#1545 Live from Radford University

He wrote the Declaration of Independence, the Virginia Statute for Religious Liberty. Two of his most notable achievements of his first term as president were the purchase of the Louisiana territory in 1803 and his support of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Thomas Jefferson was a revolutionary and a nation builder. So at this point, ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to introduce to you America's third President, Thomas Jefferson.

It is my pleasure to introduce to you America's third President, Thomas Jefferson.

He was the most extraordinary intellectual that I had ever met, and he encouraged me to read books and to think hard about them. And to envision the sort of life that I wanted to lead as a young Virginian, and so that college experience was sort of the pivot upon which everything else was determined. There were no public schools when I was growing up in Virginia. I grew up in Charlottesville, on a plantation called Shadwell on the Rivanna River. There were no public schools at that time, in fact, there were no public schools at any time.

There were preachers by Anglican clergymen who preached on Sundays, but during the week had a small number of students that they taught. The learning was extremely rigorous in my time. By the time I was your age, I knew Latin and Greek, plus French and some Spanish, and eventually I learned Italian too. So I know this will perhaps shock you, but when I was your age, I was reading about 12 hours a day. I don't know how many hours you have to read, but I'm guessing it's not 12. But this is why I'm here.

If it hadn't been for that education, I would not have gone on to do the things that I did. You know, when I was elderly, I wrote my own epitaph. You know what you want on your gravestone. And it's an obelisk. It's an obelisk that looks a little bit like a miniature Washington monument. And in it, on the surface of it, I had incised. Here lies Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, the author of the Declaration of Independence.

The author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Liberty and the founder of the University of Virginia at Charlottesville. So those three things I wanted to be remembered for? There were other things that I did in the course of my life, but those seemed to me the most important. And I would not have had the chance to write the Declaration of Independence had I not been so well educated and had taken so seriously my education as a young man. So, as I say, I grew up in the South Mountains, near Charlottesville, but I had a second home after my retirement from the presidency. In Lynchburg, in Bedford, it's called Poplar Forest, and it's a brick house, it's octagonal. So my main home was the domed famous Monticello that you've all seen. And then my sort of vacation home or retirement home was in Lynchburg, and it was shaped like an eight-sided octagon.

So I want to just talk for a short time and then we're going to take your questions. So I'll mention this in about 15 minutes. And you can line up at these microphones. And I would be very eager to take your questions on any subject whatsoever from my time or.

A few words first, if that's all right.

I was born a British subject, a British citizen. I was born in April of 1743. And at that time, we were still. Virginia was still a colony, a crown colony of England, and I fully expected to live my entire life as a British subject. But as you know from your studies, Britain was taxing us without representation. It was pressuring us in all sorts of ways, It was quartering troops in our homes. Whenever we resisted some of the rules, that came down from the court in London or from the Parliament, they would station troops amongst us. And so finally, they drove us into rebellion, and we did not want to rebel from Great Britain, we wanted to stay within the Commonwealth. But George III, who was the King and the British Parliament, pushed us so hard that eventually we felt that we had no choice as freedom-loving people but to rise up and overthrow that government.

And, believe me, that's a very grave thing to do. Think of yourselves growing up in the United States. What would it take for you?

To decide with your government that you would declare independence from it. And that's exactly what happened in 1774, but particularly in 1776. So I was a plantation owner, I lived in Albemarle County. I expected I probably at some point would be a justice of the peace or the director of a local militia. I was trained in surveillance, so I knew how to make surveillance. I expected to lead a quiet life in Albemarle County, to have a family, and that I would do certain things on behalf of the community. But I never expected to be a revolutionary, of course, and I didn't expect to be the president of the United States. So how did this happen?

Because of the education that I had, I was regarded as I was in my early 30s. Now this.

Was a very young age to us. I was regarded as one of the better writers in America, one of the best writers in Virginia. And I was given a lot of credit for how deeply I had studied the history of human rights and liberty. And so when the time finally came, in June of 1776, for us to declare independence of England. The second Continental Congress turned to me and asked me to write a declaration. I was on a committee of five to do this. I was the youngest member. I was and am a very shy person, a very private person. I had been elected as an alternate to the second Continental Congress, I wasn't even a primary delegate. And I came into Philadelphia, where the Congress was meeting, and soon was put. On this committee of five, the committee of five was a very distinguished committee. Benjamin Franklin You know, Dr.

