Original subtitles

Previously on "Thomas Jefferson"...

In 1779, when the war is making its way south,

Thomas Jefferson is elected governor

of the new Commonwealth of Virginia.

It's a chess match.

British want to capture the governor of Virginia.

Jefferson is the prize.

And then Jefferson has to flee.

The citizens of Virginia think he's left his duty

at the moment of great peril.

Which led him to a lifetime of regret

about what he had left undone in those governor years.

So the revolution ends after the Battle of Yorktown.

And he's disillusioned and exits public life

to live with his family.

But he can't just stay home.

Somewhere he has to be part of creating a new world.

In September 1783, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams,

and John Jay signed the Treaty of Paris

in the city for which it is named.

The agreement effectively ends the Revolutionary War

and catapults the new United States of America

onto the world stage.

But while his fellow forefathers established

diplomatic ties overseas, Thomas Jefferson

remains at Monticello,

mourning the tragic loss of his wife.

This is a blow which is very, very difficult

for him to recover from,

but in an attempt to save their friend,

his friends in Virginia, particularly James Madison,

arrange for him to be posted as a diplomat abroad.

Paris is very attractive to Jefferson in many respects

because, as somebody who considers himself

an enlightened philosophe and as somebody

who studied French throughout his life,

France held a special place in Jefferson's heart.

And so Jefferson goes to get the French

to go all in to support this upstart idea

of the United States of America.

Because France is also important diplomatically.

Britain would like to separate the United States from France,

and the French are aware of this.

So it's an interesting moment for him

to serve as a diplomat.

He arrives at the court of Louis XVI

and Marie Antoinette at a point

when that court is the most important court in Europe.

And it's characterized by excesses and glamour.

But there's a great deal of unease and discord

really brewing.

We're a few years off from the French Revolution,

but the underlying causes of that revolution,

the disparities of wealth, are there.

Paris is alive at this point with revolutionary fervor.

When he gets to Paris, we are on the cusp

of a world-changing event.

On July 5, 1784, Jefferson, his oldest daughter, Martha,

and his enslaved chef, James Hemings,

arrive in Paris.

It's the most opulent place he'd ever lived in.

He is in love with the architecture,

and he talks about going to the Hotel de Salm

and gazing at it like a lover at his mistress.

He bought all the wine, and he bought all the food.

Paris offered all the things

that the real Jefferson really loved,

music, theater, the arts.

He sent home crates of stuff,

paintings, books.

This was a material, consumer engagement

with the City of Light.

A lot of the things that define him

and the qualities of his personality

are best put to use precisely in an appointment

like ambassador to France because Jefferson carries

the influence of those intimate dinners

of Virginia society forward into a dinner table diplomacy,

where Jefferson saw how to work things out

of small groups.

There's the interpersonal politics

within a court context.

There's no direct conflict.

There is a wooing of people around dinner tables.

He hits his stride in France.

While Jefferson expertly maneuvers

around the French court,

he still grieves the loss of his beloved wife

and finds himself unable to connect again romantically.

The French women were kind of scary to him.

He saw the French men and women had adulterous affairs

right and left.

And so he professed to be disappointed that marriage

wasn't based on affection,

as he believed it was in his world.

He says, young American men shouldn't come to France

when they're too young because they're

going to be seduced by women.

They'll be corrupted.

But if you're in your 40s, like me, it's OK

because we have enough republican fiber

to resist this.

But then he became involved with Maria Cosway,

an artist who was married.

Maria's husband, Richard, served as the painter

for the Prince of Wales.

Unlike most of the women Jefferson had met,

who never left rural Virginia,

Maria is cultured and cosmopolitan.

He becomes enamored of her.

She spoke a musical mélange of languages.

They went to museums together, went to the countryside,

where they were able to spend time alone.

And it is here that Jefferson fell on his right wrist

and fractured it.

So as she was about to leave with her husband

to England, Jefferson, who was by this time

tremendously smitten by her,

he writes the famous 12-page "Head and Heart" letter.

