#1570 Clay’s 10 Propositions About Thomas Jefferson

There is a gas fireplace, on top of it, there are two vases with shocks of wheat, which is what North Dakota does in this world. There is a beautiful little statuette of the Eiffel Tower, there are some building blocks.

I made for my daughter when she was born with the Greek alphabet. I've no idea how much trouble that was, but she did eventually go on to study classical Greek at Columbia University. And and she was my co-host just a couple of days ago for ten days in Greece and was marvelous. We had such a great time. There's a skull, I'm sorry to say.

Every Renaissance humanist has a skull on his mantelpiece and the horse of Salini from the Parthenon marbles purchased at the British Museum. And we were just at the Parthenon and my daughter went back. This is so interesting, we were at the Parthenon.

We had a long debate about whether the marbles should be returned from England. Lord Elgin looted them, I think it's only fair to say in 1871, up selling them to the British Museum. They've been there ever since. Greece wants them back.

Of course, they should go back. Greece has a spectacular museum waiting for them.

There's no argument that England can any longer use to keep them, but of course they do so far. And so we were there, we had this debate. We went to both the Acropolis and then down to the Acropolis Museum, which is world-class, and then my daughter went back to Britain, arrived at like 4 in the morning and the next day she had to get up and take a train to London. Because an old friend from Kansas was there and wanted to go to high tea at, you know, one of the fancy places in London. But she took them to the British Museum and they went to the Elgin Marbles room. And so in one ten day period, she got to see the marbles that were looted. The building from which they were pried off and sometimes broken, and the museum in Athens, which makes the case for their return.

So she got a fuller cultural tour than any of the rest of us did, including myself. I so envied her. I would have loved to have flown back to London with her and gone to the British Museum. I've been there probably 25 times and it is truly one of the great museums. And and the Parthenon marbles are in an absolutely spectacular room in the museum. So all of that is just to acquaint you with my little world.

I so appreciate you. I asked some people on the Greek trip if they like the podcast introduction, and everyone said yes, but several said, yeah. But you need a second voice, and we are looking for a second voice, we need a new host. David Swenson has retired. Alas, I love him and was very sorry to see him go. But he has reached his 70th birthday and he was on to candide like retirement with this garden across town here in Bismarck.

LinDSAy Trevinsky and I just had a conversation I'll tell you about in a minute. She's here to stay. The Kandri, of course, Joe Ellis is, is ready to come back for more conversations. A.

Temporary host is my friend David Horton of Radford College in Virginia. He's excellent, we'll be doing more with him, but I'm looking for a semi-permanent guest host of the Thomas Jefferson are preferably female. It can't be Lindsay because she's a star, not an interlocutor. And I asked you this? People on the trip said they want more of me. Less of me interviewing people, but more of me commenting on the world to the best of my lights. And maybe some Jefferson Watch essays again, so you let me know what you like and dislike and what you want done.

We've had a transition from the Swenson era to the post Swenson era, and it's. It's been hard because he was such a central figure in the Jefferson hour and in my life. But we're doing it and I think we're doing good things and we're gonna do great things, so stay with us. This program was something I cooked up the other night in my sleep. I woke up, I was jet-lagged after coming home from Greece, and I woke up thinking. I want to create ten propositions about Thomas Jefferson, about whom I've spent my life thinking now. And I want to put them to Lindsay and see what she says. And so they were really interesting.

Theses, you know, so Luther had his 95 theses, so I have my 10 on Jefferson here, they are number one. Jefferson can be considered the most indispensable of the founders because he articulated the idea Capital I of America. Jefferson's seeming duplicity at times is really more something that you would expect in a Jane Austen novel. Where he's hesitant to be candid because he loves harmony and he's so highly mannered.

