Being Thomas Jefferson: Power, Democracy, and America’s Founding Contradictions
A conversation with historian Andrew Burstein on Writer's Voice
Segment One
In this episode of Writer’s Voice, I’m joined by historian Andrew Burstein to talk about his deeply illuminating biography, Being Thomas Jefferson. Burstein approaches Jefferson through what he calls “intimate history,” exploring not just what Jefferson did, but how he felt—and how his emotional world helped to shape the United States.
Burstein describes Jefferson as “a political moralist who converts knowledge into feeling,” explaining why Jefferson’s lyrical writing—from the Declaration of Independence to his private letters—helped create America’s moral identity . But that emotional power coexisted with profound contradictions: Jefferson imagined equality while living inside slavery, preached democracy while exercising immense control over other human beings, and spent much of his life trying to manage how history would remember him.
We talk about Jefferson’s childhood losses, his obsession with privacy and image-making, and his creation of Monticello as a kind of psychological refuge. Burstein also examines Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings, the rationalizations he used to live with slavery, and how race and power shaped his personal and political choices.
The conversation then widens to Jeffersonian democracy—his belief in harmony, affection, and an informed citizenry—and his fierce battles with Federalism and Alexander Hamilton. Burstein explains how Jefferson used emotionally charged language to define what it meant to be American, even as he struggled with fear, resentment, and moral compromise.
We close by reflecting on Jefferson’s enduring relevance today, including his insistence that “the whole art of government is the art of being honest,” and what that idea might offer us in a moment when democracy itself is under threat.
Listen for a candid, searching conversation about legacy, race, power, self-deception, and what Jefferson’s inner life still reveals about the country he helped bring into being.
Andrew Burstein is the author of Being Thomas Jefferson, The Passions of Andrew Jackson, Jefferson’s Secrets, and several other books on early American politics and culture.
Segment Two
Back in 2014, I spoke with scholar Danielle Allen about her powerful book Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality. Allen explains that while we’re comfortable talking about freedom, we’re far less certain about what equality really means — and why it matters.
Drawing on the Declaration itself, she makes a compelling case for political equality: the idea that each of us shares responsibility for shaping our collective future. And she challenges the common belief that liberty and equality are in conflict, arguing instead that freedom depends on strong, egalitarian communities.
It’s a message we urgently need to remind us of as we confront the the existential task of defending our democracy against those who would destroy it.
Interview Transcript: Andrew Burstein
Francesca Rheannon:
Andrew Burnstein, welcome to Writer’s Voice. You call this biography “an intimate history”. What helped you get inside the mind and heart of Thomas Jefferson?
Andrew Burnstein:
I have always loved the study of language and I was first attracted to Thomas Jefferson as a subject of study because of how uniquely effective he was as a writer. We don’t remember what George Washington or John Adams or James Madison or Alexander Hamilton had to say they aren’t quotable in the way Jefferson was. And, well, the Jefferson that I write about in this book is a political moralist who converts knowledge into feeling.
The reason why we still quote Jefferson, why historians love to quote him, and why some of his more beautiful words about this country encircle the interior of the Jefferson Memorial, it’s because he was seductive as a writer, both as a letter writer and, you know, if we look at the Declaration of Independence as a perfect example of his lyricism on the page, he knows how to establish authority, but he’s also very emotive in the language that he uses.
So that is essentially why he was recognized by the Continental Congress as someone who could speak to the king and speak to the world at large, not just in a legal separation of the colonies from Great Britain, but to do it with that musical cadence, that seductive weapon that was his pen. And that’s what attracts me still or intrigues me about Jefferson. The difference in this book from what I’ve written about Jefferson before is that, as you suggest, I do a deeper dive into what laid behind his language and how we can tease out elements of his own intimate life when he’s so very good at disguising it.
FR:
In fact, intimacy more broadly in the era of Jefferson is one of the lenses by which you approach your subject. So I wonder first if you could tell us a little bit about what the role of intimacy and emotion plays, how Jefferson wasn’t all that necessarily unusual in his time, and how does the modern historian understand the psychological reality of people who lived in such different times?
AB:
Yeah, that’s exactly what drives me as a cultural historian with a passionate interest in poetry. I know what attracted me to Jefferson aside from the larger-than-life character of this quintessential American founder. So doing intimate history, which is especially hard to do because we all are saddled with our modern biases, where you’re writing about or researching an individual who lived within a cultural bubble that we can’t penetrate fully, but there are ways of getting closer to, well, here’s a good example.