It must have taken him an entire day,

writing painstakingly with his left hand.

In the letter, Jefferson's heart pines for Cosway,

while his head chastises his heart

for forming emotional attachments

that can only result in the pain of loss.

"Head, well, friend, you seem to be in a pretty trim.

"Heart, I am indeed the most wretched

"of all earthly beings, overwhelmed with grief,

"every fiber of my frame distended

beyond its natural powers to bear."

The heart disputes the head's formula,

saying, without one generous spasm of the heart,

nothing is worth anything.

The heart wins the argument.

All in all, it gives us a lot of intimate detail

about the way Jefferson perceived himself.

It was a testament to his own capacity for feeling.

And at some point, she writes to him,

and he doesn't answer these letters

for long stretches of time.

So he was infatuated with her,

but it sort of cooled at some point.

As Jefferson's feelings for Maria wane,

he continues to wine and dine the French court.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic,

his fellow founding fathers

begin to debate what the laws and tenets

of the new American government will be.

And then in May 1787, 55 delegates from 12 states

meet in Philadelphia at what will eventually be known

as the Constitutional Convention.

Jefferson and John Adams miss it.

Adams is also serving as an ambassador overseas,

getting loans from the Dutch and the British.

Jefferson called the Constitutional Convention

an assembly of demigods.

One wonders--in the same way

that we don't have tone in email,

we don't have tone in mail from the 18th century--

whether he was being sarcastic or not.

He's aware of what's going to happen,

and he follows the events to the extent he can,

but it's very difficult because there's almost

no information coming out of Philadelphia

during the summer of 1787.

Now, his relationship with his protege and ally,

James Madison, was very, very close.

And Madison is going to be the architect

of the federal Constitution in Philadelphia.

So Jefferson plays an indirect but important role

via his correspondence with Madison,

particularly sending him hundreds and hundreds of books

relating to the history of republics,

and confederacies, and constitutions.

Jefferson's fear is they're going to be restoring

monarchy to the United States.

But, remember, this is a 4-mile-an-hour world.

And Jefferson is receiving information from Madison,

but the information is not happening overnight.

It takes eight weeks to sail across the Atlantic.

And so when Madison sends him the Constitution,

he's disappointed because Jefferson sort of says,

well, meh, it's OK.

Madison's saying, I'm tearing my hair out.

I sweated blood over this.

Jefferson says, well, it could be improved.

And one of the reasons why Jefferson had mixed feelings

about the Constitution is he didn't see

the Constitution as being essential to the creation

of a more perfect union.

In fact, he thought, if you got it wrong,

it would actually drive the states apart.

He's a little worried about the strength

of the presidency.

And he's very concerned about the absence

of a Bill of Rights.

Jefferson is adamant that the government guarantee

personal liberties, such as freedom of religion,

freedom of the press, and trial by jury.

The Bill of Rights, enshrining these values,

will be ratified four years later in 1791.

Jefferson also writes that constitutions

should be temporary, and they shouldn't last

more than 19 years,

and every generation should govern itself.

He says, how can you own a constitution

from some dead generation from decades ago?

But people like James Madison,

who know how hard it was to work out a compromise, say,

has this guy lost it?

How is it possible that this person

doesn't realize how hard it is to create

political compromise?

So he says, you know, we could

have a second convention.

But Madison and his fellow founders,

they say, don't mess with it.

The Constitution is ratified in September 1787.

And eventually, Jefferson comes to support it.

But as he comes to terms with its compromises,

across the Atlantic, a surprising visitor prepares

for a life-changing journey.

Throughout 1787, while the nuances

of the new American laws are debated in the States,

Jefferson continues to foster diplomatic relationships

and raise his 15-year-old daughter in France.

When Jefferson was sent to France,

he took with him his oldest daughter, Martha.

But he left his two other daughters home.

In 1784, his younger daughter, Lucy,

died of smallpox.

