Original subtitles

Previously on "Thomas Jefferson"...

Jefferson writes a letter called

"A Summary View of the Rights of British America."

It's an outlay of everything that the British government

and everything the king, George III,

has kind of done wrong.

The British imposed a series of taxes

that causes people on both sides of the Atlantic

to reevaluate that relationship

and think about who's in charge.

At the Second Continental Congress,

all the great leading lights of the colonies are convening.

John Hancock appoints a committee of five men

to draft a declaration of American independence.

The glamorous work is giving the speeches.

The hard work is being delegated

to this younger Virginian who wields a great pen

and is known for that.

And so Jefferson gets drafted to be the draftsman.

What sets Jefferson apart is the capacity

and the gift of articulation.

Nobody wrote better.

He mobilized the English language

and sent it into battle.

And in this case, it was the battle for an ethos

and an aspiration of liberty.

But as Jefferson is talking about,

"All men are created equal," he's there with his wife's

enslaved half-brother.

The fact that the core contradiction

of the idea that all men are created equal,

and Jefferson being a slave owner,

and that original sin being baked in that cake

gnaws at us still.

But it ultimately doesn't reduce its power.

Because signing the Declaration was signing

your own death warrant.

They were subjects of King George III.

And now they were rebels.

Now the hard work begins.

They need to win the war.

As the celebrations of independence quiet

in the summer of 1776...

Reality sets in for a new nation at war.

The story of the Revolution is immensely more

complicated than Declaration of Independence,

joyous new nation.

Debt, foreign relations,

relationships between the states, defense,

all of these things were still unfolding.

In the summer of 1776, just as Congress votes

in favor of independence and adopts this declaration,

a 30,000-man expeditionary force arrives in New York

to suppress this rebellion.

It's the largest expeditionary force the British had ever

sent abroad to that point.

It's a massive army by the standards of the 18th century.

At that point, Americans are a ragtag conglomeration

of colonial militias.

How can we possibly accomplish this in the face of one

of the mightiest armies upon the globe?

The British capture New York pretty easily.

They rout the Continental Army at Brooklyn,

and then they end up chasing Washington

and the Continental Army up into Westchester

and then southwest across New Jersey.

There's a great deal of uncertainty

in the summer of 1776.

Because you've got to remember,

a significant portion of the citizenry

doesn't want independence from Britain.

So you've got British loyalists who aren't on board.

And they're your friends and your neighbors,

and they're actively cooperating

with the redcoats, who are coming

to reassert their primacy.

The sentiment at the time was a very profound

and intense mixture of exultation and fear.

But while soldiers are fighting and dying,

Jefferson doesn't partake in the military, notably.

He tries to serve his state,

his attempted newfound nation in other ways.

Jefferson's leadership during the war

was in a more civilian capacity.

The states have to redraft their laws.

They can't use their old colonial charters.

They have to start from scratch.

Virginia is closest to Jefferson's heart.

It's a place of great importance

in this new republican experiment.

Jefferson knew himself and knew his strengths,

and so Jefferson comes back from Philadelphia

to help redraft the laws of Virginia.

Jefferson says, this lawmaking is as important

as the war of Independence.

And when Washington's at Valley Forge,

he might not be thinking the same thing.

But he said, this is the real work

because otherwise, it doesn't matter.

And so he sets about reforming and revolutionizing Virginia.

Prior to independence,

Virginia had a state church.

It was the Anglican church.

It wasn't very well attended, necessarily,

but it was state supported in the sense

that people's taxes went to support

this religious establishment.

And it was his strong belief, and he became really skeptical

in matters of religion, that there shouldn't

be state-supported religion.

Jefferson was not a conventional Christian

in any way.

He did not believe in the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth.

He did not believe in the Trinity.

He called those kinds of theological arguments

"monkish superstition."

And so very early on, Jefferson is interested

in the separation of church and state,

because he thought, along with Enlightenment thinkers,

the church had had too much of an influence in Europe.

You know, as Englishmen,

they believed in dieu et mon droit,

"God is my right," the motto of the royal family.

But Jefferson understands, because he reads history,

that whenever religion and the government get together,

it's bad.

It's bad for the people.

It's bad for the government.

It's also, by the way, bad for the religion.

He writes that there should be a wall of separation

between church and state.

Now, that wall is doing two things.

Just as there shouldn't be undue influence of religion

on the state, there should not be

undue influence by the state interfering with religion.

In 1777, Jefferson drafts

the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom,

a statement about both freedom of conscience

and the principle of separation

of church and state.