They had a language of psychology, and I wanted to affect a balance between what they had to say about psychological states, their science, their neuroscience, the language of sympathy. It’s still neurological studies of our own day still refer to the sympathetic connection between the brain and the organs. And so the language of neurological sympathies attracted the 18th century, the Enlightenment thinkers, of which Jefferson, of course, was one.
So the approach that I take is a restrained kind of psychological evaluation using tools that are available to a professional historian and recent work on cognitive psychology. I’m not a practitioner of psychology, and psychohistory got a bad rap, deservedly so, in the 1970s because it was greatly influenced by Sigmund Freud. And Freud’s been tossed out, and cognitive scientists have gone way beyond what people like Vaughan Brody did.
Her 1974 book, Thomas Jefferson and Intimate History, is a book that I am directly relating to. It was a best seller, and it shook up the whole early American biography profession and alienated her from Jefferson’s scholarship because she was the first to associate Jefferson with Sally Hemings. And, you know, much has flowed from Vaughan Brody’s work since then.
It’s still selling quite well. But she’s burdened by that Freudian interpretation which detracts from her otherwise insightful biography. So it’s not an accident that I have titled my book being Thomas Jefferson and Intimate History because I wanted to relate it to what she had done 50 years ago.
I don’t believe it’s possible to go deeper into the psyche of an 18th century person beyond what the evidence in the archive reveals. And so where I do speculate in this book, I inform the reader that that’s what I’m doing, and I list the pieces of evidence from which I draw that speculation. But Jefferson left posterity with an absolutely unbelievable trove of documents.
He kept every scrap, every draft of a letter. So you can look at even the crossouts of where he inserted words and phrases that he felt, you know, made his point or got his emotional message across better. And I analyze the difference between how he writes to men and how he writes to women.
So there’s lots of fodder here. And I try my best to do a creditable job of writing an intimate history without overdoing the psychoanalysis.
FR:
If you were a psychologist and you had Thomas Jefferson as a patient on your couch, what do you think the therapist would think of his core wound? Because you do speak of a Jefferson who is driven both by his romantic positivity as well as some very deep fears.
AB:
Right. So Jefferson’s life is a tale of love and longing and deep-seated friendship and deep, perhaps deeper, hatreds, which makes him the perfect subject to be on the therapist’s couch. To start at the beginning, the national creation story, that narrative, features larger-than-life figures.
And getting to the essence of who they are as flesh-and-blood individuals is an immense challenge. But in Jefferson’s case, I think it’s very doable because he grew up on the Virginia frontier. His friends in college, and he began college at 17, which was not unusual at that time, tended to be from the James River plantations.
They were near the capital. They were all from elite families whose surnames were recognizable. And Jefferson’s father, Peter Jefferson, was a frontier explorer who helped produce an amazing map.
He had a mathematical ability that his son picked up on because Jefferson saw the world. And I mean, about in his 20s, early 20s, beginning to build on an 867-foot mountain, Monticello, this Eden, this isolated, architecturally outstanding place that defined his personality. Consciously, quite consciously, he’s a self-taught architect.
But if you want to understand how ambitious he was, despite his mild-mannered being, Monticello is, in effect, Thomas Jefferson. The desire to retreat from the public, the desire to control his environment, an unusual desire for that time to afford himself privacy at length. This mountain dream world was designed to draw friends and influence people.
And he described it in letters to people across the globe. And it was a way of inviting intellectual peers into conversation with him. So his desire for worldly connections began early.
And I connected to his conception of Monticello as a unique place, which it is to this day. Now, he didn’t know his father very well. And I have found the evidence that he identified with surrogate fathers more than his own.
These are teachers, the most outstanding of which was George Wythe, also a signer of the Declaration of Independence, who was his teacher of the law. And he lived with him in Williamsburg. And Jefferson’s here in Albemarle County, where I live, on what was once the Virginia frontier, is a three-day ride in their five-mile-an-hour world from the colonial capital of Williamsburg.
Also, Jefferson said virtually nothing in the extant record about his relationship with his father, his relationship with his mother, who in the first chapter of the book, I look into how it was that this micromanager placed his mother, who died in March of 1776, at a distance from his intimates. He arranged the cemetery of Monticello so that he was closest to his dearest friend, who died before the revolution, Dabney Carr, who was also his brother-in-law, married a sister of his, and his wife, who died when he was 39 years old, and she was 33. And that was the trauma that intensified his desire to stay away from relationships that could hurt him.
