Original subtitles

Previously on "Thomas Jefferson"...

The election of 1800 is Adams versus Jefferson.

It's an ugly fight.

But this time, Jefferson wins.

And this is the first time we've had a change of parties

in the United States.

These two parties have believed for a decade

that the other represents a mortal danger,

an existential threat to the United States.

But the people have spoken, and they have decided

to elect a different president in response

to Federalist high-handedness.

In 1802, James Thomson Callender

both published and made public the allegations that Jefferson

had had a long-standing relationship

with one of the people he enslaved, Sally Hemings.

It's a bombshell. It's a huge scandal.

Callender uses this as an attempt

to attack Thomas Jefferson, to discredit his suitability

to be president.

But Jefferson has no interest

in serving a third term.

He's ready to retire.

That is when the real story comes to the fore.

In 1809, just 33 years

after writing the Declaration of Independence,

Thomas Jefferson sits in the White House

as president of a thriving nation.

He, along with his fellow founding fathers,

have worked tirelessly to mold

13 independent British colonies

into 17 United States.

What was once a disparate collection of farmers

forging new lives thousands of miles from home

has become a beacon of democracy,

leading a global charge

towards a new way of governing.

As his second term comes to a close,

Thomas Jefferson looks forward to finally retiring

on top of his beloved Monticello Mountain.

At the end of his presidency, Jefferson is what he was

when he was born back in 1743.

He's a Virginian.

This was a well-traveled man,

traveled widely in Europe,

and he goes back to Virginia.

Never left Virginia again.

When Jefferson returns to Monticello in 1809,

his oldest daughter, Martha, and her nine children

are there to greet him.

His youngest daughter, Maria, his only other child

to survive to adulthood,

had died five years earlier

after complications from childbirth.

He never, ever lost his zest for life

and particularly the company of children--

to surround himself with children,

particularly his grandchildren.

On the West Lawn, when he would gather,

not only his grandchildren but the children

of the neighborhood to come around and enjoy races,

essentially, ice cream races...

Because when he would draw the line for the race to commence

and then drop a handkerchief,

those children, who would run the distance

across the West Lawn,

and the first to make it and the second and third

would be presented with the gift of ice cream.

Perhaps the recipe of ice cream

that was gained in Paris,

and the more so because that recipe was flavored

with the little vanilla bean

that Jefferson brought back from Paris.

The favorite flavor for ice cream in the Colonies

before that was oyster, oyster ice cream.

Here, Jefferson introduces the vanilla bean.

So you can imagine these children,

anxious to succeed in those races

and enjoy that novel flavor of vanilla ice cream.

He was tremendously affectionate

to his grandchildren,

more openly affectionate and playful

than he was with his daughters, his white daughters.

Remember, Sally Hemings had six children,

who would have been at Monticello

with his white grandchildren.

Over the course of Sally and Jefferson's

40-year entanglement,

she bears six children,

four of whom live to adulthood...

Harriet, Beverly, Madison, and Eston.

We don't have any letters that say,

I know that these are Jefferson's children.

But the diary of one of his friends

talked about this connection between Jefferson

and an enslaved woman, Sally Hemings.

Madison Hemings said he was kind to them,

but he was distant.

He wasn't in the habit of being affectionate to them

in the way that he was to his grandchildren.

But he had planned for them

in a different way than other enslaved people.

All of the young men were put to apprenticeships

with the master carpenter at Monticello.

Jefferson's granddaughters' letters

talk about their trips--

stopping at inns and having picnics.

We know they're there, because when Jefferson is writing,

he says, I'm coming with the carpenter and his apprentices.

That would be his sons.

The Hemings children are interesting.

Like, they're all very talented people.

The daughter, Harriet, learns to spin.

All three of the sons played the violin, as Jefferson did.

They're all carpenters,

and Jefferson did woodworking himself.

So they're sort of like versions of himself, in a way.

And as promised in France in 1789,

Jefferson frees all of Sally's children

when they turn 21.

Her sons, Madison and Eston,

move to the city of Charlottesville,

and then they move to Ohio, where they have large families.

And they carry a lot of the Monticello history with them.

Beverly and Harriet--

Beverly is the oldest son--

they left Monticello to live as white people.

They have very light complexions,

and, in fact, do pass into white society,

adopt new identities, and disappear.

After his presidency ends in 1809,

Jefferson sees his home, Monticello,

as the embodiment of who he is

and all he has accomplished.

