♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ WILL: Jefferson was, I think, the man of this millennium.

The story of this millennium is the gradual expansion of freedom and the expanding inclusion of variously excluded groups.

He exemplified in his life what a free person ought to look like.

That is someone restless and questing through a long life under the rigorous discipline of freedom.

Freedom's not the absence of rigor; it's the absence of restraints imposed by others.

But it also, if it's going to be successful, it is going to be lived the way Jefferson lived it, this life of freedom, under severe restraints imposed on yourself.

The severe restraints of scholarship and learning and the quest to get better and better, which Jefferson kept upright to the end.

BURSTEIN: We are drawn to Thomas Jefferson because in an age when America's republican experiment was new, untested and many people, including George Washington, felt that it didn't have a great chance of success, Thomas Jefferson embodied a spirit of optimism and a belief in the promise of America's future.

(theme music playing) JEFFERSON: This, I hope, will be the age of experiments in government and that their basis will be founded on principles of honesty, not of mere force...

If ever the morals of a people could be made the basis of their own government, it is our case.

Thomas Jefferson.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: During the five long years Thomas Jefferson had been in France, a Constitution had been framed and ratified, and a new government established in the United States.

New York was now the American capital, and Jefferson was summoned there.

He had been appointed the very first Secretary of State, head of a newly created "department" that had precisely five employees.

George Washington was president, but Jefferson came to believe his new government was headed in the wrong direction, that the spirit of the American Revolution was being betrayed.

JEFFERSON: When I arrived at New York in 1790 to take a part in the Administration, being fresh from the French Revolution while in its first and pure stage and consequently somewhat whetted up in my own republican principles, I found a state of things which I could not have supposed possible, I was astonished to find the general prevalence of monarchical sentiments.

JENKINSON: France deepened his radicalism.

And he came back from France realizing that this isn't about ideas; this is about the fate of humanity.

And that he had to give himself in an absolute commitment, to the creation of something like a democratic social structure in the United States.

And that prepared him psychically for the long struggle against Hamilton and Federalism and what amounts to a counter-revolution that occurred when he returned to this country.

NARRATOR: Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury, was a hero of the Revolution, a favorite of Washington's, and had helped draft and win ratification of the Constitution.

He saw his country's future as commercial, urban, industrial.

To bring it all about, he championed a strong central government with a strong chief executive.

Jefferson envisioned an entirely different country.

He hated crowded cities where, he said, "the people ate each other."

He distrusted mere money-making, loathed centralized government of any kind.

"The president's powers should be strictly limited," he said, "most power must remain with the states."

"Hamilton and myself," Jefferson said, "were daily pitted in the cabinet like two cocks."

And as their conflict continued, each began to gather like-minded supporters.

Hamilton's followers called themselves Federalists; Jefferson's became known as Democratic-Republicans.

It was the beginning of party politics in America.

Hamilton launched a newspaper which vilified Jefferson and his allies without letup, and he warned Washington that Jefferson was, in his judgment, "dangerous to the union, peace and happiness of the country."

Jefferson responded by helping to start a newspaper of his own, in which Hamilton, his friend John Adams, and even the president were all viciously attacked.

"For God's sake," he told Madison, "pick up your pen, select the most striking heresies, and cut Hamilton to pieces in the face of the public."

Washington tried desperately to steer a middle course between his two favorite lieutenants: "I believe the views of both of you to be pure and well-meant..." he told Jefferson.

"I have a great regard for you both and ardently wish that some line could be marked out by which both of you could walk."

No such line was ever marked out.

By 1793, Jefferson was convinced he had lost the contest for Washington's mind.

Politics, he told a friend, had become "everything I hate."

He resigned from the Cabinet and went home, he said, "for good."

ADAMS: Jefferson thinks by this step to get a reputation as a humble, modest, meek man, wholly without ambition or vanity.

He may even have deceived himself into this belief.

But if the prospect opens, the world will see and he will feel that he is as ambitious as Oliver Cromwell.

John Adams.

JEFFERSON: The motion of my blood no longer keeps time with the tumult of the world.

It leads me to seek for happiness in the lap and love of my family, in the society of my farm and my affairs, in an interest or affection in every bud that opens, and every breath that blows around me.

NARRATOR: At first, Jefferson gloried in being back on his hilltop.