Franklin was one, John Adams was another from Massachusetts, and then two others who were not as prominent. And so the five of us were going to draft some kind of a statement saying that we were going to detach ourselves from the British Empire. Dr. Franklin decided not to participate. He was elderly by now, his health was not good and he said that he didn't want to do anything that would be subject to committee review. And so that left John Adams and me, and I will say this, John Adams is eight years older than I am. He was a much more important figure in the build up to the revolution than I was. He was one of those people who talks all the time in public gatherings and had hundreds of ideas and was very opinionated.

And he made some enemies because he was so outspoken, because he had strong opinions on every possible subject. And so, finally, the two of us were the last two to be on this committee. And he came to the boarding house. I was staying in a boarding house on Market Street in Philadelphia. And he came to me. And he said, Mr. Jefferson, you must write this declaration.

I didn't really think that I should because I was so young and hadn't played that bigger role in all of this. But, he said, You must write this for three reasons number one you are a Virginian, and a Virginian must be at the head of this. His reasoning was this that the revolution was being perceived in England, particularly as a Massachusetts thing, as a Boston thing. It wasn't seen as a continental problem, it was seen as a local tax rebellion by merchants in Massachusetts, in the Bay colony. And so he wanted the whole set of 13 colonies to come together at this moment. And he thought Virginia, as the most populated, the largest and most populated of the colonies, should be central. And so that's why he made George Washington the commander in chief.

George Washington I mean this carefully was not the greatest possible general at that moment. But he was a Virginian, and, as Adam said, a Virginian must be at the head of this. And that's why he said that I should write the declaration. The second reason, he said, was I? John Adams, speaking of himself, am widely disliked, and if I Adams write this, then it might not be effective. Because people will be a little tainted. Because I did it. And then, he said, The third reason why you must write it is that you write ten times better than I do. That's sort of true.

I was a better writer than John Adams. And so now, after he, the committee of five has now been reduced to three, and now to one. And now I have to do this. And I sat at a desk, not unlike this, in this rental room, this boarding house. And I didn't consult books or pamphlets, I just put a plain sheet of paper in front of me. And I thought, Well, what does one say on an occasion like this? What do you say when you're called upon to speak for all 13 colonies, to speak for human freedom? And so, without consulting anything? I wrote out my first draft in a single day, then I put it aside and processed it. A little thought about it, then I made a few corrections and then I showed it to John Adams and to Dr.

FrANKlin And they both thought it was terrific, they both approved of it. They made some suggestions, a few of them, and I accepted those. And then we made our final draft and handed it in to the Continental Congress on July 2nd, 1776. The Congress then debated it for two days, and they questioned every word, every argument, every talking point, every piece of punctuation. And I had to sit there in the Virginia part of the room and it was excruciating. Because I don't like being the center of attention for one thing, but I don't like my words being edited very much, either. Because of the codes of our time.

As a gentleman, I couldn't argue on my own behalf. I had to stay completely silent, but I also couldn't leave the room, so I had to sit there. And they were debating this and debating that, and everyone thought they knew better. It was one of the most difficult moments of my entire life. And in the end, they removed about a quarter of my original text. But it was finally ratified unanimously on the 4th of July 1776. Because of that, more than 200 years later, you celebrate our national independence on the 4th of July.

That's the story of the Declaration of Independence. The preamble is famous, but the meat of it was a list, a long list of the abuses we had endured under British colonial rule. That they had quartered troops in our houses without our permission or without compensation. That they had taken some of us across the Atlantic to be tried in courts, not of our peers, but to be tried in star chambers in London. That they had stirred up the Indians of the West to attack our frontier settlements. There were 18 significant charges that I leveled against George III and the British Parliament, which justified our revolution. In the document. I said this We should not rise up in rebellion for light and transient causes. In other words, if we're annoyed by this policy or upset by that one, that doesn't justify a revolution.

A revolution is only justified when there is a pattern of oppression. When you see that this is their m.