He becomes obsessed with decorating

and adorning his home

in a fashion worthy of America's founding father.

One visitor would later write,

"If it had not been called Monticello,

"I would call it Olympus--

Jove, its occupant."

Monticello becomes not a house.

It's a museum.

It symbolizes what he wants his legacy to be.

Jefferson adored control.

He adored architecture.

He adored a sense of himself in the world.

And Monticello becomes this embodiment,

an extension of himself.

He bought everything he liked, everything he saw.

He didn't worry about what it would cost.

He would have been an Amazon Prime customer.

There's no doubt in my mind about this,

and he would have pressed, yes, one click,

and I want it tomorrow.

But Monticello was not

a tremendously profitable place.

He didn't pay enough attention to the business side of it.

On top of the fact that this guy is a consumer,

there are macroeconomic issues at work against him.

During his retirement, the agricultural economy

is not changing for the better for Virginia planters.

Most of his agricultural practices and activities

don't produce the profits that he hoped.

Tobacco planters generally relied so heavily

on British credit,

they were normally always deeply in debt.

That didn't mean they didn't have great resources,

that they didn't have a lot of money to spend on themselves.

But it did mean that there was a kind of perpetual dependency

on overseas markets.

They're used to carrying debt

in ways that, frankly,

would probably make most of us uncomfortable.

Planters are borrowing money from each other.

They're signing notes for each other to pay their debts.

And if you're a member of the elite,

you never really get called on it.

Most of the time, you can keep signing notes,

and people will keep taking them

and giving you wine or books or people.

Jefferson is aware of his debt,

but he sees it as the currency of his class.

Having always had wealth, he presumes he always will.

Jefferson has a great sense of entitlement

to the good life,

but not that sense of hardscrabble responsibility

on how to make money and keep it.

But when Jefferson's creditors come to collect,

his pockets are empty.

In 1809, when Jefferson returns

to Monticello after his presidency,

he is forced to reconcile his debt.

After many years of floating his lavish lifestyle

on loans and favors,

when his creditors ask to be paid,

Jefferson realizes he must come up

with a way to generate cash.

He responded to this debt

by coming up with various schemes.

He had a flour mill.

He had other ventures at his plantation

that he thought would actually make money for him.

But Jefferson is not a good businessman.

His efforts to diversify-- a lot of them

are based on ideals of how a plantation should work,

rather than what is actually going

to work best for Monticello.

Jefferson is experimenting in industries

like weaving and spinning.

There are men who do ironwork.

He establishes the nailery,

and they start manufacturing nails.

Young men working in that nailery

are often being treated quite harshly.

And in the end, the various mills and that nail factory

didn't make the money that he thought could be made.

After three years of failed attempts

to make money,

in 1812, a new conflict with Britain

emerges over contested trade routes and infringements

of American rights at sea.

Amidst the chaos of war comes an opportunity for Jefferson.

During the War of 1812,

the British burned part of the capital.

And one of the things they burned

is what was then the Library of Congress.

So Jefferson's friends in Congress know he's in debt.

They pass a law to authorize the purchase

of Jefferson's private library...

Because he collects a huge number

of books, thousands of books.

He sells the entire collection intact.

He says, you can't just take the books

on politics and history.

You have to take all the books,

because all knowledge should be of interest to legislators.

And that becomes the core of the Library of Congress

that we know today.

So they buy Jefferson's library

for a lot more than it's worth.

And Jefferson now can pay his debts.

What does he do?

He takes the money and starts ordering books from England,

where he can get them much cheaper,

and he replaces everything he sold, plus a lot more.

This guy's a consumer.

He needs the infusion of cash,

but instead, he builds a third library.

And so he's getting into greater and greater debt.

And then there's the Panic of 1819.

There's a massive economic downturn.

It's effectively a depression, and he's caught out by that.

After years of prosperity and expansion,

the Panic of 1819

is America's first financial setback.

A result of fallout from the global markets

in the aftermath of the wars in Europe

and America's lack of regulation on paper money,

the Panic forces wealthy planters,

who previously just moved debts around, to pay up.

Jefferson finds himself responsible for paying back

not only money he borrowed

but money his friends borrowed as well.

Jefferson cosigns loans

for friends that fail,

and he's on the hook for those.

The suggestion was that he should downsize

and sell people the land.

But he didn't want to do that.

Because you don't sell land in Virginia.

You buy land. You get land.

Land is power in this place.