He would not leave it again, he told James Madison, "for the empire of the universe."

He canceled his newspaper subscriptions and threw himself happily into rebuilding Monticello.

THORNTON: Though I had been prepared to see an unfinished house, still I could not help being much struck with the uncommon appearance.

Mr. Jefferson has pulled down and built up again so often that nothing is completed, nor do I think ever will be.

Mrs. William Thornton.

JENKINSON: When Mrs. Thornton came and, rain was coming in from the open roof and, bricks were falling, and there were planks on the floors, and Jefferson was wandering around in his slippers serenely with tea, pretending that he was living in, in complete order.

So here's a man who had a rage for order almost unprecedented in American history, and yet he was willing to live in a state of almost deplorable dilapidation much of the time.

Nothing was ever finished for Jefferson.

Monticello was a laboratory of continuing architectural design.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Jefferson's perpetually incomplete house remained a joyous obsession.

"Come," he told a friend who hoped to visit, "with your ears stuffed full of cotton to fortify them against the noise of hammers, saws, planes, etcetera, which assail us in every direction."

He was a tireless and ingenious tinkerer, devising or adapting apparatus to add to the efficiency and comfort of nearly every aspect of his daily life, a four-sided stand that could accommodate several open books at once, an elaborate and improbable calendar clock that marked off the days of the week with cannon balls; and a machine called a polygraph that made a copy of every letter as he wrote it.

ISAAC: Old Master had abundance of books; sometimes would have 20 of 'em down on the floor at once, read first one, then other.

I've often wondered how Old Master came to have such a mighty head; read so many of them books; and when they go to him to ask him anything, he go right straight to the book and tell you all about it.

Isaac.

NARRATOR: Everything interested Jefferson.

He corresponded with scientists on both sides of the Atlantic, studied medicine, astronomy, and philosophy.

He played Mozart, sang Scottish ballads, and supervised the first archeological excavation in America.

WILL: And he emphatically said "yes" to life, in all its capacities, in a way that, in an era of specialization and intellectual compartmentalization, no one has the self-confidence to do in the late 20th century.

In the late 18th century, a man could say basically "I have brought into my compass all of human endeavor" a wonderful sense of serenity and confidence and power he must have had.

JENKINSON: Monticello is a museum, it's a private residence, it's a receiving room for uh, famous statesmen, but most of all Monticello is, I think, a kind of metaphor for Jefferson's soul.

This is the heart of Jefferson, the man of science.

He always considered himself a scientist first, a farmer second, and a statesman only reluctantly and well down the list.

♪ ♪ (birds chirping) ♪ ♪ JEFFERSON: I leave to others the sublime delights of riding in the storm, better pleased with the society of neighbors, friends, and fellow laborers of the earth, than of spies and sycophants.

I have no ambition to govern men.

It is a painful and thankless office.

JENKINSON: In the 18th century, it was required of all political figures to pretend that they didn't want the office.

General Washington did it, Adams did it, they all, they all spoke about Cincinnatus and the reluctance in a republic to, to hold office.

But they, of course, all wanted office very badly and Jefferson was no different from the others, in fact, in some regards, Jefferson was more ambitious than the others but more crafty.

And so he, quite successfully, pretended all of his life that he would have been happy to live quietly at Monticello as a farmer-scientist but the emergencies of the times in which he lived had thrust power upon him.

NARRATOR: In 1796, George Washington refused to run for a third term and the Federalists named John Adams as their candidate for president.

Jefferson was concerned that Adams would betray the promise of the Revolution, that he, like Hamilton, wanted to create a European-style aristocracy in America.

And Adams had grown suspicious of Jefferson; he considered him a demagogue, irresponsible in his flirtation with revolution, infatuated with democracy.

By the fall, Jefferson agreed to stand against his former friend for the presidency.

He lost, by just three electoral votes, and according to the rules then in place, Jefferson became the vice president.

But he soon found himself an outcast.

He and Adams were growing further and further apart.

Since they differed on virtually everything now, Jefferson was rarely consulted, even in times of crisis.

(explosion) In 1798, French warships seized American vessels trading with England.

Frightened by the possibility of invasion, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts.

To Jefferson's horror, the new laws claimed for government the power to arrest or deport any alien and made citizens who criticized the government liable to arrest.