But why did he bury his mother at some distance, where she was accompanied in death by a distant cousin, nobody who meant anything to Jefferson? And I don’t want to read too much into the psychology that determined this, but it’s something worth considering as we paint a psychological portrait of Jefferson. Now, in college at William and Mary, in his early 20s, all of his peers, his close friends, found wives who were from the elite, the planter set.
And Jefferson went years as a bachelor, as he was constructing Monticello. At that time in Virginia, among his set of friends, it was de rigueur to establish yourself as a gentleman by marrying and fathering as many children as you could. And in many cases, perhaps most cases, these friends of his married young and lost their wives, as Jefferson eventually would, after a number of difficult pregnancies, and then would marry a second time and have a dozen more children.
And so, you know, it was expected that these women understood that their role in nature, and this is very conservative and hard for us to, to grasp, but that their role in nature was to produce children. And so, even though something like a quarter, or a third, would die as a result of difficult childbirth, you don’t see a lot of intentional efforts to men to restrain themselves from impregnating their wives. And that’s what happened with Jefferson.
So, as we get him on the couch, one question would be, and this is what prurient minds all want to know, did he take his wife’s half-sister, Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman he had known since her infancy, did he take her as his concubine, as she was known, that is a woman kept for sexual gratification? That’s what their son, Madison Hemings, said in the one statement that we have toward the end of his life in the early 1870s, that his mother was Jefferson’s concubine. So, finding out whether he didn’t marry another woman, a white woman from the upper class, as all of his friends did, because the devastation that he felt after his wife’s death made it difficult for him to conceive of losing a second spouse.
He went into seclusion for for weeks and wouldn’t write to anyone. He shed tears at length every time he looked at his two surviving children, both daughters, and there are stories in the family about that depression into which he sank. Also, I wonder how, if he realized, because he didn’t appear to, he suffered what he called periodical headaches, which we call migraines today, and they would send him into a darkened room for hours at a time, usually from after waking through early afternoon, and this would occur when he was away from Monticello, when he was going somewhere, especially in politics, where he was about to face antagonists, and even in the President’s House, as the White House was then called, he continued to have these periodical headaches, and he never seemed to recognize that when they ended in 1809, which is the year he retired from politics altogether, after two terms as President, did he recognize what a nervous wreck he was through most of his political career. On the one hand, he, you know, had this outstanding desire for privacy, and constructed at Monticello private rooms, which few, if any, were allowed to enter.
If he made the connection between that and his intense desire to see the world, to see America, but to see the world in a certain way. So, when you look at Jefferson’s role in the creation narrative, from an intimate perspective, he was obsessed with image-making, obsessed with how posterity would regard him, and he wrote often that he was not made for contention. So, that conflict within him between wanting to shape the world, wanting to be seen, as I say in the book, as the Republic’s savior.
You know, George Washington was the savior of the revolution, but Jefferson went on to become, after Washington’s death, the savior of the Republic. So, to have that sense of his own self-importance, and to really demand respect, and yet to be so thin-skinned, is part of the fascination of trying to get inside his head.
FR:
You know, you’ve touched on so many important themes here. So, I want to come back to that issue of the Republic and our identity as a nation, being very much tied up with Jefferson’s notions of himself and the nation. But I want to go first to talking more about race, slavery, and power, his relationship with Sally Hemings.
You called her a woman. In fact, she was about 15, I think, when he began his affair with her. So, she was either a very young woman, or she was really just a teenager.
And this is one of the greatest contradictions that certainly we feel today about Thomas Jefferson’s life, the contradiction between the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence, said all men were created equal, talked about the pursuit of happiness, on the one hand, and on the other hand, was, in fact, an enslaver. And so, that contradiction is very much at the heart of how we now have come to think about him, but even people in his own day pointed out that contradiction. You say, Andrew Burstein, in being Thomas Jefferson, that he rationalized a lot of his less moral parts of his personality.
How do you think Jefferson understood his relationship with Sally Hemings? And how did he, or did he, how did he rationalize it? How did he put it within the context of his ideals?
AB:
Well, let’s begin with his stature as the master of the Mountain of Monticello. Think comparatively of the Lord who inherited thousands of acres in Britain, and we have the upstairs-downstairs relations where if one of the scullery maids is impregnated by the master of the titled individual who owns this spread, he will send her away, pay for the children or child to be educated and, you know, given a head start on life, but probably feels or bears little guilt in what he’s done.
