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Thomas Jefferson on Food and Freedom

Thomas Jefferson on Food and Freedom

Thomas Jefferson On food and freedom

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This transcript was run through an automated transcription service and then lightly edited for clarity. There may be typos or small discrepancies from the podcast audio.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness."

These are words from the Declaration of Independence, put forward by the 13 states of America on , 1776. And these are words written by . This is the third episode of Presidential.

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LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: As you'll hear from the historians in this episode who have spent their careers studying Thomas Jefferson, the topics we could explore today are just about endless. He played a pivotal role in shaping America's approach to religious freedom, personal liberty, art, food, science, race relations. I asked a number of experts this question: What are three things that we absolutely should know about Thomas Jefferson?

Just about all of them gave the same answer.

Number one: that the Purchase happened during his presidency. Number two: that he was the main author of the Declaration of Independence. And number three: that despite penning the words "All men are created equal," he owned hundreds of slaves at his home, .

That contradiction between his words and his actions sits at the heart of his complex legacy today. And that's why many of the guests on this episode say they continue to study Jefferson, because his big contradiction is America's big contradiction -- namely, that we believe in liberty and equality, but have wrestled throughout our country's history with how to live out that ideal.

So, let's start with a better picture of him. Here's John Meacham, who wrote the bestselling Jefferson biography, "The Art of Power."

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 1 JON MEACHAM: Well, Thomas Jefferson was tall, sandy-haired, his skin freckled in the sun. People disagreed about what color eyes he had. They appeared -- they were described differently. He was somewhat awkward physically. He was a big man. Conversationally, he would never have challenged you. He disliked conflict. He always wanted to find areas of agreement -- areas of mutual enjoyment -- as opposed to disagreement; and was, I think, in many ways, the founding father who charms us most.

He was a gourmand. He was an architect. He was a writer. He was a scientist. You know, he was a politician. He had a voracious appetite for information -- for anything new. He loved fine things. You know he died very much in debt because he wanted the best of everything. So if you were walking into the president's house in or Monticello, you would find a remarkably confident, amenable and amiable host.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Jefferson was born in 1743 and he grows up in Virginia.

His father dies when he was a young teenager, but his family was fairly well off. And he eventually inherits the land that will become Monticello. He's very intellectual and he's very well educated. He goes on to study law. And then by 1776, he's part of the small group who are charged with writing the Declaration of Independence; and Jefferson is essentially the main person who drafts the whole thing.

JON MEACHAM: I think he wanted to play a large role in the largest possible stages. I think his father had been a big, significant man. had been a surveyor and explore and someone that the people looked up to. And I think Jefferson, who was the eldest son, was born with a sense that he was to participate in the public affairs of the then colony, what was later the Commonwealth, later the nation. He had an endless appetite for affection, applause, adulation -- you know, like most political people. For that matter, like most people.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Though he's charismatic in small social settings, Jefferson doesn't like public speaking the way did. He's much more comfortable and eloquent as a writer.

JON MEACHAM: Jefferson was not a speech maker. He was a committeeman. He worked quietly, often offstage. He was often the person given the duty of writing up what a committee had decided. The Declaration of Independence, in fact, was the world's most famous subcommittee report. He did not like public performance in the sense that we think of now.

So there was an introverted part of Jefferson. But what's so interesting about him is, though he was introverted, though he often was quite eloquent in describing how he wanted to return to his farms and to his mountain and to Monticello, he was inexorably drawn to the political arena -- always seeking office. For a Biblical 40 years, with the exception of maybe four, he was either in office or seeking it. Clearly, he was absolutely addicted to it, and yet couldn't quite admit it even to himself. There was a tension in his head and his heart between ambition and quiet retirement. And ambition always won.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: OK, here's the highlights reel of his political career. After drafting the Declaration of Independence, he becomes for a couple years. Then, he becomes an ambassador to France. When George Washington is president, Jefferson comes back and serves in his cabinet as the first Secretary of State. But he ends up resigning over differences with other cabinet members, like .

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As we heard about last week, he eventually runs for president at the same time as John Adams and he comes in second, which makes him Adams's vice president. After one term of Adams being in office, Jefferson runs for president again. And he wins and takes over the presidency.

