Thomas Jefferson

(horse clattering) BURSTEIN: There is an interesting story that takes place in the eighteen-teens.

There is a clergyman who stops at Ford's Tavern in Virginia, which is on the road between Monticello and Poplar Forest.

And he encounters a man he terms "a respectable stranger."

And he engages in a conversation at some length with this stranger.

First, they talk about mechanical operations, and he's certain that the man is a, uh, an engineer of some sort.

Then they move on to matters of agriculture, and he thinks this is, in his words, "a large farmer."

Finally, they talk about religion, and he's certain that the man is a clergyman like himself.

The hour gets late, and they go to bed and the next morning, he arises and speaks with the innkeeper and asks for the stranger he had seen the night before.

And he describes him, and the innkeeper says, "Why don't you know that was Thomas Jefferson?"

ELLIS: He is the greatest enigma among major figures in American history.

I think we're attracted to him in part because of his mysterious character.

If uh, if he were a monument, he would be the Sphinx.

Um, if he were a painting, he would be the Mona Lisa.

If he were a, a character in a play, it would be Hamlet.

(theme music playing).

NARRATOR: He was a farmer, a violinist, a writer, a surveyor, a scientist, a lover of fine wines, and a restless architect who could never quite bring himself to finish his own house.

He was a reluctant politician with a voice so soft he could barely make himself heard from the podium, but he helped to found America's first political party.

He denounced the moral bankruptcy he saw in Europe but delighted in the gilded salons of Paris.

He was a statesman who was twice elected president of the United States but did not think his presidency worth listing among the achievements on his gravestone.

He was a life-long champion of small government who took it upon himself to more than double the size of his country.

He endured the loss of nearly everything he held dear but somehow never lost his faith in the future.

He distilled a century of Enlightenment thinking into one remarkable sentence, which began, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

Yet he owned more than 200 human beings and never saw fit to free them.

Thomas Jefferson was a "shadow man," said John Adams.

His character was "like the great rivers, whose bottoms we cannot see and make no noise."

He remained a puzzle even to those who thought they knew him best, embodied contradictions common to the country whose independence it fell to him to proclaim, in words whose precise meaning Americans have debated ever since.

WILL: He gave us our creed.

A lot of nations emerge from the mists of history, and their basic identity is tribal, it's rooted in groups.

Ours is rooted in a great assent, an assent to certain propositions.

We are, as Lincoln said, Lincoln being the greatest student of Jefferson of them all, "We are a nation dedicated to a proposition."

Jefferson wrote the proposition.

COX: He is the conceiving spirit of this country.

Somehow, at 33 years old, here he was, and he could write the Declaration, and they knew it.

They somehow knew that here was person who couldn't speak very well, but they knew he could write, and they assigned him that task, and he accepted it.

JENKINSON: Jefferson is important because he wrote in imperishable language some of the most important truths about culture and about freedom and civilization.

The Declaration of Independence has been quoted back at tyrants by every insurgency movement since Thomas Jefferson.

So we have to know about Jefferson because he's the man who found the language to express the greatest aspirations that humanity has.

VIDAL: He said the right words at the right time, and they were never forgotten.

Jefferson is American scripture.

You must have him on your side if you're going to have a government based upon the people.

FRANKLIN: Unfortunately and tragically, I would say that, in a sense, Thomas Jefferson personifies the United States and its history.

He was a man who claimed, you see, to be a man of the Enlightenment; he was a scientist, a humanist.

He knew what he was saying when he said, "All men are created equal."

And it simply can't be reconciled with the institution of slavery.

JENKINSON: When you start to explore the life and achievement of Jefferson, you find that there is a gap between his vision and the beautiful articulation of that vision on the one hand and then his actual achievement as a human being on the other.

Was he a contemptible hypocrite, as some believe, or were there simply inconsistencies between his life and his vision, as others like to believe, or is there some way of understanding this which preserves the integrity of Jefferson?

How can we see through these paradoxes and inconsistencies and even hypocrisies and get at the man?

(crickets chirping) JEFFERSON: Every human being must be viewed according to what it is good for; for none of us, no, not one, is perfect; and were we to love none who had imperfections, this world would be a desert for our love.

Thomas Jefferson.

NARRATOR: He was born in Albemarle County on the edge of the Virginia wilderness on April 13, 1743.

His earliest memory was of being carried on a pillow at the age of two by one of his father's slaves.

His mother, Jane Randolph, was an aristocrat, a member of one of Virginia's most prominent families.

But his father, Peter Jefferson, was a self-made man: industrious and fiercely independent.

He told his son stories of the frontier, introduced him to Indians, took him walking in the deep, uncharted woods that stretched away beyond the western horizon, gave him a love of liberty.

By the time he was six, Jefferson was poring through the books in his father's library.

Soon, he had mastered Greek and Latin and taught himself the violin.

But in August 1757, when he was just 14, his father died suddenly.

JEFFERSON: When I recollect that at 14 years of age, the whole care and direction of myself was thrown on myself entirely, without a relative or friend qualified to advise or guide me and recollect the various sorts of bad company with which I associated from time to time, I am astonished that I did not turn off with some of them, and become as worthless to society as they were.

NARRATOR: A year after his father's death, Jefferson was sent away to a one-room schoolhouse to acquire the kind of classical education his father had thought essential.

There, he met a young man named Dabney Carr, who soon became his closest friend.

On weekends, the two rode their horses to the top of what they called "Tom's Mountain" on his father's land overlooking the tiny village of Charlottesville.

They would study together in the shade of a great oak tree they both loved, and Jefferson began to talk of someday building a home there.

The two boys promised that if one should die before the other, the one who still lived would bury his friend on the mountain.

