The Thomas Jefferson Hour; #0451; His Excellency: George Washington' book

Welcome to the Thomas Jefferson Hour, your weekly conversation with the third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson. Today's program was recorded in early December 2004. Our host Phil Kristo will be speaking with Thomas Jefferson regarding a new book entitled His Excellency about George Washington from Professor Joseph L.A. Welcome to the Thomas Jefferson Hour, your weekly conversation with the third president. Seated across from me is Mr. Jefferson himself and today we inaugurate a new groundbreaking series for the Jefferson Hour. We're going to look at Thomas Jefferson's friends and enemies and we're going to begin by discussing a new exciting book by the great American historian Joseph Ellis. It's called His Excellency, a biography of George Washington. Good day, Mr. Jefferson. Good day to you, citizen. I find the opportunity to discuss a biography of George Washington, a great one with you present. It's

interesting to note that Mr. Ellis has written previously biographies of John Adams and he's done a biography of you. The third is this biography of George Washington. It was once said, I believe it was said during the revolution, that George Washington was the sword of the revolution that you were its pen and that John Adams was its voice. So I think in a very comprehensive way, Mr. Ellis is working to to explicate the three of you who were at the time deemed seminal figures. I would regard myself as the least important of the three. I think George Washington's service during the revolution more than anything else made us a free people. Now we were bound to be free in the long run. Self-government is something that is inevitable but his masterful leadership in particularly his ability to hold together the Ragtag Army through those long years without proper funding, without any decent recruitment system,

without much incentive for these farmboys to just give their lives their fortunes and their sacred honor to this cause. That I think will be remembered through the whole course of human history and Adams more than anybody else kept the continental Congress a fire and focused on its task and he made the best of a very bad situation, 13 highly independent mutually jealous colonies. Most of them with pressing concerns outside of the national arena, Adams more than any other single figure held that loose body together. So those two men I think are the heroes of the American Revolution. The third that I would add is Dr. Franklin. I placed myself very low on that scale and not with any false modesty. I wrote the Declaration of Independence and I did some important things but they certainly weren't of that that stature. Indeed it might be wise to note for our listeners that John Adams, wow as a member of the continental Congress, first

suggested General Washington to be commander in chief of the continental army. It turned out to have been one of the great decisions that Adams made, perhaps the greatest decision of his life. You wouldn't consider appointing John Marshall as chief justice of this Supreme Court another great appointment. I'm sure. Well I don't approve of Justice Marshall's 35-year reign of terror on the court but that of course is not our subject. John Adams not only in a sense was the making of George Washington by nominating him as commander in chief but he also nominated me to be the principal author of the Declaration of Independence and he did so partly with an eye to our individual merits. I as a scholar writer and Washington as a soldier but he principally nominated us because we were Virginians and Adams believed very strongly that the revolution would fail unless it had a national scope and that it was being perceived perhaps rightly as a New England affair, particularly Massachusetts hotheads, rebels in in the Boston area and that England and the rest of the world would not

regard this as a true revolution unless it became continental in its embrace and therefore wanted Virginians from the most populous state to play key roles in the revolutionary cause. That's what led to the nomination of George Washington as our commander and that's what certainly led to my important role in the Declaration of Independence. I was very obscure and not not utterly obscure but certainly I was not a national figure when I was given this task. George Washington was a national figure but not yet the father of its country. Thank you Mr. Jefferson. Let's take a look at Dr. Ellis's book. I don't quite know how to proceed but perhaps it would be best for me to just suggest to you certain areas and you can respond to them. I know you have read the book so not only do you have the the firsthand knowledge as a person who knew General Washington but you also have the opportunity to benefit from Dr. Ellis's impeccable scholarship. Let's begin first by looking at Washington's attitudes

toward the West. He was one of the first I think to work in the West along with your father both surveyed large tracks of Western land. I think they saw the West as an American future. Washington began his life as a surveyor in the northern neck and a part of Virginia that the Fairfax estates that were much troubled and heavily contested and he became a surveyor in that in that specific task and he then gained an interest in the West that never left him and held title to I think literally thousands and thousands of acres in the Ohio Valley by the great Canava the tributaries of the Ohio and what's now in your time West Virginia. He spent a lot of time in the West during the French Indian War and and as a supervisor of his own land holdings there I never did I never traveled more than 70 or so miles west to my birthplace but we shared this fascination and both of us believe that the Potomac was the

