Latest / Christians Reading Classics / Notes on the State of Virginia by Thomas Jefferson, with Cara Rogers Stevens

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Notes on the State of Virginia by Thomas Jefferson, with Cara Rogers Stevens · Christians Reading Classics

0:00
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1:27
SPEAKER_01: On the north, by a line of latitude crossing the eastern shore to Watkins Point, being about 37 degrees, 57 minutes north latitude.
1:37
SPEAKER_01: From thence by a straight line to Syncock, near the mouth of Potomac.
1:43
SPEAKER_01: Thence by the Potomac, which is common to Virginia and Maryland, to the first fountain of its northern branch.
1:50
SPEAKER_01: Thence by a meridian line passing through that fountain till it intersects a line running east and west in latitude 39 degrees, 43 minutes, 42.4 seconds, which divides Maryland from Pennsylvania, and which was marked by Mrs.
2:09
SPEAKER_01: Mason and Dixon.
2:10
SPEAKER_01: Thence by that line, and a continuation of it westwardly, to the completion of 5 degrees of longitude from the eastern boundary of Pennsylvania in the same latitude, and thence by a meridian line to the Ohio.
2:25
SPEAKER_01: These limits result from the ancient charters from the Crown of England.
2:30
SPEAKER_01: Two, the grant of Maryland to the Lord Baltimore, and the subsequent determinations of the British court as to the extent of that grant.
2:39
SPEAKER_01: Three, the grant of Pennsylvania to William Penn, and a compact between the General Assemblies of the Commonwealths of Virginia and Pennsylvania as to the extent of that grant.
2:51
SPEAKER_01: Four, the grant of Carolina, an actual location of its northern boundary by consent of both parties.
2:58
SPEAKER_01: Five, the Treaty of Paris of 1763.
3:02
SPEAKER_01: 6.
3:03
SPEAKER_01: The confirmation of the charters of the neighboring states by the Convention of Virginia at the time of constituting their Commonwealth.
3:11
SPEAKER_01: And seven, the session made by Virginia to Congress of all the lands to which they had title on the north side of the Ohio.
3:21
SPEAKER_01: So wrote Thomas Jefferson in opening his book, Notes on the State of Virginia, first drafted in 1781.
3:30
SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Christians Reading Classics, a podcast from Mirror Orthodoxy.
3:35
SPEAKER_01: I am Nadia Williams, managing editor at Mirror Orthodoxy.
3:39
SPEAKER_01: And today I'm excited to talk about Jefferson's Notes, with probably the foremost expert on this book alive right now.
3:47
SPEAKER_01: Cara Rogers Stevens is Associate Professor of History at Ashland University, and she is the author of Thomas Jefferson and the Fight Against Slavery, published by University Press of Kansas in 2024.
4:00
SPEAKER_01: And it has received numerous awards.
4:02
SPEAKER_01: It was a finalist for George Washington Prize, winner of the Herbert J.
4:07
SPEAKER_01: Storing Book Prize, finalist for Center for Presidential History Book Prize, and finalist for Journal of the American Revolution Book of the Year Award.
4:17
SPEAKER_01: So presumably Thomas Jefferson would have been well pleased.
4:21
SPEAKER_02: Cara, welcome.
4:23
SPEAKER_02: Thank you so much.
4:24
SPEAKER_02: And thank you for that very kind introduction, especially the Thomas Jefferson part.
4:27
SPEAKER_02: I like to think that too.
4:30
SPEAKER_01: I think he would have enjoyed talking with you about this.
4:33
SPEAKER_01: I hope so.
4:34
SPEAKER_01: Since but since he is not available, thank you for just indulging us and the viewers who I think will, or listeners rather, who will really enjoy this.
4:45
SPEAKER_01: But before we hit the highlights of the book itself, this is a podcast about reading classic books and texts.
4:52
SPEAKER_01: So I have to ask first, what is a classic and what in particular makes Thomas Jefferson's notes an American classic?
5:02
SPEAKER_02: Such an interesting question.
5:04
SPEAKER_02: As I've been pondering this, uh, the example that comes to my mind of a classic text is Jane Austen's work, Pride and Prejudice.
5:13
SPEAKER_02: It's a work that has stood the test of time, which I believe is what any classic should do.
5:18
SPEAKER_02: It should deal with themes or topics that resonate with humans across the decades and across even the centuries.
5:26
SPEAKER_02: And a classic, I believe, should also be excellent.
5:29
SPEAKER_02: It should skillfully and profoundly use language to evoke thought and dialogue and emotion.
5:36
SPEAKER_02: And as a historian, I'm also very interested in the way that a classic both reflects the culture from which it emerges and also shapes that culture or future cultures as a result of its popularity and its insight and its profound nature.
5:52
SPEAKER_02: And I think Pride and Prejudice is a great example of this.
5:55
SPEAKER_02: It's a work that I use sometimes to help students understand life in England in the aristocratic 18th and 19th centuries, but Bridget Jones's diary is still shaping popular culture, you know, something that young people watched when I was in my dating years, uh, and it was inspired by Pride and Prejudice.
6:15
SPEAKER_02: So we see those themes reaching across the centuries and being applicable even in a completely different time and culture.