Lindsay disagreed with that. Three, Jefferson was the right person to write the Declaration of Independence because he turned it into an immortal document. When it would have been just a state paper and not particularly famous, had somebody else written it, she agreed mostly with that. Jefferson must be seen. Number four as a Renaissance man is a great man of extraordinary accomplishment in so many different areas. And also the president of the United States, whereas we think of others as the president of the United States, and we assess them on that scale. But Jefferson must be assessed for the brilliance for his Da Vinci like capacity. His enormous curiosity, his ability to know a great deal about a great number of subjects, and to keep them gracefully in his lucid correspondence.

And so the presidency, in some sense, is the least important part of assessing Thomas Jefferson. She mostly agreed with that number five Jefferson's love affair. With Rebellion. I like a little rebellion now and then. And the tree of liberty must be refreshed with the blood of patrons and tyrants. That's actually really irresponsible, and it's turned out to be very dangerous as we saw on January 6th. That that streak of bloodthirstiness in Jefferson, which caused Connor Cruz O'Brien to say that he was the analogy in our time, would be Paul Pott of Cambodia, a little extreme there, Connor Cruz.

But that streak in Jefferson, I think, has shown how dangerous it can be in recent years, and that danger is not over yet. Number six Jefferson on Race is more complicated than we like to think. And we should be very, very, very careful. Not to oversimplify this. Including, of course, the question of Sally Hemings. But that he was a racist, he was an apartheidist, he was a slaveholder, he perpetuated slavery, wrung his hands in a good way, but he didn't do much. And yet, it's not quite as simple as the righteous want to put it, and no one can defend Jefferson on slavery. And I don't mean to ever.

But it is a complex situation and we should look on it in its complexity, including the Sally Hemings story. Number seven Adams got the better of Jefferson in their late 1812 1826 correspondence. We agreed heartily that number eight, Jefferson's lifelong fascination with the American West was the making of the continent. Lindsay did disagree with that.

She thought that everyone wanted to expand into the West. And and George Washington certainly has to be put into that equation. Washington, who was one of the sponsors of the Potomac Canal, the opening up of the of the interior, of course, Washington went into the Ohio country. Jefferson never left the Eastern Seaboard, so we disagreed about that. One of number nine. Jefferson's optimism makes no sense.

His belief that humans are inherently good makes no sense. That. It's hard to understand how Thomas Jefferson, with all of his brilliance and his deep reading of human history, could have believed that humans are basically good. If that's so, boy, we have failed in education. Because, you know, we live on the other side of Paul Pott in Cambodia, we live on the other side of the Holocaust, we live on the other side of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

We live on the other side of the brutalities of World War One and the Civil war. It's hard to look at our history, even the history of the United States, internally. And not to come somewhere around the Augustinian views that humans have a fallenness. There's a there's a kink, there's a kink in our system.

And then number ten, Jefferson was the most radical, as well as the most democratic of the founders. We agreed upon that. So just to review indispensable, she didn't agree that Jefferson is the most indispensable.

The founding fathers duplicity. She didn't really agree. She thinks Jefferson is just a liar at times, and I have to say I do too. We agreed on the importance of Jefferson writing the Declaration of Independence. We mostly agreed that Jefferson must be judged by the whole man and not merely by his presidency.

We agreed that his love affair with violence and the tree of liberty being refreshed with blood and so on is has become a dangerous proposition. And never really made sense anyway. We agreed that Jefferson doesn't have a leg to stand on with respect to race and slavery, but that it's important to to see this as a complex phenomenon and dynamism. We agreed that. Adams.

Got the better of Jefferson in the late correspondence.

We agreed, no, we didn't agree, that the West was Jefferson's gift to America. Lindsay believes that Jefferson played an important role, but by no means the central role in all of that. We agreed wholeheartedly that Jefferson's optimism doesn't really square with any realistic observation of the nature of humanity, and we agreed that Jefferson was the most radical, major figure, at least among the founding fathers. With maybe an asterisk for Thomas Paine, who wasn't really one of us in some sense, and also Patrick Henry at times. So those are my propositions. I suppose that you would say that I'm a little disillusioned about Jefferson at this point in my life.