natural artery into the Ohio River country rather than Hudson River which as you know eventually prevailed in 1825. Both of us were strong supporters of a of a dredging and canal system on the on the upper Potomac that would link it to Lake Erie that did not come about in our lifetime and both of us had given our money and our time to what turned out to be a lost cause in the Potomac but that's the reason that the capital was situated on the Potomac because we believe that it would be the gateway to the interior of the continent. We also believed that we should treat Indians as fairly as possible but that we must devote ourselves principally to our primary constituents which were white settlers. We knew that the settlement of the West was inevitable and good and that that would mean clashes with native peoples that we should do what we could as a government to limit them and to do all this by due process but that we must not shrink from war when war was necessary and Washington fought Indians in the West I never did but I I agreed with his

proposal in this respect. The only difference that we had in our Western ambitions is that Washington believed in the tenant system he believed that large landholders would rent lands to smallholders and I believe in the Oman system that we would somehow deed these lands directly to smallholders and there would not be landlords and that this would I think bring about greater democracy and more equality and would fulfill the dreams of land ownership of thousands of of average human beings that's the only significant difference between Washington and myself but generally speaking we had what I would regard as nearly identical views of the importance of the West for the future of this continent and this Republic. It's interesting to note that the the Yomans system prevailed and it prevailed primarily to benefit those who had served under General Washington in the Army. We've prevailed in the Northwest you

are absolutely right but it did not prevail in the Southwest and the Southwest the plantation system extended itself principally because of the cotton boom and the cotton gin invented by Eli Whitney and in the Southwest in Mississippi and Louisiana and Arkansas unfortunately the plantation system was dominant throughout most of the 19th century and that of course inevitably carried slavery with it so there's a fundamental distinction between lands settled north of the Ohio and south of the Ohio and unfortunately we could not prevent the land south of the Ohio from perpetuating a system that is erosive of land erosive of moral good and certainly oppressive to Negroes and of course it led to a series of compromises which ultimately were not able to hold together and of course the Great Civil War prevailed you've mentioned slavery Mr. Jefferson let's take a look at General Washington's attitudes towards slavery well Washington and I both agreed strongly that slavery is

wrong I believe slavery is wrong from a kind of enlightenment theoretical position on natural right that if all human beings are entitled to equality and Negroes are human beings therefore they are entitled to equality just like the next man and that the universal principles of philanthropy and justice and equality in good sense and sympathy meant that we must free our Negro brother and that we were perpetuating an unjust institution Washington's attitude was not as theoretical he was always a less prone to rhetoric and always more willing to look at the actual situation in its own merits in a pragmatic sense rather than in a more theoretical one and his view was slavery is just plain wrong that it does nobody any good and he believed that it was an economic disaster in addition to being a moral one and he he said less but did more on

the question of slavery and as I think everyone knows in his in his will Washington freed his slaves he didn't own all the slaves at Mount Vernon there were very complicated inheritance issues but he freed all of his slaves not immediately but after the death at some future date of his wife Martha and provided money for their maintenance so his view was I believe a more direct one I think that he would have regarded my own ideological pronouncements on the on equality as correct but I think that he was he preferred to live in a world in which basic decisions are made about basic issues that economics are always put into the mix whereas as you know I said that the economics of it were in my opinion a mere bag of tell you are listening to the Thomas Jefferson hour your weekly conversation with the third president of the United States today Mr. Jefferson is discussing the new biography his axolency by historian Joseph

Ellis it's a biography of George Washington you know me I just say to complete the thought about slavery that one of Professor Ellis's arguments is that Washington in his last years believe that he should not die without addressing the question of slavery and Professor Ellis I think in a sense breaks new ground historically speaking and saying that Washington was concerned about his legacy and he wanted to be known historically as somebody who went to the grave completely antagonistic to the future of slavery in this country and that he was unwilling for his own slaves simply to be abandoned to their fate after his death and so he went out of his way at a time when he was ill and old to address this issue and Ellis believes that this was one of his greatest acts and contrasts it with my own paralysis on the question of slavery you know

that in my last years I was helplessly in debt could not have freed slaves if I had wanted to and by then no longer really considered it a priority either so that my legacy is the most beautiful pronouncements ever issued on questions of emancipation but my actual record of behavior is unsettling to Professor Ellis whereas Washington's rhetoric is much less impassioned but his his behavior is much more in keeping with the values which now prevail in the United States in your time thank you mr. Jefferson I know it's difficult for you to speak about such things you've talked about General Washington and his look toward his legacy that suggests ambition was he a politically ambitious man according to Professor Ellis yes I knew him as an ambitious man I mean nobody

could have done all that he did and not be ambitious he thirsted for fame and glory we all did you know we knew that we were living in the crucible of human history that we were living perhaps in the most remarkable moment in the history of the world and that we were creating something that was going to have implications forever I think very few people in history can say that and we were well aware of it and we had read our ancient classics in Tacitus and Plutarch and Livy and so on and we knew the heroes of the ancient world the benefactors of mankind great soldiers great statesmen loggers poets men of letters philosophers architects townbuilders and we wanted to emulate them we wanted in our to recapitulate the great classical moments in our own persons and that's why when we wrote articles for the press we used names like