And the elite Virginians are obsessed with acquiring it.

You don't give up land unless you absolutely have to.

And the same, to a large extent,

goes for enslaved people.

But you don't get rid of your assets in that way

in order to get out of debt,

not in that culture at that time.

And so the Jefferson family--

they bring up the idea,

we could convince him to move to the Deep South,

where cotton is booming.

The opportunity is there.

If you take the enslaved laborers who are at Monticello

and take them to a different landscape,

you could absolve the debt without having to separate

the enslaved community.

But Jefferson's grandson said,

you know he'll never go for that.

And so the family basically gives up

on trying to solve Jefferson's financial problems.

He wanted everything to remain the same.

It was sort of really unrealistic

that everything is going to remain the same.

And so there's no question

that he was enormously depressed at the end.

He felt that he had failed as a patriarch,

he had failed to protect his family.

After a life as a celebrated revolutionary and aristocrat,

in his final years,

Thomas Jefferson finds himself broke and alone.

At 76 years old,

Thomas Jefferson's political career is over,

and he is deeply in debt.

He is celebrated as the author

of the Declaration of Independence,

America's third president,

and a beloved founding father.

But he is still determined to leave America with more.

In 1819...

he's a man in declining health,

but he wanted to be remembered

as the embodiment of the principles

of liberty and equality.

And so he spends much of his retirement engaged in founding

the University of Virginia.

Jefferson presided over the University of Virginia,

with hopes that this could be a seminary

for Republican leaders of the future.

But people were upset

because it didn't have a chapel.

People called it a godless institution.

And so Jefferson's vision was,

this is going to be a secular institution

that's meant to be explicitly political.

He's going to properly train young Southern men

to be good Republican citizens.

And he takes immense pride in that.

On Jefferson's tombstone, he cites three things--

author of the Declaration of Independence,

author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom,

and founder of the University of Virginia.

And it's fascinating he chose those things

and not his presidency.

As Jefferson descends into old age,

he becomes acutely aware

of the way he would like to be remembered.

He'd been there at the beginning.

The American Revolution was a really, really big deal.

We don't take monarchy seriously,

but that was the predominant form of governance.

And for having defeated that--

and he knew that it was something

that he would be remembered for,

and he wanted to be remembered in a particular kind of way.

Jefferson deliberately wrote his own autobiography

because he was writing a version of history

that he wanted to be remembered.

He wants to be remembered as someone who defended

the people's liberties...

and he stood for human equality,

religious freedom, and education and science.

Jefferson's life that we get from his autobiography

is very carefully edited and cultivated.

It doesn't just influence our understanding of him early on.

I think it continues to this day.

In his 70s, Thomas Jefferson

is reflective and sentimental about what he's accomplished.

His health is declining, but his mind is still sharp.

Jefferson was a hale old man,

but he was an old man nevertheless.

He'd lived considerably longer than the average life span

for an American man at that time.

He would go out

and ride around the plantation occasionally,

and he would come for dinner,

but he spent most of his time writing.

Jefferson loves writing letters

and receiving letters and trading books.

And one of the great joys for him

is his correspondence with John Adams

well into his last years.

The Adams-Jefferson relationship

is a fascinating relationship.

There's a very, very close bond.

They first meet in the Continental Congress.

Of course, they serve on the committee of five

that drafts the Declaration of Independence.

They're in Paris together before Adams goes to London.

But then they become estranged, really, over politics.

Adams famously skipped Jefferson's inauguration.

After a decade-long standoff between the founding fathers

of America's two opposing political parties,

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson

find themselves nostalgic

for the days of revolutionary fervor.

Years before, in 1812,

just as Jefferson began to compile plans

for the University of Virginia,

Benjamin Rush, who had served with him and Adams

in the Continental Congress,

encouraged the two old patriots to reconcile.

Benjamin Rush gets into his head

that these two people should not be enemies

because they had been such great friends.

He approaches both people,

and they start this correspondence

that has become famous.

They correspond a lot.

"I have thus stated my opinion

"on a point on which we differ,

"not with a view to controversy,

"for we are both too old to change opinions

"which are the result of a long life

of inquiry and reflection."

They're both retired. They're both opinionated.

They're both gifted letter writers.

We have these two leaders of the American Revolution

reflecting on their life's work.

Adams, characteristically, writes three letters

for every one of Jefferson's.

Adams can't help himself.

He just writes and writes and writes and writes.