At 16, Jefferson, attended by his personal slave, Jupiter, went on to the College of William and Mary at Williamsburg, the colonial capital of Virginia.

At first, Jefferson was overwhelmed by the attractions of the town.

JEFFERSON: From the circumstances of my position, I was often thrown into the society of horse racers, card players, fox hunters, scientific and professional men, and of dignified men, and many a time, I asked myself, which of these kinds of reputation should I prefer?

That of a horse jockey?

A fox hunter?

An orator?

Or the honest advocate of my country's rights?

BOBER: He went to the horse races and to the balls, and he danced, and he was involved with a lot of the girls, and he had a good time.

When he went home that summer, he realized how much time he had wasted, and then Dabney Carr went back with him, and at that point, he resolved that he would study.

NARRATOR: Now he stood apart in his devotion to his school work.

"I was a hard student until I entered the business of life," he remembered.

He was said to be at his books 15 hours out of every 24.

Jefferson's shy charm and unusual seriousness prompted one of his professors to introduce him to George Wythe, the colony's leading attorney, who agreed to take Jefferson on and to teach him the law.

He was "my second father," Jefferson wrote later, "my faithful and beloved mentor."

And Wythe, for his part, proudly showed off his prized student to the men who ruled Virginia.

BOBER: By this time, it was the brilliance and open-mindedness of this young Thomas Jefferson that inspired the Governor to invite him to the palace once a week for dinner, conversation, and music.

At that table, this young boy was exposed to the thought currents in Europe, what was then called the Enlightenment.

And later on, he said that he realized that that dining room table was truly his university.

BURSTEIN: In Williamsburg, as a student, Jefferson was soaking up all the learning he could get.

The Enlightenment, for Thomas Jefferson, was a spirit of intellectual optimism.

The Enlightenment thinkers saw the good in the human spirit, and Jefferson was most intoxicated by the idea that human beings possessed the potential to do remarkable good and that a government could be created which would tap into this spirit, tap into this impulse to do good.

NARRATOR: Jefferson eventually earned his living at the law, but politics began to take more and more of his time.

As he traveled throughout the colony, his chess set and violin in his saddlebags, he saw that his world was very little like the world the Enlightenment philosophers had envisioned.

John Locke, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton preached a "freedom of the mind," but in the British colonies, each citizen was expected to obey without complaint the dictates of a far-off Parliament.

At 27, Jefferson moved to the hill which he and Dabney Carr had named "Tom's Mountain" when they were boys.

He renamed it Monticello, Italian for "little mountain," and began to build himself a house.

JEFFERSON: I have lately removed to the mountain.

I have here but one room, which serves me for parlor and kitchen and hall.

I may add, for bed chamber and study, too.

I have hopes, however, of getting more elbow room this summer.

NARRATOR: He first built a modest brick cottage but soon began to draw up far more ambitious plans.

They were based on the works of the Italian Renaissance master, Palladio, and inspired by the classical forms of ancient Greece and Rome.

No detail would escape his imagination.

Early in 1771, Jefferson began to court Martha Wayles Skelton, the young widow of a fellow lawyer.

No portrait of her has ever been found, but she was said to be beautiful, graceful, fond of music.

He called her Patty.

They were married at her father's house on New Year's Day, 1772.

She was 23.

He was 28.

Two weeks later, the newlyweds rode through the snow to start their new life together at Monticello.

The cottage was cold and dark, and Martha was said to have shivered at the "horrible dreariness of such a house."

But Jefferson rummaged around and found a half-bottle of wine behind some books on a shelf, and they started their married life together in a tiny 18-by-18-foot cottage clinging to the edge of his mountain.

JEFFERSON: In every scheme of happiness, she is placed in the foreground of the picture as the principal figure.

Take that away, and it is no picture for me.

NARRATOR: Their first child, Martha, whom they called Patsy, was born at Monticello the following fall.

BURSTEIN: The interesting thing about Thomas Jefferson's life is that this man who comes down to us in history as the embodiment of American optimism, the promise of a bright future for this young country, then young country, in his own life, he was bound to lose everything he loved.

NARRATOR: In May of 1773, Jefferson's friend, Dabney Carr, died of "bilious fever."

True to his word, Jefferson saw to it that he was laid to rest at Monticello.

As he would all his life, he sought escape from sadness in the certainty of numbers and making lists.

He dulled his grief by calculating the length of time it would take for his slaves to prepare the graveyard for his friend's coffin.

JEFFERSON: Two hands grubbed the graveyard 80 feet square, one-seventh of an acre in three-and-a-half hours, so that one would have done it in seven hours and would grub an acre in 49 hours, equaling four days.

NARRATOR: Two weeks later, Martha's father died, leaving Jefferson crushing debts to British creditors, thousands of acres of land, and 135 more slaves.

ISAAC: "Mr. Jefferson was a tall, strait-bodied man as ever you see, right square-shouldered.

Nary, a man in this town walked so straight as my Old Master.

Neat a built man as ever was seen in Vaginny, I reckon, or any place, a straight-up man, long face, high nose."

Isaac.

NARRATOR: Jefferson sold off most of the land he inherited, but he kept the slaves, including a woman said to be his late father-in-law's mistress, Betty Hemings, and the two small children she had borne him, James and Sally.

Thomas Jefferson was now the second largest slaveholder in Albemarle County, and he set his slaves to work building his estate.

ISAAC: Monticello house was pulled down in part and built up again some six or seven times.

They was 40 years at work upon that house before Mr. Jefferson stopped building.

NARRATOR: Over the years, he would completely redesign Monticello, but it would always be both home and safe haven from the political storms that soon began to break around him.