6:23
SPEAKER_02: So Jefferson's Notes in the State of Virginia as an American classic, it does meet those criteria.
6:30
SPEAKER_02: It is a book that has never been out of print, that deals with topics and themes that are still relatable, things like he deals with immigration crises and how many immigrants should be inspired to come to America and how many would be too many.
6:48
SPEAKER_02: He talks about the best way to serve impoverished individuals.
6:53
SPEAKER_02: He talks about quarantine.
6:55
SPEAKER_02: He talks about the morality of labor and whether agriculture is better or manufacturing is better.
7:04
SPEAKER_02: Some things that are very much of their time, but also things that can be seen as applicable still to this day.
7:10
SPEAKER_02: And it's also a work that shaped American culture, particularly when it comes to its conversation on race.
7:20
SPEAKER_02: And in that regard, the work is very controversial.
7:24
SPEAKER_02: Some of its effects were very negative, some were very deeply misunderstood.
7:28
SPEAKER_02: And so I find that unlike Pride and Prejudice, which could be read and enjoyed even without any information about England in the 18th and 19th century, Jefferson's notes actually will bear far more fruit in conversation if somebody has some contextual information first.
7:47
SPEAKER_02: So I wouldn't recommend reading Notes in the State of Virginia, cold turkey, as it were.
7:52
SPEAKER_01: That's really helpful.
7:54
SPEAKER_01: And I would say this is true for a lot of documents, especially works of nonfiction.
8:00
SPEAKER_01: As I think about our conversation, like this juxtaposition of Jane Austen as a classic versus what kind of classic Thomas Jefferson's notes are, that's the big difference.
8:10
SPEAKER_01: A novel we can appreciate without any historical context, even though, of course, historical context would certainly be helpful in reading Jane Austen.
8:19
SPEAKER_01: But reading the work of someone who really is one of the foremost thinkers in American history without knowing anything about his life, work, career, and his milieu.
8:32
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that is harder.
8:34
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
8:35
SPEAKER_01: Great point.
8:38
SPEAKER_01: So before we get to more context of Thomas Jefferson, I'd love to hear more of your story because ours is kind of an unusual conversation.
8:47
SPEAKER_01: Here we are, two immigrants to this country who fell in love with it and obviously stayed here.
8:54
SPEAKER_01: And here we are talking about Thomas Jefferson of all people and in the year of America 250, no less.
9:01
SPEAKER_01: So I'd love to hear your intellectual journey, how you fell in love with American history and especially with Jefferson, and how you came to study, particularly the notes on the state of Virginia.
9:13
SPEAKER_02: Well, that is an interesting story.
9:15
SPEAKER_02: So originally I'm from South Africa, and I was born there while the government policy of apartheid was still very much going on, and kind of the resistance to apartheid was reaching a high point.
9:30
SPEAKER_02: So my childhood was marked by things like when we would go to a restaurant, I would crawl underneath a table and make sure there were no bombs attached to the underside of the table before we would sit down and eat.
9:40
SPEAKER_02: And whenever I went to school, my mom would look out the window to see where the clouds of smoke were rising to determine where the latest bombing of schools had been.
9:48
SPEAKER_02: And she was praying that it wasn't my school.
9:49
SPEAKER_02: So it was a very violent and difficult time.
9:53
SPEAKER_02: Um, and it was also a time of huge constraint on freedom.
9:58
SPEAKER_02: So my family wasn't allowed to live in the neighborhoods that we would have wanted to.
10:02
SPEAKER_02: We had to live in a whites-only neighborhood.
10:04
SPEAKER_02: I wasn't allowed to go to any school that my parents wanted me to go to.
10:06
SPEAKER_02: I had to go to a whites-only school.
10:08
SPEAKER_02: We weren't allowed to have the friends that we wanted or read the books that we wanted, or um, there was no, there was a limited amount of freedom of religion in the in the in the country.
10:19
SPEAKER_02: So coming from that background to America, which is a nation based on this document that claims a self-evident truth is that all men are created equal and have equal natural rights.
10:34
SPEAKER_02: Even though this country itself has wrestled through what does that practically look like in terms of race, by the time I got here in 1990, I was going to a school with children of every color of the rainbow, and I was allowed to read whatever, and my family was allowed to have friends of all races, and you weren't restricted from marrying somebody of a different race.
10:55
SPEAKER_02: And so for me, the American idea has really been central to my intellectual development and central to my idea of freedom and living a life, a really worthwhile life.
11:08
SPEAKER_02: Um, both in terms of freedom of movement, freedom of thought, freedom of religion, all of these things have just been really key for me living here in America.
11:16
SPEAKER_02: Uh, and that's how I kind of started down the road of investigating Thomas Jefferson and really struggling through how did the man who wrote such a beautiful phrase of freedom and so many other freedom documents like the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, how could he also have enslaved hundreds of human beings over the course of his life?
11:35
SPEAKER_02: And Notes on the State of Virginia, although it might not seem like it at first, is actually was my way into understanding him and his time a little bit better and being able to kind of come to terms with the paradoxes of his life.
11:49
SPEAKER_01: That's a beautiful story.
11:51
SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
11:52
SPEAKER_01: And yeah, it's remarkable again how much we're shaped by our background that lead us to questions we are then enticed to ask.