"Your letter was received in due time

"and with the welcome of everything which comes

"from you with its opinions on the difficulties of revolution

from despotism to freedom, I very much concur."

They still don't agree on everything.

But the venom has been taken out of things.

The sting is out of it.

They're arguing about history, to some extent.

They're arguing about politics, to some extent.

But they're not fighting about it anymore.

"I wish your health may continue

"to last much better than mine.

"We shall meet again,

"so wishes and so believes your friend.

But if we are disappointed, we shall never know it."

It's as if Adams and Jefferson are reimagining

and reaffirming the original bond that made them both,

at the same moment, Americans.

In 1826, he had been ill for a number of months.

He'd had a bout of some sort of bacterial infection

and had been treated with mercury.

By June, it's clear that he's failing.

In the last few days of his life...

It's early July,

and he's coming in and out of consciousness.

He's asking those around him, is it the Fourth?

Is it the Fourth?

He called his family into the room,

and he said, the end is near.

Do not weep for me.

Turning to his daughter, he said,

I go where your mother is.

And we prepare a place for you.

And a story that is told

is that he asks to be raised on his pillow,

and nobody knows what he's saying.

The only person who knows that's what he's saying

is Burwell Colbert,

an African American enslaved person who does it

and raises him on his pillow.

And then he closes his eyes, and he goes to sleep,

and he doesn't wake up.

John Adams and Jefferson die on the same day...

July 4, 1826.

They die on the 50th anniversary

of the Declaration of Independence.

It's an amazing coincidence,

and it's a fitting end to their story.

When Jefferson dies, he is surrounded

by people who have been looking after him his entire life.

One of the last people that he sees

is an African American man, enslaved man.

It brackets his life.

He comes into the world at the hands of enslaved people,

and at the end, he, again, is surrounded by enslaved people.

Jefferson left this country with its founding creed,

but only after his death will the enslaved people

of Monticello find out if his vision of liberty

applies to them.

After Jefferson's death

and his lifetime spent espousing

man's natural right to liberty,

the enslaved community of Monticello

anxiously awaits their fate upon the reading of his will.

There was some hope within the enslaved community

that because this is the apostle of liberty,

he would have a deathbed conversion.

There's people like Washington, who, in his will,

frees enslaved people who belong to him.

But Jefferson didn't free his slaves.

90% of his wealth is bound to these enslaved people.

He doesn't free people, because he can't afford to.

He died deeply in debt, and as a result of that,

there's a huge auction to settle his debt.

That sale is advertised-- "130 valuable Negroes."

It's among the largest sales of enslaved people

in the United States.

And so on a cold January morning in 1827,

the moment arrived to liquidate Thomas Jefferson's property.

Can you imagine what that must have felt like,

to watch a member of your family be sold?

Sold alongside artwork out of the house,

chairs from the dining room, alongside horses and cattle.

My great-great- great-grandfather

was sold there on the West Lawn,

along with scores of other people.

My fourth great-grandfather is Peter Hemings,

and Peter Hemings was sold at the 1827 sale.

Despite talking about the consequences,

about family separation, a lot of these families

ended up separated.

Generations of people never saw their families again.

In one case, Jefferson puts in his will

that his blacksmith, Joe Fossett, is freed

and can live in his cabin with his wife and his family.

But Jefferson didn't free his wife and his family.

And so the day Joe Fossett got his freedom,

he watched his wife and his children

auctioned off to a number of different purchasers.

His son Peter Fossett, who was 11 years old,

many years later said,

we were scattered all over the country,

never to meet each other again until we meet in another world.

I think about that line all the time.

He understands what separating people

from their families does.

He understands the long-term consequences,

but these families end up scattered all over the world,

all because this one family couldn't figure out

what to do with their finances.

He had written about personal liberty.

He had written about equality.

He had expressed some of the most beautiful

and important sentiments known to man.

And yet, he could not live out his ideals.

Jefferson separated, by sale or gift,

400 enslaved people over the course of his lifetime.

In the last 250 years...

Thomas Jefferson's story has been pruned and curated.

That he has come to be known as the pinnacle

of American exceptionalism

is no accident.

There was a revival of interest in Jefferson

around the time of the Second World War.

When set against fascism in an existential fight

like the Second World War,

Franklin Roosevelt,

and I think the American people more generally,

saw Jefferson as the embodiment of the principles

of liberty and equality.

And Roosevelt dedicated the Jefferson Memorial in 1943.