Publicus and and Camillus and Cicero and so on because we were self-consciously taking on the aura of this glorious classical world that had been rediscovered in the Renaissance and we shaped our characters out of the pages of Plutarch's lives of the eminent Greeks and Romans in Washington did too and he was a deeply ambitious man he he thirsted for military glory and once he realized that he was the father of his country he did everything in his power to protect that status and worried almost every day of his life that he would make a misstep that would cost him that reputation George III the tyrant of England when he heard that George Washington had broken his sword after the revolutionary war and retired to Mount Vernon George III said if he really means that he's the greatest man who ever lived because that had never happened before as you know revolutions usually end in military dictatorships and that the power elite usually cling to their power and refuse to relinquish it in our

entirely willing to tyrannize their populations no matter what they said earlier and here was this man this uniquely virtuous man who was as thirsty with ambition as anybody who ever lived who had a higher commitment to Republican values and and retired to domestic and pastoral life after the revolution as you know we called him out twice more once to the constitutional convention in 1787 and then to two terms as president and in both cases his deepest concern was that by participating in those events he would be regarded as a man who didn't mean it when he said he wanted to retire to quietness at Mount Vernon it has a take to correct you Mr. Jefferson but he was called out a third time to be commander in chief of the American forces during the quasi war I I knew you would say that that the your man John Adams was forced to to include George Washington as the commander in chief during the the Quasai war with

France the undeclared Cold War against naval Cold War against France and in 1798 and 1799 and and Washington was old in firm he even he didn't want to do this but he got himself talked into it by the evil genius of American life Alexander Hamilton and Ellis says the George Washington's participation in that army the provisional army that was created in the crisis of the Quasai war in 1798 was the greatest single mistake that George Washington ever made in his whole life that he he doesn't say in his dot age but he implies it lent his great reputation and his great stature to Hamilton's Machiavellian schemes I think General Washington broke every rule he had established as as president when he forced Hamilton on his successor John Adams who did not want

him at all I think what one of the things that emerges from Joseph Ellis's biography of George Washington is that Hamilton was a extraordinarily unscrupulous man when it suited him I believed he was a man of some virtue in other words that he had character we'd call him a man of parts I didn't see him as corrupt to the core I certainly didn't but what Joseph Ellis suggests is that when it was an issue that he felt very strongly about Hamilton was willing to be a very dangerous man and to do whatever it took to prevail and that he tried in 1798 and 1799 to in a sense become the Napoleon of the United States and fortunately the people and John Adams prevented that don't diminish the role of John Adams by by ending the Quasai war he ended the opportunity for a new born apart to emerge and that unfortunately Washington didn't see it until too late and allowed himself to be used by Hamilton who never according to

Ellis really loved General Washington he merely saw as Hamilton himself put it Washington he said is it an e just very essential to me in other words a protector and a patron and of course that is one of the sad moments for me and in the Ellis book the realization that Washington treated Hamilton like a son and all Hamilton could do in response was to use him of course that puts me in an equally bad light because Joseph Ellis argues again and again that I was another son who betrayed the father figure mr. Jefferson we have to take a short break but when we return from that break we'll have an opportunity to examine what you have suggested further Clay Jenkins and will be in Norfolk Virginia on January 21st 2005 and he will be in Williamsburg Virginia on January 22nd 2005 please visit our website www.thythinjefferson.org www.thythinjefferson.org or call 1-800-274-1240 1-800-274-1240 for more

information about either of these performances welcome back to the Thomas Jefferson hour today mr. Jefferson is talking about the new biography of George Washington his excellency by professor

Joseph Ellis who interestingly enough has also done biographies of mr. Jefferson and John Adams at one point these three were considered the the sword and the pen and the voice of the American Revolution before we went to our break mr. Jefferson you were suggesting that professor Ellis has accused you of the same thing that happened with Colonel Hamilton that here Washington offers you essentially the role of a surrogate son and and you like Hamilton be trade him is this is this something that sets well with you is this the way you remember it well it depends on how I look upon it from Washington's point of view I believe he would have regarded me as as a a man who betrayed him who undermined him as his own secretary of state he gave you a key role in his in his new government he I think he would say that I was on gentlemanly at certain

points during the late 1790s the Philip Motsie letter a letter that you wrote about you and criticized Washington that was published and I think bitterly bitterly heard him one of my nephews as you know wrote a letter to him pretending to be somebody else trying to draw out criticisms from Washington of me and Washington was later informed that this letter had come from my circle from my nephew and I suppose he couldn't help but believe that I must have had a hand and I didn't but you know there was there were a series of events in the 1790s which was a very violent and terrible decade of political wrangling the birth of the political parties the French Revolution the Quasai War the impressment of our sailors internal divisions about what the country really was you were not happy with the Washington administrations jay treaty jay treaty which I believed was basically reinstlaving ourselves to the British empire economically if not politically in other words that instead of declaring