Jefferson had that same kind of aristocratic pretense, although in his most famous writings, he comes across as the most democratic of the writers of his time. But simply referring to this as a contradiction isn’t really getting us anywhere. It’s too easy to say.
So if we look at his class identity first and recognize at the same time, where he’s in charge of everyone and everything, you know, he inherited the hundreds of enslaved people. I think twice as many were owned by his father-in-law, John Wales, who was also Sally Hemings’s father, right? So he was Thomas Jefferson’s wife’s Paddy.
He called her Paddy, Martha Jefferson. He was her father from his first marriage, but her mother died shortly after her birth. He was married to two more women from the upper class and they both died.
Then he took as his concubine Sally Hemings’s mother. Jefferson was replicating what his father-in-law did. And maybe Sally Hemings, who was an attractive woman by all accounts at the time, one of the enslaved men who produced a short memoir referred to her long straight hair and said she was appeared nearly white.
She was three quarters white. So Jefferson was avoiding burying two more, if he was patterning himself in some way on John Wales, was avoiding the pain of burying more wives. And because Sally Hemings apparently did not leave the mountaintop that we’re aware of, this is the place where Jefferson is safest, where he controls his environment.
And so the Hemingses, her brothers and sisters and half brothers and sisters, I described the Hemings family, the extended family as a parallel subordinate family. They came to him when he was first married because John Wales, his father-in-law died a year or so after Jefferson was married. And he inherited more slaves from John Wales than he had from his own father when he came into his majority.
And his mother, who survived until 1776, would lease some of the slaves to Jefferson who were helping him to cut paths through the mountain, do all of the construction work that Jefferson oversaw as the landscape architect. So that gives you something of a picture of his isolation and his social power. And I just want to correct one thing.
Yes, Sally Hemings came to France at the age of 14 or 15 as the nanny, you would say, to Jefferson’s younger daughter who didn’t make the trip with him in 1784. So three years later, she hadn’t seen her father. And Sally Hemings came, it wasn’t Jefferson who asked for her, but she was known as Sally’s, as Maria’s maid, Maria Jefferson.
So she was 15 when she arrived with Jefferson’s younger daughter in Paris. And while Madison Hemings, their son who gave the interview to the newspaperman who published in the early 1870s in Ohio, he, Madison Hemings, said assuredly that his mother left France in 1789, when she was maybe 16, 17, enceinte, he used the French word, pregnant. Now, if she was pregnant by Jefferson in 1789, and bore that child back in Virginia, there is no record.
Jefferson did record the births of the rest of Sally Hemings’s, I believe it was six children, four of whom survived to adulthood. But we don’t know about that first child, whether it’s there actually was one, if the child died in infancy. At any rate, the nature of Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings, the emotional character of it is unknowable.
I have introduced in the book a number of new suggestions, including the one where we look at race and class together, and not just see this as Jefferson, the owner of human beings, taking one of these enslaved human beings as his mistress, as his concubine. But he also inherited from John Wales, immense debt. And if he had been a better money manager, Jefferson would have found his way out of debt by selling land early on.
Instead, he owed John Wales, his British creditors, and that debt kept growing and Jefferson had this wrong impression that he was going to find his way to pay back the debt by having bountiful harvests, bumper harvests, on his tobacco, his wheat, whatever was exported to Britain. Well, that was unrealistic. And he was saddled with debt that kept growing.
And one of the reasons, one of the rationales that he could use for why he did not emancipate slaves was that he could not get out of debt because there were not white servants, since there still were indentured servants in the lead up to the revolution. Some Virginians like Jefferson thought that the Germans were known to work hard and so German peasants could be brought in and work the land and that would facilitate the emancipation of the enslaved. But that was never realized either.
So Jefferson was rich with rationalizations and when it came to slavery, he could write eloquently of why African Americans deserved their own republic. He just also was convinced that their resentments were so deep and deservedly so that only a race war could eventually, after emancipation, so that, and the white America had all the weaponry, so it was going to be a bloodbath. And this is Jefferson’s calculation that because of this and because whites did not believe that they could coexist with blacks as social equals, that the liberal solution was to send all the emancipated slaves away, either to West Africa, where Africa could reclaim those who were kidnapped from its shores, or to Haiti.