And it's the high watermark

of the representation of Jefferson

as the apostle of liberty.

And so the Jefferson many of us grew up with

was an extension of an FDR-era Democratic Party

that was liberal-- lowercase L--

inspiring, rooted in the Declaration,

and intelligent.

The lessons of his presidency,

of the writing that he did

can be used to inspire patriotism.

Over the course of the last 70 years,

Jefferson's story has been molded

in order to bolster the American narrative.

But until Jefferson's full story is told,

can the real story of America's founding be known?

Much conversation has surrounded

Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemings,

as well as the promise he upheld

to emancipate her children.

But though Sally watched each of her children

walk free upon their 21st birthday,

she, like the rest of the enslaved community

at Monticello,

learns her fate upon the reading of his will.

He does not free her in his will.

Jefferson's daughter basically gives Sally Hemings

an unofficial sort of freedom.

She's given her time.

And that means that she's basically allowed

to go and come as she pleases.

So Sally Hemings moves into Charlottesville

with her sons, Madison and Eston,

and she's able to live there until her death.

After a nearly 40-year relationship,

Sally Hemings is neither granted her freedom

nor ever officially acknowledged

by Jefferson or his family.

While Jefferson's loved ones and descendants are buried

next to him at Monticello,

Sally's gravesite is unknown.

Years later, after Sally and Jefferson's deaths,

Sally's son Madison publishes a memoir

claiming that he and his siblings

are Thomas Jefferson's children.

But his story is fervently denied

by Jefferson's white descendants.

Jefferson's grandson says it wasn't Jefferson.

It was... a nephew.

Jefferson's granddaughter, Ellen Coolidge,

says a similar thing.

Two of Jefferson's grandchildren are quoted,

saying that the children were fathered

by Jefferson's nephews.

That's why they look just like Jefferson.

And so that's the line that historians stuck to.

The idea is that this is impossible.

Jefferson would never do anything like this.

He couldn't have lived among his grandchildren

and have a mistress.

Historians are saying there's no evidence

that this happened.

I was insulted by that.

To say that Madison Hemings's recollections

and the recollections of a man named

Israel Gillette Jefferson,

who corroborates what Madison Hemings said--

to say that there was no evidence

was like saying that they didn't even speak.

If you don't listen to enslaved people about slavery,

what the heck are you doing?

The morality suggests that you should pay attention

to what they're saying.

And that's how I ended up writing the first book.

So, in my book, I look at these two stories--

the Jefferson grandchildren's story

and Madison Hemings's recollections--

to try to see what corroborating evidence

there was to prove that these are Jefferson's children.

If you look at who is at Monticello at the time

that Sally Hemings conceives all of her children,

it's Thomas Jefferson.

When Thomas Jefferson is away in Washington,

Sally Hemings isn't getting pregnant.

When Thomas Jefferson is at Monticello,

she's getting pregnant.

The children are named for people connected to Jefferson,

and then there's one nuclear family

that walks away from that place,

and that's Sally Hemings and her children.

All of this made it clear that Madison Hemings

was likely telling the truth

when he said that Jefferson was his father.

But these histories

from the enslaved community are discounted

because historians have long discounted the oral histories

of African Americans

by saying that they are less valid

than other types of historical information,

things like diaries and handwritten records.

The key here being, people who are literate

are able to produce better history

than those who are not.

And so the story

that Jefferson's white family weaves

becomes the main narrative.

These are the ways that they have protected his legacy

for 200 years.

My book came out in 1997.

Eugene Foster arranged the DNA testing

in 1998.

They test the descendant

of Sally Hemings' youngest son, Eston,

and they compare that with an unbroken line

through to Thomas Jefferson's brother Peter.

The DNA study in 1998 confirms

that Thomas Jefferson

fathered Sally Hemings's last child, Eston.

Annette Gordon-Reed got it right

before the scientists did.

It's one of the singular

and most formidable contributions

of an American historian, ever.

So the combination of the things that I'd done

and the DNA changed the way people saw things.

Why is this important?

Because of what it said about the way

people write about history

and who is a credible witness and whose story matters

and the suggestion

that the founding era is the era of white people

and not the era of lots of different people.

We learn about the Hemings through Madison Hemings

and through Israel Gillette Hemings,

who confirm from their own experience--

They were there. They witnessed it.

And yet, historians, for decades,

dismiss these firsthand accounts

from the enslaved community.