12:02
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
12:04
SPEAKER_01: So that brings us back to Jefferson and how he himself got around to writing this particular document, which is a different kind of book than, say, like the Declaration of Independence.
12:17
SPEAKER_01: More people perhaps have read, hopefully, more people have read the Declaration of Independence than they uh than have read the notes on the state of Virginia, which is very different.
12:27
SPEAKER_01: But what is the background here and why did he write this?
12:31
SPEAKER_01: And why did he write it when he did?
12:33
SPEAKER_02: It's maybe one of the most interesting background stories to a book that I've ever come across, actually.
12:40
SPEAKER_02: So this is a book that started out as a questionnaire.
12:43
SPEAKER_02: Uh, and so you have to go back in time to the Revolutionary War, picture the 13 colonies on the brink, fighting for their survival, desperate for any kind of European aid that they could get because they're trying to go up against the greatest empire in the world at the time, the English Empire.
13:02
SPEAKER_02: And so in 1780, the French had begun to aid the Americans in their revolution, and um the secretary of the French delegation in America sent out a questionnaire to all of the 13 different colonies, or by that point calling themselves states, um, just attempting to get basic kind of statistical information.
13:25
SPEAKER_02: So the queries, as they are called in the original questionnaire, um encompass things like boundaries, rivers, seaports, mountains, climate, population, um, counties and towns, laws, religion.
13:41
SPEAKER_02: So basically a list of all of the fundamental aspects of a society.
13:46
SPEAKER_02: And to my knowledge, Jefferson was the only person at the time he was the governor uh of Virginia.
13:53
SPEAKER_02: He was the only representative of a state who really took this assignment seriously.
13:58
SPEAKER_02: He loved keeping lists and stacks of information about his state of Virginia.
14:05
SPEAKER_02: And now this is the perfect opportunity for him to use this.
14:08
SPEAKER_02: So he immediately set to work compiling answers to all of these questions for the French delegation and sending it off.
14:16
SPEAKER_02: And then after he sent it off, he was having so much fun he couldn't put it down.
14:20
SPEAKER_02: And fortuitously, around the same time, he was elected to membership in America's, at the time, most prestigious scientific society, the American Philosophical Society, which still exists today in Philadelphia.
14:33
SPEAKER_02: Um, and when Jefferson found out he had been admitted to membership in this scientific organization, he asked another recently elected member whether what he had written for the French might actually be something worth expanding upon as a work of science for other members of this philosophical society, not only in America, to read, people like Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Charles Thompson, Benjamin Rush, some of our greatest scientists, thinkers, philosophers of the time, but also for European intellectuals.
15:10
SPEAKER_02: And these are the real heavyweights of the day who are shaping the way that people understand science.
15:16
SPEAKER_02: And Jefferson thinks maybe this is my opportunity to represent America properly for the first time in the international scientific community with this book.
15:28
SPEAKER_01: That's brilliant.
15:29
SPEAKER_01: And that's um such a striking diplomatic move.
15:32
SPEAKER_01: Make America look good for everybody else at this like challenging time.
15:37
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's very necessary.
15:39
SPEAKER_02: If we want the French to continue to support this brand new, you know, barely born nation, they need to not be believing myths about um our climate, for example.
15:51
SPEAKER_02: And that was a very real problem that Jefferson faced.
15:54
SPEAKER_02: At the time, the kind of conventional wisdom about America was that um the climate in America was colder and damper than in Europe, and that therefore all the flora and fauna were smaller and weaker, including Native Americans, all animals, all plants, all smaller and weaker.
16:13
SPEAKER_02: And there was even a theory among many prominent scientists that any Europeans who emigrated to the New World would themselves shrink over time living here.
16:23
SPEAKER_02: And so Jefferson had a very important task.
16:26
SPEAKER_02: He had to prove statistically and with data and with evidence that actually the climate here was very healthy, that Native Americans were brave, were um were not being um shaped negatively by the environment, but were the equal of Europeans in their physical capabilities, uh, and that the country itself would eventually produce people of genius the same way that Europe had.
16:53
SPEAKER_01: So it's a very um it's a very ancient argument in some ways, it strikes me.
16:58
SPEAKER_01: I'm thinking of the Hippocratic treatise on airs, waters, places, where it's sort of like here's where different people live, and here's how smart or how healthy they are.
17:09
SPEAKER_01: Yep.
17:10
SPEAKER_01: So there's very much that scientific racism of uh the day that comes through.
17:16
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, or even more recently, Montesquieu, you know, climate shapes the kind of political form that might occur, or geography shapes the political form that might occur in any particular place.
17:26
SPEAKER_02: Jefferson took those arguments very seriously, but he needed to correct the record on how the climate was affecting life in North America.
17:35
SPEAKER_02: So, how did the French and the English react?
17:40
SPEAKER_02: Um, there are going to be various reactions to this book.
17:44
SPEAKER_02: It was um widely printed and read.
17:48
SPEAKER_02: In fact, it was first printed in France, in French, against Jefferson's will.
17:53
SPEAKER_02: And a fun kind of detail of the story is Jefferson, when he was done working on the manuscript in 1785, so five years after he first started, um, he privately printed about 200 copies, and he only wanted to share them with the scientific community and with some trusted friends and with the College of William and Mary, where he believed that the future leaders of the state of Virginia would read it and would be persuaded by its anti-slavery arguments and by its arguments in favor of a new constitution for Virginia.