Some suggestions even at the time, Texas and some of the lands to the West because Jefferson was always like many of his Virginia peers, an expansionist and believing in American exceptionalism and the idea that we had this vast continent and should make certain that the Europeans could never settle any of it and that America’s bright future was tied to its conquering of the West. And so one of the thoughts, because 3000 miles across, there could be freed Blacks settled in the areas west of it that America had not yet moved into.
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FR:
So he had these rationalizations. I want to spend some time that we have left here, going now beyond to his political role in the revolution and beyond. I mean, you very clearly say in this book, Andrew Bernstein and being Thomas Jefferson, that his notion of what we now call Jeffersonian democracy was a key part of America’s sense of itself, the myth of America.
And, you know, as we’ve already been talking, we understand that myth has deep divisions from actual reality. But nonetheless, it’s still an idea that informs us today. In fact, I think you could say that a lot of the outrage at Donald Trump and what he’s been doing has been coming from ordinary Americans who feel that this notion of democracy that we have, you know, been inculcated in deep in our bones since the earliest days that we went to school, you know, is being destroyed by him.
So there is really a line between us and Jefferson. So I’d like you to talk about Jeffersonian democracy. What was his vision for America?
And then I’m going to ask you about his conflict with federalism, because this is an other conflict that is very, very much alive today.
AB:
Okay, that’s a big topic. Obviously, Jefferson made his mark. And again, referring back to how he was chosen to write the Declaration of Independence.
He had a unique way of writing, such that he could challenge the King of England in powerful, emotive, lyrical language, and establish the justification for the United States. And the first time the words United States of America were written down in a public document was in the Declaration of Independence. The United States of America, they were called the United Colonies up to that point.
But he didn’t strictly invent the term. So what he was able to do was to create a moral identity for the people of the United States, the citizens of the United States. And in doing so, he not only excoriated the king, part of the language that he used, that I love so much, is he would attack the king for having sent swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.
And nobody, nobody else would have inserted words like that, language like that, into the Declaration of Independence. He wasn’t just a lawyer writing a legalistic document. He was an emotional man using an emotive script to establish the moral identity of the United States.
He went on to, well, in establishing his presidency, his first inaugural address is one of the great documents in American history, where he writes about not just his optimistic belief in an informed citizenry, but in the, to quote from that first inaugural, harmony and affection, without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things. I think I’ve got that right. Liberty and even life itself are but dreary things.
So harmony and affection was his political message. And he’s saying that the old world of monarchs and peasants lacked the ability to constitute a society based on essential moral equality. And that when Americans, like American sailors, took commerce to the ports of Europe and elsewhere, simply their appearance abroad, their character, their identity would translate into producing the feeling that was needed to overturn aristocracy and monarchy and established republics.
When he was in France in 1784 to 1789, it was the time when the liberal nobility, people like the Marquis de Lafayette and another who was extremely influential on Jefferson’s thinking as a political moralist, the Marquis de Condorcet, although little known, he had a greater impact on Jefferson than Lafayette, the better known Lafayette, who was a surrogate son to George Washington. What Condorcet did, and Condorcet was the progressive that we wanted, we want Jefferson to be. Condorcet was kind of the Bernie Sanders of his time, if I may.
He was an ardent feminist, even before Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women came out in 1792. He was an ardent anti-slavery proponent and wrote an anti-slavery book that, in 1788, that while he and Jefferson were communing at length in these Enlightenment salons where Enlightenment ideas were circulating, and Condorcet was so close to Jefferson that Jefferson wanted to translate and started translating this book into English. The idea was that Jefferson himself was not going to risk his own social and political reputation by calling for the emancipation of all America’s slaves.
But through surrogates like Condorcet and the Englishman Richard Price and others, and George Wythe, his mentor in the law at William and Mary, who became a judge, was also vehemently anti-slavery. So Jefferson was befriending and supporting the ideas of anti-slavery. But when he came back to America, all of that which he had imbibed in France kind of went out the window because he became Secretary of State under Washington and he was saddled with a lot of other problems, the least of which, well not the least of which, one of which was Alexander Hamilton.
And this is to segue into the Jefferson’s federalist opponents. Jefferson, he became that provincial Virginian who was indebted to British creditors and doubled down on his commitment to being a slave owner and left it to the next generation to find the remedy that his generation of Southerners could not. Well, he came into Washington’s cabinet months, a few months after his arrival in Virginia, after five years in France, and Hamilton had already gotten a head start.
The battle between Hamilton and Jefferson was a battle for Washington’s ear. Washington presided. He took the job as president, literally, one who presided, literally, and effectively was a judge of character and was balancing the opinions of Hamilton, who was an Anglophile, and Jefferson, who was a Francophile.