Though it will not be written into law

for another seven years,

the statute is the basis for what will become one

of the defining tenets of the American government,

the First Amendment.

He says, this is what makes us better than Europeans.

We're not forced to pay taxes to support

a religious establishment.

And Jefferson's very, very proud of this.

Virginia, as he sees it, is first

in disestablishing religion.

The separation of church and state

is a key indicator of freedom for him,

but it is a rebellion against orthodoxy.

And an orthodoxy has a general tendency to impose itself

upon individual freedom and especially freedom

of conscience, so you see Jefferson waving the banner

of individual freedom of conscience

against any imposition by larger forces or orthodoxies.

And this is a really important and powerful step,

and a big part of what the country we know today

is supposedly about.

Jefferson's closest partner in authoring the statute

for Separation of Church and State

is newcomer to the Virginia legislature, James Madison.

Madison is the junior partner.

He's small.

He's brilliant.

He's a writer.

He's who Jefferson is in closest contact with.

And Jefferson drafts Madison into his camp over time.

Friendship was a very important thing to Jefferson.

And Jefferson and Madison were friends.

His political allies were not just instrumental connections.

These were his people.

Between 1777 and 1778, Jefferson and Madison

draft over a hundred bills that go on to shape Virginian

and then federal laws.

But while Jefferson toils over statutes,

the war begins to move south.

In the north, the British focused

on occupying major cities, Boston,

and New York, and Philadelphia.

As the war moves south, the British strategy changes.

The southern war is guerrilla war.

It's a much more chaotic war.

And then, in 1779, Thomas Jefferson

is voted in as the second elected governor

of the New Commonwealth of Virginia.

This is during the time when the war is raging all

throughout the colonies and is making its way

more directly to Virginia.

And at this point, thanks to the "Summary View

of the Rights of British America,"

he's an important political figure in Virginia.

But Jefferson's governorship is one

of the most controversial periods of his life,

and certainly of his public life.

And now, Jefferson the enlightened,

naive young lawyer, philosopher, would-be statesman

has a reality check.

Jefferson's sharpest weapon has always been his intellect.

Now he's thrust into a place he'd never imagined he'd be,

the front lines of war.

In the summer of 1779,

as Jefferson settles into his role as governor,

the war begins to move south,

and the threat of violence looms over Virginia.

The British had been waging war

for five years at this point.

They're angry.

This war has been very unpleasant for the British.

It hasn't gone very well.

It's one thing to go into a country

and try to depose a set of rulers.

It's another thing to try to occupy

a large swath of territory.

Armies take.

They need food, they need shelter, space.

They generate hostility to their presence.

The British Army just couldn't manage the process of being

an occupying force against what was a much weaker power,

but had the home field advantage.

So it's been a nasty, intractable insurgency

in many respects.

And they've kind of taken off the gloves.

But as Jefferson bears the weight on his shoulders

for the responsibility of protecting and defending

the Commonwealth of Virginia, Jefferson and others just

do not believe that the enemy is going to have

any effect on Virginia.

He says the war is happening up north.

And he says Virginian farmers need to return to business.

They need to return to farming and the sustenance

of their families.

However, at the end of 1779 and the beginning of 1780,

British ships have been seen off the coast of Virginia.

And he's slow in reacting to that.

That year of 1779 to 1780,

Jefferson finally begins to worry

about keeping the capital in Williamsburg

because the enemy could sail up the James River

and lay siege.

So they moved the capital that spring

to much better defended ground on the heights of Richmond.

But then they receive information and knowledge

that the enemy is sailing up the James River to Richmond.

His letters during this time are calls for help.

He's trying to conscript people back to his side.

He's saying, we're being attacked.

We shall omit nothing in our power for the support

of the troops, but I must appraise you

that our means of supply are not at present

what they have been,

so that they may perhaps suffer,

though they shall not if we can prevent it.

But Washington doesn't have that many troops to spare

and doesn't quite say, well, you're on your own,

but that's kind of the implication.

And then on January 1, 1781, 1,600 British troops,

including an elite green coat division under Benedict Arnold

known as Dragoons, storm Richmond and wreak havoc

on the new capital city.

There are constant British attacks,

a very fateful one of which is led by the traitor

Benedict Arnold.

When the British come, an enslaved man says

within ten minutes there wasn't a white man

to be seen in town.

Everybody else had scattered to the four winds.

Jefferson is struggling to govern a society

that is falling apart around him.