I still love him, I love Thomas Jefferson, I can't imagine my life without Thomas Jefferson, and I want to live in Thomas Jefferson's America. Except for the race question and and gender, I believe we would be a better people if we were more Jeffersonian in all those other respects.

I am, I don't discount Jefferson, I don't despise Jefferson. I find him perplexing at times. But I am not a critic of Thomas Jefferson. But I am not naive if I ever was about Jefferson's greatness. I think it has to be contextualized in a very large number of ambiguities and ambivalences. That's today's edition of Listening to America.

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Hello everyone and welcome to this special edition of Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson. I have the great pleasure today of sitting across from Lindsay Trevinsky, who has finished her second book, this one on John Adams. And today we're talking about ten propositions about Thomas Jefferson. I've laid out ten theses about my man, Mr. Jefferson, and I'm very eager to have Lindsay's reaction.

So I do find an awful lot of ways to fill the time. And so September was quite busy because that's Constitution Day, of course, so lots of speaking and traveling and all wonderful opportunities and good things.

Number two Jefferson's seeming duplicity at times may be understood as a kind of Jane Austen character gentlemanliness, which he disliked confronting or disagreeing with those with whom he had intercourse. Number three Nobody else could have written the Declaration of independence into immortal fame, others could have written it, but none the way Jefferson did. Number four. Jefferson must be seen as a renaissance man who just happened also to be the president of the United States. That is, his greatness cannot be measured by his political career.

Number five, Jefferson's love affair with Revolution and what he called a little rebellion now and then, has had a deeply negative influence on American history. Never so much as now. Number six Jefferson has had much to answer for on race and slavery. But it is not unfailingly a bad record. It is important to be attentive to ambivalence and nuance on this most volatile of questions. Number seven, John Adams got the better of Jefferson in the Late Correspondence between 1812 and 1826, and, in some respects, Adams was, quote, the bigger man number eight. Jefferson's lifelong fascination with the American West was the making of our continental America of his near contemporaries.

Not even George Washington had such a continental vision. I think only Jefferson was capable of the Louisiana purchase number nine. Many of Jefferson's optimisms were based on an erroneous reading of human nature, and number ten, Jefferson was the most radical, as well as the most democratic of the founders. My dear friend Lindsay, I'm guessing you don't agree with all of that.

Let's start with the first one. Jefferson can be considered the most indispensable of the founders. Now I know that a famous multi-volume biography of Washington called him the indispensable man. I'm guessing you agree with that.

And here's why if you had said that Thomas Jefferson was the indispensable man for maybe the age revolutions. I think that is an argument that I could at least understand, or at least get behind partially, but for the American revolution, for our nation. The problem with that argument is that by the time Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, the war had been going for over a year. Second, there had been, as as the great Pauline Mayer wrote in a book called American Scripture. There were hundreds of declarations, so the concept of a declaration of independence was not particularly revolutionary.

Three. By the time Jefferson wrote it, the reason he was given permission to write it is because people were already supporting this concept. So, while the phrasing is brilliant and I think went on to spy, inspire other revolutions, hence my argument about the age of revolutions for the American version.

I don't actually think it was all that important in terms of sparking the flame of things. And then when we think about what comes after declaring independence, which I believe was much more of a foreign policy statement than a domestic statement. Jefferson played relatively little role during the revolution, and he played relatively little role in the constitutional era. And while I think he was a good and important secretary of state, he wasn't indispensable in that sort of early, foundational period. You know, who I think is indispensable, and that is Washington. But I think I've made that argument for our listeners before, so you're in a certain sense.

It was a sort of news release announcing the birth of Americans seeking foreign aid.

But I think it is later. And, you know, I think if we're thinking about documents that actually articulate the nation, there are a lot of them. I think the the Constitution and the Preamble to the Constitution is one of the best. So I just, I think that, you know, he is.

He is indispensable for international thought, I'm not sure, he's indispensable for crafting the idea of the American nation.

No, yeah, I don't disagree with that.