economic independence which we ought to have done we admitted economic dependence and the j treaty which was negotiated by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John J. of New York wrangled the hearts of southerners particularly but really wrangled the hearts of most Americans because it it it was cynical from a kind of humian point of view David Hume the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher who believed the commerce is really the center of life I disagree with that I think ideas are the center of life when John J went to England he took with him a number of American concerns about the beforets in the Old Northwest about economic reparations about the slaves that had been absorbed by the British army during the war and now needed to be given back to their slave holders or compensation paid and other outstanding issues and and the Mississippi River and the West when jay came back the treaty was extraordinarily disappointing and

essentially gained nothing for the United States except the status quo and in my opinion it's a based us against the British Empire well it perhaps is a bit more basic than that Mr. Jefferson you frankly thought that America's economic future lay with France or the continent and there were many who believed that England and Hamilton I think was chief among them believed that England would be our economic future that's right Hamilton took a very cynical view of it and thought well England may be unpleasant and we may have declared independence from them but we are not economically independent from them so we shouldn't even pretend to be and we should just accept the fact that their Navy is going to protect our shipping and that we're going to have to to yield to their trade system whether we like it or not and that we have limited maneuverability against Britain when we have frustrations and the rest of us felt no we're a sovereign independent nation we should stand up to

Britain if it means economic independence freedom is greater than comfort and profit and that we should be willing to pay that price and so the J Treaty wrankled and really it it was the first time that George Washington was seen and Ellis makes this point in his biography his excellency it was the first time the president Washington was seen not as a man above the fray a nonpartisan sort of Patriot King but as an actual partisan politician and the newspapers began to attack him personally and who was supporting those newspapers at that point I wasn't it was I had nothing to do with that although Philip Frenow one of the poets of the revolution had come to work in the State Department and he was publishing a fairly mild set of criticisms of Washington but but most of this criticism of Washington was coming from independent Republican newspapers over which I had little or no control whatsoever and they were vicious towards the president and he took it very personally by now George Washington felt that he

really was above criticism that he was he had earned the right through war through the constitutional convention as the president of the United States he had earned the right to be left in peace in his last years and he hated every piece of skirless criticism or just criticism leveled against him which brings to mind this this Philip Matsey letter I you know I wrote a letter to my old Patriot Italian friend Philip Matsey in which I said you would be surprised to see men who have been soldiers in the field and Samson's in the field and Solomon's in the temple have now had their hair shorn by the Harlem England this was in response to the J Treaty it was a private letter and I did believe I have to say I believe that George Washington had relaxed his virtue in his last years that he was less mentally acute than he had previously been that he had become more of a creature of partisanship and indeed more of a creature of

Hamilton you retired from the State Department for that reason you believe that the battle between you and Alexander Hamilton for really the future of the American government had had been decided in Hamilton's favor and you at that point withdrew yourself I believe there was no point in my staying because Hamilton not only was winning all the battles with the National Bank and Assumption and tilting our foreign policy towards Britain rather than towards France but he was meddling in the portfolio of other cabinet ministers he saw himself truly as the prime minister I don't think that he would deny that if he were here and he was meddling in the portfolio of the State Department and it just seemed to me that I was wasting the last years of my life in a highly disagreeable scene and that if I couldn't contribute more to the Washington administration than I seem to be able to do that I had better go home and mine my turnips and that's what I did I left as soon as Washington would let me I would have gone sooner but he insisted that I stay on into a

second term for a short time then I went to Monticello thinking that that was the end of my political life it turns out that wasn't quite true and I think really that the breaking point between you and General Washington really came over your realization that he was another of the high federalists in fact the whole society of the Cincinnati was one of those those monarchical trappings that bothered you so very much well right after the war the officer corps decided that they wanted to stay in touch with each other and began as innocently enough we know after a war there's a great deal of shared experience and camaraderie and these men felt that it would be a mistake just to disperse themselves back into private life that they should have reunions and that they should perpetuate their friendliness and and even their fame by creating an organization so they created the Society of the Cincinnati which was named after the great Roman Cincinnati we've talked about him on other

occasions but he was a first in war first in peace first in the hearts of his countrymen as Lee put it of General Washington in our time and the Society of the Cincinnati was I suppose you'd say a club of revolutionary veteran officers but the problem was that it was an exclusive club into which you had to be invited and secondly the part that really wrangled the American spirit was that it was a hereditary club and that the first born son would be in the Cincinnati too even though he might never hold a gun in his life and we regarded this as the as the seed ground of aristocracy in the United States and I was shocked that George Washington would be willing to participate in an organization with those values and I was at that time was his trusted friend and advisor and he listened to my advice and he distanced himself somewhat from the Society of the Cincinnati at that time I think he still believed that I had