And he is missing his other daughter, Maria.

And so in 1787, Jefferson insists that his daughter

Maria come to France.

And he says, "She should come

with a careful Negro woman, such as Isabel."

And Isabel Hern was 28, 29,

but she was pregnant at this time.

And instead, they send Sally Hemings,

who is at the time 14 years old.

Sally Hemings' parents

are Elizabeth Hemings,

who's an enslaved woman,

a matriarch of the enslaved

community at Monticello,

and John Wayles, who was

Thomas Jefferson's

father-in-law.

So that makes Sally Hemings,

Martha Jefferson,

Thomas Jefferson's late wife,

makes them half-sisters.

So 14-year-old Sally Hemings,

who has known Virginia her whole life,

is asked to be the company for young Maria Jefferson

on this weeks at sea and then arrival in France.

In July of 1787, Thomas Jefferson

and his eldest daughter, Martha,

welcome his eight-year-old daughter,

Maria, and Sally Hemings to the City of Lights.

There will be dramatic changes

in both his and Sally Hemings' personal life

during his time in Paris.

When they get to Paris, Sally Hemings

is very quickly thrust into a position

that many Americans,

especially the enslaved people,

were never in.

She traveled over the ocean

and into this unfamiliar territory.

She'd come from an extremely rural place to a metropolis.

Paris was a very active place.

So it would have been a very exciting time for her

but kind of scary.

She's by herself.

She's got an older brother, but he's also hired out,

training to become a professional chef.

She can't speak French.

And the only people that she knows

are Jefferson and his daughters.

And so her world in France would have been

pretty confusing because Jefferson is attempting

to conceal that he has enslaved people in France

because French law actually prohibits

enslaved people in the city.

Although slavery isn't officially outlawed in France

until 1794, the Freedom Principle

had long held that any enslaved person

who set foot on French soil was considered free.

After the Enlightenment,

slavery fell out of fashion in Paris.

And the number of enslaved who sued for their freedom

nearly doubled between 1762

and when Sally Hemings arrives in 1787.

Both of the Hemingses could have sued for their freedom.

So Jefferson has to grapple with the rights

they have in France that they would

not have in the United States.

Jefferson writes, saying that the law

is on the side of the enslaved person.

And there's nothing you can do if they

find out that they are free.

It will be difficult, if not impossible,

to interrupt the course of the law.

Nevertheless, I have known an instance

where a person bringing in a slave

and saying nothing about it has not been

disturbed in his possession.

The person Jefferson refers to in the letter

is of course himself.

He can only hope that the language barrier

is enough to keep Sally and James unaware

of their options while they're in France.

Because if she'd gone to the Admiralty Court and said,

this man is trying to keep me from my freedom,

it would have been a disaster for his reputation.

And Jefferson has his status as the apostle of liberty

among all these other people who admire him in France.

That would be damaged irrevocably if they knew

he had enslaved people with him.

That would have been a huge embarrassment.

And so because he kept a record of every transaction

that he made, we know eventually

he begins to pay wages because he understands

that it's a different status than if they were in Virginia.

And so at that point, she begins living a life

that was unlike anything that she probably could

have imagined before that time period.

Sally Hemings becomes the maid for his daughters.

So she would have had to have been in society

accompanying her charges.

But we don't really even know exactly

what Sally is doing all day because the girls

are in school.

But we might extrapolate from research,

she eventually went from being the lady's maid

to Jefferson's daughters to being a chambermaid

because she's being paid with the servants

at the Hotel de Langeac, which is Jefferson's residence.

And then in 1789, when she's 16 years old,

Jefferson starts buying her a good amount of clothing.

Before, he's just paying her the salary,

but then he's buying clothes for her.

Jefferson's in his 40s.

His wife has died.

He is used to having people around him who tend his body,

who dress him and undress him.

It's clear that Sally and Jefferson

begin a sexual relationship.