24 men were seized, mostly anti-Federalist newspaper editors who supported Jefferson's cause.

Ten were found guilty of sedition and sent to jail.

JEFFERSON: These and successive acts of the same character, unless arrested on the threshold, may tend to drive these states into revolution and blood, and will furnish new pretexts for those who wish it to be believed that man cannot be governed but by a rod of iron.

NARRATOR: Frustrated and powerless, he retreated to Monticello again, convinced now that the Federalists were enemies of the Constitution, that a fresh revolution might be necessary.

Jefferson secretly began to draft legislation to be passed by individual states asserting their supremacy over Congress.

Since the states had created the federal government, he argued, they had the right to challenge any federal law they thought unconstitutional.

As the presidential contest of 1800 approached, the Federalist Party was split between supporters of President Adams and Hamilton's hand-picked candidate, Thomas Pinckney of South Carolina.

Now Jefferson changed tactics.

He turned from orchestrating resistance behind the scenes and stood again for president.

An ambitious but erratic young New York lawyer named Aaron Burr ran with him.

It was one of the dirtiest elections in American history.

The Federalists savaged Jefferson wherever and whenever they could.

LINN: The election of any man avowing the principles of Mr. Jefferson would destroy religion, introduce immorality, and loosen all the bonds of society.

To vote for Jefferson is no less than a rebellion against God.

The Reverend William Lynn.

NARRATOR: Jefferson gave as good as he got, and paid money himself to a drunken editor named James Callender, who attacked John Adams and spread gossip about Alexander Hamilton's private life.

Jefferson's mind, Adams said, had been "soured and eaten to a honeycomb with ambition."

In early 1801, the electoral college met in the new capital to pick the next president.

When the votes were counted, it was clear that neither of the Federalists, Adams or Pinckney, would ever have enough votes to win.

Jefferson now found himself battling for the presidency with his one-time ally, Aaron Burr.

Each man had 73 votes.

The House of Representatives would have to settle things.

Congressional voting began on February 11, 1801, and went on for six contentious days and 36 separate ballots.

CONGRESSMAN: The scene was now ludicrous.

Many had sent home for nightcaps and pillows, and wrapped in shawls and great coats, lay about the floor of the committee-rooms, or sat sleeping in their seats.

At one, and two, and half past two, the tellers roused the members from their slumbers and took the same ballot as before.

NARRATOR: They were hopelessly deadlocked.

When rumors spread that the Federalists might refuse to accept a Jefferson victory, the Republican governors of Pennsylvania and Virginia vowed to send their militia to seize the capital.

Many feared the American experiment was failing.

One man held the key; he alone could persuade his fellow Federalists to break the deadlock.

Alexander Hamilton disliked Jefferson, but he despised Aaron Burr, whom he thought a "most unfit and dangerous man."

To him, the survival of the new republic was at stake.

Finally, at Hamilton's urging, the Federalists gave up.

Exhausted legislators elected Thomas Jefferson the third President of the United States.

JEFFERSON: The revolution of 1800 was as real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of 1776 was in its form.

We can no longer say there is nothing new under the sun.

For this whole chapter in the history of man is new.

The great extent of our Republic is new.

Its sparse habitation is new.

The mighty wave of public opinion which has rolled over it is new.

The order and good sense displayed in this recovery from delusion, and in the momentous crisis which lately arose, bespeak a strength of character in our nation which augurs well for the duration of our Republic; And I am much better satisfied now of its stability than I was before it was tried.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Just before noon on March 4, 1801, Thomas Jefferson, a month shy of his 58th birthday, strolled into the Senate chamber, the only part of the brand-new Capitol building to have been completed, to take the oath as president.

Feelings against Jefferson among the displaced Federalists still ran high.

A bitter John Adams had appointed federal judges sure to oppose everything Jefferson wanted, and then left town at dawn rather than take part in the inauguration of the man who had once been his friend.

Jefferson moved into the President's House and declared it "big enough for two emperors, one pope, and the grand lama in the bargain."

He did all he could to end any confusion between presidents and kings, he barred the use of his face on coins, forbade any official celebration of his birthday, and threw open the doors of the executive mansion to anyone who wanted to see him.

PLUMER: In a few moments after our arrival, a tall, high-boned man came into the room.

