Ellis Gordon-Reed

ellis gordon-reed

John Cole: “Books & Beyond” talks are talks from authors of recently published books that have something to do with the Library of Congress [Library], and tonight’s book and tonight’s authors, of course, have a great deal to do with the Library of Congress, our history, our origins and the entire institution. This is a talk in association with an exhibition about Thomas Jefferson, which is -- I hope you have a chance to see, which is in our Jefferson Building across the street. That exhibition is open until Oct. 31, and we do hope that you will have a chance to see it.

Tonight we are celebrating the book that was published in conjunction with that exhibition. But before we move on to the book I would like to introduce and ask to take a bow, Irene Chambers, who is the Program – the Interpretive Programs officer or the exhibits officer for the Library of Congress. Irene, would you like to stand?

[applause]

To talk about the book and its origins, I’m pleased to introduce the Library’s Publishing officer, Ralph Eubanks. Ralph? Give Ralph a hand of applause.

[applause]

Ralph Eubanks: Thank you, John. About two years ago a publishing colleague of mine asked me if I’d ever considered doing a visual biography of Jefferson to tie in with our upcoming exhibition. My response was, “There are two perfectly good books out there on Jefferson right now. There’s ‘American Sphinx’ by Joseph Ellis, and there’s ‘Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy’ by 2

Annette Gordon-Reed.” In addition, the Library had just publishing its own book on Jefferson, a scholarly book, “Thomas Jefferson and the Education of a Citizen”. I told him that I thought the market was gutted.

However, I started to give some thought to this inquiry and realized that although there was much published on Jefferson, there was nothing that really combined visuals with words and that made Jefferson accessible visually. It was then that “Thomas Jefferson: Genius of Liberty” was really born. But I didn’t think the book should rely totally on visuals. I felt the book needed some grounding in scholarship. So, two of the first people that I contacted to work with us on this book were Joseph Ellis and Annette Gordon-Reed. I’m pleased and honored that they took time out of their busy schedules to work with us on the book and also to be here with us this evening.

So, now I’d like to turn things over to Gerard Gawalt who is the curator in the Manuscript Division of our Jefferson collection. Gerry…

[applause]

Gerard Gawalt: It’s a pleasure to welcome you all here tonight. When we first started talking about doing an exhibit on Thomas Jefferson and then a book, what we really wanted to work with was Jefferson’s written legacy. I think that we have done that both in the book and in the exhibit, and though Jefferson’s legacy to try to examine those parts of Jefferson’s life that have a great impact on himself, on the world around him.

And what we have tried to do in both items is to try to see Jefferson’s writings as the touchstone, the starting point for this examination and then to allow the reader or viewer to experience Jefferson through his expanding world from the Piedmont where he was born and raised through the creation of a republic in the 3 state of Virginia, through the American Revolution, through the growth of the United States, across the continent and on into the world at large, or the world as Jefferson knew it, which of course is somewhat smaller than it is today; however, in doing this we have tried to let Jefferson’s words, and also his -- a lot of his writings in this library speak for themselves.

Without going into very much detail I would just like to say that Jefferson’s writings and his library are the touchstones of the Library of Congress. They form the core, if not the spirit, of the Library and give it its meaning. And generally, it’s a license to collect throughout the world. I think that while we’re on the topic of the book and before I get onto the featured speakers, and I’m not going to take very much time, I think it’s important to recognize Sara Day, Linda [Barrett] Osborne and Heather Burke who are the editors of the book. If they are here, if they could stand up, because without Heather, without Sara Day there wouldn’t have been a book. Believe me, I think those of that that are here working on it realize that.

[applause]

So this is as much their book as it is the rest of us. And now I’m just going to briefly introduce the featured speakers. They really need very little introduction.

Annette Gordon-Reed is professor of law at New York Law School. She is, of course, best known for her work on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. But more than that, as we found out on the exhibit committee of which she was a member, she’s a person who brings broad knowledge not only of Thomas Jefferson and his world but also the world that we live in today and helped us through many rough spots in trying to create the exhibit. And her essay in this book, “Thomas Jefferson and the Boundaries of American Civilization,” is certainly a gem. And so without further ado, I think that we should just welcome Annette Gordon-Reed. 4

[applause]

Annette Gordon-Reed: Thank you very much. I’m very happy to be here with you tonight with Joe and numbers of the people who worked with us on the exhibit and putting the book together, a book that I’m very, very proud of. It turned out to be wonderful I think. It’s a masterful job.