When exactly Thomas Jefferson begins

his sexual relationship

with the enslaved Sally Hemings is unknown,

but it is clear that the physical relationship

begins while she is in France, between 1787 and 1789,

when she would have been between 14 and 16 years old.

There is no ethical landscape in our world today that says

that a sexual relationship between a 40-year-old male

and a 16-year-old enslaved female is OK.

It's an unequal power relationship.

That is absolutely certain.

But many people in early Virginia

got married at the age of 16, men and women.

Some people got married younger.

It was not the scandal in the 18th century

that certainly it would be today.

It's hard for us.

This is so out of bounds,

but it wasn't out of bounds at that time.

I'm talking about the age part of it.

The slavery part, that's always a problem.

There has been much speculation

about the nature of Sally and Jefferson's relationship.

Many historians have presented theories

that there was a deep affection between them,

possibly even love.

Her grandchildren say Mr. Jefferson loved her dearly.

They don't talk about what she felt about him.

Does she feel flattered and adored?

Or does she feel like she has no choice

because, after all, he owns her?

We don't know.

I think for somebody to say that it is a deep love affair

is to make up a story

because we don't have any evidence.

Sally Hemings, being an enslaved woman,

could not have consented.

She could not have refused his advances.

There's a gross imbalance of power.

To think about love and to think about things

in that way without thinking about the vulnerability

in the position that particularly

enslaved women were in,

it makes it a very, very fraught subject.

And I don't know how we position a story

that is rooted in such an exploitative relationship

as something benevolent,

as something that was good for her.

As Jefferson navigates his complicated relationship

with Sally Hemings, unrest between France's

sharply distinct classes escalates.

In April 1789, the tension comes to a head

when factory riots lead to the death of 25 people

at the hands of police.

In the wake of the American Revolution,

Jefferson can see the signs of a burgeoning crisis

in France and wants to understand its roots.

Something was rotten in the state of France.

This was a period of the crisis of the French monarchy.

Things were not working all that well.

The monopolies, the abuses of the French aristocracy,

the barriers to free exchange, all of these things

were impoverishing the French people.

Jefferson at one point goes to visit a peasant's hovel.

On one hand, he provides us with an account which explains

the conditions that are going to lead

to the French Revolution.

On the other hand, think of this poor peasant

who this ambassador is kind of examining

his house as though he's visiting, you know,

a scientific exhibit.

Jefferson really believes that the more

the economic interests of the government

are aligned with the economic interests of elites,

the more likely it is that the liberties and opportunities

for ordinary people to pursue life, liberty, and happiness

would be limited.

It's ironic because Jefferson was an elite member

of the Virginia gentry.

But he saw firsthand, French peasants

barely had enough to eat while the elite lived in grandeur.

And for Jefferson, this was all proof

that the old regime in Europe was corrupt,

and America was better because poor people

were better off in America,

if you don't factor in the enslaved people, of course.

Then the revolutionary struggle becomes hotter,

and hotter, and hotter, and sort of explodes.

In May 1789, the French Revolution officially

begins when riots break out at the Etats Généraux,

an assembly of representatives from the feuding classes.

More than a hundred people are killed in the mayhem.

The revolution was underway and would have

followed its course whether he'd been there or not,

but he does host meetings with some of the revolutionaries.

I mean, you can't escape it in Paris in 1789.

Jefferson drafts a Charter of Rights

with his friend, Marquis de Lafayette,

a French aristocrat who fought in the American Revolution.

In August, just a month after French insurgents stormed

a medieval political prison known as the Bastille,

Lafayette and other French liberals

meet secretly at Jefferson's home to discuss

a new French constitution.

He says, "The Republican movement in France

is a continuation of our revolution."

So when other Americans are put off by the terror

and because now there had been violence, Jefferson says,

no, we've got to support this.

This was part of a global movement for liberty.

But in September, five years after arriving in Paris,

watching yet another violent revolution erupt around him,

Jefferson wonders if it may be time to return home.

In September of 1789,

as the French Revolution gains steam,

Jefferson decides it's time to return home.