That's a very short version of Jefferson's path to the .

By now, you probably know that I like asking Julie Miller, the historian at the , what it would be like to go on a blind date with these early presidents. I just I find it a really helpful way to get a better sense of them. So here's what she said about Jefferson.

JULIE MILLER: So, he certainly charmed some people. For example, here at the Library, we have the papers of Margaret Bayard Smith, who was the wife of a newspaper publisher, Samuel Smith, and the newspaper was the National Intelligencer. And it was the newspaper that was affiliated with Jefferson's party. So, the Smiths were smitten with Jefferson. Margaret Bayard Smith says things like, 'When I met him, I took his hand and vibrated all over.’

She doesn't say exactly that, but she sort of conveys that that's kind of how she felt. And she says, 'He was so modest and so personable and so kind. And yet there I was in the presence of Thomas Jefferson.' And then subsequently, she went to his house a couple of times and she describes how charming and friendly he was and how hospitable he was. And his married daughter lived with him, and again, their hospitality was made possible by the labor -- the coerced labor -- of enslaved people who had no choice but to serve them. That's how these Virginians could be hospitable.

And she describes how Jefferson gave her a tour of his library, took her on a carriage ride through his lovely grounds around his house. She complained that he drove too fast and that sort of thing. So, he probably would have been fun, right? In a sense, because he was interested in many, many, many things. He had a very, very, very interesting house in a beautiful setting.

I would get away from him as fast as possible.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Why?

JULIE MILLER: I don't think he's a good catch. And in fact, you could do a lot better.

He was not always truthful, Thomas Jefferson. He sometimes said things behind people's backs that were not very nice, and he could be a little tricky. He was very different from Washington. Washington was really a man of candor in many respects. Jefferson was not. Jefferson was really a politician. Washington was a politician, too, but Washington was all about, like, leading by the quality of his character. Whereas Jefferson was president at a time when the parties, while still not officially parties -- they were still what people were calling factions, in a sense -- were much more developed. And he was very much a creature of his party, very interested in undermining the other party. And even though in his inaugural address he said, “We are all Republicans. We are all federalists.” He didn't mean it. You know, he didn't. He basically felt that his people should come out on top and the other people should not.

So no, I don't think -- I think you'd go on a date with him, it would be really fun, and you wouldn't go again. I think you'd spend a little time with him and maybe you would feel that there were layers and layers of things to know about him, which perhaps you wouldn’t like.

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LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, let's begin peeling back those layers.

And one of the first ones we'll look at is the splintering of political factions. You know how I said before that Jefferson resigned from being Washington's secretary of state? Well, that's because he's already clashing with people like , who's running the Treasury under George Washington.

If you've been listening to the soundtrack of “Hamilton,” the musical, then a lot of this is probably very familiar to you.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: This is Annette Gordon-Reed, a professor at Harvard Law and a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer talking about Jefferson's beef with Hamilton.

ANNETTE GORDON-REED: He did not like Hamilton's financial plan to assume state debts -- that the federal government would do that. He did not like the fact that Hamilton thought that the president should serve for life on good behavior and that the Senate should serve for life on good behavior, even though the person will be elected.

Jefferson thought it was too much like a monarchy and that you should have regular elections. Hamilton wanted something very much like Great Britain, and Jefferson said: This is a chance for us to do something completely new.

These are two positions that were not reconcilable. Hamilton persuaded Washington that his way was better. And Jefferson sort of found himself on the losing end of a lot of battles in the cabinet battles. And so, he just left. He resigned his office. In 1793, he made the decision that he was going to resign and go back to Monticello. And that's what he did, and claimed that he was out of public life. But I think he was kind of -- you know, he was lying in wait for his chance to be president, which he eventually became.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Jefferson worries that the whole system they set up isn't working. It's supposed to be a republic of the people, and he thinks it's starting to look too aristocratic and too much like a monarchy. He ends up eventually referring to his own presidential election as the Revolution of 1800.

PETER ONUF: Jefferson has a gift for exaggeration and hyperbole, which is famous, particularly now that we love Hamilton so much. It's hard to understand how he could have had such fear and animosity. Anyway, he thought of it as a transformative moment of both returning to 1776, getting it right, purging the of high Federalist tyranny and despotism.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: That was Peter Onuf, one of the hosts of the BackStory podcast -- which is a great history podcast to listen to -- and a Jefferson scholar at the .