18:27
SPEAKER_02: So that was that was the limits of the audience that Jefferson envisioned for this book.
18:32
SPEAKER_02: And he worried that if it was printed or published any more widely, it would actually produce a backlash within the state of Virginia.
18:41
SPEAKER_02: And in 1785, um, there was a growing anti-slavery movement.
18:46
SPEAKER_02: Um, several religious organizations had, like Quakers and Methodists, um, were attempting to free slaves and to petition the government of Virginia to end slavery in the state.
18:57
SPEAKER_02: But there was also a massive anti-slavery backlash.
19:00
SPEAKER_02: So there was kind of a war of petitions.
19:02
SPEAKER_02: Anti-slavery petitions would arrive, and then pro-slavery petitions would raise such an outcry that the Virginia legislature almost reversed gains on behalf of free black people in the state.
19:14
SPEAKER_02: So it was a very, very controversial thing to criticize slavery, and Jefferson knew this.
19:18
SPEAKER_02: So he doesn't want to print this widely.
19:20
SPEAKER_02: And then uh in 1785, one of his best friends in France got sick and died.
19:27
SPEAKER_02: Now, Jefferson didn't realize it, but this man was actually a British spy.
19:32
SPEAKER_02: And the privately printed copy of Notes in the State of Virginia that Jefferson had given this man fell into the hands of an unscrupulous French printer who then went about making an author, unauthorized translation of the book.
19:45
SPEAKER_02: So Jefferson had kind of had to jump in at the last minute and very reluctantly.
19:50
SPEAKER_02: He had some input, um, but he said that this the final French version was a mutilated version of his original English manuscript.
19:59
SPEAKER_02: And so he was forced by that to then authorize a copy in English in 1787 just to correct the all of the mistakes in the French text.
20:10
SPEAKER_02: And this was widely read, this was widely appreciated.
20:13
SPEAKER_02: Um, I don't know that he ever fully convinced some of the leading French scientists, but he never gave up trying.
20:20
SPEAKER_02: He even worked on having the entire skeleton of a giant moose shipped over to him in France so that he could reconstruct it and put it on display and prove to the French scientists that life was not degenerate and small here in North America.
20:35
SPEAKER_01: Wow.
20:36
SPEAKER_01: So the backstory of this book, it's just it's like, you know, you keep opening a box and another one pops up and it has lots of twists and turns.
20:45
SPEAKER_01: It's amazing.
20:46
SPEAKER_01: It is amazing.
20:47
SPEAKER_01: So, how did the American audiences re react once they got the authorized by Thomas Jefferson version as opposed to the unauthorized French translation that became popular overseas?
21:00
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
21:00
SPEAKER_02: Well, it was it was immediately popular.
21:02
SPEAKER_02: It went through several printings within Thomas Jefferson's lifetime.
21:06
SPEAKER_02: And he kept on actually adding and correcting his own personal copy.
21:12
SPEAKER_02: In fact, there's a fantastic quote from Thomas Jefferson about the way that he viewed this book by the end of his life.
21:20
SPEAKER_02: So this is 1814, just um he dies in 1826.
21:25
SPEAKER_02: So um a little bit over a decade before he dies, but he writes to a friend that he's given up on the idea of taking all of the additions that he'd been writing in the margins of his own book throughout the years and creating a totally new edition because he said, I begin to see it is impracticable for me.
21:45
SPEAKER_02: Nearly 40 years of additional experience in the affairs of mankind would lead me into dilation nowhere.
21:52
SPEAKER_02: Experience indeed has not altered a single principle, but it has furnished matter of abundant development.
21:59
SPEAKER_02: The work itself.
22:00
SPEAKER_02: Indeed, is nothing more than the measure of a shadow, never stationary, but lengthening as the sun advances and to be taken anew from hour to hour.
22:09
SPEAKER_02: So he viewed it as a never-finished project.
22:13
SPEAKER_02: Um, but he, by the time he was, you know, 1814, he's an old man.
22:18
SPEAKER_02: He doesn't see that it would be practical for him to publish an entirely new edition.
22:23
SPEAKER_02: He just kind of had to keep on writing in the marginalia of his own work.
22:27
SPEAKER_02: Um, anyway, so it's very popular in America.
22:30
SPEAKER_02: Now, some people view it and they love it.
22:33
SPEAKER_02: Others read it and use it to politically attack Jefferson.
22:38
SPEAKER_02: So, in this work, he argues on behalf of religious freedom, and at one point he prints a copy of his um his Virginia Law for Religious Freedom as an appendix to us.
22:51
SPEAKER_02: These words are then used to attack him during the election of 1800.
22:56
SPEAKER_02: His Federalist opponents argue that Jefferson is an atheist, that he is an enemy of religion, he's an enemy of Christianity, that he will burn Bibles in the streets if he is elected.
23:06
SPEAKER_02: And they use quotes from this book to make that argument.
23:09
SPEAKER_02: Other enemies argue that Jefferson is too harsh toward black people in this book.