What I want to do, briefly, is to talk about what I tried to do in my essay and on the subject of “Thomas Jefferson: Genius of Liberty.” The notion of genius, as you probably know, is something that’s thrown around quite a bit these days. There are geniuses of baseball, geniuses of everything. It’s sort of hard to tell what it actually means. Jefferson thought that -- one definition that he gave of the notion of genius or used it when he was speaking was of a natural talent that someone possesses or another phrase is, “Someone who has a lively imagination.” I certainly think that fits the bill with Jefferson. It’s a somewhat less exalted definition of genius than we typically think of today. But, I think that the term fits him. Joe will talk a little bit later on about his understanding of what “genius of liberty” means with respect to Jefferson, the problems he has with it and the way he supports it.

For me, I think, genius, and when I think of Thomas Jefferson as a genius of liberty and my notion of his genius has to do with the way that he posed the right questions at the right time, which is I think something that people who have a genius do. At the precise moment, ask the questions. Even if they don’t have the right answers at the time, they help us get to that. They pave the way for other people to ponder the question, to refine it and perhaps come to some deeper understanding about things that are essential in life. I think Jefferson certainly qualifies as a person who did that even though, as you know, he didn’t always have the right answers. 5

Another problem with genius, we think of a genius as someone who does have all the right answers, and he didn’t. I think that pointing that out sometimes we sometimes go too far in sort of knocking him because he didn’t have all of the right answers, but he did ask the right questions, I believe, at critical points. The other thing that I think of when I think of Jefferson and genius is someone who annunciates ideas that have universal application, that people can take, different people at different times, can take and make meaningful in their lives in a way that his helpful to them and helps them expand.

Now, the flip side of that is that it’s not always a positive thing as we saw with the bombing in Oklahoma where people took Jefferson’s words about the tree of liberty and the notion that this meant that you had to kill people -- that you become a terrorist when you disagree with the government. But in general, it is a genius that poses a question and presents ideas, annunciates ideas in a way that can have universal applications whether it’s a musician – Beethoven -- that surely he didn’t write the music for the African American person in East Texas in the 1960s and 70s but as something that you can listen to and I can listen to and draw something from. And that happens in music. It happens in sports. It happens in politics. And I think it certainly happens with respect to Jefferson.

The theme of my essay really was to try to say that I think that what is most needed for Jefferson right now in thinking about him is to rescue him from symbolism. Now the term, “genius of liberty,” may seem to be moving away from that, but the idea is to hold that thought in our minds long enough to appreciate what he has to offer, but not a moment longer than is necessary to convey the image of someone who did contribute a lot to the American nation. Genius of liberty, the problem, of course, is that it is symbolism. And there’s been so much about his life that’s been seen in symbolic terms that the man himself, his strengths and weaknesses have gotten lost. 6

I have a friend, Joe knows him as well, Herb Sloan, who was saying that one of the reasons that Jefferson is not as popular among historians as he seems to be among the general public is that he was a visionary. He thought that historians, in general, are mistrustful of people who are visionaries and not as pragmatic as some of the other Founding Fathers. He was a visionary, but strangely enough, I think a bit part of his vision, some of the important parts of his vision, have come true. I mean we are a country from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific, for better or worse. There are problems with how that came to be, but nevertheless, that was something that he saw and something that happened.

We’re not a nation of yeoman farmers, but we are a nation of small homeowners, people who take the right to property and the right to individual property seriously as a vehicle for freedom. It’s not a farm, but it is your property. It’s not his precise vision but the spirit, the ethos, which is something that Garry Wills talks about in the introductory essay. The ethos of liberty and what liberty means is certainly present even if it doesn’t come out in exactly the way that he expressed it.

There are the bad things, of course: the issue of race and slavery, his failures along those lines, the “Notes on the State of Virginia” in which he talks about a vision for America that is anything but the multicultural vision that we have for ourselves today. Blacks, he did not believe, and whites could coexist together. That’s a question that he raises and that he’s grappling with in that essay in the book that has caused him a lot of problems. But, again, this fit under my category of questions that have to be asked. They’re important questions.

Can you have a non-assembleable group of people, a minority group, in a majority culture? Can they exist as citizens within the United States? Now, we like to think that that question has been answered. I suggest in my essay that it has not been answered. We don’t know exactly how that is going to come about. And we can criticize him for raising the question, but it is a fundamental question. 7

How is it going to be done? How can you have a nation as a family if the citizens within that family – I’m equating family with citizenship, if there’re people who cannot be part of your family? And that is the question that he asks in the”Notes on the State of Virginia” and doesn’t answer it so far as our satisfaction. But it’s a fundamental one, and it’s one that we have to keep asking ourselves until we get the right answer.