He was dressed or rather undressed, in an old brown coat, red waistcoat, old corduroy small clothes much soiled, woolen hose, and slippers without heels.

I thought him a servant when General Varnum surprised me by announcing that it was the president.

Senator William Plumer.

NARRATOR: Jefferson acted quickly to undo what he considered the excesses of his predecessor.

He pardoned everyone locked up under the Sedition Act, returned monies paid in fines, even wrote letters of apology on behalf of the government.

He cut spending, shrank the Navy, abolished federal jobs he thought unnecessary, and battled stubbornly with the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, his cousin John Marshall, over whose vision of the Constitution would prevail.

JENKINSON: He came to power in what he called the Second American Revolution.

And people wondered whether he would actually recreate the nation on a much more democratic line than his predecessors had been comfortable with.

In fact, Jefferson was a very moderate president.

He didn't alter the foundations of the Hamiltonian system.

He merely attempted to put it on a republican tack.

JEFFERSON: A noiseless course, not meddling in the affairs of others, is a mark that society is going on in happiness.

If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretext of taking care of them, they must be happy.

Thomas Jefferson.

(fireworks) ♪ ♪ SMITH: July 5, 1803.

Washington.

Yesterday was a day of joy to our citizens and of pride to our president.

The news of the cession of Louisiana only arrived about 8:00 of the night preceding.

This mighty event forms an era in our history, and of itself must render the administration of Jefferson immortal.

NARRATOR: In 1803, Jefferson bought Louisiana, the vast territory between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains, from France for $15 million.

It was a sum nearly twice the Federal budget.

Though Congress had not authorized that amount, and his enemies accused him of abusing the Constitution's powers, Jefferson agreed to pay it.

It was the greatest land deal in history.

JENKINSON: The Louisiana Purchase is in a sense the making moment of American history, because by buying Louisiana, Jefferson not only doubled the size of the country with a single stroke of the pen, I mean it was unprecedented in human history to buy an empire but by buying this territory, he essentially removed Britain, France, Russia, and Spain from serious contention on this continent.

NARRATOR: Even before Jefferson bought Louisiana, he had quietly fitted out a government expedition to explore it, headed by two young army officers, his private secretary Meriwether Lewis, and William Clark, the brother of a revolutionary hero.

He called the expedition the Corps of Discovery.

JENKINSON: Jefferson loved the notion of discovery.

He loved the idea that this continent was a "treasure house of the unprecedented" and we were going to describe it and fall in love with it.

But behind the facade of the philosoph inventorying the west, Jefferson was a quite shrewd geo-politician and he was able to give different messages to different constituents to enable what, for him, was partly a practical matter of making sure that this continent was going to belong to us; and then secondarily, and more interestingly, his Enlightenment program, which was to say "Let's go see if the woolly mammoth is still roaming on the Great Plains somewhere.

What does the source of the Missouri really look like?

What kinds of Indians are those and what can they teach us about human relations?"

NARRATOR: From the newest section of the nation, Lewis and Clark sent him boxes full of their discoveries, animal skeletons and buffalo robes, maps, and mineral samples.

Jefferson planted Indian corn from the Great Plains on his farm and proudly displayed elk antlers in his front hall at Monticello.

JEFFERSON: However our present interest may restrain us within our own limits, it is impossible not to look forward to distant times, when our rapid multiplication will expand itself beyond those limits and cover the whole continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms and by similar laws.

NARRATOR: But despite his lifelong interest in native culture, Jefferson believed that White settlement was more important and encouraged the removal of nearly all the eastern Indians from their homelands to the west.

CALLENDER: It is well known that the man whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps and for many years has kept, as his concubine, one of his slaves.

Her name is Sally.

The name of her eldest son is Tom.

His features are said to bear a striking though sable resemblance to those of the president himself.

There is not an individual in the neighborhood of Charlottesville who does not believe the story and not a few who know it.

James Callender.

NARRATOR: On September 1, 1802, a Federalist sheet called "The Recorder" published a sensational attack on Jefferson's character.

The author was James Callender, the same erratic newspaperman Jefferson had once paid to malign the Federalists, who had now gone over to the enemy's camp.

He charged that one of the President's young slaves, Sally Hemings, was also his mistress.