23:16
SPEAKER_02: Um, and others, actually far more, argued that this book is proof that he was a closed abolitionist and that he was a friend of black people and that he was going to use the power of the government to interfere too much in slavery if he was elected.
23:30
SPEAKER_02: So I guess just like any politician, anything that he says publicly is fair game for an attack.
23:36
SPEAKER_01: And it seems like his comments on race have been in particular uh controversial and still remains so.
23:44
SPEAKER_01: And my understanding is that's kind of like the biggest argument you've made in your book that has perhaps expanded the conversation.
23:53
SPEAKER_01: Can we talk more about this?
23:55
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
23:56
SPEAKER_02: So Jefferson writes about slavery at several different points in the book, but there's a section actually in the chapter on laws where he first recounts an anti-slavery amendment that he, in fact, and his own college mentor, uh law school mentor, George Wyt, had written that had a four-part plan for emancipating infants, educating them according to their talents, expatriating them or colonizing them to whatever location proved proper at the time, and then supporting them until they became their own free and independent nation.
24:34
SPEAKER_02: So it's at once a plan to try to persuade Virginians to end slavery by freeing the children of enslaved workers.
24:43
SPEAKER_02: So it would theoretically not cost anybody anything.
24:46
SPEAKER_02: You're just freeing infants from the year 1800 on.
24:50
SPEAKER_02: Uh, you'd be educating them so that they are able to support themselves.
24:54
SPEAKER_02: And then there's a form of reparations for slavery involved here as well, that Jefferson envisions giving these people their own new nation.
25:02
SPEAKER_02: He argued that if these people remained within America, white prejudice would be too much to allow them to fully incorporate as equal citizens, and also that they would have a recollection of the 10,000 different injuries that they had sustained under the system of slavery.
25:19
SPEAKER_02: And so, in his mind, trying to create a multiracial country would be too difficult, might even lead to a race war.
25:26
SPEAKER_02: And so he and others supported him in this.
25:29
SPEAKER_02: Um, this wasn't an unusual suggestion at the time to support colonization for freed slaves.
25:36
SPEAKER_02: But Jefferson didn't stop there.
25:39
SPEAKER_02: After he laid out this emancipation amendment that had never actually even been successfully presented to the Virginia Assembly, because it would have been too controversial.
25:47
SPEAKER_02: He went on to explain all of the differences in race that he and other members of the scientific community believed to exist between the white and the black people.
25:59
SPEAKER_02: And at this point, a modern reader, and quite frankly, a reader at the time, many of those readers, uh, would be shocked by some of the things that Jefferson said.
26:11
SPEAKER_02: Um, the context is that he was repeating very commonly held beliefs within the scientific community.
26:21
SPEAKER_02: There was an assumption that whiteness was superior and blackness was inferior, and there was just a question about whether blackness was permanent or if it was a result of climate.
26:33
SPEAKER_02: Uh, if it wasn't a result of climate, if it was a result of some innate, we would say, genetic um difference, then um where did that difference come from?
26:44
SPEAKER_02: And so Jefferson dives into all of these scientific quote-unquote uh theories of the day and then speaks about the supposed differences that are manifest between the white and the black races in a way that is really shocking to modern readers and devastating to somebody who is a lover of all equality.
27:07
SPEAKER_02: But again, at the time, this would not have been seen as controversial, this would have been seen as repeating commonly held racial stereotypes and quote-unquote science, the best science of its time.
27:18
SPEAKER_02: So the story gets really interesting when Thomas Jefferson sends a manuscript of what he's written to uh his friend Charles Thompson, who's another member of the American Philosophical Society, and asks for his feedback.
27:33
SPEAKER_02: And Thompson gets back to Jefferson and says, you know, love what you've done, agree with everything that you've said, particularly all that stuff about race, agree with you that probably there's differences there.
27:45
SPEAKER_02: But because I do agree with you and I do think differences exist, I think that that might be taken as supporting slavery.
27:53
SPEAKER_02: And for that reason, I would take that entire section out.
27:58
SPEAKER_02: So Thompson's advice is so that you do not be misunderstood as using racial differences to justify enslaving an entire group of people, just delete the whole section on racial differences.
28:11
SPEAKER_02: And Jefferson, unfortunately, did not follow his friend's advice.
28:16
SPEAKER_02: But what he did do is he drastically altered the text.
28:21
SPEAKER_02: And so my book was one of the first ones that was able to take advantage of some new work that's been done with the manuscript that's really unfolded for scholars where Jefferson made edits and when he made edits.
28:35
SPEAKER_02: And so I was able to track when did Thomas Jefferson get that feedback from his friend Charles Thompson, and um, how did he alter the manuscript in response to that feedback?
28:46
SPEAKER_02: The most important detail is that Thomas Jefferson wrote an entire chapter condemning slavery.
28:53
SPEAKER_02: It's the chapter called Manners, or in more modern parlance, we might say the culture.
28:59
SPEAKER_02: So his description of the culture of Virginia, he entirely dedicated to a condemnation of slavery and how slavery was corrupting the culture and the economy of Virginia.
29:09
SPEAKER_02: After he got Charles Thompson's feedback, Jefferson more than doubled the length of that chapter to really add some of the harshest condemnations of slavery written by any founding father.
29:20
SPEAKER_02: To make absolutely crystal clear he was not pro-slavery.