Of course, he didn't always live up himself to those ideals, but I think that's a unique power that he had. So all right we are now. We've done two here, I hope we will be able to get to all of them. My friend, the second one. And this is, of course, a huge problem in Jefferson studies. You know, his duplicity that almost everyone who knew him, and including people who respected him, said. There's a difference between the Jefferson. You meet on the street or or in a salon somewhere, with his exquisite manners and politeness, his love of harmony. And then there's Jefferson when he's not in your Zip code, and they're frequently quite different, Jefferson's. And that he's capable of not just duplicity, but outright lying.

And we, I think we could establish that. Jefferson told important lies on a number of occasion, that Jefferson told important lies on a number of occasions, including to George Washington. So my point is that that one way of looking at this Lindsay is that he had these exquisite manners and he hated conflict of all sorts. And so he was more likely to express conciliatory things in the presence of others and be a little more tough and critical in the privacy of his room, with the pen and paper. Do you think that in any way?

There were moments, though, when he, as you pointed out, outright lied. And I don't think that that fits because the sort of honor system and the morality code established in in that period did value honesty. And in sort of living up to one's, standing up to for one's principles and taking responsibility for one's actions, that was a. It's a major theme throughout the Austen novels. As you know, if you are a man of honor, you have to take responsibility for the poor decisions that you have made. And even if that is uncomfortable, the last piece. And I think that this duplicity thing is, you know, it's complicated because it's outward duplicity. But then I think what a lot of people bump up against is the inward duplicity. In that, Jefferson articulates a series of principles and then sometimes often fails to live up to them internally. And I, as we've discussed before, that is in some ways, a human condition. We all fail to live up to our principles from time to time.

You know, I always like to point to, I'm very concerned about climate change and yet I'm on a plane an awful lot. And those are not necessarily consistent actions. And so he can certainly be forgiven for some of the more day-to-day transgressions against his set of values. But things like, you know, one of the one of the funnier ones is. He believed it was really important to, you know, not be overly spendy, to not to not be flagrant in your expenses. And yet could not help but constantly buy more books and buy tons of French wine. And while his debt when he died was not entirely his fault, it was certainly in large part his fault. And that is, I think, an inconsistency in principles that Jane Austen would have had an awful lot to say about.

I agree with that. We need to take a short break.

Attempted to make the best of it. Occasionally. Even he had to say this doesn't put Jefferson, and necessarily the best light. Jefferson lied to Washington on a couple of occasions, including a very important one. He lied to John Adams on a couple of occasions. He lied to Abigail Adams on a couple of occasions.

It's hard for me to square that with what I know about Jefferson, but it does seem to be indisputable. So, you know, one of the cliches we have about these things is that people lie so often to each other that they wind up believing in their own lies. I feel certain that Jefferson, on the whole, thought he was a man of great candor.

I think people have his own time puzzled over. In other words, they didn't just say, Oh, what a hypocrite, they just couldn't quite figure out what that.

I do think that's what makes truly authentic people so unusual that what you see is what you get, regardless of where you are. And I think with Jefferson. The problem is that most politicians would acknowledge that discrepancy. And I think his inability to acknowledge it is what plagued people then and plagues people now. Agreed.

So how he developed this persona, I don't know, but we have this idea of a man of exquisite civility. You offer you the another glass of fine wine, and who would ask you a question about your research and love of harmony in Jefferson? I think that's genuine. But he also was a man of power. And if you're a man of power or a woman of power, you're gonna have to scratch sometimes and fight that you are. I don't know where it comes from either.

Certainly, some of it was accentuated by his experiences, and I think his diplomatic time was particularly formative in that regard. Because he understood that maybe his natural proclivities for this mannered way of speaking and existing was really an asset, especially in France, Jefferson really understood that this, you know, this way of being, was an asset abroad. And so I think perhaps it was both a nature and a nurture situation.

If you're sort of making a list of the great presidents, he doesn't usually wind up in the first five, and maybe not in the first ten. He was a kind of a quiet president, luckily he bought the Louisiana territory. But, you know, he had a theory of government which made him a less than forceful president of the United States, less than forceful executive. But and I see his greatness.