When British forces arrive, the Virginia troops

don't stand a chance.

The invasion of Virginia is an existential moment for him.

You have the most powerful army in the world

in your neighborhood.

And from a quarry as significant

as Thomas Jefferson, there would be

immense personal insecurity about falling

into the hands of the British.

And then Jefferson himself is almost

captured by Arnold's forces.

The British officers said, where is Governor Jefferson?

We are here with these silver handcuffs

to take Governor Jefferson prisoner.

But he escapes.

And the government has to flee Richmond.

They go to Charlottesville.

Virginia's a mess.

Just over a week after fleeing from Williamsburg

to Richmond, Virginia officials are forced

to set up a new capital in Charlottesville,

only 4 miles from Jefferson's home.

For safety, Jefferson takes the highest

ranking members of the Virginia House of Delegates

in at Monticello.

He is living there with his wife,

his nine-year-old daughter, Martha,

and his three-year-old daughter, Maria.

Jefferson, during this entire period,

is wondering whether, first and foremost,

we can still conduct our government

out west in Virginia, but what is going

to happen to my family, to me?

All of this turmoil, all of this upheaving

is naturally going to have an effect on their family...

And have an effect on a young Mrs. Jefferson,

who is constantly pregnant.

We know that childbirth was extremely difficult for her.

Over a period of ten years,

she gives birth to six children.

Martha is the eldest.

The second child, a little girl, Jane,

does not live very long.

The third child is a little boy,

Peter, named for Jefferson's father,

doesn't survive but a few days.

Their fourth child is Maria.

She does survive infancy.

In the winter of 1781, his wife had just

suffered the death of their fifth child

and would be pregnant with their sixth child.

Meanwhile, the British troops continue moving west,

closer to Monticello.

The British dragoons seek the capture of as many members

of the Virginia House of Delegates

in Charlottesville, where they know they are in hiding.

But certainly, the one who has the highest price on his head

is the governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia.

It's a chess match.

The British want to capture the governor of Virginia.

Jefferson is the prize.

As British troops march west through Virginia,

the threat against Jefferson grows.

With each passing day,

the British get closer and closer

to the new capital in Charlottesville

and his home, Monticello.

So in May of 1781, he sends a letter to George Washington.

It's another plea to Washington for help.

Jefferson writes to Washington,

the whole force of the enemy within this state

I think is about 7,000 men.

Your excellency will judge from this state of things

and from what you know of your own country

what it may probably suffer during the present campaign.

And the British continue to attempt to capture Jefferson.

And then a man named Jack Jouett,

who owns and operates the tavern in Cuckoo, Virginia,

he overhears a number of British dragoons

reveal themselves, the more they consume,

of the orders of British Lieutenant Colonel

Banastre Tarleton to proceed westward

and seek the capture of Governor Jefferson.

Jouett road overnight 40 miles.

It's very much like Paul Revere warning

that the British were going to attack Lexington and Concord

five years before.

In fact, it's a much longer ride.

And he arrives at Monticello before the British do.

And Jouett forewarns them, saying, gentlemen,

they may be but a few moments behind me.

According to the legend, Jefferson gave him

a glass of Madeira, thanked him for his efforts.

But Jefferson didn't leave right away.

He put his family in a carriage,

sending them on their way down to land that Jefferson owned

down near Lynchburg, Virginia.

But he waited to leave.

Taking his time, Jefferson proceeds

very calmly to bury the state papers below the floorboards

of his dining room.

And then finally, at the last moment,

Jefferson sets off on horseback.

And he rides to Montalto, the taller mountain

just to the west of Monticello.

Enslaved people had shoed the horse shoes on backwards,

so that way when the horse is running down the mountain,

it looks like Jefferson is actually

running up the mountain.

And it confuses the British.

He rides up along the side of the mountain.

And then he dismounts from his horse

to look back at Monticello through his spyglass.

And there they are.

When Jefferson flees Monticello,

he leaves it in the hands of his most trusted

enslaved family, the Hemingses.

They storm Monticello.

And Martin Hemings, who is Elizabeth Hemings' eldest son,

greets them at the front door and refuses

to allow them entry, and refuses to tell them

where Jefferson is.

Of course, they were going to kill him if they had done so.

The captain of the British dragoons

takes from his side saddle a pistol...

Says, "You will tell me where Governor Jefferson is,

or I will inflict a mortal wound."

To which, Hemings pulls his coat back,

replies, "Fire away."