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This is their way of working with us. And when you see that, it's a pattern of consistent oppression and tyranny, then, and here's the hard part then you not only have a right to rebellion, but you have a duty to rebellion. In other words, this wasn't something that we could just agree to live with. We now had a moral duty to protect our rights as human beings by detaching ourselves from the British Empire. My mother was against it.

I had a young wife back at Monticello, Her health was never great. She wanted me home. Of course, we had no way to communicate, I was in Philadelphia.

She was back in Albemarle County. There was no way to communicate, I could send a letter, it would take three weeks, but I could get there. I worried about home.

I wanted to be home in Virginia. I always considered Virginia my country. I'm a Virginian first and an American only second.

After that, after the declaration of independence, I came home and I was put on a committee to revise the laws of Virginia. I won't go into any detail about this, but I spent four years. It was the hardest work of my life. We went through every law, we reformed them.

We made them more understandable by writing them in plain English, we got rid of all sorts of laws that had made no sense anymore. This was the hardest and most disciplined intellectual work of my life.

Meanwhile, the war is going on. I did not fight in the Revolutionary War, I'm not a soldier, I'm a civilian, I'm a writer.

I'm a thinker, I'm a philosopher, I'm a political theorist, but I'm not a soldier. I wasn't at Valley Forge. I was the wartime governor of this Commonwealth of Virginia during a very difficult time when the war had really been fought. In Boston and Philadelphia, and New York, and then upstate New York.

Suddenly, in 1780 and 1781, the war came here to the Carolinas and to Virginia. I now was the governor.

I'll just say, honestly, I wasn't a very good governor.

We probably needed a great man on horseback like George Washington. At this point. I was much more of a mild-mannered person. I always tried to take my roles very modestly. I just didn't have the right stuff to lead us through the war.

By the end of it, the British actually attacked our new capital at Richmond.

The government then moved to Charlottesville, then they attacked Charlottesville, eventually they attacked Monticello, my home in the mountains, just outside of Charlottesville. A group of British dragoons, sort of an elite cavalry group, came up the mountain. I could see them with my telescope.

It was clear that they were going to try to capture the governor of Virginia. I fled away into the mountains. It seemed like the right thing to do. I was blamed for this, I had political enemies.

One of them was Patrick Henry.

They started.

Telling me about my conduct and my deportment during this crisis, that broke my heart because whatever failures I may have made.

I was doing the very best I could under almost impossible circumstances. We couldn't get ammunition, we didn't have enough muskets, all the horses had been requisitioned elsewhere, we didn't have hay to feed our horses.

People weren't available for military service because they were fighting in the Continental Army. It was an almost impossible situation that probably anybody would have had difficulty with. To be investigated by my fellow Virginians for malfeasance was really the hardest political.

Humiliation of my life. I thought then that I was done forever with politics, that I was just going to lead my life as a quiet country farmer in Albemarle County. But that's not how things turned out. During the time that I revised the Law Code of Virginia, I added 120 new bills, new laws, one for the creation of public education. It was not passed into law in my time.

But the most important of them, I think, was the Virginia Statute for Religious Liberty.

What that means is this? When I was growing up, we had a state religion as a colony of Britain, we had a state-sponsored religion, the Anglican religion. And everyone had to pay taxes to support those church services, you had to pay taxes to support those churches and their clergy. If you didn't have your children baptized and confirmed in the Anglican church, you could be fined or even imprisoned.

Yet out here, in the western part of the state that was already being settled. There were Scots-Irish people, there were presbyterians, there were Calvinists, there were Moravians. There were a whole group of Protestants who were not Anglican, who didn't agree at all with the Anglican Church. In fact, they left England to get away from the Anglican Church. And yet they're being taxed to attend churches that they don't admire.

So I thought we cannot have an established church.

Everyone has to be able to worship the God that they please and the church that they favor. Nobody should have to pay taxes to a church that doesn't represent their own religious sensibilities and doctrine. So the Virginia Statute for Religious Liberty separated church and state. It said, that you, as a Virginian, every one of you in this room is free to worship the God of your choice. It could be an Islamic God, it could be Allah, it could be a Jewish God, Jehovah, it could be an American Indian God, the Manitou, or it could be Catholicism.