Now, in terms of the presentation of his vision, of the ideas that have application to other people, that people can take in their time and make their own. There’s no question that the Declaration of Independence, the parts that he wrote, have been words that blacks and Asians and all types of people in America have taken to heart and made them stand for more than what he intended them to stand for. And with that in mind, with the question that he raised about what -- how this is going to happen in multiracial society and with the vision of equality and freedom, even if he couldn’t answer the question in the right way, I think he has pointed us to a path that can help us eventually answer the question and answer it in a way that he might not have, but in a way that is suitable for our time.

The image that I have in mind with Jefferson and the Declaration and what he is most known for among American citizens is that as [John] Marshall said about the Constitution. It’s a Constitution we expound. The genius of the Constitution is that it’s flexible. It’s something that can be taken in any generation and made meaningful. Jefferson and the Declaration to me are in the same thing, so I didn’t mind the title, “Genius of Liberty,” for Jefferson, even with the kinds of problems that we will talk about.

But I’m glad that it’s the title of the book, and I think the essays in the book, and what I hope we’re able to do tonight is to talk about the ways in which Jefferson in the 21st century will still have meaning for us, that we will get to know him as a man, appreciate him as a genius of liberty, but as I said, only insofar as we know, as we can use that phrase to understand why he someone who is important to all 8

Americans, not a plaster saint, not a statue but a person who did have a lively imagination, did have natural talent that he used in service of the country. Thank you.

[applause]

Gerard Gawalt: Thank you. That was excellent. Before we go any further, just two notes. After Joseph Ellis speaks there will be a question and answer period. So, that will take up the bulk of the time. And also, after everyone gets through at 7:00, next door there will be a book signing and reception. So that takes care of the bookkeeping.

And on to the next speaker who is Joseph Ellis. He’s a professor at Mount Holyoke College. He is the author of “The American Sphinx,” probably at this point next to “Thomas Jefferson: Genius of Liberty,” the best-known book on Thomas Jefferson. He is author of a forthcoming book, “Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation.” And for this book, “Thomas Jefferson: Genius of Liberty,” he wrote an excellent essay called, “Why Jefferson Lives: A Meditation on the Man and the Myth.” I think that without further introduction, most of you are familiar with Joseph Ellis, and we’ll welcome him here to speak to us tonight.

[applause]

Joseph Ellis: Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure and privilege, an honor, to be here at the Library of Congress, Mr. Jefferson’s library. I’m staying tonight at the Jefferson Hotel. It’s a pleasure to be on another panel with Annette and a special pleasure to be on a panel where we don’t have to begin discussing DNA and Jefferson’s sex life. 9

[laughter]

I was a bit of a troublemaker for the Library of Congress when we were deliberating about the exhibit. I had missed the first meeting of the advisory committee at which time the title “Genius of Liberty,” was tentatively at least, decided upon for the exhibit. When I came into the deliberations I said, “This is a mistake.” So I think the reason that I’m here this evening is to explain myself [laughs].

What I meant was that the phrase is inherently celebratory, reverential and platitudinous. It is about not Jefferson the man that walked the earth between 1743 and 1826, not the complicated, inherently paradoxical and contradictory critter that historians and biographers have come to know. It’s about the granite- faced fellow on Mount Rushmore, the marble statue at the Tidal Basin, the floating enigma around Monticello. And the actual exhibit isn’t about that platitudinous Jefferson. It’s about the complicated Jefferson.

Now, I like Annette, have gone on speaking tours and have encountered the American public on Jefferson, and I can tell you right now that a lot of them want to believe that the reverential, celebratory, platitudinous Jefferson is the Jefferson. I’ll tell you one story, which you might have heard before, but it’s a true story.

I was speaking in Richmond and had offered my mutedly-critical remarks about Jefferson’s character, and a very well-coifed, elderly woman rose in the question period instead, “Mr. Ellis, thank you for your remarks. They’re all wrong. You have not the vaguest idea who Jefferson was or is. He visits me every night in my bedroom” --

[laughter] 10

-- “and I know him.” I didn’t ask her what she meant by “know.”

[laughter]

Anyway, she concluded with a wonderful flourish. She said, “Mr. Ellis, you are a mere pigeon on the great statue of Thomas Jefferson.”