BURNABY: The colonists of Virginia are haughty and jealous of their liberties, impatient of restraint, and can scarcely bear the thought of being controlled by a foreign power.

Andrew Burnaby NARRATOR: In 1765, Britain had passed the Stamp Act, which imposed on American colonists a special tax on printed matter.

Many Virginians, Jefferson included, were incensed that a distant parliament could, without so much as consulting them, demand money from their pockets.

Protests erupted from New Hampshire to Georgia.

BURSTEIN: There came a time when English liberty no longer felt the same as it had.

By the 1760s and 1770s, there was something new in the air.

They felt that they were being enslaved.

They used the term "enslavement" to describe what Parliament was inflicting upon these people who had grown up with a certain view of English liberty.

And if English liberty could no longer be preserved, then what was their recourse?

NARRATOR: In 1769, the Virginia House of Burgesses passed a resolution pledging to boycott British goods rather than pay a new tax.

The first man to sign was the richest man in the colony, a tall, austere veteran of the French and Indian War, George Washington.

Thomas Jefferson, the newest member of the House of Burgesses, was the sixteenth to sign, and over the coming years, as patriotic feelings continued to rise, so did his influence.

The shy and bookish student of philosophy was becoming a revolutionary.

When Massachusetts patriots defied the Crown by dumping tea into Boston Harbor, the British government tried to starve the city into submission with its warships.

Jefferson helped persuade his fellow Burgesses to declare a day of prayer and fasting to show Virginia's solidarity with the people of Boston.

Its effect, he said, "was like a shock of electricity."

In 1774, as the colonies prepared for the first time to meet together in Philadelphia at what they called a Continental Congress, Jefferson wrote "A Summary View of the Rights of British America."

He boldly argued that since the association between Crown and colonies was purely voluntary, Parliament had no inherent authority over Americans.

JEFFERSON: Are Americans to live at the imperious breath of a body of men whom they never saw, in whom they never confided, and over whom they have no powers of punishment or removal?

Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day, but a series of oppressions, too plainly prove a deliberate, systematical plan of reducing us to slavery.

The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy but cannot disjoin them.

NARRATOR: Jefferson's essay was widely read in both England and America.

And he was aware of the traditional penalty paid by those whom the Crown considered traitors.

BRITISH MAN: You are to be hanged by the neck, but not until you are dead; for while you are still living, your bodies are to be taken down, your bowels torn out and burned before your faces, your heads then cut off, and your bodies divided into four quarters to be then at the King's disposal; and may the Almighty God have mercy on your souls.

NARRATOR: On June 11, 1775, Jefferson set out from Monticello for Philadelphia; he had been chosen as a delegate to the Continental Congress.

By then, Americans had fought British soldiers at Lexington and Concord, and George Washington had left Philadelphia and was on his way to take command of the rebel forces.

The American Revolution had begun.

(horse whinnying) WARD: "Philadelphia, June 22, 1775.

Yesterday, the famous Mr. Jefferson, a delegate from Virginia, arrived.

He looks like a very sensible, spirited, fine fellow, and by the pamphlet which he wrote last summer, he certainly is one."

Samuel Ward NARRATOR: In 1775, kings still ruled in France and England, a czarina in St. Petersburg, a sultan in Constantinople, a divinely invested emperor in Peking, and a shogun in Japan.

But in June 1775, a small group of merchants, planters, and lawyers met in Philadelphia to see whether they might govern themselves.

Thomas Jefferson of Virginia rented himself a room and began to circulate among the other delegates: Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania; Robert Livingston of New York; Roger Sherman of Connecticut; and a short, opinionated delegate from Massachusetts, John Adams, who would become Jefferson's friend, then his enemy, and then his friend again.

Adams was as voluble as Jefferson was reticent, but he took to the young Virginian right away and thought him "tough as a lignum knot."

ADAMS: During the whole time I sat with him in Congress, I never heard him utter three sentences together.

Though a silent member of Congress, he was so prompt, frank, explicit, and decisive upon committees, that he soon seized upon my heart.

John Adams JENKINSON: Jefferson is 33 years old.

He's one of the youngest members of the Continental Congress of the United States.

He's a provincial from Virginia, he has scarcely ever been out of his home state.

He is a shy man.

He has perhaps a slight speech impediment, and he has a high-pitched and weak voice and is not given to asserting himself in any way.

He's considered a brilliant committee man, but he has no presence in the Continental Congress.

ELLIS: He's not comfortable talking in public.

He's not a great orator.

In fact, he's, even as a lawyer, not very good at making oral presentations to juries.

He's much more comfortable crafting language in private, where he has control.

NARRATOR: Over the next two years, Jefferson would serve quietly on 34 different committees.

He was a master at drafting legislation, had what Adams called "a happy talent of composition," and impressed everyone with his hard work.

But he was privately suffering.

JEFFERSON: I have never received the scrip of a pen from any mortal in Virginia since I left it nor been able by any inquiries I could make to hear of my family.

The suspense under which I am is too terrible to be endured.

If anything has happened, for God's sake, let me know it.

NARRATOR: In September 1775, his second daughter, Jane, had died at 17 months, leaving his wife so frail and grief-stricken that she could not even write to him.

BOBER: He was living in a three-mile-an-hour world.

It would have taken him better than a week to travel the distance from Philadelphia to Virginia, and so, of necessity, Martha was alone a great deal of the time and, and suffered.

She, she often went into states of depression because she wanted him with her and, of course, because she was losing these, these "dear pledges," as Jefferson called them, one after the other.

NARRATOR: On March 31, 1776, Jefferson's own mother died.

