day.

The stages from Washington, D.

C. were relatively few and far between. So all of those things are true. He is both bitter. He doesn't want to be there.

He's unhappy about it. But I also firmly believe that he was trying to do what he thought would be best to give Jefferson a fresh slate and to help him start on sort of a clean page. Because all of his other actions in the transition period and in the immediate weeks following were nothing but conciliatory. And he instructed his cabinet to cooperate. He instructed them to offer assistance in any way.

He really set the tone. So there's a lot to criticize, but I do think that there's actually good faith... There's a good faith argument that there was no precedent of this and he was genuinely trying to do what he thought was right.

Yeah.

And I think that's a lovely tradition in American history. But I do think that we're looking backwards a little bit if we say that, with all of our knowledge since then, he should have had it at the same time.

But Adams actually loved Jefferson. He forgave him. There never would have been a reconciliation without John Adams. John Adams did the heavy emotional lifting and the reconciliation. He had many, many good reasons to be bitter about Jefferson, in a way that Jefferson did not have equally good reasons to be bitter about John Adams.

And yet Adams did the right thing and restored the friendship. So he's the bigger man. in my view. It does seem a little strange. When we come back, I want to read a little bit more of this letter.

And I want to ask you one further question about transfer of power. Stay with us, everyone. This is a special edition of Listening to America with Dr. Lindsey Chervinsky, 10 things about Margaret Bayard Smith.

Welcome back to this special edition of Listening to America. Lindsay Chervinsky, 10 things about Margaret Bayard Smith. You know, we were talking about Adams leaving town on the 4 a.m. stage to Baltimore, not staying for Jefferson's inauguration. Was it a slight or was it a good sense on the part of John Adams that enough is enough?

And at this point, nobody really knew what the protocols were for this sort of thing. We get it. Here's my question for you. Many people today say that what happened on January 6, 2021 was a protest that got a little out of hand, or maybe aggressive tourism, or that has been overplayed. Was it or was it not what we have to call an attempt at a coup d'etat?

Everyone needs to be held to account. This was an insurrection. I mean, I love this country so much and I just don't understand.

Al Gore gave a fabulous, gracious speech. Gore's partisans didn't attack the Capitol and try to prevent the transfer of power from Bill Clinton to G.W. Bush. That's the norm as late as 2000.. And yet in 2020, there are people who say, well, if the election was stolen, we have a right then to take back the government by force.

And that is a very, very depressing conclusion. I want to go back to this letter on March 4th, 1801 to Susan B. Smith by Margaret Bayard Smith. She's talked about the transfer of power, which I think is like, it's the classical statement of the peaceful transfer of power in American life. That's how great she was as a writer.

She goes on to say, I cannot describe the agitation I felt while I looked on around in the various multitude and while I listened to an address, the inaugural address, containing principles the most correct, sentiments, the most liberal, and wishes the most benevolent, conveyed in the most appropriate and elegant language and in a manner mild, as it was firm. If doubts of the integrity and talents of Mr. Jefferson ever existed in the minds of anyone, methinks this address must forever eradicate them. The Senate chamber was so crowded that I believe not another creature could enter. On one side of the house, the Senate sat, the other was resigned by the representatives to the ladies.

The roof is arched, the room half circle, every inch of ground was occupied. It has been conjectured by several gentlemen whom I asked that there were near a thousand persons within the walls. The speech was delivered in so low a tone that few heard it. Again, the details we get from her, we get from no other source. And then she has one, and at the end of the letter, she says something so important that it really helps us understand who Jefferson was.

And I, this may make you gag, of course, Lindsay, but when he went back to the boarding house, Conrad and McMunn's, where he'd been staying during the transition, he had been accustomed to seat at a group of other individuals, mostly men, at the far end of the table, as far away from the fireplace as anybody. This was his way of being gracious. He goes back after the inauguration. When he walks in, people start to get up to give him pride of place at the best seat in the house. He's, oh, no, no, no, no, no, I'm accustomed to sitting across the, I'd be, I'd be quite happy there.