When it's time to come home, Jefferson has the idea

that he's going to take Sally and her brother,

James Hemings, back to Monticello with him.

Despite Jefferson's best efforts

to keep Sally and James in the dark

about French slavery laws,

they are both aware of the choices

they now have.

So the decision would have been,

do you stay in France, where you have freedom?

Or do you return to slavery in the States?

Sally Hemings decides that she was free in France,

she was enjoying herself, and she wanted to stay there.

But Jefferson pleads with Sally to return

to Monticello with him.

And so Jefferson is forced into a position

of negotiating for what that relationship is going to be.

Historians can't prove this.

To produce documents with her name,

telling people how he was going to take care of her,

it would have been an admission.

But this is one of the things that historians

say is likely true.

Jefferson promises her she would have a good life

at Monticello and that any children she had

would be freed when they were 21.

She agrees to that.

And she decides to come home with him.

I'm in awe of Sally Hemings,

the courage this young woman showed

to stand up to the man who owned her,

to tell one of the most powerful people in the world

the terms on which she would do something.

Even though I imagine she knew once she comes back

to Virginia he could say, nah, never mind,

he could die, and it was a huge risk.

And so people ask me all the time,

well, why did she do that?

But you have to think about choice

under those circumstances.

She was far from her mother.

She was far from her family.

It's not as simple as slavery or freedom.

And I don't know that France would

have been a real viable solution to her at the time.

When the French Revolution is emerging in France,

what choices would she have had as a young Black woman

not of an adult age?

Where was she going to live in France, with whom?

And that's a dilemma

that a number of enslaved people faced,

even when people were deciding whether to take their freedom

or run away when they were in the United States.

It's great to be free, but would you want

to be away from your family?

Well, here's what some of the descendants and I feel.

We don't know. There's no documentation.

But we think that she wanted to come back.

But she was really smart.

And she thought, this man wants to be with me.

And she exercised her own agency

because, by the way, Sally Hemings was pregnant.

In September 1789,

Jefferson returns home to Virginia

with his enslaved mistress, Sally Hemings.

When she's 17, Sally Hemings gives birth

to her first child.

The child died.

But her relations with Jefferson would continue.

Jefferson moves Sally from enslaved quarters

to a stone room below Monticello

so that she can be closer to his room

in the main mansion.

Sally negotiated with Jefferson

an easier life for herself

within Monticello's plantation system.

And so Sally Hemings becomes a seamstress,

which is relatively light labor compared

to what other enslaved women would have been doing.

Sally will occupy her quarters under Monticello

for the next 40 years.

Over the course of that time,

she will bear six more children.

Her children are able to remain with her,

which is different than a lot of enslaved women.

And there's a lot more work that I think the Hemings

are largely spared from because of their position

within the enslaved community.

Was there hierarchy?

Yes, there was hierarchy.

We must always remember, members of the Hemings family

were related to their owners.

We know that other Hemings siblings were related

to Jefferson's wife's father.

And, as a result, they were light-skinned people.

In the 1790s, the Duke of Rochefoucauld

comes to Monticello.

And he reports that there are some members

of the enslaved families who are just as white,

if not even whiter, than he is.

Yes, many of the enslaved people related to their owners

had privileges.

And so unfortunately, this idea

that the lighter your skin is,

the closer you are to privileged people continues

to plague our society.

We need to challenge ourselves

about our understanding about race and beauty

and how it affects how we view history.

Even though we embrace our multiculturalism today,

we still do rank our multiculturalism.

Our fascination with Sally Hemings

has a lot to do with our exoticism of her.

If she had been an African woman

unmixed by any European blood, I think that it might have

been even more cause for consternation.

She's accepted now as having been his mistress.

But I often wonder if it's not qualified by the fact

that she is, by many standards, half white.

I wonder if we would be able to accept him

having a sexual relationship with a woman

who was not mixed race.