Migraine headaches paralyzed him for weeks.

JEFFERSON: Perfect happiness, I believe, was never intended by the deity to be the lot of any one of his creatures in this world.

The most fortunate of us frequently meet with calamities which may greatly afflict us, and to fortify our minds against the attacks of these misfortunes should be one of the principal studies and endeavors of our lives.

(church bells ringing) NARRATOR: On June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia introduced a resolution that declared that "these United Colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states."

Congress scheduled a vote on Lee's resolution for early July, hoping it would convince France to join their struggle against England, the mightiest power on earth.

They established a committee to draft "a declaration of independence," to which all 13 colonies could subscribe.

Benjamin Franklin was asked to write the first draft and refused; he made it a policy, he said, not to write documents subject to editing by others.

Jefferson and Adams were assigned the task.

JENKINSON: Both Jefferson and Adams were committed to a republic, but they had very different styles.

Jefferson was bland and careful and aphoristic and high-flown.

His rhetoric always soared towards aspiration and, and to human dignity.

Adams was earthy and, anecdotal, and pugnacious.

Jefferson says, "I think you ought to do it."

And Adams says, "No, three reasons you must do it.

First, you are a Virginian, and a Virginian must be at the head of this business.

Second, I, John Adams, am disliked and obnoxious, and if I write it, it will lack credibility.

And third, you are ten times better a writer than I am."

(clock ticking) JEFFERSON: Not to find out new principles or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before, but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take.

NARRATOR: Alone in a rented room, Jefferson went to work.

BOBER: I would love to be there when he was writing the Declaration of Independence.

He was in a little house on, on Market Street, writing on this wonderful desk.

His servant, Bob Hemings, was with him.

He would serve him tea while he was working.

He would play his violin periodically and he would write without any notes.

I would love to see him struggling for exactly the right word, the right phrase trying to match the sound and the sense of each of the words, the cadences, thinking through the ideas that he'd been studying of John Locke, of Montesquieu, all the reading that he had done over the years.

And as he struggled over each word, writing, crossing out, "interlining" as he said.

And then, as a page got too messy, copying it "fair."

NARRATOR: It took him only a few days.

The document, he said, was simply "intended to be an expression of the American mind."

VIDAL: He was able, somehow, to pick up on all the waves of thought that were going through from Paris to London, from the coffee houses to Boston, and all these ideas were coming in and coming in.

What is a good country?

What is a good way to live?

What is a republic?

Should we have a republic?

What is a monarchy?

What is a colonist?

What are the relations between master and slave, the relations between owner and the owned?

And he took all of this and in two or three sentences, hurled it at the world.

And it still goes round, it still inspires, and it is still the essence of whatever spirit we still have and that we once had, indeed.

JEFFERSON: When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

("My Country Tis Of Thee" instrumental) ELLIS: Those are the closest things to the magic words of American history.

Those are the words that all Americans, at some very, very important level, believe in.

They are the essential words of the American creed.

And part of Jefferson's genius was to articulate, at a sufficiently abstract level, these principles, these truths that we all want to believe in.

The level is sufficiently abstract so that we don't have to notice that these truths are, at some level, unattainable and, at another level, mutually exclusive.

Perfect freedom doesn't lead to perfect equality, it usually leads to inequality.

But Jefferson's genius is to assert them at a level of abstraction where they have a kind of rhapsodic inspirational quality.

And we all agree not to notice, not to notice that they are unattainable, and not to notice that they are mutually exclusive or contradictory.

They are, in some sense, nice representations of Jefferson's personality: wishing to be above it all and concealing the contradictions.

NARRATOR: On July 2nd, Congress unanimously approved the central clause of Jefferson's declaration, proclaiming American independence.

JEFFERSON: And for the support of this declaration, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.

NARRATOR: Two days later July 4th, 1776, 12 of the 13 states approved the entire document.

New York would take a few more days to make up its mind.

It was read on the streets of Philadelphia.

ADAMS: It will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America.

I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival.

It ought to be commemorated as the Day of Deliverance by Solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty.

It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other from this time forward, forever more.

John Adams.

(fireworks) WILL: We have a civil religion in this country.

And he provided a catechism.

I mean, every religion ought to have a catechism, here are what we believe.

Want to be an American?

Here's what you will believe.

No one knows how you become French.

No one knows where Germany comes from it sort of emerges from the mists.

We know when we started.

We know the afternoon, July 4, 1776.

And we know how to become an American, you come here, and you assent.

Then you're an American, just as American as anybody whose family has been here for ten generations.

You're in, you're it!

That's what an American is.

BOORSTIN: He said that here in this place, the happiness of the human race may advance to an indefinite, though not to an infinite, degree.

He expressed his optimism and yet his refusal to be a utopian.

And I think that what distinguishes our kind of society and, and the Jeffersonian view of our society from others is that it is not ideological.

It's not stuck in the prison of some dogma but rather is constantly responding to the changes in the world and Jefferson was the apostle of that experience.

COX: When you stop and think to yourself, do you really believe all men are created equal or all people, let us say, are created equal, you have trouble believing it.

But you don't ever wish it hadn't been written.

If the equality clause will trouble us a thousand years, as Frost said, if it'll trouble us, then the pursuit of happiness will mystify us forever.

And I like the trouble and I like the mystery.

NARRATOR: Jefferson's own feelings about that momentous day are unknown.

He noted in his account book only that the temperature at 6 A.M. was 68 degrees and rose to 76 before falling again, and that he bought seven pairs of gloves to take back to Monticello.

BOBER: At the time that Jefferson was in Philadelphia writing the Declaration, Martha was at home in Virginia suffering from the recent loss of a baby.