And that Jefferson was the father of her children.

COOLEY: My grandfather told me about it when I was ten years old.

He called me into his living room and he said, "Son, it's time for you to learn about your heritage."

And he said, "You're a special person.

You're part of a special family.

You, through your mother and me, and my mother and so on, are a descendant of Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States."

JENKINSON: Sally Hemings remains the, the notorious mystery of Jefferson's sexual life.

We don't know.

The evidence is slender.

What we know is this, that Jefferson was at Monticello about nine months before Sally Hemings' children were born, that her children were certainly mulattos, that they had a White father, that Jefferson may have been their father.

Her youngest son, Madison Hemings, late in his life gave a newspaper interview in Ohio saying that his mother Sally had told him, Madison Hemings, on her deathbed that Jefferson was his father and the father of his siblings.

BOBER: I think we must consider who Thomas Jefferson was.

The idea that Thomas Jefferson could have had a young mulatto mistress in a house overflowing with young children whom he adored is inconsistent with everything we know about the real Thomas Jefferson.

His granddaughter Ellen said, "There are such things as moral impossibilities."

COOLEY: The historians who, who say "Oh, that couldn't have happened," they really didn't know Jefferson as well as they think.

I have the benefit of 200 years of consistent solid oral history.

Sally was, without a doubt, Thomas Jefferson's mistress, lover, substitute wife for 38 years.

No question about it.

NARRATOR: Jefferson never specifically responded to Callender's charges.

"The man who fears no truths has nothing to fear from lies," he said.

John Adams said he did not believe the charges but, he told his wife, they were nonetheless "a natural and unavoidable consequence of that foul contagion in the human character, Negro slavery."

ELLIS: This has been dragged through the pages of history.

It's like a tin can that's been tied to Thomas Jefferson's tail and has rattled through the pages of history.

If it were a legal case brought before a dispassionate group of uh, jurors, the evidence would now be such that Jefferson would be found not guilty.

FRANKLIN: It doesn't really matter whether he slept with her or not.

He could have.

After all, he owned her.

Um, he was, she was subject to his exploitation in every conceivable way.

It was he who brought her to Paris; it was he who sent her home from Paris.

He had complete control of her destiny.

And he might have fathered the several children to which we sometimes give him blame or credit.

But when we see the countryside at Monticello and all over Virginia and South Carolina and North Carolina and other places littered with mulattos of every conceivable description: red-haired, green eyes, freckled faces, and all the rest, we know that someone is busy sleeping with their slaves and I see no reason why Thomas Jefferson should be excused from that.

♪ SLAVE: Oh Lord, trouble so hard.

♪♪ (wind howling) JEFFERSON: Monticello.

April 13, 1804.

Our spring is remarkably uncheery.

A northwest wind has been blowing three days.

Our peach trees blossomed the first day of this month; the poplar began to leaf so as to be sensible at a distance about the seventh.

Asparagus showed itself about five days ago; perhaps we may have a dish today or tomorrow.

But my flower beds are in a total neglect and therefore not a fair measure of the season.

My daughter exhibits little change, her fever is small and constant.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: When Congress ended its session in the spring of 1804, Jefferson hurried home to Monticello, where Polly lay desperately ill from an abscess in the breast.

She died on April 17th.

His father and mother, his best friend and beloved sister, his wife, and all but one of his children, were dead.

Only his married daughter Martha remained.

JEFFERSON: Others may lose of their abundance, but I, of my want, have lost even the half of all I had.

My evening prospects now hang on the slender thread of a single life.

Perhaps I may be destined to see even this last cord of parental affection broken.

But whatever is to be our destiny, wisdom, as well as duty, dictates that we should acquiesce in the will of Him whose it is to give and take away and be contented in the enjoyment of those who are still permitted to be with us.

NARRATOR: In the autumn of 1804, still grieving over his daughter's death, Jefferson was overwhelmingly re-elected to a second term as president, winning all but two of the 17 states.

But events overseas, along with his own stubbornness, ensured that his second term would be marked by few successes.

(explosions) SOLDIERS: Fire!

NARRATOR: Britain and France were at war once again.

Both sides preyed on American shipping, impressing American sailors into their navies and seizing valuable cargo.

Because he had reduced his own navy to nearly nothing, Jefferson was powerless to retaliate.