29:23
SPEAKER_02: He was not only anti-slavery, but he was prophesying or predicting for Virginia's future that unless they abolish slavery, God himself would be on the side of the African peoples in a future slave rebellion, and that justice would demand that the white population essentially be wiped out.
29:42
SPEAKER_02: So that's a significant change.
29:44
SPEAKER_02: The other significant changes that he made were to the sections dealing with race, where before Jefferson had used phrases that might be read as certain, um, kind of closing the book on these different racial categories.
30:00
SPEAKER_02: After he got Charles Thompson's advice, Jefferson was a better scientist.
30:05
SPEAKER_02: He went back and added phrases like, I advance it as a suspicion only.
30:11
SPEAKER_02: He talked about further research being necessary.
30:14
SPEAKER_02: And he added passages where he praised different aspects of African-American, what he believed to be intrinsic traits within the black race, um, like a superior sense of morality, for example.
30:31
SPEAKER_02: So the end result is Thomas Jefferson very clearly did not intend to be pro-slavery.
30:38
SPEAKER_02: He very definitely intended his work to be read as anti-slavery.
30:42
SPEAKER_02: He did not intend to be read to write a book that was forever condemning black people to racial inferiority.
30:49
SPEAKER_02: And in that book and in other places, he made very clear that in terms of rights, all races are equal, just as all human beings are equal, no matter the differences in any individual's intellect or beauty or any other characteristic.
31:05
SPEAKER_02: Natural rights apply to everybody equally.
31:08
SPEAKER_01: And of course, this is a conversation that uh people have noted already in the Declaration of Independence, that he really does intend to mean everyone.
31:18
SPEAKER_02: He really does, yeah.
31:20
SPEAKER_02: The rough draft of the Declaration of Independence is particularly enlightening to anybody who's interested in this question.
31:25
SPEAKER_02: There was a very long paragraph initially in which Jefferson specifically talks about the African slave trade as a violation of human rights, sacred rights, he calls them.
31:36
SPEAKER_02: Um he really condemns King George for the ways in which he had kept open slave markets and violating these people's rights.
31:44
SPEAKER_02: And he uses the word men to describe the people being bought and sold in slave markets.
31:50
SPEAKER_02: So clearly, men for Thomas Jefferson does not just refer to white males.
31:55
SPEAKER_02: He is using it in the most inclusive possible sense.
31:59
SPEAKER_01: So it is striking that given the opportunity to remove what he was warned would be a very controversial part of his book, Jefferson instead doubled down and expanded it.
32:13
SPEAKER_01: So do you think this is something he just did?
32:22
SPEAKER_02: Well, I think he the ways in which he expanded it were to try to make it more um scientific in the sense of more open to future research rather than stating as a closed fact that there were racial differences or permanent racial categories or levels of superiority or inferiority.
32:45
SPEAKER_02: So he would have been changing this in order to open the door to future research and to future discoveries of um all forms of human development.
32:58
SPEAKER_02: Now, did he realize that this was just going to open him up to more attacks?
33:04
SPEAKER_02: Um, some people, after they read the final published version of the book, praised Jefferson for being an excellent scientist.
33:13
SPEAKER_02: So John Adams, for example, is one of the first readers of a privately printed copy.
33:18
SPEAKER_02: He wrote to Jefferson that he felt that the passages on Negroes were like diamonds.
33:22
SPEAKER_02: So to quote John Adams.
33:25
SPEAKER_02: Um there were others who felt that Jefferson had, and I'm going to quote again, depressed the Negroes too low.
33:33
SPEAKER_02: But even those individuals were not fighting for the kind of equality that we would today.
33:40
SPEAKER_02: Even the people who critiqued Jefferson at the time tended to believe that whiteness was superior.
33:46
SPEAKER_02: They just had different ways of thinking about how to get everybody to be white.
33:52
SPEAKER_02: So, for example, some of his greatest critics were people who believed that the races should intermarry, that white men should be paid to marry black women at West, and that that would be a great way to kind of get rid of blackness and make everybody the same color.
34:06
SPEAKER_02: So, yes, Jefferson absolutely did open himself up to more critiques, but also the whole subject of race was so fraught, and people at the time had such a low understanding of human differences.
34:22
SPEAKER_02: Um, that what sometimes surprises me, although I'm I'm disappointed in Jefferson a lot of the time, and I wish that he had changed this section more, I also want to give room to be surprised that he was as open to equality as what he was, that for the first time in human history, he and other members of this Christian Enlightenment era really wanted to emphasize equality of rights and equality of natural creation.
34:53
SPEAKER_02: So God in endowing all human beings with this sense of equality above the hierarchical, climate-based, unequal, um, pro-slavery systems that had been in place for so many hundreds and even thousands of years.
35:10
SPEAKER_02: So, yes, disappointing, on the other hand, remarkable.
35:15
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
35:16
SPEAKER_01: And again, it's hard to uh judge so frankly someone from another time and relying on research, the best research of his day, as you noted.
35:27
SPEAKER_01: And uh my husband, a historian, frequently says, we will be judged in the future for blind spots we don't even know we have right now.
35:36
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think about that too.
35:37
SPEAKER_02: I try to write about people in the past the way that I hope somebody will write about me in the future.