While Jefferson settles into a quiet life

with Sally at Monticello, the new American government

under its first president is beginning

to take shape without him.

In April 1789,

while Jefferson was still in Paris,

his friend and fellow Virginian George Washington

had been sworn in as the first president

of the United States.

And all of the most powerful voices of the revolution

are vying for seats in his cabinet.

Washington is a president without precedent.

He is filling in the role of president

with only the broadest outlines being established

by the Constitution.

He wants Jefferson to be secretary of state,

particularly because Jefferson

has all this international experience as a diplomat.

But Washington has to beg Jefferson to take the job.

And he sends James Madison to see him.

He says, hey, are you going to accept this?

And Jefferson says, I'm not sure.

And Madison has to tell Washington to ask him again.

This is testimony to how highly Washington

thought of Jefferson.

He sort of bites his lip and writes to him again

and says, please serve as secretary of state.

The country really needs you.

And Jefferson goes, well, if you really want me,

I guess I'll do it.

Jefferson had intended to eventually return to France,

but in March of 1790, he heads to the new U.S. capital

in New York City to serve in America's first cabinet

alongside his soon-to-be rival,

Revolutionary War hero Alexander Hamilton.

Hamilton, Washington's young aide de camp,

is tapped as Treasury secretary.

Now, Hamilton and Jefferson famously feuded

throughout most of their adult life.

And one of Hamilton's attacks on Jefferson

was that he was an elite who talked about populism.

And Jefferson looked down on Hamilton

as an immigrant upstart.

Fundamentally, each believes the other

represents an existential threat to the republic.

Hamilton believes that Jefferson

wants to overthrow all order.

Jefferson believes that Hamilton is restoring

monarchy to the United States.

Jefferson is horrified to realize

that the system of government that has been set up

while he was in France seems to be heading

towards more centralized power,

what he sees as a more British direction,

in particular in Hamilton's plan

to centralize the federal Treasury

and to begin accumulating debt to build the United States.

Hamilton's financial plan,

which is modeled on the Bank of England,

is to consolidate one national debt

that the Treasury controls and the government repays.

It's a system built on a recognizable British model,

and Jefferson hates that.

And he also wants to get the cabinet out of New York.

He doesn't like cities.

He doesn't like New York City.

He believes cities were sources of corruption.

They were sources of inequality.

The residents of cities, in his view,

didn't make good citizens.

He wants to move the center of gravity

further towards the south.

And so one of the great critical compromises

in American history is where,

over dinner at Jefferson's house,

he brings together Madison and Hamilton

and negotiates moving the capital

down to Virginia area off the Potomac,

but accepting Hamilton's financial plan

for a more centralized financial system.

But the banking center will remain in New York.

In the infamous room where it happened,

they both got what they most wanted.

And it ends up being a pretty good trade

in the fullness of time.

And so there was an opportunity there

when they did work together productively.

But you get that sense of the seeds of disagreement

that will really rupture.

And the differences between Hamilton and Jefferson

will quickly spread beyond the cabinet room

to the public at large.

Despite their successful compromise,

Jefferson and Hamilton continue to clash.

And in this divide, America's two-party political system

is born.

Supporters of Hamilton become known as the Federalists.

They support centralized government,

a national bank, alliance with Britain,

and an economy based on merchants and trade.

Supporters of Jefferson become

the Democratic Republican Party.

They support states' rights, strict interpretation

of the Constitution, an agricultural economy,

and an alliance with France.

It's hard for us to imagine just how

acrimonious the 1790s were.

You really had two opposing parties form,

each of whom thought that if the other group had power,

the American experiment would fail.

Jefferson and Hamilton seem

to be fighting over everything.

And Jefferson is telling Washington,

look, Hamilton's out to get you.

Hamilton's going to overthrow the republic

and institute a monarchy.

And Washington is saying, no, he's not going to do that.

Jefferson thought that Washington

would side with him, naturally,

because they're both Virginians.

But Hamilton and Washington had been through the war together,

and Jefferson had not been.