But British troops stormed past Hemings,

determined to find the governor they assume

is still inside.

Below Martin Hemings, in a secret panel,

is an enslaved person who has gathered up all the silver

and all of the valuables in the home,

and was keeping them beneath the secret space.

So he can hear everything that's happening.

And the story goes that it's a couple of hours to a day

that this enslaved man is below,

having kept all the valuables.

The Jefferson family tells the story that that enslaved man

was such a loyal servant.

But read through the African American perspective,

this man is keeping himself safe, one.

And secondly, just in case the British do actually end up

capturing Jefferson, say, winning the Revolutionary War,

well, he has all the silver in his hands.

After tearing Monticello apart as they

search for Jefferson, the British

realize they are too late.

Captain McLeod says, "Come on, boys,

"I understand Jefferson has the best stocked

wine cellar in all of Virginia."

They all help themselves.

It happens to be

King George III's birthday, June the 4th.

There might have been a toast.

They placed the wine bottles in their satchels,

and they ride off.

Monticello is left intact.

But Jefferson, whose second term as governor

ended two days prior, is brutally criticized

for how he handled the invasion.

The citizens of Virginia think he's left his duty

at the moment of great peril.

He's totally disgraced.

The House of Delegates launches an inquiry

into his actions as governor of Virginia

in organizing the defense of the state.

It's a low point of his public life.

Washington sends him a very thoughtful

and measured and kind letter, saying, you're a good friend,

and your service was great.

And he more or less says,

you're being unfairly criticized.

But part of being a man in Virginia,

a man of that elite class, meant showing physical bravery

and showing tenacity.

This is an honor culture,

and it was a very military culture.

It's a culture that valued military service.

This is why these men fight duels.

This is why Washington is so admired in this period,

and Jefferson admired Washington.

But Jefferson's skills didn't lie in that area.

And so he's presented as a coward.

Jefferson leaves his governorship

as a laughingstock.

The once-celebrated revolutionary retreats back

to Monticello in disgrace.

By the fall of 1781, the tides of war

begin to turn in favor of the Americans,

as Spanish, Dutch, and French forces

join the rebels in their fight against Britain.

The war culminates in Yorktown, Virginia.

British troops under General Cornwallis

had set up a base at Yorktown.

But on September 28, 1781,

Washington's troops and his French allies

placed Cornwallis' base under siege.

After more than three weeks of relentless battle,

the British surrender,

essentially ending the Revolutionary War.

After the surrender at Yorktown,

things are winding down.

The peril has passed for the state.

Jefferson has returned to Monticello.

His whole retreat from Charlottesville

was looked on with disdain by many

of his political opponents.

In December of 1781, he is cleared by a board of inquiry

established by the House of Delegates,

but he never really feels that he's off the hook.

I think what he learns as a politician,

rooted in his wartime service as governor,

is that circumstances change very quickly,

and that it is a foolhardy politician,

a foolhardy officeholder,

who stands by a philosophical creed

in the face of adverse circumstances.

After this inquiry clears him,

he believes he's exiting public life.

He's still got a bit of a cloud over him.

And he's disillusioned.

Jefferson tells the House of Delegates

that he has retired from politics.

He retreats back to Monticello to continue building

his estate and to care for his two young daughters

and pregnant wife.

The fact that Jefferson and Martha

got pregnant again and again suggests

a healthy physical relationship.

We have scraps of evidence to suggest

that it was a very, very close marriage,

seemingly a happy one.

Jefferson was often away.

But by comparison, George Washington

leaves to go attend the Continental Congress

in the spring of 1775 and doesn't come home again

for eight years.

The Second Continental Congress,

Jefferson was constantly going home,

to the point where people are saying, hey, where are you?

And he constantly says, "I want to be with my wife."

And even though she's pregnant a significant amount

of that time, she's highly competent

in running a household.

She understands how to raise her daughters.

Also, Martha seems to be very patient

because they build the first Monticello in January of 1772,

but he can't stop tinkering with it.

It's constant work.

And it must have been incredibly difficult

to establish a family in a building site.

Jefferson loved reworking this house.

He says, "Pulling down and putting up

is one of my greatest passions."

He draws plan after plan, working out what should

the sequence of rooms be, where will his books be,

the size of his library?

He has a room that's going to be a museum.

How will that fit into the house?

Monticello was a never-ending process.

He had to literally flatten the top of the mountain

to build his house there.

He loves this place.

He loves that mountain.

And he's seeking to impose his vision and his will on it.