They lost a son.

They lost another daughter.

And it was at that time that Jefferson wrote to John Page that, "it is with great difficulty, great pain that I can stay here."

NARRATOR: He was frantic to see her.

He was, he told a friend, "under a sacred obligation to go home."

It would be many years before the American people knew that Thomas Jefferson had written the most important document in their history.

MAN: Oh Lord, trouble so hard BOTH: Oh Lord... WOMAN: Trouble so hard.

MAN: Yes indeed my... BOTH: Troubling hard.

Yes indeed my troubling hard.

Oh, Lord, troubles so hard Oh, Lord... FRANKLIN: I thought they were beautiful words when I first heard them.

I was thinking of what assurances they gave me, that I was equal to others and that no one could take that away from me.

It, it reinforced what I was being told at home, that no man, anywhere, was any better than I was.

NARRATOR: In 1776, when Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence proclaimed that all men were created equal, 539,000 Americans, one-fifth of the population, were owned by other Americans.

Jefferson had in his first draft blamed the English king for encouraging and sustaining the slave trade, but all mention of it was dropped from his text when slave-owning patriots objected.

The new nation had simply sidestepped the issue.

BOTH: Oh Lord, troubles so hard JENKINSON: When Jefferson was a young man, he spoke about emancipation, and he did, in the course of his life, propose more than a dozen pieces of legislation that would have enabled immediate or gradual emancipation of all of the slaves, at least of Virginia.

None of those proposals was accepted.

In fact, most of them were overwhelmingly defeated or ignored and from time to time, Jefferson was denounced for his emancipationist views.

And so he learned a lesson; he realized that if he went to the wall as an absolutist on the issue of slavery, that he would lose his credibility on other fronts that were equally important to him.

And so, in a sense, from the middle of his life, he began to temporize.

And he began to talk about the next generation.

And he postponed slavery as America postponed the issue of slavery.

SLAVES: It's a long John.

SLAVE: Come on down... ALL: Come on down JENKINSON: And Jefferson is right at the heart of this national paradox.

SLAVE: That the dog is coming... SLAVES: That the dog is coming... SLAVE: And I got to go.

SLAVES: And I got to go.

SLAVE: He long gone.

(gunfire) (horse neighing) (explosion) (gunfire) (horse neighing) (yelling) (yelling) (explosions) (thunder) NARRATOR: As others fought the Revolution that Jefferson's eloquence had helped spark, he returned to Virginia.

There, he fought another, quieter revolution.

As a member of the new House of Delegates, he would help draft 126 bills aimed at overturning aristocratic rule and smoothing the way for individuals to rise on the basis of virtue and ability.

He called for public schools, streamlined the legal system, and overturned the law which had favored eldest sons in inheriting property.

But he was most proud of his bill for Establishing Religious Freedom in Virginia, which declared that government had no right to favor any faith.

Throughout America, citizens were taxed to support the state's official church.

In New England, Quakers, Catholics, and Jews were forbidden from holding any public office.

And in Jefferson's own Virginia, heresy was a capital offense.

JEFFERSON: Our rulers can have authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them.

The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit.

I have ever thought religion a concern purely between our God and our consciences, for which we were accountable to him and not to the priests.

For it is in our lives, and not from our words, that our religion must be read.

But this does not satisfy the priesthood.

They must have a positive, a declared assent to all their interested absurdities.

My opinion is that there would never have been an infidel if there had never been a priest.

WILLS: Separation of Church and State had not occurred in our culture, in our whole history.

It had simply never occurred before.

The most revolutionary thing about the Revolution as it worked out into a new government was that one step, the separation of church and state.

ELLIS: It essentially says that inside each of us, inside me, inside you, there is this kernel or core of something sacred, something that cannot be violated, something that cannot be coerced or tampered with by the state, by the government, by institutions of any sort.

And that is our essence, and, and that essence is extremely powerful.

If we can protect that essence and allow it to voluntarily express itself into the world, it's the single most powerful force in human history.

NARRATOR: Jefferson wrote the bill, but he could not get it passed in the House of Delegates.

It would be ten years before Virginia actually adopted it.

And it was his friend and closest political lieutenant, James Madison, who led the fight to win final passage.

JENKINSON: To understand Jefferson, you need to know that he was a collector of protgs.

He could never have achieved what he did without able-bodied men who yielded their own characters to his.

They seemed to recognize that there was some type of greatness in Jefferson that simply deserved that support.

I think it's fair to say that Madison was a great man who yielded himself to an even greater man.

(explosions) NARRATOR: In 1779, Jefferson was elected War Governor of Virginia.

His tenure soon proved a nightmare.

He was powerless to halt inflation, had trouble recruiting militiamen, failed to respond fast enough when British troops invaded Virginia, and was forced to abandon the new capital of Richmond to the enemy.

And in June 1781, enemy forces briefly occupied Monticello itself.

(footsteps) ISAAC: The British searched the house but didn't disturb none of the furniture, but they plundered the wine cellar.

The bottles they broke the necks off with their swords, drank some, threw the balance away.

The British said they didn't want anybody but the Governor; didn't want to hurt him, only wanted to put a pair of silver handcuffs on him.

NARRATOR: Jefferson and his family narrowly escaped.

Some members of the legislature now accused him of cowardice.

JORDAN: A resolution was introduced to investigate his conduct, and it was suggested that he was cowardly.

The British tried to capture him at Monticello, and there's no question about it.

He didn't hang around to be captured.

Uh, but I think that that's common sense and not cowardice.

NARRATOR: The House of Delegates eventually exonerated him, but Jefferson, no longer governor, remained at Monticello, out of public life.