As president, Jefferson does even subtle things to set a new tone for the role. Remember how in the first episode about George Washington, Julie Miller talked about how he was trying to make sure the Europeans took him seriously? Well, keep that in mind as you listen to this story about Jefferson.

There's this story about how a British ambassador, Anthony Merry, comes over with his wife for a

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 4 diplomatic visit.

JULIE MILLER: So Anthony Merry dresses himself up in his, like, special diplomatic jacket or whatever. And takes him over to meet the president because he's going to be presented to the president, right? So, they arrive in the White House, which was called the President's House at the time, which is kind of a wreck. It's not, like, totally built. And they can't find them. So, Madison and Merry are kind of standing there, and, you know, they don't really know what to do. And Merry thinks he's going to be met with some kind of pomp -- that there's going to be, like, a reception, and people are going to be standing around and he'll be introduced to this one and that one. And there's just nothing. He's just standing there. So, then, he sees Jefferson -- Jefferson kind of wanders into the room, as if he wasn't even expecting him. And he's wearing, like, old slippers and sort of ratty-looking pants and stuff.

And thenthey're kind of standing up uncomfortably in the hallway. And it's incredibly awkward -- just incredibly awkward. So, anyway, then the insults continue. Merry and his wife were invited to dinner, and they don't make a place for them to sit and no one walks his wife into the dinner. They have to just scramble around and find a place to sit at the dinner. So, after that, Mrs. Merry won't go to any more dinners. They stay in Washington for years, and Mrs. Merry won't go to anymore dinners.

And it's a scandal. He writes home and he says, 'You know, I can't believe this guy. He must be doing this on purpose -- to shame me.’ And he was. I mean, he was. That's what he was doing.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, it was purposeful.

JULIE MILLER: Yeah, right. So, on one hand, the thing that's interesting about this is that Jefferson wanted to promote the idea that the United States is a republic. It does not have a court. It does not have a king. And Jefferson liked the idea of what he called pell-mell. In other words, the idea that in these kinds of diplomatic functions, everyone's going to just sit where they like and there aren't going to be so many rules about who visits whom first, and who walks whom into what room and whose wife sits where, and this and that.

In 1803, Jefferson tried to write out what his principles about all this were. In this document -- this is Jefferson's handwriting…

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: It's beautiful handwriting.

JULIE MILLER: It's very small. And this document is called "Canons of Etiquette."

In other words, these are his rules. And basically, what he's saying is, you know -- hang on, let me get it. So, he makes a couple of rules just to kind of clear things up. He says a couple of things. One of the things he says: “When brought together in society, all are perfectly equal, whether foreign or domestic, titled are untitled, in or out of office.”

And the thing about the clothes is also very, very interesting because Jefferson was known to have very fancy French clothing -- because of the time that he had spent in France as he was minister to France. And there's a famous portrait of him dressed in a very frilly shirt. And he, in fact, loved all sorts of fancy French things and owned them and used them. But when he met the British minister, he wore his rundown slippers and his raggedy clothes. And he was kind of making a

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 5 point. He was saying, 'This is a republic. We don't stand on ceremony here. This is how we do it here.'

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Part of what's interesting, though, is that in some other notable ways, Jefferson exercised a lot of power as president.

It's during his first term that the Louisiana Purchase happens. This is where the U.S. buys basically the middle third of what's now the United States from France -- well, from in particular. This is land that includes what's now , , , , , , .

At the same time, on the international front, Napoleon is waging war across Europe, and Europe is a mess. Jefferson ends up trying to keep America out of all of this, but he's struggling.

Here's Peter Onuf again.

PETER ONUF: The big thing to keep in mind is that America is always at war, or the threat of war, during that entire first quarter century of the New Republic's history. And Jefferson seeks to negotiate his way through those dangers and has mixed success. It's hard to stay out of those wars. He is, in many ways that he wouldn't like to acknowledge, an ally of Hamilton's in constructing a fiscal military state capable of preserving the United States in a dangerous world. Jefferson was as much a big government guy as any Hamiltonian when it came to foreign affairs. He had to be. It was that kind of world.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Here's John Meacham on how Jefferson reshapes the office.