Instead, he imposed an embargo on the exporting of all American goods.

It was a disaster.

It did nothing to discourage the British and French from attacking American ships, and it devastated the economy, provoking outrage at Jefferson throughout the country.

30,000 seamen lost their jobs, the price of cotton and tobacco plummeted, and smuggling was rampant as many ignored the new law altogether.

The president stuck with the embargo in the face of all the evidence, he was sure that it would keep the country out of war.

But when desperate American merchantmen continued to defy him, he ordered them arrested and their ships searched without warrants.

"Congress," he said, "must legalize all means which may be necessary."

Instead, Congress ended Jefferson's embargo.

His enemies delighted in his troubles and the Federalist press stepped up their attacks, calling him an "imperial conqueror" and a "despot."

WILL: Jefferson was a tormented president because, like so many subsequent presidents, he found that foreign policy took far more attention than he wanted.

Being a good American, he wanted to look west, not east across the Atlantic.

And he was drawn into worrying about the Old World and its troubles and tumults and prejudices and superstitions and all the things we were supposed to transcend.

NARRATOR: By 1808, he was anguished and exhausted, still unwilling to admit that his embargo had been a failure.

But as the end of his second term approached, expressions of appreciation poured in from all across the United States.

His countrymen hated his embargo, but they did not hate him.

WILL: He was heavily petitioned to seek a third term and said, no, that one of the great legacies of George Washington is the tradition of walking away from power, of not doing all you can do, of knowing when to stop.

It's a sign of political genius to know when to stop and Jefferson did.

JEFFERSON: Never did a prisoner released from his chains feel such relief as I shall on shaking off the shackles of power.

Nature intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science, by rendering them my supreme delight.

WILL: Jefferson left office on the 4th of March, 1809.

Seven days later, he rode out of Washington and lived 17 full years after that and never again came back to Washington.

Sound fellow.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ JEFFERSON: I am retired to Monticello where, in the bosom of my family, and surrounded by my books, I enjoy a repose to which I have long been a stranger.

My health is perfect, and my strength considerably reinforced by the activity of the course I pursue.

I talk of plows and harrows, and of seeding and harvesting, with my neighbors, and of politics, too, if they choose, with as little reserve as the rest of my fellow citizens, and feel, at length the blessing of being free to say and do what I please, without being responsible to any mortal.

JENKINSON: The phrase "pursuit of happiness" comes from John Locke; it was a widely-used phrase in the 18th century in Enlightenment circles and it essentially means the pursuit of public happiness, the creation of a, of a, of a, republic which enables humans to thrive.

But, for Jefferson of course, it means much more than that.

A life of friendship, a life of love and family, grandchildren, gardening, good food, good wine, good conversation, correspondence with absent friends, a love of the arts, music, architecture, dance, literature.

In a sense, happiness for Jefferson means finding the art of living without intrusions by institutions that might get in the way of that.

NARRATOR: Jefferson would remain at Monticello for the rest of his long life.

He told friends that he could now at last take things easy.

But he was soon as busy, he admitted, "as a bee in a molasses barrel."

(rooster crowing) BACON: Mr. Jefferson was always an early riser, arose at daybreak or before.

The sun never found him in bed.

I used sometimes to think, when I went up there very early in the morning that I would find him in bed; but there he would be before me, walking on the terrace.

Edmund Bacon.

JENKINSON: Jefferson said he got up before the sun every day of his adulthood.

He bathed his feet in ice water and then, according to his testimony, went straight to his writing table and worked assiduously for five or six hours answering letters.

And Jefferson complained that letter-writing was sheer drudgery.

He said, "Compared to this, the life of a cabbage is paradise."

JEFFERSON: No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden.

But though an old man, I am but a young gardener.

NARRATOR: Jefferson took gardening as seriously as he took government and nothing gave him more pleasure.

"The greatest service which can be rendered any country," he said, "is to add a useful plant to its culture."

His gardens were his laboratory: he grafted peach wood, sowed cabbage seeds with his daughter and his granddaughters, grew 250 kinds of vegetables, and set out 1,200 fruit trees.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ JEFFERSON: My dear Granddaughter, Nothing new has happened in our neighborhood, the houses and the trees stand where they did; the flowers come forth like the belles of the day, have their short reign of beauty and splendor, and retire, like them, to the more interesting office of reproducing their like.