35:43
SPEAKER_02: Not that I think I will be the subject of a history book, but if I were, I would want charity.
35:48
SPEAKER_02: Um, and so I try to extend that toward the historical subjects that I write about as well.
35:54
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
35:56
SPEAKER_01: So we take all this background to Jefferson's work, and what do we do with this today?
36:02
SPEAKER_01: So for somebody who is a first-time reader who is listening to you talk about this book and decides, you know what, I really need to read this.
36:10
SPEAKER_01: How would you go about this task?
36:14
SPEAKER_02: Well, I would um I would warn any potential reader that they were going to get into a work of science and of politics, as well as of literature.
36:28
SPEAKER_02: So there are pages and pages of Notes in the State of Virginia that are charts and lists.
36:35
SPEAKER_02: There are minute details about, uh, as I said, the geography and the mineral production and the climate and the different population density.
36:46
SPEAKER_02: So there are aspects of the book that I might even describe as boring myself.
36:51
SPEAKER_02: Um, and so I wouldn't want somebody to read this not expecting to find those different aspects there.
36:57
SPEAKER_02: On the other hand, there are there are sections that are almost um small r romantic um in their style.
37:07
SPEAKER_02: So, for example, Thomas Jefferson describes a beautiful um geographical feature called the natural bridge that he actually was on property that he owned in Virginia.
37:19
SPEAKER_02: Um and when he writes about it in Query 5, I'm gonna quote just a little bit, he's been giving this very dry scientific description of, you know, the river is 40 feet by 55 feet, and there's a limestone here and this there, and this kind of um just describing things very dryly.
37:39
SPEAKER_02: And then he describes what it's like to look over the edge of the natural bridge.
37:44
SPEAKER_02: And what he says is, switching into um a different, um, totally different tone, you involuntarily fall on your hands and feet, creak, creep to the parapet, and peep over it.
37:58
SPEAKER_02: Looking down from this height about a minute gave me a violent headache.
38:02
SPEAKER_02: If the view from the top be painful and intolerable, that from below is delightful in an equal extreme.
38:09
SPEAKER_02: It is impossible for the emotions arriving from the sublime to be felt beyond what they are here.
38:14
SPEAKER_02: So beautiful an arch, so elevated, so light, and springing, as it were, up to heaven, the rapture of the spectator, is really indescribable.
38:25
SPEAKER_02: Here you have this beautiful kind of transition from the age of enlightenment with its classifications and its systems and its lists to the romantic era.
38:37
SPEAKER_02: Let me talk about sublime emotions and raptures as I look at the natural beauty around me.
38:44
SPEAKER_02: And so that's the kind of Jefferson that you get to know as you're reading Notes on the State of Virginia.
38:48
SPEAKER_02: He transitions back and forth between his political project, to his scientific interests, to his political interests, to his defenses of um human freedom and his belief in particularly religious freedom and the importance of self-consent or consent of the governed informing constitutions.
39:10
SPEAKER_02: And so it's just a really fascinating insight into the mind of one of our most prominent founding fathers in the 1780s.
39:20
SPEAKER_01: And I love that passages like this one remind us that he visited the places he's talking about.
39:25
SPEAKER_01: Here's Jefferson the hiker, the romantic sort of explorer of the sort that we have in European literature and poetry of the time.
39:33
SPEAKER_01: You know, go to the remotest spots and glance over the mountains or the sea.
39:40
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
39:41
SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
39:42
SPEAKER_02: You kind of get a sense of his personality and the things that he loved and was passionate about.
39:48
SPEAKER_02: And you can kind of read through the between the lines rather, in some very interesting ways.
39:55
SPEAKER_01: So this is a podcast called Christians Reading Classics.
39:58
SPEAKER_01: And with Jefferson, of course, we're talking about someone who mentions God a great deal.
40:03
SPEAKER_01: But what does that mean?
40:04
SPEAKER_01: And I know this is a complicated topic, but you've noted how, for instance, in his uh thinking about races and equality of citizens, this is an important factor.
40:15
SPEAKER_01: So what should we keep in mind?
40:20
SPEAKER_02: Well, I think Jefferson himself had a very interesting journey of faith.
40:27
SPEAKER_02: And not all facets of his journey are clear.
40:31
SPEAKER_02: Historians still ferociously debate them.
40:34
SPEAKER_02: I personally believe that he had an Anglican upbringing and a certain measure of loyalty to the Anglican denomination that lasted throughout his life.
40:46
SPEAKER_02: So he tithed to the Anglican church, he supported different pastors, he hired Anglican ministers to marry and bury and counsel uh over the entire course of his life.
40:59
SPEAKER_02: Um, we also think that in college he read uh many Enlightenment thinkers who questioned Christianity and particularly questioned um all of the he would have called them irrational aspects of the Christian faith.
41:13
SPEAKER_02: So anything to do with miracles or the Trinity, uh anything that he could not rationally explain.
41:20
SPEAKER_02: Um by the mature years of his life, he had suffered a great deal.
41:25
SPEAKER_02: He had lost his wife, he had lost children, he had lost parents, he had lost best friends and siblings, and kind of the amount of death in an ordinary person would experience over the course of their life is staggering.