The accusations, he told his friend, James Monroe, "inflicted a wound on my spirit which will only be cured by the all-healing grave."

JENKINSON: Jefferson was an incredibly sensitive man, thin-skinned, vulnerable, fragile in character.

He didn't really have the temperament to be a political figure.

His greatest desire was harmony and to be loved, and he couldn't stand not to be loved.

JEFFERSON: I have taken my final leave of politics, have retired to my farm, my family, and books from which I think nothing will ever more separate me.

JEFFERSON: May 20, 1782.

Dear Mr. Madison, Mrs. Jefferson has added another daughter to our family.

She has ever since and still continues very dangerously ill. NARRATOR: Patty Jefferson was dying.

His wife had borne him six children in 10 years and had already lost three of them.

She had frequently been ill, and the birth of this last daughter, Lucy Elizabeth, had proved too much.

PATSY: As a nurse, no female ever had more tenderness or anxiety; he nursed my poor mother, sitting up with her and administering her medicines and drink.

For four months that she lingered, he was never out of calling.

Patsy Jefferson.

BURSTEIN: Thomas and Patty Jefferson had read Laurence Sterne's novel, "Tristram Shandy."

This was a novel about the workings of the human heart.

And as Patty Jefferson lay dying in September of 1782, the two Jeffersons sat at her bed and they wrote out together this quotation from "Tristram Shandy."

And it started out in Patty Jefferson's handwriting, a little four-by-four inch piece of paper.

And on the script of paper, Patty Jefferson began, "Time wastes too fast."

PATTY: Time wastes too fast, every letter.

I trace tells me with what rapidity life follows my pen.

The days and hours of it are flying over our heads like clouds of windy day, never to return more.

Everything presses on.

BURSTEIN: At this moment, orchestrating it as a deathbed adieu of two lovers about to part, Jefferson picks up his own pen and continues the quote, "And every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu."

JEFFERSON: And every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu.

Every absence which follows it are preludes to that eternal separation.

Which we are shortly to make!

BURSTEIN: Jefferson kept this little piece of paper in the most private drawer in a secret compartment of the drawer beside his bed.

And it was folded and unfolded countless times over the years, and in it was a lock of his late wife's hair and a lock of the hair of one of their infant children who had died.

And this was the real Thomas Jefferson, the man of sentiment who loved deeply, who felt deeply.

BACON: Mr. Jefferson sat by her, and she gave him directions about a good many things that she wanted done.

When she came to the children, she wept, could not speak for some time.

Finally, she told him she could not die happy if she thought her children were ever to have a stepmother brought in over them.

Holding her hand in his, Mr. Jefferson promised her solemnly that he would never marry again.

And he never did.

Edmund Bacon, Overseer.

BOBER: When she finally did close her eyes, he fainted, and he was carried out of the room insensible.

NARRATOR: Patty Jefferson died on September 6, 1782.

For three weeks he did not leave his room.

BURSTEIN: He couldn't talk.

For a man for whom control was important, this was the one time in his life when he completely lost control.

BOBER: It was at this time that a bond began to form between Jefferson and his daughter Martha, who they called Patsy.

And Patsy was the only one apparently who could get through to him.

PATSY: He walked almost incessantly night and day, only lying down when nature was completely exhausted on a pallet that had been brought in during his long fainting fit.

When at last he left his room, he rode out, and from that time, he was incessantly on horseback, rambling about the mountain in the least frequented roads and just as often through the woods; in those melancholy rambles, I was his constant companion, a solitary witness to many a violent burst of grief.

Patsy Jefferson.

("Yankee Doodle" playing) POWNALL: North America is become a new primary planet in the system of the world, which while it takes its own course in its own orbit, must have effect on the orbit of every other planet and shift the common center of gravity of the whole European world.

It is earth-born and like a giant ready to run its course.

Thomas Pownall.

NARRATOR: In 1784, the year after America officially won her independence, Thomas Jefferson's "Notes on the State of Virginia" went to press.

It was the only book he would ever write.

In it, he spelled out his vision of an American future, an agrarian paradise in which power would rest with those who worked the land.

His treatise was a wide-ranging discourse on politics, economics, agriculture, commerce, and manufacturing, and a ringing defense of the region he called his "country" against criticism by some foreign observers who belittled everything in America, from the size of her animals to the intelligence of her leaders.

In his book, he also wrestled with the question of race.

JEFFERSON: I advance it therefore, as a suspicion only, that the Blacks, whether originally a distinct race or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the Whites in the endowments both of body and mind.

This unfortunate difference of color, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.

FINKELMAN: He says that Blacks are not as smart as Whites, that they have no skills in poetry, in music.

He says that they can never accomplish what Whites can accomplish.

He compares Roman slaves to Black slaves and says Roman slaves did all these wonderful things, but that's 'cause they were White.

JEFFERSON: Besides those of color, figure, and hair, there are other physical distinctions proving a difference of race.

They have less hair on their face and body.

They secrete less by the kidneys and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odor.

BURSTEIN: We don't like it.

It doesn't make us happy to think that the man who is heralded for his love of equality and liberty, who believed in the promise of America perhaps more than any of his generation, that within Jeffersonian optimism, there could exist this dark side.

FRANKLIN: Jefferson knew what he was doing.

And the transgressions that he committed were transgressions of the mind as well as the heart, and that makes it less easy to understand how a man of such gigantic intellectual powers and so forth could fritter away his time speculating about how Blacks smell or how they reason and that sort of thing.

ISAAC: Mr. Jefferson bowed to everybody he meet, talked with his arms folded.

Gave the boys in the nail factory a pound of meat a week, a dozen herring, a quart of molasses, and peck of meal.