a better handle on the will of the people than he might and I was able to counsel him to avoid wholesale commitment to the Society of the Cincinnati and in fact to detach himself and maybe quit he didn't quit but he did withdraw to a certain degree and I you know these things seem trivial to people listening in your time but I believe that we were talking about a very basic issue and that is will we have a hereditary cast of aristocrats in this country who will lord it over the rest of us or not and if the if the great man himself president Washington let commits himself to this organization it seems to me that that leads to a class hierarchy that is entirely anathema to a republic and that's frankly I also disagreed with John Adams search for titles of nobility I felt that they all of that creates artificial distinctions which are the death of a republic so that was one of my success stories one of your success stories with Washington terms of convincing Washington to withdraw some did you have

some other success stories with Washington no no Hamilton won every battle and I said you know I I have to admire Hamilton he's a natural aristocrat you know born in obscurity to be sure but if ever there was a genius on earth who by sheer force of his brain and his will became a commander of men it was this Colonel Hamilton and I said he's a colossus onto himself using the term from you know the ancient world the colossus of Rhodes bestriding the harbor at Rhodes and I said that he's a host onto himself you know he would one time he was challenged by the House of Representatives because they wanted to investigate what they took to be corrupt financial dealings in his treasury department he I can't remember exactly how it worked but the the resolutions were passed at the end of the term so that there would be a long time for him to stew in these juices of corruption and Hamilton decided to solve the problem before the term ended and he stayed up for days and wrote this masterful

defense of his department it was 40,000 words or something it was some gigantic treat us and solved the problem and I all I could do is stand back in admiration of his sheer capacity for hard work the treatise on manufacture was another one of those colossus he could he could well the Federalist papers would never have been written without Hamilton your friend Mr. Madison pales in well Madison's just a gentleman he has a real life but Hamilton was some sort of true believer in his own genius and he had genius and really a mastery of of all that came under his embrace and except for except for Mrs. Reynolds well he didn't he never mastered his own libido but but that's a private matter and however disagreeable it is it probably symbolizes some larger hungers in the Hamiltonian spirit but what I'm trying to say however begrudgingly is that Hamilton was one of the greatest men and if he had been

committed to our values that is the values of the republic rather than the monarchy he thirsted for he could have been the greatest American because he certainly worked harder new more grasped more in some ways even saw more than the rest of us he was the first American to think financially he was indeed and his decision to side with England turned out to have been the wisest of moves you mean in the J tree in the J tree wise wise if you if you believe that consuming is the business of being American I think at this point in American history it's not even an issue for discussion Mr. Jeff I believe there are higher values that poetry and culture and architecture and freedom and liberty and dignity and a certain temperament are higher values than goods of the things that always troubled you and Professor Ellis brings this out is that you didn't admire the Washington mind at least in so far as learning was

concerned I must say and I don't mean any disrespect but he had a school boys brain he had the best judgment of any man that I ever met without a single exception but it was slow slow brain you know and we were so annoying to the rest of us because we were you know it's Madison it's Hamilton it's Monroe it's John Marshall it's John Jay some of the most brilliant and lively men who ever walked on earth and then there's this sort of trotting old horse who has perfect judgment but no capacity to think Washington you know as your friend John Adams learned Washington's most important single trait was his capacity for silence something that Adams never mastered and the reason that Washington was silent is because partly it was it was calculated so that he could withhold his views and hear those of others before he pronounced but it's also because he didn't have any confidence in his own capacity to think on his feet and so his silence was seen as profound wisdom this is Adams talking

now when in fact it was a cover for Washington's brainlessness I hope I don't speak too harshly I love the man I think he will be adored as long as liberty has advocates in the world and he was the greatest horseman of his time and the great soldier and great surveyor and a great landholder and a great planter but he was not a large intellect I know in a previous program Mr. Jefferson you suggested the president of the United States should be a learned man is General Washington the exception to that rule well he was learned by your standards you know I would put him with any president of your time and I think that Washington was as well read as anyone he read widely he is his writing is not fine but it is pragmatic and cogent he worried about his own grammar and he went back in later life and corrected some of his letters he that's a point that professor Ellis makes in this book his excellency that Washington kept his correspondence but went back and corrected some things when he realized

that his early efforts had been less than fully grammatical Washington had a certain genius but he did not have a bright mind and these are different things I mean I would in the long run you want Washington's genius rather than Hamilton's quickness because Hamilton was committed to the wrong values and then his intellect becomes an issue I mean it's worse if you have someone committed to the wrong values who has all that mastery whereas with Washington his values were except for this brief period in the 1795 through 99 period when he kind of lost his acuity and became more partisan I think Washington had lived a life of splendid judgment and that entitles him to be considered the father of his country and by the way the term father of his country I believe was first used in a German American newspaper in 1785 and he's been known as the father of his country ever since so we have a couple of minutes left mr. Jefferson summarize the contributions of general Washington to the country incorporating professor