And she says, that's, that's who Thomas Jefferson is. That's Thomas Jefferson, this mild man of the people. That's good political.

And, you know, we still, that's still very much how politics works today. We always talk about the American maid for inauguration. And, you know, when Melania wore that jacket that said, I really don't care, do you? I mean, like clothes and presentation are so important to politics. And, um, he was a master at that game.

What's the thing that sticks in your throat about Jefferson? I mean, here, there was no more polite and gracious a man in this era than he, and yet for some reason you find him duplicitous or annoying.

Like something was sticking in my craw. It was really just like annoying me. And I realized that Jefferson and FDR are the same person. They're both brilliant communicators about democracy. They both have a lot of personal sorrow in their life.

They're very hard to get to know. They kept pretty much everyone at arm's length. They were master politicians. They could make people do what they wanted in the way that they wanted them to be done. And they, they were often too faced about it.

They could be quite duplicitous and dishonest, and that made them brilliant politicians. I in no way challenged their skill or their ability to get things done, but it makes me like them a little bit less, not like dislike their principles, but just personally feel a little bit grossed out by it in a way that, like Theodore Roosevelt, was so freaking honest about who he was and John Quincy Adams was so freaking honest, and they're in some ways much less effective, but I love them for it. And so that's just my own personal, you know, I think every historian has to approach their subjects in the way in their own way, and choose their subjects in their own way. And so I can appreciate Jefferson. I can write in short quantities about Jefferson.

I can't live with Jefferson for the years that you have lived with Jefferson, because, you know, I think.

. He would have been elected almost certainly to a third term. He hands it off to his closest friend, James Madison. There's this lovely letter, March 6th, 1809, from Jefferson to Margaret Bayard Smith, because she said when the last time, one of the last times she was in his office at the White House, she said, please give me something so I can remember you when you go away. And I know I may never see you.

Yes, we're planning to come, but you know, it's a long.

. Listeners, I'm rolling my eyes. She says, please give me a token of something that I can cherish as much as I cherish you. And so he gave her a geranium. This is what he says in the letter.

He gave her a plant. They both love plants.

Smith and sends her the geranium she expressed a willingness to receive. It is in very bad condition, having been neglected laterally, as not intended to be removed. In other words, he didn't intend to take it back to Monticello, so he was going to just let it die. But now she has it. He cannot give it his parting blessing more effectually than by consigning it to the nourishing hand of Mrs.

Smith. Plants have sensibility, as the analogy of their organization with ours seems to indicate. He's saying plants have brains. If plants have sensibility, it cannot but be proudly sensible of her fostering attention of his regrets at parting with the society of Washington. A very sensible portion attaches to Mrs.

Smith, et cetera. And then he invites them to come to Monticello. You gotta love that. She took this, this half-hearted geranium, and brought it back to life. And this was her, her memory of the great man.

No one asked Adams for a plant. Did she bring it back to life?

All right.

the most important thing for me in the, in this letter is that she says, Jesus, what an isolated wilderness this thing is. There's nobody here. We're going up these roads. They're in deplorable condition. It's woods every direction.

It's not even clear that the civilization can exist here. And we come around this corner and Jefferson is riding his horse on his daily exercise. He greets us. He brings us back to the house. He serves us tea.

And it's an amazing letter about sort of the Gothic nature of Virginia at this time. So it's an immense letter. I urge everyone to read it, but she does address slavery and she didn't have to, because, as you know, the tacit arrangement, the contract with Jefferson, is that you never mention it. That that's, that's the price of friendship with Jefferson, that you just agree never to bring it up, even if you feel ardently about it. And John Adams, when he finally wrote to Jefferson about slavery in 1820, said, I've, I've never really wanted to raise this with you.