And when England and France went to war in 1793, Washington clearly sided with Hamilton. He had a more conservative perspective, whereas Jefferson was more, you might say, married to the idea of democratization. Hamilton wanted the moneyed elite to connive with the government.
And that’s perhaps an unfair verb for me to use, connive. But Hamilton thought that by enriching the already well-heeled moneyed elite and having them support the government, that a consolidation of power at the national level was a good thing for the growth of the American economy, which at that time was admittedly weak. Jefferson thought it was more important to maintain the kind of expansive agricultural empire, not to find America replicating the urban squalor of the European cities he had visited, but that the expansion of farming would present America with this impetus to maintain its Republican character and to spread the wealth, in effect.
But Hamilton and the Federalists were more inclined to maintain a status quo and looked upon Jefferson’s constituency as those who might resort to mob action, whose refusal to be comfortable with the moneyed elite running the show, who really believed in democracy, that they would. And there had been instances, the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794 is an example, where resisting Hamilton’s tax, rural farmers protested, and Washington and Hamilton led the national army into western Pennsylvania with a show of power. And, you know, Jefferson and his chief political ally, James Madison, were incensed by this kind of power grab that Hamilton was behind.
So they established effectively an anti-administration newspaper, and that was the beginning of the two-party system in America, 1792-93. So there were many factors coming together, both domestic and foreign policy related, that why Jefferson in retirement referred to his election as president, 1800-1801, as the revolution of 1800, because it was, he believed, an unstoppable force that was rejecting Hamiltonianism. Washington was dead by then.
And for the rest of his life, he considered his role in the United States to be the savior, the preserver of democracy, of Republican authority. And more than anyone else, he went to his grave still fearing that aristocracy and democracy would take over, and that his dreams for America would not be realized.
FR:
And how ironic it is, in fact, that now we have a Supreme Court that is filled with Federalist ideology, Federalism being the Hamiltonian idea. I mean, we can say, you know, between the yeoman farmers and the bankers, the bankers seem to have won, as has an increasingly monarchical presidency. What do you think Hamilton would think of what we are going through today?
AB:
As a historian, I’m shy from making statements like that. But Hamilton, I’m not sure he truly respected even George Washington. Hamilton thought that he was always the smartest guy in the room, and that he should be calling the shots.
I think, you know, Jefferson looked at him as kind of the, to go Shakespearean, as the Iago whispering in Washington’s ear, and that Washington, Jefferson actually rationalized that why Washington leaned toward Hamilton was that he became senile in his mid 60s, and that he was truly a Republican of the Jeffersonian mold. And had he lived longer, Jefferson would have had a chance to convince him. This is not at all true.
But that’s kind of part of how Jefferson thought and rationalized. Hamilton, because he was such an arrogant individual, I think would understand the monopoly on power that we see in America in 2026. How he would be, how he would feel about the Trump presidency, I don’t have the faintest idea.
But I don’t think he would be any more to the left than he was in his own time.
FR:
Well, let me rephrase that then. What do you think we, in this time where we are fighting a battle between democracy and that kind of oligarchy that really you described Hamilton as being in favor of, what lessons should we take from your biography of Thomas Jefferson, from Jefferson’s example himself, as we try to defend our democracy today?
AB:
Well, Jefferson talked back to the king in 1774, before almost anyone else. And he said, let those who flatter fear it is not an American art. Talking back to the king is like talking back to the would be monarch that that we see in in the White House today.
And he charged, open your breast sire to liberal and expanded thought. So talking back to power begins at the beginning in this country. And there is still, you know, there are still those voices, particularly, you know, I mean, we know that the instantaneous communication that exists today, in their world, it was letter writing, it was written, it was a typographical dominated world, where the written record was the most potent, the most powerful.
Today, it’s visual, for the most part, the visual media. But Jefferson, when he began his political career, was bold. Another in this same, I go in into depth about the summary view on the rights of British America.
This is the 1774 prequel to the Declaration of Independence. And perhaps we should end with this. He wrote, the whole art of government is the art of being honest.
And he believed that. I mean, that’s the spirit of 1776. I’m not saying that he enacted, that he was, he became too much of a hardened politician to be always honest.