Ellis's point of view or not what do you think he represents well professor Ellis's thesis is that Washington was a man of fierce ambition who only could be the greatest man in the world by mastering self-restraint that he wanted to fight his natural capacity was to fight but he soon realized that fighting in the revolutionary war was the mistake that what he should do is do a delaying action and skirmish rather than fight and we could outlast the British and that this was counterintuitive to Washington and counter to his own impulse to fight so that he mastered himself as a war leader and saved the country then he committed himself to the Commonwealth so greatly that he was willing to be called out of retirement to preside over the constitutional convention where he was silent but his very presence was symbolically essential to the legitimacy of that body which after all did not have constitutional authority to rewrite the whole constitution of the United States the articles of confederation were still meant to be in effect then Washington allowed himself to be drafted as

the president and as president he showed a balance between monarchical energies which he knew we needed to pull the country together he's a true nationalist but he also was always a Republican and so he didn't allow himself to be aggrandized too much and I so the I think what Washington contributed to the country was a willingness to subordinate his own impulses to a common wealth set of interests and that I think is the very definition of great leadership thank you very much mr. Jefferson we will be back in just a moment with the scholar who represents you Professor Clay Jenkinson Clay Jenkinson will be in Norfolk, Virginia on January 21st, 2005 and he will be in Williamsburg, Virginia on January 22nd, 2005 please visit our website www.thythinjeverson.org or call 1-800-274-1240, 1-800-274-1240 for more information about either of these performances welcome back to the Thomas Jefferson hour Clay Jenkinson has seated across from

me Clay this was an interesting program not only is Joseph Ellis's new book his excellency extraordinary but getting Thomas Jefferson's take on it makes it doubly so well I'm a big fan of Joseph Ellis I had a chance to work with him a number of years ago on Ken Burns's documentary film on Thomas Jefferson Joseph Ellis was one of the principal on air consultants and we were two of the historical consultants for that Ken Burns project and I liked him immediately and I began to read his work I've read all of the Ellis books that I know of passionate sage which is about John Adams which I personally think is the best of his books I think it's the most

brilliant treatment ever of John Adams then there's American Sphinx which actually has a brief brief mention of me in the preface that's his study of the character of Thomas Jefferson which I liked very much although not as much as the Adams book as founding brothers which won him the national book award he then has this interesting study of George Washington called his excellency I like this book I wonder what you thought of it Bill I don't like it as well as I like the others but I think that's because I don't really care about George Washington in quite the same way I care about Adams and Jefferson Washington is not one of the intellectual forebears one of the real founders in that sense that perhaps explains it to you I think Ellis would acknowledge that clearly enough I mean I think he he returns to Adams and Jefferson again and again and again when ideas are being discussed it's you can't do that with George Washington too much and both Adams and Jefferson are creatures of paradox and you know they're puzzling you have to puzzle to

understand them and you can never quite understand them you know Merrill Peterson said that after 20 years of talking of thinking about Jefferson he found him impenetrable and and and Joseph Ellis calls Jefferson the American Sphinx you know the Sphinx is a mystery and he sees Adams as this irrepressibly articulate man but who is constantly at war with his own sense of of his character passionate passionate sage so here's Washington who's more of a plotter by that standard and a lot of this book is about the war and I don't know how you felt but I was fascinated by it but I I wouldn't reread the war sections I would reread the presidential sections I think it's interesting to note that Washington was very Jeffersonian though and his desire to control himself he had this Vesuvian temper I guess it made Adams temper look look almost pale by comparison and I think he didn't lose it often but when he lost it it cost him

dearly well Jefferson says you know later we you know we like to quote from a letter this is I'll read parts of this over the course of this out of character segment this is to Dr. Walter Jones in January of 1814 and Jefferson talks about a number of Washington qualities in a sense dams the great man with faint praise but he says his temper was naturally irritable and high toned but reflection and resolution had obtained a firm and habitual ascendancy over it he had mastered it if ever however it broke its bonds he was most tremendous in his wrath and Jefferson reports in other situations that he saw a couple of instances where Washington lost it and the he would just blow up he would shout and scream and one time he took a wig off and said and stomped it on the ground and he said something I can't remember which newspaperman this was about but somebody written skirlis things about him and Washington read this and and stormed and said I have only