Or presbyterianism, or, what became, methodism, that you are free to worship as you please. And the government has absolutely no right, under any circumstances, to tell you what to believe, or how to pray, or what your faith is. That bill took eight years to pass in the House of Delegates. It was very controversial.

Many people were against it for a variety of reasons, and many people denounced me for writing it. And they accused me of being an atheist. In fact, all of my life I was accused of being an atheist, I wasn't. But you can't control how other people will regard you.

In fact, that law, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, was passed only because of the work of my closest friend, James Madison.

I'm great at proposing these sorts of things. But it takes somebody with strong legislative capacity to see them through committees and all the political setbacks. And to establish, to build a coalition and to find the timing to put these bills through, and it took eight years, but finally, in 1786, it was passed. And I must say that, although I'm mostly known for the Declaration of Independence.

The Virginia Statute for Religious Liberty is probably the greatest thing that I ever did. And you are fortunate to live in a country where you are absolutely free to worship or not, and to subscribe to any denomination, any faith, any religion, without political reward and without any political penalty.

Well, it's after all of this. After the debacle of my governorship, one more terrible thing happened. That is that my wife Martha, died. She died on September 6, 1782. In this terrible year, she died of complications of birthing her sixth child. We did not have good medicine in my time.

We did not have obstetrics, you know, the medicine that helps women give birth safely. In fact, the medicine of my time was deplorable. The two standard methods of medicine in my time were bleeding and purging. And so if someone was sick, they would take a pint or a quart of blood out of their arm. Or they would purge the person who was ill. And by purging, I mean, they would give us a medicine that would just flush out all of.

Their systems within a few hours, bleeding and purging, that was it. There was no penicillin, there was no way to alleviate pain.

There was very little surgery, no transplantation, we barely understood the circulation of the blood, so we were almost living in the dark ages with respect to medicine.

You know, when you bleed somebody, it almost never helps them. And maybe you know that. George Washington got pneumonia in the last weeks of his life in 1799, our greatest, you know, one of the greatest men who ever lived. And his doctors didn't know what to do. He had strep throat.

They bled him again and again and again, and finally, he died of dehydration. He died of loss of blood because they were bewildered, they didn't know what to do. And so my wife, in your time, would have lived to be, you know, an old woman.

But in my time, because of the barbarism of our medicine, she died at the age of 33.

When she died, I had, I suppose, what you would call a nervous breakdown. My grief was so intense that I didn't know if I could go on. And only the fact that I had these young children that I must take care of kept me moving forward in life. But it took more than a month for me to even, you know, leave my bedroom. I slept on a pallet.

I wouldn't sleep in our bed, I slept on a pallet on the floor and I had food brought in quietly. And during the day, I would take my horses, I had great horses and would ride them just madly in the hills near Monticello. Well, finally, Mr.

Madison, who was already my closest friend, he lived at Montpelier, which is about 30 miles from Monticello. He convinced the Congress of the United States to send me to Europe as a diplomat to France, and I accepted this. Madison's view was that this would get me out of the world of Monticello. So intense and so I went off to Europe, and I spent five years there. I spent five years in Paris as an American minister and eventually the ambassador.

You know, Dr. Franklin was our first ambassador to France, and he was universally loved. He was one of the greatest individuals. He was a scientist and a diplomat. And he was humorous and a great ladies man, and he had a kind of a suavity that made everyone love him.

You know, he's the man who realized that lightning is electricity, his famous kite experiment. But he also invented bifocals and the Franklin stove and something called the Harmonica. He was a brilliant scientist. He served as the first American ambassador to France. Then he retired while I was there in 1785 and I replaced him, but it was so difficult to replace so famous a man.

But during those five years in France, two things, three things, really. one is that I did recover emotionally. Fell in love with French culture, French music, French food, French art, French architecture, French gardening, French politeness. The second thing is that I got to witness the beginning of the French Revolution, so I'm I'm the most fortunate of men. I participated in one revolution here and had a sort of a minor leadership role.

And then I got to witness a much, much, much more dramatic revolution in France, and I felt the French revolution was, in many respects, a vindication of ours. Because the little flame that we lit on the 4th of July 1776 of human freedom had now jumped the Atlantic. And it looked like it was going to liberate all of the peoples of Europe. And so this was a extraordinary event for me, deeply fortunate to witness this. And I was sorry when it turned into a reign and eventually ended in the dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte. The third thing about my time in France is that I became radicalized.