But the whole art of government is the art of being honest, is kind of the mantra that distinguished the colonial protest against the ministers of Great Britain, who were subservient, who were the courtiers. And we see the courtiers in Washington today in the cabinet and in the executive branch. But there are always those bold thinkers, writers, speakers, who recognize that abuse of power is what sinks governments.
And that respect for the educated citizenry is the ideal we were founded on.
FR:
That’s so important. You know, corruption, or dishonesty, corruption is being at the heart, the heart of the poisoning of democracy, I think, is absolutely critical and too little understood, I think, today, although people are beginning to wake up to it. So I want to thank you so much, Andrew Burstein, for ending on that note, which I think is something we can really take forward with us in being inspired by the best of who he was.
Your just fascinating and beautifully written biography is Being Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History. Thanks so much.
AB:
Thanks for those kind words, Francesca.
Interview Transcript: Danielle Allen
Back in 2014,we spoke with scholar Danielle Allen about her wonderful book, Our Declaration: The Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality. I started out by asking her “Why does equality have to be defended?”
Danielle Allen:
The dominant ideal in our political discourse is liberty these days, and you can assess that by looking at how frequently concepts of liberty or freedom in contrast to equality are evoked in the speeches of presidential candidates and sitting presidents. And when you go through this, you’ll find that there is much more frequent emphasis on freedom and liberty than equality. So I think we’re more comfortable thinking about freedom.
We know how to think about freedom. We understand that as a concept about our individual empowerment, our development as individuals of our own choices and personal capacities. We have ready ideas about possible restrictions to our freedoms or challenges to our freedoms, whether they’re coming from government or other forms of intervention.
So I think we have well-honed ideas for thinking about freedom, and we have more confusion around the concept of equality. So there’s the issue in the first instance that we know straight off that we’re not all the same. So what can it possibly mean to say that in some sense we’re all equal?
And then if one identifies a core feature of humanness, of humanity that we share, our capacity to be political creatures, then there’s a sort of subsequent question of, well, but what does that actually mean in practice? How does that idea of a core element of equality in human beings relate to how we think about politics or our social life and social policies or economics? And that’s confusing.
It’s a complicated subject.
FR:
Danielle Allen went on to explain in more detail what equality means in the context of the Declaration Of Independence:
DA:
Well, the Declaration of Independence makes a very profound case for political equality, and that’s the kind of equality I focus on. And what political equality consists of is really there are two things. There’s, first of all, a basic recognition that a defining feature of human beings is our capacity to be political.
So human beings, we do things in groups. We do things in groups through talk and conversation. That’s something that’s true around the world.
It’s true across time. And our capacity to participate with others in conversation to make judgments about our current circumstances and what we should do about our current circumstances is all that is at the core of what being political is. So in the first instance, to say that we’re all equal is to recognize that each of us has that capacity to participate in politics and to take ownership of our own lives, again, to judge our present circumstances and to choose a course for the future.
So then there’s a second question of once one recognizes that we all have that core capacity, what kind of political system can best recognize that capacity? And there the answer is democracy. And then you have to start thinking about how in the context of a democracy one achieves genuinely egalitarian empowerment of a citizenry.
So there are issues that come into play there about education. There’s issues, of course, about voting rights and civil rights and how people have access to political institutions. There are issues of how we fund campaigns.
Is it important to start thinking a little bit more about public funding of campaigns to open up the playing field for who can have the chance of running for office? So these are the kinds of things one needs to think about. And ultimately, if you ask somebody, do you want to be equal?
The question that I have in mind there is, do you want to have an equal share of responsibility and opportunity to shape our shared political life? And that’s what we’re really talking about with the concept of political equality.
FR:
This idea that liberty is more important than equality. You actually talk about the fact that there is no liberty without equalities. Is that right?
DA:
That’s right. Exactly. So it’s important to say, first of all, that this very commonly held idea that liberty and equality are an intention with each other, that’s an idea that really dates to the middle of the 19th century.
And it emerged with Marx and the responses to Marx. So Karl Marx and Communist Manifesto and other documents did make the case that in order to achieve economic egalitarianism, one would have to violate property rights and things like that. And then the response to that was for generations of philosophers to start out by assuming an opposition between liberty and equality.
In fact, for thousands of years before that, philosophers took liberty and equality to stand in harmony with each other, to be mutually reinforcing of each other. And this is the Republican tradition. It’s the tradition from ancient Greece, from ancient Rome.