I've, I've always been inhibited from raising this question. And so she says this, she's walking around because Jefferson, even when he has them there, Jefferson spends the day in his study and in the fields. And after breakfast, you're all on your own until dinner, which would be about 3 p.m. And she says, she's taking a walk. It is generally shady, with openings through the trees for distant views.

We pass the outhouses for the slaves and workmen. They are all much better than I have seen on any other plantation, but to an eye unaccustomed to such sites, they appear poor and their cabins form a most unpleasant contrast with the palace that rises so near them. It's pretty strong, I think, don't you? She also says towards the end,

But then she says this, so he takes her, takes them into his sanctum sanctorum, his famous study, and nobody gets in that study. And he shows her stuff. He does a whole little show and tell thing. So she says his suite of apartments, opens from the hall, consists of three rooms for the library, one for his cabinet, which is a sort of office, one for his chamber, his bedchamber, and a greenhouse. He has not yet made his collection, having just finished the room, which opens to the one of the terraces.

He showed us everything he thought would please or interest us, his most valuable and curious books, those which contain fine prints. Among these, I thought the most curious were the original letters of Cortes to the King of Spain, a volume of fine views of ancient villas around Rome, with maps and minute descriptions of the buildings and grounds, an old poem written by Pierce Plowman, a great medieval poem, printed 250 years ago. He read near a page of Middle English, which was almost as unintelligible as if it were Hebrew, and some Greek romances. He took pains to find one that was translated into French, and on and on and on. So he's doing the Jefferson, the whole Jefferson treatment, that he's a polymath, that he has a greenhouse, that he has exquisite manners, he has incredible folios of plates of the Roman ruins, that he can read Middle English and read some aloud.

You've got to say this is a very charming moment. It is, but.

Then she says, it takes him a long time to complete his projects, and she says, there's something droll about this house. You've been in the house many times. You know there is something droll about this house. Very odd house. I mean, it's like, it's obviously.

It's a great letter by his principal admirer amongst women, and in some ways a groupie. I want to just fast forward to 1816, Lindsay. In 1816, she writes him an alarmed letter about tax being made on him for being an atheist. She's seen this, that this has somehow gone public, and she writes him this letter. He writes, Ben, one of his great letters.

He says, don't worry about this. They don't know who I am. He said, because I believe in religious freedom, quote, my enemies wished him, in third person, wished me, wished him to be thought an atheist, deist, or devil, merely for advocating freedom from their religious dictations. He says that the test of a person's religion is their life, and he's quite willing to be judged on that score, and he believes that her life, her religion, must be good too. Whatever it is, he wouldn't inquire because of the greatness of her life.

He says, but this does not satisfy the priesthood. They must have a positive, a declared assent to all their interested absurdities, and then he says this, one of his most quoted lines, my opinion is that there never would have been an infidel if there had never been a priest. So that's a great, another, one of the things you have to admire I know about Jefferson is his extraordinary commitment to freedom of religious thought, expression, and observance, that he is America's single greatest champion amongst the founders of unlimited freedom of the human conscience. It's probably my favorite thing about him. And he says it beautifully.

He wasn't an atheist. He was a deist, although that's sort of in the suburbs. He believed that Jesus was the greatest man who ever lived, or nearly so, but only a man. He disbelieved in the trinity. He said terrible things about organized religion.

at times. He said, priests are like cuttlefish. They spread an inky black gloom through the very medium in which they move. That's, that's amazing.

Or if he did print it, he wanted to.

But his discredit did not really say anything against the Federalist attacks. And that actually really opened him up to attacks in his own way, because he was much more established in his religious view. And so a lot of Republicans were able to curry favor with some of the other religious sects that were more minorities about the importance of religious freedom.

The only difference, I think, is Adams believed there has to be some religious glue to hold the lusts and passions of humankind in check. And Jefferson's view was from the Scottish Enlightenment, no, there's a moral sense, and people can get this right without any formal religious apparatus. I think that's the only way in which they really disagreed much about that question. But let me ask a closing question. We're out of time.

We owe a lot to Margaret Baird Smith.