[laughter]

Now you know how you normally figure out to those kinds of remarks about 48 hours later. She had given me her card, however, so I was able to write back to her and say -- say so and so poet. And say, “Madam, it’s not important that you regard me as a pigeon. It’s extraordinarily important that you recognize Thomas Jefferson was not a statue.”

And, I think that was my basic point in the deliberations. And in fact, I ended up being, maybe the only time in my life, successful. The title of the exhibit is, “Thomas Jefferson.” The title of the volume is “Genius of Liberty,” and I don’t have as much trouble with that because each of the authors including Annette, me and others are able to in the crucible of their essays spell out what they understand that term to mean. I think Wills does an excellent job in the introductory essay.

But I think that an exhibit in the first year of the millennium ought to reflect the scholarship that’s gone on, at least for the last third of the century, which has been a scholarship starting back in the middle ’60s, which has cast shadows over Jefferson. It’s made Jefferson not a figure that we talk about as a saint or as an apostle but as a man, a complicated and flawed creature. The great shadow, of course, is slavery and race, which Annette has mentioned. I think that we need to see him, not warts and all, but in the shadows as well as in the sunlight. 11

Was he a genius of liberty? Well, was he a genius? In the, in the modern sense of the term, meaning a person who makes these brilliant, penetrating discoveries no one else has made in the line of Newton, Einstein, Freud, perhaps Marx in politics, perhaps Aristotle, the answer is no. Jefferson was essentially a derivative thinker. He’s a synthesizer and he puts together ideas that are circulating as he said himself about the Declaration, to synthesize the harmonizing sentiments of the day.

As a political thinker, he’s not original. He’s extraordinarily lyrical. Science, no. Franklin, yes. Jefferson, no. Architecture, a little better, though essentially derivative, again copying thing off of books and prints, certainly Monticello, the Richmond capitol and the University of Virginia are great American architectural landmarks. But they’re essentially versions of a classical, palatial style. So, he’s not a genius in anything. He’s not great because of his depth in any one area. I do think he’s great for his range across many of those areas.

A genius in the second sense, which I think Annette was trying to identify, and I’ll try too, meaning having an affinity for or a talent for or a great concern about, yes with regard to freedom or liberty. Jefferson has a distinctive role in the founding generation. I think the only other person with his views on liberty is Tom Paine. Most of the other great figures to include Washington, Madison, Hamilton, Adams and Franklin, have a different view of the relationship between the individual and the state or the relationship between society than Jefferson does.

I think that in the exhibit and in Jefferson’s own correspondence and life, the two best places to see Jefferson’s distinctive view of liberty or freedom are first of all, in the period from 1776 to 1779 when Jefferson is revising the laws or the code of laws for the Commonwealth of Virginia. He is concerned with eliminating the last vestiges of primogenitor and entail. And he sees his task as removing those, what he calls, “dead hands of the past.” For Jefferson the past is a dead hand. 12

For most of the other founders, the image is the lamp of experience. For Jefferson, the past is a dead hand.

And if you can get rid of those vestiges from the dark ages, from the medieval period, from the feudal times, then the individual energies of individual American citizens will flow out naturally and liberally and freely. Jefferson in that sense is really the epitome of the kind of 18th century American philosophy. He agrees with Voltaire that the last king should be strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

[laughter]

If you can get rid of despotic government and powerful ecclesiastical institutions, natural forces will flow foreword.

The second most eloquent place where Jefferson, I think, displays his view of freedom or liberty is in his first inaugural address. It is probably, well it is certainly, one of the three great inaugural addresses -- I’d say the second. The first is Lincoln’s second inaugural -- in American history. He wrote it himself. Let me try to read a section from this. It’s all contained in the exhibit by the way. He says one thing more. This is about what we need in America at this time:

“A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them [otherwise] free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this alone is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.”

What you see there is the clear statement of what we would regard as the essential values of 19th century liberalism, the liberalism that is summed up most eloquently in the view – in the classic by John Stewart Mill, “One Liberty.” It is 13 the definition of individual liberty that has in our modern eyes a kind of libertarian identity. It is hostile to any form of government power. It is one of the great thieveries of the 20th century that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was responsible for building the Jefferson Memorial and associating Jefferson with the New Deal because the New Deal and its embodiment of government power is the essence of everything that Jefferson would have found loathsome and foreign and alien and threatening to his definition of liberty.