Give them that worked the best a suit of red or blue; encouraged them mightily.

Isaac.

NARRATOR: The comfortable life Jefferson led at Monticello, like the lives led by all his fellow-planters, depended entirely on the labor of slaves.

They built and rebuilt his great house, tended his gardens, cooked his food, waited at his table, drew his bath.

He considered himself a good slaveholder.

He treated the men and women and children he called "my people" and "my family" courteously for the most part, and he ordered his overseer not to whip them except in "extremities," preferring to rely upon what he called "the stimulus of character" to make them work.

But he also hired his slaves out to neighboring planters and bought and sold them freely, being careful, as he said, to keep the transactions private because "I do not while in public life, like to have my name annexed in the public papers to the sale of slave property."

ELLIS: What is going on inside his head as he walks among these African Americans and thinks about their future and the future of the nation?

It is a mystery.

It is a mystery.

And how can we get those different personae inside Thomas Jefferson to talk back to us together?

BURSTEIN: The fact that Thomas Jefferson didn't lose much sleep over the slavery issue reflects in part his other concerns, that he was able to rationalize that this was one of those things he wouldn't be able to accomplish.

He wouldn't be able to change the way Southerners felt about their economic system.

But that he didn't do more, that he didn't write more vigorously in opposition to slavery.

That he felt that Blacks were by nature, inferior.

There's no answer for that.

FINKELMAN: One of the defenses of Jefferson is always, "Well, he was just a Virginia planter and we can't expect anything else from him.

He's just like his neighbors."

And I think the point to be made is he was not just like his neighbors.

We don't build monuments to people who are just like their neighbors.

We don't put them on the nickel.

We don't make them icons.

Jefferson was a very special man and we can expect more from him.

And so we compare him to the best of his generation.

We compare him to Washington, who freed his slaves, to his cousin John Randolph of Roanoke, who freed his slaves, to his neighbor Edward Coles, to the thousands of individual small Virginians who freed their slaves.

The free Black population in Virginia grows from 2,000 to over 30,000 in a space of about 30 years.

A lot of Virginians are freeing their slaves.

Where's the master of Monticello?

Why isn't he there?

JEFFERSON: The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.

Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever.

Thomas Jefferson.

JENKINSON: In "Notes on Virginia," in a really interesting passage, he says, "The man must be a prodigy whose manners and morals are not corrupted by this institution."

And Jefferson saw that, once you're in that institution, it will drag you down morally, and you cannot, you cannot escape these dilemmas.

FRANKLIN: I'm a forgiving man, therefore I forgive him for what he did.

But I remember that what he did was a transgression against mankind.

SLAVES: What have, I done?

PATSY: We had a lovely passage in a beautiful new ship that had made only one voyage before.

There were only six passengers, all of whom Papa knew, and a fine sunshine all the way, with the sea as calm as a river.

Patsy Jefferson.

NARRATOR: In the spring of 1784, Thomas Jefferson and his eldest daughter Patsy sailed for Europe; his two other surviving girls, Polly and the baby Lucy were left in the care of relatives.

Jefferson had been named to represent the new United States in France.

Their arrival was not auspicious.

The man carrying their baggage cheated them.

Crowds gathered to stare at James Hemings, their Black man-servant.

No one understood Jefferson's bookish French.

At first, Jefferson disliked Paris, he was shocked by the high price of everything, disapproved of the emphasis Parisians put on fashion, and was appalled at how the poor lived.

BURSTEIN: Jefferson was in France in the salon culture on the eve of the French Revolution.

He was witnessing a kind of stirring that was reminiscent of America in the 1770s, and so he was, of course, sought after by many of the notables of Europe to give his perception of these political doings.

JEFFERSON: I was much an enemy to monarchy before I came to Europe.

I am 10,000 times more so since I have seen what they are.

Under pretense of governing, they have divided their nations into two classes, wolves and sheep.

Experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe and to the general prey of the rich on the poor.

NARRATOR: Jefferson may have scorned the monarchies of the Old World, but he was soon scouring the continent for anything he thought might improve life in the New.

A portable copying device, phosphoretic matches, apricots, wine grapes, olive trees, and a device to make pasta.

He haunted bookstores and sent a set of encyclopedias to his friend James Madison because he thought they would be useful in writing a Constitution for the United States.

And he would soon plunge himself $4,000 further in debt, striving to hold up his end in the elegant Parisian society that both disgusted and drew him.

JENKINSON: Jefferson was a provincial from America; he called himself a "savage from the woods of America."

And suddenly, he was lowered, as if from a hot air balloon, into the glittering world of late aristocratic France.

And it overwhelmed him, he was intoxicated by its beauty and its decadence and its intrigue, its flirtation, its architecture, its music, its dance, its literature, its science.

He knew he shouldn't love it, but he was overwhelmed by it, and it was an awakening for Jefferson.

JEFFERSON: So, ask the traveled inhabitant of any nation, in what country on earth would you rather live?

Certainly, in my own, where are all my friends, my relations, and the earliest and sweetest affections and recollections of my life.

Which would be your second choice?

France.

NARRATOR: And he charmed the city, he hosted lavish dinners, was presented at the court of Louis XVI, and was a favorite in diplomatic circles, all the while negotiating complicated commercial treaties meant to relieve America's trade deficit and keep the high seas safe from pirates.

But on January 26, 1785, Jefferson learned of still another death in the family, his youngest daughter, three-year-old Lucy Elizabeth, had died back in Virginia.

Only two of his six children now survived: Patsy, whom he had placed in a French convent school, and six-year-old Polly, still in the care of relatives in Virginia.

