Geoff Bennett:
It has been 250 years since Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, a document that declared all men equal, even while hundreds of thousands of people remained enslaved.
Judy Woodruff recently traveled to his Virginia home of Monticello to learn more about the third president of the U.S. and about how his own contradictions reflected the nation’s.
It’s part of our series Crossroads: America at 250.
Judy Woodruff:
Thomas Jefferson’s legacy is written all over his beloved Monticello, his home and plantation perched on a mountaintop in Charlottesville, Virginia.
But some of the newest words here aren’t his; 610 names are engraved on the 60-foot-long curved memorial wall, one for each of the enslaved people who lived and labored here. Made out of weathered steel, it opened in 2023.
Annette Gordon-Reed, Carl M. Loeb University Professor, Harvard University:
This is called a contemplative site.
Judy Woodruff:
For generations, their stories were largely absent from the way Americans remember the author of the Declaration of Independence.
What does it say that it took this many years to recognize the lives of these enslaved people?
Annette Gordon-Reed:
Well, it’s the state of the country. We became interested in the issue of race and slavery in the 20th century as we realized there was a broader story to be told.
Judy Woodruff:
That story has been at the center of Annette Gordon-Reed’s work for decades. A professor of law and history at Harvard University, she is one of the country’s leading scholars on Jefferson. She took me on a tour of the home and grounds he designed.
Annette Gordon-Reed:
So this is all the mind of Thomas Jefferson in this one section here.
Judy Woodruff:
And he loved this place.
Annette Gordon-Reed:
Oh, absolutely. Yes, he did love this place. And that’s one reason, when we think about giving up slavery, this place ran on slavery.
Judy Woodruff:
Over his lifetime, Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people.
How large a contradiction was there between what he wrote in the Declaration, all men are created equal, and how he lived his life?
Annette Gordon-Reed:
Well, it’s a huge contradiction, but it’s a contradiction that I think that lots of people lived with. One of the things that happens when you put things down on paper is that you’re held to a particular standard. But because he created this document that we all look to, we have higher expectations of him, I think, than we do of other people.
Judy Woodruff:
Jefferson was also a farmer, violinist, scientist, and an architect who never quite finished work on his own home here.
Throughout his 83-year life, he wrote tens of thousands of letters and documents that helped shape the early United States. That’s one of the things about being a prolific writer and keeping a record. People can note what you said when you were 20 and know what you said when you were 80, and sometimes they don’t go together.
In her latest book, “Jefferson on Race: A Reader,” which he edited, Gordon-Reed revisits those writings to ask what they reveal about his views on race, slavery, and the country he helped create.
Annette Gordon-Reed:
It was not until the 20th century and the civil rights movement that people began in earnest to really question what he said about it.
Judy Woodruff:
But she also argues that Jefferson was trying to carefully shape how history would remember him.
You have spent, what, 30 years studying him. What new were you able to learn from all of this?
Annette Gordon-Reed:
We focused on the way that Jefferson fell short and was conservative in ways. But I think the letters show and the documents show that this is a person working in a very, very complicated situation.
He wants to be remembered for the revolution and for the University of Virginia and the statute of religious freedoms. Those are things that are progressive, creating a university that didn’t have a chapel at the center, but had a library at the center of it, championing religious freedom. That was a progressive kind of thing, and the Declaration of Independence, helping to create a nation that was a republic in a world that was mainly monarchies.
Judy Woodruff:
But these writings also revealed deeply racist beliefs.
Annette Gordon-Reed:
The interesting thing about putting these letters together and these documents together is to see how people live white supremacy, how they live race in the country. He has particular views about race, particular views about African American people.
In the “Notes on the State of Virginia,” for example, he says that he never saw a Black person utter anything beyond plain narration, in other words, telling a story. He’s basically saying they couldn’t reason. And yet, at Monticello, he asked people to do things all the time that required reason.
And in some of these letters, he talks about individual people as intelligent and capable of doing things.
Judy Woodruff:
But perhaps no part of Jefferson’s life has forced a greater reckoning than his relationship with the enslaved Hemings family.
Annette Gordon-Reed:
Sally Hemings and her siblings, five of her siblings, had the same father as Martha.
Judy Woodruff:
As many as 70 members of the Hemings family were enslaved at Monticello over the course of five generations. After his wife, Martha, died, Jefferson began a decades-long relationship with Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman who was also the half-sister of his wife. Together, they had six children.
Annette Gordon-Reed:
They weren’t seen as important. You change the whole story when you identify, you give the person a name and you give them a context. This isn’t just a 14-year-old manservant. This is his wife’s half-brother.
And so we don’t know how they dealt with each other, but immediately the reader can think, well, what was that like? How did they do that?
Judy Woodruff:
Of the more than 600 people Jefferson owned, he freed only 10. Most were members of the Hemings family.
What was holding him back?
Annette Gordon-Reed:
Well, the question of race. He lived in a community that was suffused with these ideas. And it’s not just about an individual who has bad thoughts about race. It’s a community that has values that promote these kinds of things.
Judy Woodruff:
Despite Jefferson never giving up the system of enslavement that sustained his way of life, Gordon-Reed resists reducing him to a single dimension.
Annette Gordon-Reed:
He thought he had done a lot. Jefferson was obsessed with the revolution and the United States of America, the creation of the United States of America. It was a big deal to create a new country.
And I think his record shows that we have expectations of him that could never have been fulfilled. He was on Earth to do the things that he did. And the things that I want him to do or I would have wanted him to do, he wasn’t.
Judy Woodruff:
Given everything we know, should he be more honored, or do the negatives outweigh the positives?
Annette Gordon-Reed:
I don’t think the negatives outweigh the positives. I think we’re sitting in a country that he helped to found, and so many aspects of the country have moved forward because of the words that he decided to put in the Declaration.
It could have been written in a completely different way. But to have those words about equality and the pursuit of happiness, those things have been enormously useful to all Americans.
Judy Woodruff:
Have your own views on this evolved over time?
Annette Gordon-Reed:
Yes, I think maybe it’s because I’m getting older, but I am less, I would say, negative about Jefferson. I see how hard it is to do anything in the world.
And the fact that he did a lot is impressive to me. And I think it’s as much about me and my growth and my understanding about how to grapple with these kinds of contradictions. It’s been a learning experience for me.
Judy Woodruff:
For Gordon-Reed, the question isn’t whether Jefferson was a hero or a villain. It’s what Americans do with a founder whose ideals reached farther than he did.
You have said that understanding Thomas Jefferson calls on — in a way, calls on all of us to think about, are we living up to our ideals at this moment? What did you mean by that?
Annette Gordon-Reed:
In looking at him and seeing flaws and the good parts and the bad parts, we — and also the optimism that he had about the country, we have to look to ourselves to decide, are we up to this, this notion of keeping a republic?
And are — do we really value the idea of science? Do we really value the idea of a multicultural society in a place that is — has been from the very beginning full of all different types of cultures and religions, religious diversity? That’s always been a part of America.
But do we value that? And it’s not clear to me that many of our fellow Americans actually do. So I think it’s an opportunity for us to search as we approach the 250th anniversary, do we want to go forward with all of this, this American experiment that he thought was something new under the sun?
He said, we can now say that there’s something new under the sun, and he thought that was the United States. And the question is, do we believe that?
Judy Woodruff:
For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Judy Woodruff in Charlottesville, Virginia.