Now, when I say he's doing it, of course,

he's not doing that labor.

It's stunningly beautiful.

But it's also very much a Virginia house in the way

it accommodates slavery.

It's really designed to put slavery almost out of view.

Jefferson is hiding the work of food and hygiene,

of laundry, of firewood, in little staircases

and lateral passageways.

But we can actually see children's imprints

in the bricks.

And that tells us that these young hands

were put to work.

At Monticello, you find yourself face to face

with Jefferson, both what made him great

and also where he failed.

Monticello is a metaphor, as a statement

that Jefferson and the United States

is built on enslaved labor.

And this vision, the story, can only be

this special and exquisite if you can't see

what's happening underneath.

After the colonists declare themselves free

from the tyranny of British kings,

in the early 1780s, many consider the rights

of the enslaved as well.

In the mid-Atlantic, in places like New York

and Pennsylvania, you have the start

of movements against slavery.

And even in places like Virginia,

there was a thought that slavery would over time

diminish in importance.

After the Revolution, a number of slave owners

emancipate all of their slaves.

One of his own cousins, Richard Randolph, did.

William Short did, a man named William Ludwell Lee.

Jefferson knows many of these people.

He's related to many of these people.

Jefferson does not choose to emancipate his slaves.

An enslaved man, Israel Gillette Jefferson,

talks about when he's within earshot

of a conversation between Jefferson

and one of his good friends.

And his friend is basically trying to convince Jefferson

that slavery needs to be ended,

that the enslaved people need to be freed.

He hears Jefferson struggle,

saying, yeah, I know slavery is bad,

but I don't think we can end it.

Imagine if you're a young enslaved person

overhearing this conversation.

You can't say he was just a man of his time

because other people at his time

free those enslaved people.

But Jefferson does not know how to undo all the things

that he wants from his perfect

and idyllic house on a mountain.

Slavery is so essential to his economic and social system

that even though it's questioned,

it's very hard to imagine extracting

oneself from that system.

After the war, most of the founding fathers

continued to debate the foundational principles

of the new union, but Jefferson remains at home

with his family at Monticello.

While there, he establishes a correspondence

with Francois Barbé-Marbois, the secretary

of the French delegation in Philadelphia.

Marbois sends Jefferson a set of questions in an attempt

to learn more about the new country.

Jefferson's responses to these queries

are eventually compiled and published

in what will become his first book,

entitled "Notes on the State of Virginia."

So the secretary of the French delegation

asked Jefferson about the landscape in Virginia,

the flora and the fauna

and what kind of animals there are.

And then he says, tell us about how

Native Americans live.

Tell us about what slavery means to how people live.

The interesting thing about Thomas Jefferson was

the way that he looked at Native people and the way

that he looked at African Americans

are really different.

"Notes on the State of Virginia"

comes from Jefferson's view of himself

as a kind of scientist, but Jefferson always blurs

the line between what he thinks of as observation

and what are truly his opinions.

In the answer to the query about Native Americans,

Jefferson starts out with a bunch of charts.

This is the name of this group,

this is how many of them there are,

and it goes on and on like that,

until all of a sudden, he's off into speculation

about, first, Native American culture,

but then their intelligence.

Native people of the Old South, their farming,

from corn crops and everything,

are quite impressive, and probably better

than some white settlers moving into the area.

And so they're almost like the role models.

He writes, "Their execution are

"much stronger than with us because they

"are more exercised.

"I believe the Indian then to be in body

and mind equal to the white man."

So he says, they're the equal sort of humanly of us.

They just have not been civilized.

He claimed if they start to speak English and live

like we do, at the cost of their culture, of course,

they could become the equal to whites.

There's the idea of already being partially civilized

because of what they do.

They won't have to be taught, where African Americans have

to be taught because they're pulled, clearly,

out of their natural world and then brought to the Americas.

But when he writes about Black people

in "Noted on the State of Virginia,"

he seems to traffic in stereotypes.

He goes on for pages about race.

He clearly believes that Black people

are genetically, biologically inferior to white people.

And he says this.

I advance it that the Blacks,

whether originally a distinct race

or made distinct by time and circumstances,

are inferior to the whites

in the endowments both of body and mind.

He also says they're essentially

intellectually useless.

"Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason,

"and imagination, it appears to me

"that in memory, they are equal to the whites,

"in reason, much inferior,

"as I think one could scarcely be found capable

"of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid,

"and that in imagination,

they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous."

Jefferson's surrounded by enslaved people

who learned to read and write.