The Hyacinths and Tulips are on the stage, the Irises are giving place to the Belladonnas, as these will to the Tuberoses, and so on.

As your mama has done to you, my dear Anne, as you will do to the sisters of Little John, and as I shall soon and cheerfully do to you all in wishing you a long, long goodnight.

NARRATOR: His daughter, Patsy, was nearly always at his side, entertaining guests, hosting dinners, and helping to run the household.

JEFFERSON: Dear Mrs. Cosway, My daughter, whom you knew in Paris as a young girl, is now the mother of 11 living children and the grandmother of about half a dozen others.

Among these, I live like a patriarch of old.

COOLIDGE: My Bible came from him, my Shakespeare, my first writing table, my first handsome writing desk, my first Leghorn hat, my first silk dress.

What, in short, of all my treasures did not come from him?

NARRATOR: There were sometimes 12 grandchildren in residence at Monticello, swarming over the grounds, playing games, and running races under their grandfather's fond direction.

COOLIDGE: About 1:00 my grandfather rode out, and was absent, perhaps, two hours; when he returned to prepare for his dinner, which was about half-past 3:00.

NARRATOR: Jefferson never turned away a visitor, and he often had a dozen friends and acquaintances dining with him.

JENKINSON: And only after the tablecloth was removed would there be any wine.

And then Jefferson would drink two or three glasses of wine, the glasses were much smaller than they are today, and often he diluted his wine with water.

Then he would take some tea a little bit later, gather with his grandchildren in one of the parlors, conduct an amateur seminar in ideas and in reading.

TRIST: When the candles were brought, all was quiet immediately, for he took up his book to read; and we would not speak out of a whisper, lest we should disturb him, and generally we followed his example and took a book, and I have seen him raise his eyes from his own book, and look round on the little circle of readers and smile, and make some remark to mama about it.

JENKINSON: And then the rest of the evening would be Jefferson's private time when he would retreat to his sanctum sanctorum, what he called his "cabinet" and read and study until perhaps 10:00 P.M. and then sleep.

SMITH: If full occupation of mind, heart, and hands, is happiness, surely, he is happy.

NARRATOR: One day in 1812, a package postmarked Quincy, Massachusetts, arrived.

In it was a book by John Quincy Adams.

A note from the author's proud father, Jefferson's old personal friend and political foe, John Adams, followed.

They had not spoken or written to one or another for a dozen years.

JEFFERSON: Dear Sir, A letter from you calls up recollections very dear to my mind.

It carries me back to times when, beset with difficulties and dangers, we were fellow laborers in the same cause, struggling for what is most valuable to man, his right of self-government.

Laboring always on the same oar, with some wave ever ahead threatening to overwhelm us and yet passing harmless under our bark, we knew not how, we rode through the storm with heart and hand, and made a happy port.

ADAMS: Never mind it, my dear sir, if I write four letters to your one; yours is worth more than my four.

You and I have ought not to die before we have explained ourselves to each other.

ELLIS: They are a kind of odd couple who recognize in each other um, the values that are lacking in themselves.

And the correspondence that they, that they, uh maintained between 1812 and 1826 is probably the greatest correspondence between public figures in American history.

It's a kind of elegiac correspondence in the twilight years of their respective lives.

It becomes clear what they have in common is a recognition that each of them is not complete without the other, that Adams is a realist who is sometimes cynical and needs Jefferson's idealism to redeem him from that cynicism.

And, in the same way, Jefferson can float away into a somewhat unrealistic set of assertions, but he's got Adams there to ground him.

VIDAL: In their last days they were the last survivors of the Founding Fathers, and suddenly, they struck up a correspondence, which is one of the most moving in American literature.

And they're talking about their invention, the United States, and some things disturb them, some things they're rather proud of.

BURSTEIN: It was to John Adams that Jefferson wrote, "I believe in the dreams of the future more than the history of the past."

It was to John Adams that Jefferson looked to for a sense of history.

It was to John Adams that Jefferson could express his profound appreciation for the spirit of '76 which lived in him until his dying day.

NARRATOR: "I rejoice in the correspondence," a mutual friend had told Adams when he heard that he and Jefferson had begun to write one another again.