I see it in his languages, I see it in the Library of Congress, I see it in his architecture. I see it in his capacity as a writer of letters. I, I see it in his gardens. You know, there's so many areas where Jefferson is just absolutely admirable.

And then there is his time as a political figure. And it always seems to me that that's not the way we measure Thomas Jefferson, We measure others that way, say Franklin Roosevelt, but Jefferson, Jefferson's greatness is elsewhere. I think, How about you?

It's the apex of his political career, but his career was so it's really hard to put into a bucket, and so to call it a political career is sort of. It's almost a misnomer. Because, in some ways, the the fact that his, his minions go on to be his successors. And can, you know, continue? The Democratic Republican, or Jeffersonian Republican domination of the political scene is is a continuation of his political career. And so I agree that he's very hard to define and he really can't put him into just a political bucket. And that would be doing a disservice to so many other aspects of his life.

I think he loved that trope. I don't think that trope really holds up, you know? John Adams said. Way, he's way more ambitious than he ever lets on.

This is, I think the most important one, number five, and I feel very strongly about this. That Jefferson's saying, I like a little rebellion now and then. It's as important in the political world as thunderstorms of the natural world. And the tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots, and we must never come down too hard on rebellions. Because they, they show that that the people still are alive and and care about their rights. Where that comes from in Jefferson, I just don't know. It's very odd for a man who never struck anyone in the course of his life, so far as we know.

But it's also really dangerous. Lindsey, I mean, every knucklehead on January 6th thought of himself as fulfilling Jefferson's dream. That you, you've got to fight, you've got to be willing to be volatile, you've got you. You have to be willing to to flare up when you feel that your basic liberties are being trampled upon. And he's sort of the.

Of all the presidents, I'm trying to think of another one, the only one closest Donald Trump, I would say maybe Andrew Jackson. But of all the presidents, Jefferson is the one who keeps saying we need a little political violence.

Generations after generations have to live with them, have to start to see them with a reverence. And so to suggest that they should be torn down all the time is incredibly dangerous, because building something new is is really hard. And you know, one of our recent conversations was about the Constitutional convention and how difficult it was to actually get any sort of agreement on a series of compromises. While that concept might be nice in theory, in lived practice, the French experience with revolutions demonstrates how dangerous it can be to just keep having them. Because it leads to violence, it leads to dictatorships, it leads to all sorts of really terrible things if you're not trying to craft something safely.

I mean, obviously we know he is not a man of blood, he didn't fire rifles in the war. This is a he's an exquisitely peaceful, harmonic sort of person, and yet he has this bloodthirsty rhetoric before I answer that.

I think he did have a genuinely optimistic view of mankind and thought well of his fellow humans, as we will discuss it. I have no idea why he lived in the world and should have had no reason to feel that way, but he did. And so I think he genuinely hoped that future generations, or future rebellions, or whatever like, of course, they would come up with something better because humans are great. So, you know, that's my generous interpretation.

I think he also was remarkably skilled at putting on blinders and compartmentalizing his thoughts when he felt like it. We know that he lived through the early excesses and violence of the French revolution. In fact, wrote about executions that he that occurred just down the street from him while he was still in Paris. And did so with sort of a stunning disregard for the lost life, or an amazing ability to forget about it pretty quickly. And so I think that if you're going to be that type of person, you have to have an ability to to not. Either not see what's happening around you or to compartmentalize it quite quickly. This proposition that Jefferson was.

It's really bad that this is a real problem. And the founders, Jefferson wasn't alone, I mean, some of the other founders talk this way Give me liberty or give me death, don't tread on me, etc. etc. But Jefferson was the philosopher of this movement, and I don't quite understand it.