So let me just quickly explain what I mean by this. What I saw in France, a nation of 20 million on a beautifully fertile landscape, was human misery. I'll just wait a moment, no problem. We had no such devices in my time.

If we had, I would have been a I would have been addicted. I can tell you that because I'm an information junkie, I want information. I had a library of 7,000 volumes of enormously expensive books, largely a reference library, because I wanted to know things. In your time, you can know almost everything at the end of your arm.

And then I could have communicated with my wife from Philadelphia, I could have communicated with Lewis and Clark when they were out in Montana. But no such technologies were, even they not only didn't exist, they weren't even dreamed of. If you had said to me in 1804, when I sent Lewis and Clark up the Missouri River. Someday, Mr.

JEFFERSOn There will be a device which is connected to nothing, and you'll be able to talk to people thousands of miles away. I would have said this will never happen, it is impossible to believe that anything like this will ever happen. We didn't have electricity. I lived in a three mile per hour world.

Nothing traveled faster than that three miles per hour. If you wanted to go to Europe, it was six or seven weeks in a boat no larger than a yacht. If Socrates or Moses had come to Monticello, they would have recognized the agricultural practices as unchanged. So we were living just before the Great Industrial Revolution.

I saw a bit of it in England.

But we were living just before the Great Industrial Revolution, which swept away almost everything and brought.

You joy at any rate. When I saw that France was a failed state, here were these 20 million extraordinary people, beautiful, fertile landscape. And they were miserable. They couldn't even put bread on the table for their children. They were literally malnourished and some starving. I thought, How can this be?

How can it be that a good and industrious people on a beautiful landscape can't feed themselves well? It was because they had a bad and corrupt system. So I wrote a series of letters to Mr. Madison back home saying, we can never let this happen to us. We must find mechanisms to never let our own nation become corrupt, our government swollen and inefficient, our taxes too high, our regulations too great.

We can never let a class system where a few have most of the wealth and the mass have.

In the United States. So I wrote a series of letters trying to wrestle with these fundamental questions.

And so that was the most intellectually fruitful period of my life. But here's what happened. So I'm radicalized by all this, by watching this misery and then insisting that we have to find ways never to let it happen to us. And then I came back in 1789, I only came back on a leave of absence.

I was bringing my daughters back, I wanted them to have their time in Virginia so they would marry Virginians. And I needed to do some very important things back at Monticello, so I applied for a leave of absence. I came back in November.

When I arrived in Norfolk at the shore, there was a letter waiting for me.

And it was from George Washington, the new president of the United States, an old friend and, of course, a very great man. And the letter said Mr Jefferson, I want you to be my secretary of state. I've sent your nomination to the Senate and they have approved it, so congratulations.

You're the secretary of state, but I was intending to go back to Paris. He didn't consult me, he didn't ask me, he just made me secretary of state.

So now I had no choice. You can't say no to George Washington. So I didn't ever go back to France. I had to send for all my luggage and have my affairs wrapped up by my friends there. And so now I'm part of the first administration.

I was the first secretary of state and I served in that capacity for three and a half years.

Now I wanted to be the president of the United States, and here's why I felt, and I want to be careful about this. I felt that George Washington and John Adams, both great men, both dear friends, were taking the country in a kind of monarchical, royalist, aristocratic direction. Particularly led by Alexander Hamilton, the secretary of Treasury. And I felt that we were going to squander the revolution, that here we'd had this idealistic revolution and the rights of man and self-government, and a republic.

And now we were just following old templates from Britain and the old World. And that Washington and Adams had misunderstood, I think the meaning of the revolution, they were moving towards a kind of a semi-kingship model. I stood for the presidency in 1800, I narrowly defeated John Adams, my old dear friend, and now I was the third president of the United States.

I reduced taxes, I reduced the size of the army and the Navy, I started to pay off the national debt. I regard a national debt as a national disgrace. You know, your parents and grandparents in your time have amassed this gigantic national debt, and they not only don't pay it off, they increase its size every day.