He admired Washington.

And he wanted to be the favored son of Washington.

And that didn't happen.

In 1793, as the American government is taking shape,

Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI

are brutally executed in France.

And once again, Thomas Jefferson

and Alexander Hamilton find themselves on opposite sides

of the political fence.

The whole world was fighting with itself

in the 1790s in the wake of the French Revolution.

And the reverberations of the bloodbath

in France were felt in America.

Jefferson feels the French Revolution is being

inspired by America's example.

And they topple their king, so much the better,

despite the fact that the king is the person

who'd bailed out the United States

during the Revolutionary War.

And Jefferson's idealism in this regard,

his radicalism becomes a little bloody.

The statements he makes excusing the excesses,

the mob in the French Revolution,

are pretty close to indefensible.

He writes one of his most infamous letters

in response to the French Revolution.

My own affections have been deeply wounded

by some of the martyrs to this cause.

But rather than it should have failed,

I would have seen half the Earth desolated.

Were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every country

and left free, it would be better than as it is now.

It doesn't quite say, you need to break

a few eggs to make an omelet,

but that's kind of the thinking.

He is fine with a bunch of heads

rolling down in the wake of a guillotine.

He's an ends-just-the-means kind of guy

when it comes to liberty.

But Washington, Hamilton, Adams

are much more concerned that anarchy can turn

into a new type of tyranny.

Washington declares a policy of strict neutrality.

He says, we are not going to get dragged

into continental squabbles.

We are going to focus on building our own strength,

economically and militarily, and expanding and solidifying

our new nation.

Jefferson is secretary of state,

but he disagrees with his government's foreign policy.

Jefferson crucially sees neutrality

as aligning the United States with the British

and is a betrayal of this idea of an empire of liberty.

And so Jefferson starts to engage

in sort of really kind of dirty politics.

So there's the "Gazette of the United States,"

which is a proadministration organ.

And Jefferson thinks it needs a counterpoint.

And so there's a critical excursion up the Hudson River

that Jefferson takes with Madison.

They stop off and recruit a newspaper editor

named Philip Freneau, who had gone to college

at Princeton with Madison,

to be the editor of a new opposition newspaper.

Philip Freneau hates the British.

He'd been briefly captured by them during the war.

But he says, you know what?

I can't make enough money running a newspaper.

Jefferson says, don't worry about it.

We'll hire you in the State Department as a translator.

So Jefferson is serving in the cabinet

as secretary of state,

furious about a foreign policy he doesn't support.

But not only doesn't he support it,

he's actively trying to subvert it by funding and incubating

a new newspaper whose sole purpose is to attack

the foreign policy of the government

that he is serving as secretary of state in.

It's close to treasonous.

In any other context, it would be called just that.

And it is driving Washington nuts

to see himself being attacked in the press.

But Hamilton also sponsors a newspaper,

which is basically the party organ

of the Treasury Department.

And so what we see is the media being used

to mobilize political opinion in the United States

for the first time.

They're starting two political parties

under the nose of Washington

and against his express wishes.

Washington was not a member of a political party

as a matter of principle,

our first and only independent president.

The hope was that people in Congress

would represent their conscience

and their constituents,

that they could do this without retreating to faction.

In 1793, George Washington begins

his second term as president.

And he, his vice president, John Adams,

and secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton,

continue on with the Federalist initiative

for international neutrality

and a centralized federal government.

And so Jefferson concludes that he's

always the odd man out.

He feels that he's not getting anything accomplished

and that Washington isn't listening to him anymore.

He eventually resigns in a huff.

In December 1793, Jefferson retires once more

to Monticello as the country falls deeper

into political divide.

Just 20 years after the Sons of Liberty threw 46 tons

of tea into Boston Harbor, the new nation appears

to be charging toward Civil War.

And despite Thomas Jefferson's best efforts to remove himself

from the fight, he will soon be thrust

right back onto the front lines

of dirty partisan politics.