41:39
SPEAKER_02: Um, and so there's a lot of speculation that Jefferson was led back toward his faith by some of the suffering that he endured.
41:47
SPEAKER_02: And certainly by the end of his life, he was adamant that he was a follower of Jesus.
41:54
SPEAKER_02: He just had a very firm belief that Jesus himself had never claimed to be the Son of God or to have performed any miracles, that he was the greatest moral teacher ever to live.
42:04
SPEAKER_02: And Jefferson predicted that all the young men of Virginia would become Unitarians in the sense of believers in or followers of Jesus as the greatest moral teacher, without kind of buying into the miraculous and the nonsensical elements that Jefferson believed were present in the scripture that shouldn't have been there, according to Jefferson.
42:25
SPEAKER_02: And he was so wrong.
42:26
SPEAKER_02: So, of course, the second great awakening was going to radically change the landscape of religion that he had been born into.
42:33
SPEAKER_02: So Jefferson is a person who deeply um considers the divine, who is very much aware of divine standards of justice, who isn't afraid to use that kind of language to make predictions about how God might intervene in human affairs at key points in time.
42:54
SPEAKER_02: Not every day in his life was he using this kind of language, but at key moments.
42:57
SPEAKER_02: So notes in the state of Virginia, I tremble for my nation when I remember that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever.
43:04
SPEAKER_02: This is his prediction of God being on the side of the slaves.
43:08
SPEAKER_02: Um he also says beautiful things like uh the first line of his Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, whereas Almighty God hath created the mind free.
43:18
SPEAKER_02: And he goes on to argue that Jesus himself did not um physically punish those who did not follow him, um, that he left individuals to make their own decision about this.
43:29
SPEAKER_02: So Jefferson is steeped in the Christian faith.
43:32
SPEAKER_02: He is wrestling with it, he is chewing on it, he is arguing about it, he is rejecting portions of it and trying to embrace other portions of it.
43:42
SPEAKER_02: And so it's very interesting to read him from a Christian point of view and see the areas in which his ideas overlap and the idea areas in which he was really um a force of his own.
43:56
SPEAKER_01: He was very much an intellectual.
43:59
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
43:59
SPEAKER_01: Thinking about everything, overthinking everything.
44:02
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I maybe that's one of the reasons why I feel an affinity for him.
44:06
SPEAKER_02: I sometimes suffer from the same affliction, and I've have to learn not to do that.
44:10
SPEAKER_02: And yeah, he probably probably never got away from that himself.
44:15
SPEAKER_01: He really does strike one as an academic, just reading this book with the lists, the information, like no piece of data that he met that he didn't love.
44:26
SPEAKER_02: That's so true.
44:26
SPEAKER_02: And that's probably why he was such a terrible farmer, and he never really made a lot of money as a farmer.
44:32
SPEAKER_02: He was an academic.
44:33
SPEAKER_02: He would just so much rather be in his office reading and writing and thinking and corresponding with great scientists rather than trying to work out how to make his crops more profitable or really manage the day-to-day of his Monticello and his other plantations.
44:48
SPEAKER_02: And that's part of the reason why we now look back and think of him as a hypocrite, because by the end of his life, uh, whereas George Washington freed all of his slaves in his will, Jefferson did not.
45:00
SPEAKER_02: And that's partly due to the fact that he was so deeply in debt.
45:04
SPEAKER_02: He had failed so utterly as a farmer, and um also because he'd lent money to others who had then defaulted on their loans, that Jefferson was uh legally prohibited from freeing more than a few slaves.
45:18
SPEAKER_02: Um, his his uh human property as well as his physical property all had to be sold within a few years to pay off the debts of his Monticello.
45:27
SPEAKER_02: And in fact, his grandson spent the rest of his life trying to pay off the family debts.
45:32
SPEAKER_02: So if only Jefferson had paid more attention to farming, if only he had lived a more frugal life, perhaps practically he could have done more.
45:42
SPEAKER_02: On the other hand, then we wouldn't have the Jefferson who wrote and who was so politically influential as what he was.
45:51
SPEAKER_01: People are complicated.
45:53
SPEAKER_02: Very much so.
45:56
SPEAKER_01: Well, I have to ask you our usual final question.
46:01
SPEAKER_01: What classic do you wish you had written and why?
46:06
SPEAKER_02: So I'm gonna go back to Jane Austen, shocker.
46:09
SPEAKER_02: Uh my favorite book is Jane Austen's Um Persuasion, which is the book that she completed at the end of her life, and she died um when she was in her early 40s.
46:22
SPEAKER_02: And the reason I love it is it's a very deeply thoughtful work about decision making and regret and forgiveness and love.
46:36
SPEAKER_02: Um and the fact that Austin was able to write so beautifully about human nature and human relationships when she herself had never been married, in fact, had only been engaged for less than 24 hours once.
46:50
SPEAKER_02: Um, it's just incredible.
46:52
SPEAKER_02: She was a remarkable human being.
46:54
SPEAKER_02: So that is a classic worthy of the name.
46:57
SPEAKER_01: I love this.
46:58
SPEAKER_01: Cara Roger Stevens, thank you so much for joining me for this conversation.
47:03
SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much for having me.
47:04
SPEAKER_01: It's been my pleasure.