There’s another part of the inaugural though that goes a step past this in suggesting the level of, I don’t know whether it’s genius, but intuition that Jefferson has. Here:

“I know, indeed, that some honest men fear that a republican government can not be strong, that this Government is not strong enough; but would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept it firm and free on the theoretic and visionary fear that this Government, the world's best hope --”

-- a phrase Lincoln will steal later on --

--“the world’s best hope, may [by possibility] want energy to preserve itself? I trust not.”

Up until this point in time within the revolutionary generation, the presumption was that in order for American – the American republic to succeed you needed to have some form of an energetic government -- the Federalist Party -- that would manage and help propel the society, direct its energies. Jefferson is saying the source of energy in this kind of republic is not going to come from the government. It’s going to come from the people, that he is hostile to any form of government intervention or government intrusion. But he sees in the people, in a way that I think, for example, makes him kind of a prophet for the cyberspace 14 and the Internet, the unbelievable power that is to be released if you do free people in this kind of environment.

He is opposed, however, to the 20th century view of liberalism, as I indicated that the New Deal, that the Lyndon Johnson and Kennedy administrations represent. Notice on Jefferson’s tombstone the three things that he identifies: the Declaration of Independence, religious freedom, and UVA – the University of Virginia. He doesn’t say anything about any of his achievements in government, not about secretary of state, not as president, not the Louisiana Purchase. He wants to remove himself from that.

And in some sense, if you want to look for his ideal society, it is the University of Virginia. The University of Virginia was established without a president, without a provost and without an administration. You can hear faculty throughout the land cheering on.

[laughter]

But there was no curriculum. There were no rules of study. Everything was to be governed by the honor code, the internalization of the right thing to do. It didn’t work, by the way, though the University of Virginia did not have a president until the early years of the 20th century because of Jefferson’s influence. It is that ideal that Jefferson, I think, is after. Any form of coercion that forces an individual to behave involuntarily is wrong.

If he’s not the genius of liberty, in all senses of the term at least, he is nevertheless in my view, the great rhetorician for freedom in American history and perhaps in modern world history. It’s hard to listen to the words; they are the magic words of American history. They’re like the golden oldies that we’ve heard so often that we don’t hear them anymore. But, just listen to this. “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” Jefferson had written “sacred and 15 undeniable.” Probably Franklin changed it to “self-evident” under the basic principle that American did not need foreign aid.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable” -- he had written unalienable rights. Listen to this -- “that among these rights” -- that means there might be others, too. Tort lawyers everywhere, get ready.

[laughter]

“That among these rights are life” -- self-explanatory -- “liberty” hmmm, “and the pursuit of happiness” -- a phrase he gets from George Mason, who’s written into the preamble to the Virginia Constitution. “That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men” -- what how does it is go -- “to secure these rights governments are instituted among men” -- well, the Lockean principle, consent of the government.

Now these are the magic words of American history. Whereas when most lawyers and constitutional historians are talking about original intent, they’re talking about the Constitution. The Constitution is merely the laws the structure of government. The philosophical principles on which those laws and the government rests are laid down by Jefferson in the Declaration in these words. They have a genius about them because they have floated over time. They were heard in their own time in one way. Lincoln at Gettysburg heard them to mean other things. Martin Luther King on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 heard them to mean other things, the “promissory note,” he said.

And it can be frustrating. You can get cynical, especially if you teach a class. You put those words down. You arrange the students into groups and you say here are three issues: abortion, gun control and welfare reform. And people on both sides of each one of those issues will be able to find in the language of Thomas Jefferson, support for their particular position. I would venture that it takes a genius, perhaps, to be able to do that. 16

[laughter]

What I said at the end of my efforts went like this, and this is where I’ll end.

“In the end, to echo his own cadences, prudence dictates and decent respect for the opinions mankind requires: that we celebrate his astonishing immortality. The ultimate Jeffersonian legacy is the perpetual and unbridgeable gap between our ideals or dreams and the more fallible and sometimes sordid lives we live. Jefferson always speaks to us across the gap from the idealistic side, beckoning us like the great green light in the Great Gatsby toward our different dominions in the Promised Land, always receding just beyond our gaps into the middle distance of the better future. Jefferson remains relevant and resonant for the same reason that eternal and everlasting life remains a human hope. The man who walked the earth from 1743 to 1826, if you could know him well, will always disappoint you. The myth he has become, on the other hand, for all its contradictions and elusive abstractions, has occupied the high ground in all our national and international battlegrounds and still remains the seminal source of our will to believe.”

Thank you very much.

[applause]

[end of transcript]