JON MEACHAM: Well, he broadened the powers of the office remarkably. He was a strong chief executive. By buying Louisiana the way he did, he created a precedent that Jackson, Lincoln, FDR all drew on in times of crisis. The presidency was stronger when he left it than he found it. And one would not have bet on that, given his political leanings were for a weaker central government -- until he held executive power. He was against executive power until he had it, basically.

The presidency was immeasurably strengthened by Jefferson's years. And the examples of that are the purchase of Louisiana, the imposition of an embargo to try to avoid war with Britain, and also the idea that an executive and the role of the state was to explore and to be more culturally engaged. So, the Lewis and Clark expedition was something that was undertaken in the Jefferson presidency. He saw the presidency not merely as a political office, but as a cultural one.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: We're going to take a little detour here to talk about Jefferson's interest in science, exploration and food. It may seem a little strange to sandwich this in between our discussion of his presidency and his legacy with , but this is another part of who he is that shaped his personal and presidential decisions.

His interest in science and exploration is a large part of what motivates him during his presidency to commission the Lewis and Clark expedition, where a small group of Army volunteers set off to explore and chart the West. We can also see how Jefferson's decision-making as president took a decidedly scientific approach. Many of his papers are full of tables and charts and lists. That was the way he thought through decisions -- by listing out numbers of soldiers or numbers of ships.

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And now to food. Both Jon Meacham and Julie Miller already mentioned Jefferson's love for the finer things in life and how much of this stems from his time in France. Part of what's complex and interesting is how he wanted the presidency to be less aristocratic, and yet he personally had very high-minded tastes. I spoke with Joe Yonan, 's food editor about this part of his character.

JOE YONAN: Some criticized him during certain points of his life for being maybe too interested in what the French had to offer. I'll use wine as an example. Before Jefferson went to France he, like many of his contemporaries, primarily drank Madeira and Port and other really strong, high- alcohol wines. And when he went to France, he really became enamored of this more sophisticated, more complex lighter wine.

And that was true throughout his life. And when he died, the wine cellar at Monticello had thousands of bottles of wine, and they were almost exclusively from southern France.

He brought back hundreds of vines and cuttings from dozens of grape varieties in Europe, and he had this fantasy that he would plant them all at Monticello and they would take off and bear fruit and he could would be a vintner.

Well, that didn't really work out that way. But he did become quite a connoisseur of wine, and he bought what, I think, today would be considered possibly scandalous accounts of wine. When he was president -- now, this was out of his own money -- I read one estimate that over the course of his administration, he spent about $11,000 on wine. And that, in today's dollars, that would be $175,000, which is pretty remarkable when you think about it. I dare say that Barack Obama did not spend $175,000 of his own money on wine while he was president.

You know, one other thing about Jefferson that really fascinated me when it came to food is that, by many accounts, actually, he loved vegetables more than meat. And, in that way, he was really ahead of his time. You know, you think of this trend now toward vegetables at the center of the plate and meat used as a garnish. And Jefferson was talking about those things in his day. There was one quote that I thought was really interesting where he wrote to his doctor in 1819: “I have lived temperately, eating little animal food. And that, not as an aliment, so much as a condiment, for the vegetables, which constitute my principal diet.” Now, that's something that you could hear a chef like Dan Barber at Blue Hill in say today.

He planted this really incredible garden at Monticello. He called it his kitchen terrace garden, but it was a thousand feet long. When you think about a thousand feet, that's three football fields long. And he grew 330 varieties of vegetables there. The garden was primarily for his experiments. He took detailed notes on which varieties did better and which did worse. And again, he was ahead of his time. He was promoting the eating of tomatoes long before most people believed that they weren't poisonous. Jefferson was seen in public eating a tomato, and it was a scandal.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Do you get the sense at all that these interests of his opened up the culinary -- I don't know -- vision of America, in some way.

JOE YONAN: You know, there's some debate about specific things that Jefferson might have introduced to America. Like, there are myths that he introduced vanilla and macaroni, which was sort of the preferred term for all pasta at the time. And I think those have been debunked. But he

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 7 was certainly one of the first people to make and talk about ice cream.