regretted one moment since I became the president of the United States every moment since I became the president and you know he had this unbelievable temper and he couldn't he's very thin skin couldn't stand to be criticized and at some point he bought the Washington myth that Washington was beyond criticism and then people started to criticize him more and more in those last years including Jefferson and it's tragic in the case of Jefferson Washington basically finally decided that Jefferson was a bad man and broke communications with him and they died on reconciled and I think that's unfair I think Jefferson was being a bad man in certain respects in response to Washington's leadership but how do you think he was being a bad man? Well Jefferson wrote these things to Matty and others saying that Washington was basically senile and that's a point that Ellis makes that Jefferson and Ellis says Jefferson was simply wrong that Washington was not losing his mind was not relaxing you know whatever whatever euphemisms Jefferson is using for senile or Alzheimer's Ellis says that's just not true and so Jefferson was doing that and Jefferson

was leading opposition to the J Treaty and to other things and but at the same time he was writing Washington about crops and hemp and machines and inventions and slaves and you know the usual Jefferson pattern not letting Washington know that that he Jefferson had broken with him politically and was working to undermine the the high federalist party that's what drives all of Jefferson's enemies to distraction that Jefferson will write them sweet letters about writing machines and inks and pens and new books being published in the classics and new farming techniques and plowshares and never say and by the way I'm working actively to unseat you and so the Jefferson wants to maintain this level of gentility and does but doesn't remind people that he has become their enemy whereas Adams would say at the beginning of the letter you'd say I just like everything that you are doing and I'm working to stop it young man you scamp and by the way but let's still talk about these new books being published so Adams would come at it up front as we

like to say and Jefferson was deceptive you believe that in Ellis's book Jefferson comes off the worst of all I don't know about the worst of all but yes I mean right up there and let me just read this one passage this is really well written book one of the things that makes Joseph Ellis so much fun as he's a great writer this is page 274 of his excellency and it's a chapter called Testament he's talking about George Washington's ambition and he says his insistence for example on a powerful continental army and a wholly sovereign federal government become projections onto the national scene of the need for the same kind of controlling authority he had orchestrated within his own personality whether it's he had mastered himself and now he was creating a nationalist master for the country he goes on a recognition that he could no more trust the people to behave virtuously than he could trust his own instincts to behave altruistically and here's the killer sentence one of the reasons to take another

example he eventually found Jefferson dishonorable was that unlike Hamilton Jefferson could never acknowledge the depth of his own political ambitions I think that's the that's a key sentence to understanding Thomas Jefferson that Washington understood his ambitions Hamilton understood his ambitions Adams understood his ambitions wrestled with him in a Calvinist way but Jefferson had to always pretend that he didn't have them and maybe he convinced himself and I think the sense is he probably did convince himself but everyone else saw him as a man of ambition and so this this this problem in Jefferson between his self illusion the persona that he wants you to love and we do love and have love for 200 years and the real Jefferson who's back there somewhere doing bad things and and clawing after power that upset everybody Adam said he had a mind honeycomb with ambition and Washington they eventually saw that Jefferson was ambitious and but the only person who didn't see it was Jefferson

who I and I think Ellis is absolutely right Jefferson never got it that he was a man and like other men he had passions lusts dislikes doubts hatreds ecstasy's rankers and these them that human beings have a whole package of stuff and Freud would say a lot of it is dark stuff and Jefferson couldn't see it and he believed that he was this serene palladium stoic philosopher who was a farmer reluctantly a politician Washington had to pretend the same thing but he knew that he wasn't that and that he had to master himself to be the thing he wanted the country to love and yet as our producer keeps pointing out to us marketing is everything and Jefferson was a was a master marketer more than all of the rest of them combined I think anyone would have to say that Jefferson was of all the founding fathers the greatest spinner because he spun Jefferson to us and we have continued to believe it up till the present moment so there we have George Washington

in old age correcting his grammar Jefferson in old age writes Madison and says take take care of me after I'm gone and Madison did the little shrimp here's another great passage I want to read another one that I love this is a portrait of Washington at the end of the revolution page 149 there was also says Ellis one new ingredient in the heroic chemistry Washington's growing recognition that justice his place in the heavens was assured his time on earth was running out during the war he was too preoccupied with the daily duties of command to notice that he had moved past the allotted time 50 years that male members in the Washington line seldom reached and that he referred to as the meridian of life as he observed to the officers at Newberg his hair had in fact grown gray in the service to his country those huge eye sockets were now permanently creased the impressive muscularity of his torso had begun to soften and sag the massive bone structure that had carried him with such grace on horseback or on the dance floor was now afflicted with rheumatism the man