So what's going to happen when you become 21, when you become full-on adult citizens? You're going to inherit that debt, you're going to have to pay it off. That is taxation without representation. They're too spineless to pay their bills, and they're just going to leave it to you.

That's a form of economic tyranny. In my opinion. It's a disgrace. Mr. Hamilton had created the national debt and they had some good reasons for it, but I wanted to pay it off.

So during my administration, we paid off 37 percent of it, as much as we could do. And then Mr. Madison and James Monroe, my successors, helped to finish it off, but that was my number one priority. The Mississippi River was the western boundary of the United States from the treaty in 1783..

So when the war ended, we got all the way across the Appalachians, everything to the Great Lakes in the north and to the Mississippi River in the west. It's a huge amount of land. It was the size of Europe, so now we have this immense country and most of the population is still on the eastern Seaboard. In fact, when I was president, only about 250,000 people were across the Appalachians.

So the whole country was like an infinite wilderness. Of course, there were native peoples there, but from a European and American point of view, it was a blank slate. But the Spanish and the French were trading the Mississippi River back and forth, they controlled New Orleans, which is the exit point of the Mississippi.

And already our wheat and our timber and our oats and other things were going to market. Not across the Appalachians, but down the Ohio and into the Mississippi, and down to New Orleans, where they would get on ships. So we needed to keep New Orleans open, we needed to keep the Mississippi River open. And the Spanish closed it, they just unilaterally closed it.

No Americans could use the river anymore. And so I was pressured, especially by the West, to do something about this, to get the Mississippi open. And so I sent my protege, James Monroe, I sent him to Paris to try to figure this out. And what I wanted to do was at least buy New Orleans. If we could buy New Orleans, we could station troops there and keep the river open.

But I was prepared to spend about $6 million to buy New Orleans. Napoleon was desperate for money, and so he made a counteroffer. He agreed to sell us all of the Louisiana territory for $15 million, so I was going to buy a village for $6 million.

Instead, I wound up buying an empire for $15 million. It doubled the size of the United States, it took our western boundary all the way up to the rocky mountains. So suddenly, with a single stroke of my pen, I made the greatest land sale in human history. I don't take any credit for this.

It just happened. It was the making moment of American history. It meant that this was going to be our continent. And we weren't going to have to share it with the French, or the Spanish, or the English, or the Russians. This was going to be an American experiment. I called it an empire for liberty, such as the world has never previously seen.

What great, good fortune for the American people again. I take no credit for this. So then I needed to figure out what we had purchased, I mean, nobody knew, nobody knew what we had just purchased.

We had some vague sense, and so I sent my protege, my secretary, Meriwether Lewis, who had grown up a few miles from Monticello. He was young enough to be my son. I had no sons. I made him my private secretary in the White House.

And I trained him in longitude and latitude and so on, and he then went off with his friend William Clark. The Lewis and Clark Expedition, and they ascended the Missouri from St. Louis all the way to its source. In 1804 and 1805, they crossed the Shining Mountains, the Rockies.

The Great Columbia and floated it down to the Pacific and then came back again. 7,689 miles. Extraordinary, one of the great explorations in human history. This opened the River of the Missouri.

And as you know, it wasn't long thereafter than settlers and traders, and so on, began to penetrate into the American West. And so the Lewis and Clark expedition is of enormous importance. I would have been reelected to a third and a fourth term, just the purchase of Louisiana, but I decided to retire after two terms because I think that's enough. I think that every political figure should retire within a decent time.

Back into private life, and so in March of 1899, I watched my closest friend, James Madison, become the fourth president. I went back to Monticello and for the last 17 years of my life, I never really ventured very far from Monticello. Farthest I went was Richmond. I had chances to go back to Washington, D..C. but I turned them down.

And I just lived with my grandchildren in my gardens and my scientific experiments and my correspondence. So what's my message? My message to you is that I hope you will read more books than you're assigned. The more books you read, the more interesting you will be. I prided myself on being the best prepared person in every room I ever went into.

And the best prepared person in the room usually controls the discourse. That's number one. I would urge you to make music if you can, you know?

All music was live, we couldn't listen to music, you had to make music to hear music, there was no recorded music of any sort, and so we were all trained.