And he brought a pasta-making machine home with him from Italy. He had a wide-ranging curiosity. When he traveled, he wanted to see things being made, and he wondered if he might be able to make them, too, at home. So, he apparently stayed up all night when he traveled to Italy to watch them make parmesan cheese. I find that really interesting. I think he was a lifelong learner. He was really curious about the world and wanted to experience that.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: All roads in the study of Jefferson, though, eventually lead us back to his relationship to slavery and to those words: Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

PAUL FINKELMAN: Jefferson is ordering carpets from France and books and more books and more books and French wine. It's being paid for by buying and selling human beings. And I don't know how you explain that. But I think it's something that the American people should think about, because it's partially the contradiction of American culture -- it's the contradiction of American society -- that we believe in liberty and equality, but we have a harder time practicing.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: This is Paul Finkelman, author of the book, “Slavery and the Founders.”

PAUL FINKELMAN: He buys and sells human beings throughout his life. He punishes slaves for this behavior by selling them away from their families. And in the only book he wrote, “Notes on the State of Virginia,” he writes a scientific defense of racism and a scientific defense of slavery. He essentially says: It's OK to sell husbands from wives, wives from husbands, children from parents. He says they don't love each other the way we -- meaning white people -- love each other.

So, we have this gigantic, enormous contradiction between a philosophy of liberty, and a man who is, while not physically cruel -- he doesn't have his slaves beaten – is, emotionally, incredibly cruel to his own slaves. And, in fact, owns his own children.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Thomas Jefferson fathers six children by ex-slave , though only four survive past infancy. During the time of his presidency, there are some reports of his relationship with her. But Jefferson never publicly addresses the rumors.

Fast forward to present day, and most historians take the relationship between Jefferson and Sally Hemings as pretty uncontested fact, given the historical records they've looked through and some of the recent DNA testing of ancestors.

During his life, Jefferson owns more than 600 slaves. And only a few of those does he ever free, even in his will.

PAUL FINKELMAN: Between 1780 and 1810, the free black population -- the non-slaved population -- in Virginia grew from about 2,000 people to over 30,000 people.

That enormous growth in free blacks came from individual slave owners, the neighbors of Thomas Jefferson, emancipating their own slaves, setting their slaves free -- making conscious decisions to sacrifice their own economic high standard of living because it's immoral to own human beings.

Thomas Jefferson was not one of those people. George Washington kept his slaves all his life, but he also gave them land to work. He stopped monitoring them the way masters did – he prepared

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 8 them for freedom. And then when George Washington died, he freed every one of the slaves and gave everyone of them land. Thomas Jefferson didn't do that.

I think you can embrace Jefferson for many reasons. He is the author of the Declaration of Independence. He is a scientist who pushes for more science. He articulates notions of separation of church and state, which are very important, and I have no problem embracing him for that and honoring him for that. But at the same time, not only his personal life, but his public life, is one that is adamantly pro-slavery.

And I think the tragedy is because he was so famous, and because he was who he is, he's someone who could have done something that would have mattered. Jefferson was the leader who could have said: We Virginians must begin to end slavery.

If you go through Jefferson's writings, you can find lots of statements where he says that slavery is wrong; where he says that this is not a good idea. And then you have to ask yourself: This is a man who was willing to risk his life to fight the greatest military power on Earth -- he says in the Declaration that he offers his life, his fortune and his sacred honor for American liberty to fight the British -- but he can't figure out how to lift a finger to end slavery.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: I asked Annette Gordon-Reed how critical Jefferson's contemporaries would have been of him and the fact that he wrote “All men are created equal” and, yet, was a slaveholder.

ANNETTE GORDON-REED: We see him as very reactionary and conservative, in the way people portray him [today]. But at the time, the mindset -- the image -- was of an anti-slavery person. There were some people who thought it was hypocritical, obviously, that he was a slave owner; but I think the more predominant feeling was that this was the system he was born into, and he spoke out against it and that he believed that eventually things would go -- you know, that things would change.