But I know that it empowers some of the worst elements in American life. And I don't think the people of January 6th were trying to talk to maintain the baseline of American liberty. They were trying to overturn a legitimate election and cheered on by a former president. But I can't in any way regard them as heroes of human liberty, who, you know, Jefferson said of Shays rebels in 1786. Well, they're misguided, but, you know, we shouldn't be too hard on them, because even in their misguidedness, they remind us of what's at stake. I don't really want to be reminded of that too often.

Do you?

It's quite enough. Thank you very much. And, of course, Roosevelt was sporting for war and went and became a kind of odd hero in the Spanish-American war. But this reminds me, too, of your man, Adams, who said of Jefferson. Concerning street action in Philadelphia during the quasi war, he said As you know, no doubt you was fast asleep in philosophic tranquility, Mr. Jefferson.

And Adam said, What, what think you of terrorism?

We're talking with Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky about ten of my propositions about Thomas Jefferson. I'm doing pretty well, we're agreeing on most of them. And I think maybe you've changed my mind on a number of things. We'll be back with this special edition of Listening to America in just a moment.

Stay tuned everyone.

Welcome back everyone to the special edition of Listening to America. I'm with my friend Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky, the author of her second book, this one on the second. President John Adams were talking about my ten propositions. About Thomas Jefferson after a lifetime of trying to make sense of him, you know? Meryl Peterson, in his preface to his wonderful one volume biography of Jefferson for Oxford University Press, said that, in some respects, after all that time, he found Jefferson impenetrable. So, number six and this list.

Lindsay Jefferson has much to answer for on race and slavery. Let me just put a full stop there. But it's not as awful as is sometimes alleged. It's awful. There's no excuse, there's no apology. We can't, we can't wish this away.

We can't explain this away, we can't, we can't find some sort of a defense of Jefferson. But occasionally, I see things that are so profoundly critical of him on this subject that it does, I think, do some damage to the historical record. He wrestled with this problem, he attempted to do some things, including an 18-8. To get Congress to outlaw the slave trade, he made a number of proposals. And, in the privacy of his study and notes on Virginia, has some thoughts about emancipation. Gradual or immediate?

What do you think? We've had this conversation before, of course, and we're gonna have it again. How do we weigh this? How do we give enough?

Condemnation of Jefferson's behavior, not that that's what historians are meant to do. And yet also realized that he was a man who who had a conscience, who wrestled with this, who didn't know quite what to do. Who meant it when he said, We have the wolf by the ears? How do we assess this?

Or, you know, how do we want to assess that? And in some ways, I think it's actually accurate to say that Jefferson was and should be judged as a man of his time. By which, I mean, he did have guilt and he wrestled with this institution, which a lot of people did at the time, he did not take action on it, which some people did not a lot, but some did.

Of course, Washington did more than he did, and there were other people that did take more action. John Randolph is one who are going to talk about in a future episode. There are others who did take action, so he, he fails in comparison to those that did. He was not as explicitly pro-slavery as some of the people that came later, like a John C.

Calhoun, or some of the positive good Southerners that put forth the argument that slavery was a positive good and and and he also, I think one of the the real challenges is. We know so explicitly that he had this physical relationship with an enslaved woman. In a way that we can guess that in other instances, or we know other people did too, but it's not as personal, it doesn't feel as personal. Because we don't know the names of all the people involved, and we don't know the ages, the children, and we don't know their their life stories. So I think, in in this way, it's, it's fair to say, of course, as you did, that he is, he is deserving of a lot of blame. And yet that blame, I think, rightly, should be put within the context of the time. Which is in no way an apology for the behavior. But I think a better way to understand the systems that people were operating within my mentor in this respect.

Today there are racists, of course, and maybe all of us have some squibs and tinges of that in us. But we've largely overcome that sort of systematic, unquestioned race prejudice that existed at that time. But almost everybody in Jefferson's time who was white was a racist. In the sense that they thought not clear what to make of Africans and African Americans. And even the people who who were much more forthright and successful in addressing the question of slavery. So I think that's part of when you say he was a man of his times, you know, there's a zeitgeist. There's a way of seeing things that we all have.