And on this view, in order for each of us to protect our liberty, it’s very important to be part of a strong community that protects all of us together from external dangers, but also then can protect each of us internally from being dominated by any of the others in our community. And to have that strong and healthy community that we might be part of, one needs healthy social bonds and those social bonds need to be egalitarian. So that’s the sense in which freedom depends on equality.
We need equality amongst ourselves as citizens in order to form a social unit that has the capacity, the strength to protect us and protect our freedom.
FR:
So what I’m hearing you saying is that there is a connection between equality, liberty and community.
DA:
That’s right. Exactly. Yes.
So equality is what helps us build community and community is what helps us protect our liberty. That’s the connection among these ideas. And it’s again, it’s important when I talk about equality, that what I am talking about there is first and foremost, political equality.
And that means the chance to participate in our public and shared decision making. I’m also talking about social equality in the sense that it matters that when we interact with each other on the street or in shops or in our churches or any of our organizations, that we have an egalitarian ethos. And I think, you know, we can be very proud of that in this country.
If you look at our social organizations, it’s amazing how many of them are run through committees and structures of committees. And that’s a very egalitarian, democratic approach. And that’s valuable.
That helps us form our bonds of community. And then with regard to economic questions, it’s not that we need, in fact, equality of economic outcomes. So that’s not entailed by political and social equality, but we do need an economic system that’s fair, that’s recognized by everybody as fair.
And that does do a reasonably good job of making sure that the sort of distribution of the goods that we produce isn’t too skewed. So in other words, excessive inequality is a problem. But to say that excessive economic inequality is a problem is not to say that everything needs to be equalized.
FR:
So you take up this issue within the context, of course, of a close reading of the Declaration of Independence itself, but also the people who wrote it. And they were, you know, white men of property, of landed means, several of them, most notably Thomas Jefferson, but others too were slave owners, who yet you say they when they said all men are created equal, they meant all people. So could you talk about kind of the tension between these men as writers of a constitutional, of a document that speaks to all of us, as you say, not only in this country, but obviously has spoken to people throughout the world who have based their own constitutions on the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution.
Talk about that tension.
DA:
I think one of the most important things to remember about the Declaration of Independence, and this is true of the Constitution as well, is that there were many participants in those conversations, and they did not all agree about everything. So there are many voices in the Declaration. It’s not a single voice that we hear.
So I like to call the Declaration a polyphonic text. So just to give you an example, the committee of five that drafted the Declaration consisted of four northerners, none of whom were slaveholders, and one southerner. Okay, so right there in the committee, you have an argument about the question of slavery.
And so John Adams, for example, who was instrumental in moving the Declaration forward and in its drafting, didn’t think slavery was a good thing. And the decision in the opening of the Declaration to talk about our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, leaving out the property concept, was a decision in the direction of those who were against slavery. So the southerners had been using the property concept, the idea that one of the things they wanted to defend was their right to property, as a way of defending slavery.
And Adams helped keep that concept out of the Declaration of Independence. So that’s a place where we can see one of the participants who wasn’t a slave owner doing important conceptual work to make sure that a truly egalitarian foundation was being built. So I think that’s the most important thing to say, is that there’s a diversity of opinions and views around the table, and there were people participating in the Continental Congress who were already against slavery, working toward thinking about how to move beyond it, and so forth.
FR:
And even Thomas Jefferson, am I right, he put in a clause that was then taken out that condemns slavery?
DA:
That’s right. It’s complicated. I mean, so Jefferson, he gave us that incredibly grand opening that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.
And then in the list of grievances against King George, he had a long section where he complained, he criticized King George for having protected the slave trade, for having started the slave trade, and so forth. And he talks there about the king’s violation of the sacred rights, sacred natural rights of men from Africa in bringing people into slavery. So he uses exactly the same vocabulary for talking about the rights of the enslaved Africans as he uses for talking about the colonists who were subjects of the British king.
So he does draw an equivalence there. And so in that regard, even Jefferson seems to have genuinely meant that when he said all men are created equal meant all people. But there’s a twist, because he put that passage in there, not simply or not straightforwardly as a sort of mere condemnation of the slave trade.
But also, I mean, there’s a sort of political purpose there, which is that the southerners were interested in seeing the slave trade end, because they had a market in their own slaves. So when there was no slave trade, their own slaves were going to be worth more, and they could profit by in effect, breeding slaves and trading them. So it’s a really double edged element there that Jefferson’s put in.
But it was struck by the Continental Congress. And the reason it appears to have been struck is because that language about the sacred and natural rights of the enslaved was too polemical from the point of view of the slave faction.