who had once led the pack and fox hunts now often declined the invitation to join the hunt rather than bring up the rear a somber note of resignation began to appear in his correspondence to the point in tone of a once great athlete passed his prime who felt literally in his bones that he was gliding down the stream of life when Lafayette departed Mount Vernon after an extended visit in 1784 the parting prompted nostalgic reminiscences of bygone days and a stoic forecast of encroaching darkness brilliant analysis you get a sense of Washington as never before in one way to turn a phrase Ellis is marvelous and you know I think this is a very fair book it doesn't put Jefferson in a very good light it sees Jefferson as sort of a dreamer and a schemer and a man who's disconnected to himself and is willing to betray some deep friendships in order to maintain his own illusions about the world it certainly would be the John Adams worldview I don't think it's true but I think

that there's truth in it I think that this is part of a larger movement in American historiography to reposition Jefferson downward and now that there's this kind of classical anthropological scapegoat theory now that Jefferson is as wounded and seen as vulnerable every historian every author feels free now to point out the big inconsistencies in Jefferson does this mean that as a John Adams interpreter I'm going to get more gigs now I doubt it somehow there's a the problem with Jefferson is that he is just he cannot finally get enough of him even when you are unhappy with it see Adams is it's the classic example of that rekindling there right friendship and correspondence he couldn't stay angry there was something compelling about Jefferson because I mean everyone who disliked him thought but on the other hand he's this gifted designer and he is this fabulous reader and he's in man of elegance and he's always gracious and when you're with him he makes you

feel like a billion dollars and he sends the sweet note and perfect penmanship and thinks of you and sends you the gift and he everything around him is beautiful and and lovely and symmetrical and ordered but then he dies and then the creditors come well there's that I mean the the House of cards could not stand without Jefferson's spirit holding them up we know that and but that's the point that I want to close on we're just about out of time and I invite people to go to our website www.th-Jefferson.org this is the beginning of a series we're going to do on Jefferson's basic friendships and antagonisms we're going to do two programs on each an in character program we've just done on Jefferson and Washington and we'll do an out of character program going deeper into this book by Joseph Ellis and we'll read books on the other great friendships so you can follow along and you can purchase a copy of his excellency if you like get it on amazon.com or from your local bookstore but it is really a wonderful book but Jefferson I think comes off as in a sense a

second rank man of the founding fathers not just by what Joseph Ellis says explicitly about his character but by an implicit contrast and the part that I wanted to just quickly mention is that Washington in his last years decided to do two things he decided to address the problem of slavery but he had sort of been pussy footing around all of his life and he did and he freed his slaves and after the death of his wife and he made it very clear that he regarded slavery as as an appalling poison on the American Republic but he also wrote a letter that I had never heard about before to a Cherokee leader in which he pledged his own personal reputation and prestige in saying that we are going to do justice by the American Indian we are not going to be vicious removalists we're not going to destroy or assimilate your culture I George Washington pledged myself to finding a way to doing justice to our Indian brethren

and I believe that the honor of the United States is at stake here I'd never heard of that letter before Bill but when I read it I was surprised because it's another one of his legacy letters it didn't it turned out to be of course farcical because not even George Washington could prevent the madness that occurred in the Jacksonian era but I think it's remarkable that he believed that he should stake his historic reputation on this act in the final in the final analysis it's George Washington who's the real man of enlightenment you know what the less said the more done I mean he he walked the walk rather than talk I don't know what the people say but you know what I'm saying that Washington was not an impressive orator like Adams or a brilliant penman like Jefferson or a lovely architect like Jefferson he was as the man of deep character and it came at enormous self mastery it wasn't natural he had to build his own character thank you very much Clay another wonderful addition of the Thomas Jefferson hour

join us as we out of character discuss the book his next one please George Washington by Joseph Ellis we'll see you all next week bye bye Clay Jenkins and will be in Norfolk Virginia on January 21st 2005 at the TCC Roper Performing Earth Center the topic for this Friday evening performance will be the second American Revolution tickets go on sale on December 6th through ticket master or you can save the ticket master fees by purchasing tickets at the Roper MacArthur Center ticket office the following day Saturday January 22nd Clay will be in Williamsburg for an up close and personal branch of the King's Mill the topic will be becoming Jefferson's people proceeds will sponsor the Kiwanis children fund and the Thomas Jefferson hour please call 1-800-274-1240-1800-274-1240 for more information or visit our website www.thryphonjefferson.org www.thryphonjefferson.org Music for the Thomas Jefferson hour was provided by Stephen Swinford of Las Vegas, Nevada

to ask mr. Jefferson a question or to donate nine dollars and receive a copy of today's program on CD please call 888-458-1803 again the number is 888-458-1803 thank you for listening and we hope you join us again next week for another entertaining historically accurate and thought provoking commentary through the eyes of Thomas Jefferson