I think Jefferson clearly is a racist. I don't think you can deny that once you've read notes on the state of Virginia. I don't think that that makes him very different from, say, someone like Hamilton. But Hamilton was dramatically more likely to face this issue and to try to wrestle it to the ground than Jefferson does that. square with your thinking.

But let me just quickly turn to Sally Hemmings for another moment, you know? On the one end, some people say his relations with her had to have been rape. Because how else can you characterize the enormous power differential and so on? On the other end of the spectrum? There's sort of the notion that they were star-crossed lovers across these racial lines, that there was a genuine love affair. Affection. Kind of a common law marriage that was made impossible by the racial distinctions of the era and everything in between. I don't know the answer to this question.

I get it that the power differential means that there's something corrupt in a person of power, taking advantage in one way or another of a person who's powerless. But I also worry that by rushing to a really extraordinary critique of Jefferson, we may be missing part of the dynamic of the thing.

She understood the laws, she was there with James, she understood she spoke the language, at least partially. She could have done that and she didn't, and, you know, a lot of people say, well, she had, like.

She was forced to go back, maybe? But she was able to negotiate a series of conditions which were kept so clearly, she was able to negotiate them successfully. In a way that most people were not able to operate within the realms of slavery. And so it is okay to say that it was both a coercive relationship and there may have also been affection. They're not mutually exclusive. It's okay to say I think ill of him for this, but also respect the agency that she carved for herself in a really difficult situation.

As a human institution, and there were human friendships across these boundaries, there were collaborations there were, there were sometimes mutual trust and respect, there was codependency that that. Any simple answer to a question of this sort, particularly in a relationship that appears to have lasted for more than three decades, is, I think, a mistake. Which doesn't exonerate Thomas Jefferson, but I think it's important to withhold judgment to a certain degree. Even when you say he was coercive, I think I would change that a little, I would say it was a coercive situation.

But I think Adams was far the better man in this, that Adams, first of all, he took the initiative. Jefferson often went silent, Adams kept poking him, I use that term deliberately, Adams wanted this.

He wanted to work things out, he wanted them to explain themselves to each other, he wanted to fight a little bit in order to reach healing and clarity. And Jefferson is sort of frustratingly evasive. He's bobbing and weaving like Muhammad Ali, trying to let Adams punch himself out.

I come away from the correspondence with a deeper love of John Adams and a little disappointment in Jefferson. How about you?

They're, you know, they're both retired, they're not going to go back into public office. If anything, John Adams has more to lose because his son does still have a political career. So any sort of exposition of these letters would be more damaging to him than it would be to Jefferson. And and yet he, you know, and he's human, and he's, he's open, and he's willing to admit his flaws, and he engages in real, honest discourse. And that is something that I think Jefferson struggled with, because it does require.

It does require the the engagement sometimes, and the the good conflict.

And so he had something to prove. And Jefferson?

When there was, there was plenty for him to say, We're gonna run out of time.

Uh, Adam, certainly not. Is that Jefferson who gave us the West?

So I think at this point and by this point, people had been talking about, how do we get the Floridas, how do we get New Orleans? For decades? And you know, Hamilton wanted to do it by force, and the others wanted to buy it. And so I think it was at this point, almost a unanimous consent, that some sort of purchase had to happen. And it was Jefferson's good fortune to be in office. When Napoleon decided to cut his losses on the Colonial project and just offer it up wholesale, rather than continuing to sink money, blood and fortune in the North American project.

He was a superb diplomat. Oh, let's do 10 things about the Louisiana purchase, then, yeah, we will, all right. The last two are these of Jefferson's optimism about human nature and his belief that we are up to it. It's just fundamentally wrong.

Um, that's one proposition. It's just wrong. I mean that, and I'm always shocked that he believed that the human nature was perfectible. I mean, you just, you want to say, Have you looked around much, Mr?

JEFFERSON And and then, finally, that I and I wonder what you think about, I think you agree with that, right? That that there's just something cracked. Yeah, I mean, I mean Klein.