He's surrounded by enslaved people who trained

for a decade or more to be French chefs,

enslaved people with great skill.

And yet he writes in the "Notes on the State of Virginia"

that to free enslaved people would be like

to free children, that they wouldn't be able

to take care of themselves.

And yet, everything in his life is provided by the labor

of enslaved people.

We don't do ourselves or Jefferson any favors

by glossing that over.

We do need to see that Jefferson's views

on racial ranking and alleged inferiority

were part of a culture of thought

that prevailed in the United States

for another century.

He did not believe that Blacks and whites could

live together in harmony.

He says that we'll never get over our prejudices.

They will never forgive us

for the things that have been done.

"Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites,

"10,000 recollections by the Blacks of the injuries

"they have sustained will probably never end

but in the extermination of the one or the other race."

He had had the experience with the Revolution of seeing

African American people join the British forces to fight,

to fight against the American colonists

for their own freedom.

And so after the American Revolution

and the Revolutionary War, he fears Black men.

People are quick to hold on to the good words

that Jefferson wrote, but they do not grapple

with the "Notes on the State of Virginia.

It has been too easy for people to say

Jefferson is a great success,

he did these things for our nation,

he helped give us this founding creed,

without grappling with the duality of his legacy.

Part of history is not excusing people for what they

believed in real time, but understanding

that if even the best people of a given era,

the most articulate people, if even they could be

so woefully wrong about such elemental things,

what are we missing in our own time?

In the spring of 1782, Jefferson is living

a quiet and peaceful life at Monticello.

While he busies himself with literature

and the ongoing construction of his estate,

Martha gives birth to their sixth child, Lucy Elizabeth.

But their domestic bliss will be short-lived.

After giving birth to a daughter, Lucy,

Martha Jefferson has severe postpartum health problems

throughout the summer of 1782.

Martha Jefferson suffered greatly

during that childbirth.

Her ensuing illness is heartbreaking.

Jefferson is at her bed incessantly,

day in, day out,

doing everything he possibly can

to engage her to continue to live.

They both have enjoyed reading to one and the other

throughout the years from Laurence Sterne's

"Life And Opinions of Tristram Shandy."

There is a moment when Mrs. Jefferson tried

to write a passage from it.

It's his wife's handwriting,

very, very faint.

It's hardly legible.

And then, in his very careful, orderly script,

Thomas Jefferson picks up where Martha left off.

Jefferson folded that piece of paper.

He put it in an envelope that included the locks of hair

of their deceased children.

Then, on September 6, 1782, at the age of 33,

Martha Jefferson dies.

There is the belief that he promised his wife

before she breathed her last that he would

never marry again.

He has to be pulled away from the bed.

He has to be physically lifted up.

The daughter, Martha, is so overwhelmed.

She's only ten years old.

And we know her aunt, Mrs. Jefferson's sister,

Elizabeth Eppes, is right there.

And she instructs her niece, Martha,

"Go look after your father.

There's nothing you can do now."

You must go and look after the living.

He is grief stricken, goes into, really,

a spiral of depression.

It was deep, and it was long lasting.

Jefferson more or less shuts down for weeks, or even months.

It's clear that he didn't know what to do,

and people around him didn't know what to do

to help him in this grief.

His daughters and friends actually despair

for his life at that point, they're so worried.

They tried to get Jefferson to ride out

into his native woods and fields on horseback.

That's his greatest pleasure.

And they continued to lose him,

day in and day out.

The horse just meanders away

with hardly any attention from him.

It is clear that she held a very,

very deep place in his heart that he never forgot.

I mean, death is a constant in his life.

He's lost a lot of children.

But this is a blow which is very, very difficult

for him to recover from.

Despite the criticism he faced as governor,

Jefferson remains in high standing among his friends

and colleagues.

Desperate to pull him out of his depression,

they appeal to his affinity

for European luxury and philosophy

and arrange for him to be sent to France as a diplomat.

This is as much an attempt to save their friend as it is

to try and serve the public.

He thinks he has retired from public service.

He's told his friends that he has.

The world he envisioned with Martha was shattered.

But somewhere, he has to be part of creating a new world.

And so he goes to France.

He's a widower with three young children.

And there will be dramatic changes in his personal life

during his time in Paris.

Jefferson's time in France will redefine

his personal and professional life.

He will thrive as a diplomat and politician,

and develop a shocking relationship

that will unexpectedly transform not only

the next 40 years of his life,

but his enduring legacy today.