But this DNA study and Annette Gordon-Reed

shows us that these enslaved families matter.

It's important to resist

the idea that researching slavery

is difficult or impossible or too challenging a project

to undertake.

I think the more that we think through ways

that we can elevate the stories

and preserve these histories,

the more that we can start to bring some of this history

out of the shadows.

Suddenly, centuries of lies

and wishful thinking are gone.

And what stands is the truth.

And what is that truth?

The truth is what America is,

which is this remarkable combination

of lies and reality

and contradiction and hope and fear,

all of which Jefferson was.

If we want to understand

who we've been and who we are

and who we want to be, it begins

with an honest conversation

about Thomas Jefferson.

As more

of Thomas Jefferson's complicated story

has come to light...

Many changes have been made in the way history is taught

and understood in America.

There was this turn with historic sites,

including Monticello...

starting to supplement

those traditional historic records

with the human side,

grappling with slavery,

to teach history as a full story,

as not just the high point.

Monticello and early American history

are way more than stories about Jefferson.

The Getting Word African American Oral History Project

traveled over 40,000 miles,

looking for descendants of families

associated with the Monticello enslaved community,

locate them, and record their oral histories.

This work that goes

into understanding enslaved communities

is part of a groundswell that's happening

to reunite those families.

Monticello hosted the 25th anniversary

of the Getting Word Project,

and over 300 people came

from the descendant community alone.

It's almost beyond words, all of the descendants

gathered at the West Lawn,

where our ancestors had been sold.

I mean, it's this power of place.

It's the power of saying, this is where it happened.

My job as a descendant of enslaved people

is to debunk the myth...

and to give voice to my ancestors.

Their voices were silenced in life, but mine isn't.

And my people represent millions of enslaved people

throughout American history.

Jefferson could never have envisioned

that descendants would return to Monticello for a reunion.

We can unite with one another and learn about what happened

and also move forward.

Those individuals have lived out

the Declaration of Independence.

They are the patriots.

They have taken and extended

the Declaration of Independence

for themselves and for their families

and for their communities in ways that Thomas Jefferson

never would have envisioned.

People have said to me,

you seem to be proud of Thomas Jefferson.

Missing the whole point.

I'm not ashamed or proud of Jefferson.

He will always be very important to our history

and to making this country what it is.

But I'll tell you who I am proud of--

those people who stood up and made

his life possible,

made it possible for the United States

to be here today.

So what do we make of the legacy

of Thomas Jefferson today?

He was, obviously, a person

with this vision of a society.

He articulated things that hadn't been articulated

in quite that way before.

It sets forth an ideal when you think

about citizenship and its glories and responsibilities.

But we have to reckon

the apostle-of-liberty Jefferson

with the Jefferson

whose legacy makes us uncomfortable.

Jefferson was the one politician--

brilliant, articulate,

popular, a slave-owner--

who could have made a difference...

and didn't.

The crime feels worse because...

it's abetted by things that we admire.

And we don't quite know where one starts and the other ends.

And so we worry that if Jefferson was impure,

then our ideals are impure.

We worry that if Jefferson was wrong, our nation is wrong.

Because America's greatnesses

are linked inextricably

with...

its horrors.

There's nobody else

that contains that observation about the country

like Jefferson.

And so we have to think

about the period of America's founding

in ways that would be productive and helpful

and help us envision a future where we could solve

some of the inequality caused by the systems set up by people

like Thomas Jefferson.

Some of the founding fathers

hold up better to scrutiny than others.

So you have to take the good with the bad and the ugly

and look at all of it together in context

and not demonize them and not idolize them,

which itself makes their wisdom more accessible,

which I think is infinitely more interesting,

because it's more human.

And that itself, I think, can inspire us to hold ourselves

up to higher standards and learn from their examples--

their successes and their failings.

We need to continue debunking the mythology.

However, we must always remember

those inspiring words.

Jefferson didn't write those words considering Black people

who were free or enslaved.

He didn't write those words considering women.

He certainly wasn't thinking

about the Indigenous populations

whose land they were occupying.

But he did give us this inspirational place

that we could always aspire to be.

We could always aspire for equality.

We could always work to make these words true.

And for generations of people,

that is exactly what has happened.

Jefferson's story is one of conflict and contradiction.

But it remains the story of America.

As he himself wrote in a letter in 1790...

"The ground of liberty is to be gained by inches,

"and we must be contented to secure what we can from time

"to time and eternally press forward

for what is yet to get."