He could not bear the thought of being apart from her any longer.

POLLY: Dear Papa, I hope you will send me a doll.

I am very sorry that you have sent for me.

I don't want to go to France, I had rather stay with Aunt Eppes.

Your most happy and dutiful daughter.

Polly Jefferson.

JEFFERSON: My dear Polly, I wish so much to see you that I have desired your uncle and aunt to send you to me your sister and myself cannot live without you, and after a while, we will carry you back again to see your friends in Virginia.

Adieu my dear child.

Yours affectionately, Thomas Jefferson.

NARRATOR: It would take nearly two years before the little girl who barely remembered her father arrived.

She was accompanied aboard ship by one of Jefferson's slaves, 14-year-old Sally Hemings.

NARRATOR: In 1786, as France edged closer to revolution, Jefferson was introduced to a beautiful, graceful 27-year-old artist from England named Maria Cosway.

He was 43 years old and suddenly in love.

BOBER: Jefferson met Maria Cosway at a time in Paris when he was perhaps most susceptible to a romantic attachment.

He was a lonely widower.

Martha had been gone four and half years.

And he met the beautiful and talented Maria Cosway, and she literally swept him off his feet.

JENKINSON: She was blonde, petite, learned in languages, adept in music, a conversationalist, a flirt.

And somehow Jefferson was swept into her orbit, and he, he became intoxicated for the last time in his life.

BOBER: And she was married.

And Maria was a devout Catholic, so that Jefferson had to have realized that this relationship could go nowhere, but he fell deeply in love with her.

And they had a beautiful, beautiful month together with what he called their "charming coterie."

NARRATOR: They visited one another's homes, walked along the Seine, took long carriage rides together through the French countryside.

BURSTEIN: They went to a play together; they picnicked together.

Something was coming back to him, something that Maria Cosway inspired in him.

JENKINSON: But it produced a crisis for Jefferson.

He had, since the death of his wife, lived primarily in the head, and suddenly, the heart came streaming out with a, with an urgency that he was surprised by.

So, when she left, he wrote a dialogue attempting to, to make sense of this.

JEFFERSON: Madam, seated by my fireside, solitary and sad, the following dialogue took place between my head and my heart.

HEAD: Well, friend, you seem to be in a pretty trim.

HEART: I am indeed the most wretched of all earthly beings.

Overwhelmed by grief.

HEAD: This is one of the scrapes into which you are ever leading us you must learn to look forward before you take a step which may interest our peace.

HEART: Let the gloomy monk, sequestered from the world, seek unsocial pleasures in the bottom of his cell!

Had they ever felt the solid pleasure of one generous spasm of the heart, they would exchange for it all the frigid speculations of their lives.

HEAD: Do not bite at the bait of pleasure till you know there is no hook beneath it.

The art of life is the art of avoiding pain.

HEART: Leave me to decide when and where friendships are to be contracted.

We have no rose without its thorn, no pleasure without alloy.

HEAD: Those which depend on ourselves are the only pleasures a wise man will count on, for nothing is ours which another may deprive us of.

JENKINSON: After Mrs. Cosway returned to England, Jefferson reasserted the head and, I think, lived in the head for the rest of his life.

I think the emotional life, the life of human commitment, had been so full of grief for Jefferson with respect to his wife, or his children, his best friend that he finally felt that, that human relations were too painful and that it was simply better to live in a world of abstraction and ideas and architecture and not in a world of the flesh.

VIDAL: Well, I think the head absorbed the heart.

And perhaps it's his great resonance today that, along with a first-rate cortex, the heart is beating within his mind.

(drums) (horns) (gunfire) JEFFERSON: Was ever such a prize won with so little innocent blood?

Rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated.

Were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every country and left free, it would be better than it now is.

NARRATOR: In the summer of 1789, the French Revolution began.

And when the people of Paris finally rose up against their king and the city streets ran with blood, events which horrified much of America, Jefferson would remain true to the revolutionary spirit.

And when Jefferson heard that poor Massachusetts farmers had taken up arms against their creditors, frightening his old friend John Adams, he sided with the rebels.

JEFFERSON: God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion.

What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?

Let them take arms.

What signify a few lives lost in a century or two?

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

It is its natural manure.

(explosion) NARRATOR: In October 1789, as the French Revolution intensified, Jefferson, his two daughters, and their slaves sailed at last for home.

He took with him 38 boxes of books, hampers of wine, statuary, and food unobtainable in America, parmesan cheese, raisins, and macaroni.

86 more crates would follow on another ship.

As usual, he had spent beyond his means.

PATSY: We reached Monticello on the 23rd of December.

The Negroes collected in crowds around our carriage and almost drew it up the mountain by hand.

Then the door of the carriage was opened, they received him in their arms and bore him to the house.

It seemed impossible to satisfy their anxiety to touch and kiss the very earth which bore him.

Patsy Jefferson.

NARRATOR: The Master of Monticello had been looking forward to putting his affairs in order, then returning to Paris.

But on the road from Norfolk, he had already been handed an urgent letter from George Washington, the country he had helped create was calling on him again.

JENKINSON: Jefferson is the enigma of American History.

ANNOUNCER: From revolutionary ideals to the reality of republic.

BURSTEIN: Thomas Jefferson embodied a belief in the promise of America's future.

ANNOUNCER: He expanded America's frontier, and changed higher learning forever.

JENKINSON: Jefferson loved the notion of discovery.

ANNOUNCER: But a shadow of scandal haunts his legacy. COOLEY: The historians really didn't know Jefferson as well as they think.

ANNOUNCER: The founding father's final chapter.

Next time on Thomas Jefferson. (music plays through credits)