I was a violinist and a fiddler, I could play the cello, but my daughters were talented with the harpsichord and so on. So I would urge you to read books and to make music, but most of all, I would urge this.

As you now become full-on American adults, it's going to be your America, not mine, not your parents even. It's going to be your America. And you're going to have to step up and insist that your America does the right thing. As you understand it, and that your government represents you as frugally as possible.

So you're going to have to take on a leadership role if you want to live in the world that you want to live in. And I don't mean any disrespect to your parents and grandparents, but they've had their time. The earth belongs to the living, the earth belongs to the living, that's you.

And you can remake America in any way you want, but you can't just be passive. If you're passive, you'll just have to endure whatever is. But if you take an active role and my own life is an example of this, you can change the world. And so I would very strongly urge you to step back and ask yourself what's right and what's wrong with America in your time and what can be done about it?

And what can I, what can you do to make it better? And I dare say you can think of that the revolution was made by people who would otherwise be unknown to history. John Adams.

Would George Washington be known if he had just been a plantation owner up at Mount Vernon? They would all be forgotten if it hadn't been for the willingness to step up at the critical moment and make the difference. And many of them sort of average human beings until this moment, and I'm one of those, so I want to take questions.

Who has the first question? Please don't be shy right here, go ahead, great question.

And I'll.

See that political fighting and cutthroat behavior started to really get in the way or influence my life. It's a great question. You think your own time is so awful and paralyzed and politicized, and so on. It's always been that way. And I was accused, as I said, of being an atheist, which I wasn't.

I was accused of being too Frenchified. Patrick Henry said that I had absurd my native Vittles. I'd stopped eating Virginia ham and was now eating French cuisine. I was accused of being a liberal, I was accused of having cheated revolutionary widows out of their estates as a Virginia lawyer.

The people that feared what I represented did it by attacking me personally. This happens, and at times we gave as good as we got. I'm sorry to say, but I want to live in a nation of harmony where we just do the rational, the right thing. But you can't count on that.

And so politics is politics. And so you have to have a pretty thick skin to be a public figure, and I didn't have a thick skin. I was very sensitive and easily wounded. And my desire when attacked is always just to leave the stage and go back to Monticello and just work in my gardens.

And that's one reason why I retired after two terms. Thank you. Another question, please, who would I be today, politically or as a person? You know, the earth belongs to the living, not the dead, so it's hard to know.

But I'm fiscally conservative, in other words, low taxation leave as much money in your pockets as possible. A minimalist state. You know that government is best, which governs least. So in that sense, I would more resemble the Republican Party of your time, probably, or Libertarian. But on social issues, my view is that you're within some very broad limits.

You're free to choose whatever life you want that it's not the business of your government to tell you who you are and how you will engage in the world. And so I'm a social libertarian, I think that people should manage their own lives. This term is going to sound a little odd.

I'm essentially an anarchist, by which I mean not chaos, but anarchy. Means that you govern yourself, and you govern yourself, and you govern yourself, and you govern yourself. And if we all educate ourselves and govern ourselves, we don't really need much government. I'm also an isolationist. I don't think we should meddle in the affairs of Europe.

And so in your time now, you've had a war in Iraq recently and Afghanistan. Those are very far away places in my mind, and now you're fighting a proxy war in the Ukraine. I might have changed my mind, probably I would.

But in my own time, I was an isolationist, saying, let's just turn our backs on the rest of the world. Let's build a kind of beautiful society here. And let that society's idea, the beauty and the justice and the truth of our society, impress the world. And they'll all want to be like us. We don't have to send troops anywhere. So would I still hold that view in your time?

Probably not, but maybe so. It's hard to project yourself beyond your own time and place. But I will say this, I'm an isolationist.

I am a minimalist in government and I also believe in the 10th Amendment, and I don't know if you remember the 10th Amendment, the Bill of Rights. But it says those powers, not delegated to the national government, belong instead to the state. I believe in Virginia first, Georgia first, Maryland first, Vermont first and the nation second. And that the national government should be small, and it should only do truly national and international things, but everything else should be left to the states.

So I don't think I would really have a home in any of your parties, given that. Other questions Yes, here. Did you have children? By a slave woman?

Well, I'm sorry you asked that question, you certainly had every right to ask it. But I never talked about my private life, It's very private, I won't ask you about your private life.