I mean the real criticism of Jefferson and slavery comes more near the end of his life, when the sectional crisis heats up in Missouri -- the Missouri Crisis of 1819 and the decision about whether or not Missouri was going to come into the Union as a slave state or free state -- and things divide along sectional lines. Then I think there begins to be much more criticism of slaveholders, because the conflict is much more open at that point.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: I asked both Annette and Paul what they think about the word “hypocrite” to describe Jefferson. That's a word you hear a lot today in reference to the difference between his public words and his personal actions. But neither one of them found that word particularly fitting. Interestingly, though, they had different reasons why they took issue with it.

PAUL FINKELMAN: So, it's more than hypocrisy -- it's kind of a blindness and dishonesty that develops and helps create the culture of slavery and racism that, in some ways, we're still trying to overcome today.

ANNETTE GORDON-REED: I think the hypocrisy charge is sort of a shorthand way of saying that you know something about Jefferson. You know what I mean? It's like it's become a trope. It's sort of an easy way to make a comment about him, without really thinking about what's going on in his life.

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I think he's no more hypocritical than the other members of the founding generation. We fixate on him, really, because of the Declaration. “All men are created equal” -- Madison didn't say that, but he held slaves. Other people, did as well. So, it was a hypocritical age, I would say, if you must use that term.

But I think that's a feature that's not unknown to most of us. In everybody's life -- maybe nothing so big as slavery -- but surely, there are things where we have particular intellectual beliefs but we are not emotionally equipped to follow through on them. We say we believe in one thing, but we don't live that way.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: I'm sure there are people who've asked you if you like Jefferson. What is the answer you tend to give people when they ask you that?

ANNETTE GORDON-REED: I tend to give people: Sometimes I like him, and sometimes I don't. As a subject, I think he's endlessly fascinating. As a person -- I mean, as much as you can know a person who died centuries ago -- I think the saving grace for me for him is that I don't detect malice in his personality. Cluelessness, yes. A person who had the prejudices of his time about race -- the prejudice of many people today. But I don't perceive him as a malicious person the way I read about some slaveholders and some people in that era.

So, on balance, I would say -- the most I could say is some things I respect and admire and other things I just hate. Ambivalent, I suppose, would be the best way to put it. But as a subject I don't think there's anybody more interesting, the Hamilton moment notwithstanding.

There's nobody who made more contributions in different places than he did. I mean, he's all over American history. And I just don't think it's possible to understand how we started if you don't grapple with his life. He went on so many different areas, thought about so many different things – science; religion; race; politics; government; where African-Americans fit in the American polity.

We don't like his answer. But, the fact that he suggested it would be a struggle I think is pretty useful to us, because in some degree he -- in some ways -- he was right. It hasn't been easy for blacks and whites to live together as equals in this country. And that's one of the reasons people damn him -- for suggesting that it wasn't going to be possible -- but it was not a notion that was farfetched, because we're still grappling with these issues today about black citizenship.

I mean I studied his life because it's a way of talking about most of the central questions that Americans grapple with. How do we live together here in a multiracial, multicultural society? He didn't think we could do it. But I think his life, you know, invites us to think about this and to try to figure out that question that he could never answer.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: That brings us to the end of this week's episode. There is obviously so much more we could have discussed on these topics and on others. Like, we didn't really get to talk about freedom of religion or about how Jefferson founded the University of Virginia. There's just -- there's so much. So, if you want to continue the conversation with other listeners of this podcast, find us on Instagram and Twitter at @presidential_wp. All week, we'll be exploring more of Jefferson's complex legacy. I'm sure many of you will have a lot to say about both the best and the worst of what he has left this country. As Peter Onuf said--

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 10 PETER ONUF: He's a wonderful guy to worry about. And probably the anti-Jefferson talk has been just as important as the kind of reverential worship of the great Democratic icon in keeping his name and fame alive -- because with Jefferson, you get both sides. You can't get away from this complicated, seemingly contradictory legacy. They're both there. It's not as if you have to accept one at the expense of the other. In fact, if you do, you're not going to have a nearly complicated enough understanding of this thing that we call democracy, which has its very dark side, but is also, of course, the only hope we have for what it would take to have a liberal and just regime and a world of peace and all that good stuff.

It's all there.

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