Because this is history and not in my own time, I will answer your question. You have a science in your time called DNA. And tests have been done on descendants of my line and descendants of the line of Sally Hemings. And the DNA tests suggest that she was my mistress, or my concubine, or my mate, and that we had possibly as many as six children together, four, certainly.

I never commented on this in the course of my life, not once. The rumors spread, of course, and it was actually a scandal-mongering newspaper account in 1802 September of 1802, but I never once commented on it. And so I think you can trust the DNA, let's put it that way.

Other questions What would I think of your government?

Swollen If you agree with me, government should only do things that are absolutely necessary, but not things that are maybe desirable. Then you would have to conclude that your national government is just a gigantic, swollen mess. I wouldn't approve of it. You're running these fearsome national deaths.

Your government meddles in almost every aspect of life, you look to the national government for solutions rather than to your state and local governments. You have a forward. I think you have more than 700 military bases around the world. All of this is anathema to me.

It's like a nightmare scenario. I don't even think Mr. Hamilton would approve of the gigantism of your national government in your time. I don't know how to say this politely, but you don't seem to be drawing the best possible people to Congress. In a democracy, you get to choose anyone you want to be, your representative, or your president, or your mayor, or your city council member.

That's how democracy works. But I hope you will always choose the best, the most extraordinary, the most virtuous. The people of the greatest integrity. The people who have modesty about themselves, who are not puffed up by their own egos. As I look at your Congress, I think it doesn't represent the best of the American people. It's up to you to decide these questions, not me. But as an outsider from a couple of hundred years ago, you don't look like Plato's Republic, let's put it that way.

Now someone asked about Sally Hemings. I'm going to break character now because we're almost out of time, so I'm just going to take off my little wig. Here. I want to talk seriously for a moment. It's clear that Jefferson had children by Sally Hemings, whom he owned.

The Hemings family had very special status at Monticello, they were household servants, slaves. And while Jefferson was in France, Sally Hemings came across the ocean in a ship, bringing his younger daughter, Mary Maria, to join him. And he seems to have taken up with Sally Hemings in France. Or certainly when he got back, so we know that now.

The DNA is, I think, solid, Jefferson said. All men are created equal. And yet.

Jefferson said All men are born equal to human beings. It's appalling. How can you say if you say all human beings are born equal, and then you own some? That's a fundamental hypocrisy. Either you mean it or you don't. If you don't mean it, then why say it?

If you mean it, then you have to act on it, you can't then just say, oh well, I guess I'll live with this inconsistency. And most of Jefferson's closest friends around the world were abolitionists, were appalled by slavery, and yet Jefferson never.

And so this is really a very, very, very, very serious blot on his historical reputation, and we get it that he was a man of his times. And et cetera, et cetera. But the fact is, he knew better, and he never did more than just a few things about this. This didn't used to be a big deal, but it is a big deal and now it's become a really big thing.

And it's kind of tainted Jefferson to the point that people talk about removing statues of Jefferson. Even at William and Mary, there's talk, maybe, of tearing down the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C. As you know, if you've been following the whole monuments question and so on, this has gotten very, very serious. And on the whole, I think that's really good. We need to have this conversation.

We can't pretend this isn't the case. The history of this country is the history of poisoned race relations because of slavery and its legacy. And the civil rights movement occurred in my lifetime, not yours. You're the beneficiaries of it. It's not over yet.

But this is a reckoning that we have to face as a people. I know it makes us uncomfortable. I know that we don't want to throw out everybody and I don't think we're going to throw out Jefferson, but it's so serious.

And I urge you to talk with your teachers about this and talk with your pastors and your family. Finding a balanced way to think about this is really, really, really difficult, but exceedingly important. And so when I started out working on Jefferson many years ago, slavery wasn't even a particular issue. And now it is the issue. And maybe it shouldn't be the only issue. But it certainly needs to be right there, at the center of any understanding.

Which was built by Black slaves. I do hope that you will go to college if you can, and I hope that you will very, very, very seriously consider Radford. Great things are happening here, gorgeous campus.

I hope that you'll find the place which is congenial to you, but that you will consider Radford as your intellectual home. So thank you so much.