"I consider you and him as the North and South Poles of the American Revolution.

Some talked, some wrote, and some fought to promote and establish it, but you and Mr. Jefferson thought for us all."

JEFFERSON: And so we have gone on, and so we shall go on, puzzled and prospering beyond example in the history of man.

And I do believe we shall continue to grow, to multiply, and prosper until we exhibit an association, powerful, wise, and happy, beyond what has yet been seen by men.

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.

So good night.

I will dream on, always fancying that Mrs. Adams and yourself are by my side marking our progress.

BACON: I went to old Davy Isaac's store and got a ball of twine, and Dinsmore found some shingles and made some pegs, and we all went on to the old field together.

Mr. Jefferson looked over the ground some time and then stuck down a peg, then directed me where to carry the line, and I stuck the second.

He carried one end of the line, and I the other, in laying off the foundation of the university.

Edmund Bacon.

JEFFERSON: Our university is the last of my mortal cares and the last service I can render my country.

This institution of my native state, the hobby of my old age, will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind to explore and to expose every subject susceptible of its contemplation.

NARRATOR: Jefferson still had one great task ahead of him: he wanted to build a new University of Virginia.

He would list it as one of the three greatest accomplishments of his life.

JENKINSON: His three achievements were all intellectual ones, the Declaration of Independence which enabled us to be a free people, the Virginia Statute which said that the mind is utterly free and uncoercible, and then, to make sure that that tradition of free exchange of ideas had perpetuity in American culture, he designed the University of Virginia.

It was meant to be a kind of temple of continuing revolution and Enlightenment rationality.

It was an experimental college.

It was the first college in the, in the history of the world that was not a divinity school, that was not founded by a religious organization.

Jefferson had some ideas that, that weren't, in the end, adopted.

But, for example, he didn't want degrees to be given; he didn't want matriculation.

He simply wanted people to come when they felt like it, to study what they pleased, and leave when they felt educated.

And it was meant to be what he called "an academical village."

JORDAN: We can see Jefferson walking on the north terrace with a telescope looking at the campus as it came into being.

We can follow Jefferson on a horse riding down to inspect as the pavilions began to be constructed.

We can see Jefferson attending the early meetings of the Board of Visitors.

We can see Jefferson, the correspondence, hoping to get the best professors from Europe to come to this new school.

And beyond all of that is a radical notion: this is public education.

It's not a school controlled by a religious group.

It's a school in which a generation would be trained for leadership roles.

It's a school that would be attended by the natural aristocracy, that is, the people who were just bright, and not by the artificial, people who were born into certain families.

JENKINSON: Instead of one blockish building like the College of William and Mary at Williamsburg, he designed a campus, the first American campus.

It consists of what he called "the lawn" which had the rotunda at one end and an open prospect of the Blue Ridge at the other end.

And then barracks or dormitories along the way.

Jefferson saw this as a, as a hobby in his old age but I think its, its purpose was much more serious than that.

He was afraid that the revolutionary edge of the founding generation would not be recapitulated in the younger generations.

And so he wanted to create a temple to the Enlightenment in his old age, and he did.

JEFFERSON: Come, too, and see our incipient University, which has advanced with great activity this year.

By the end of the next, we shall have elegant accommodations for seven professors, and the year following the professors themselves.

No secondary characters will be received among them.

Either the ablest which America or Europe can furnish or none at all.

ADAMS: Quincy, Massachusetts.

March 2, 1816.

My Dear Mr. Jefferson.

Would you go back to your cradle and live over again your 70 years?

John Adams.

JEFFERSON: You ask if I would agree to live my 70 or rather 73 years over again?

To which I say "Yay."

I think with you that it is a good world on the whole, that it has been framed on a principle of benevolence, and more pleasure than pain dealt out to us.

There are indeed, who might say "Nay," gloomy and hypochondriac minds despairing of the future.

To these, I say, how much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened?

My temperament is sanguine.

I steer my bark with hope in the head, leaving fear astern.

NARRATOR: Throughout his long life, Jefferson had endured more than his share of grief, and his old age saw still more of it.

Patsy's husband went bankrupt and grew apart from his family.

She moved permanently to Monticello with her children.

His favorite grandson was stabbed by his drunken brother-in-law.

A granddaughter died.

Two of his nephews killed a slave, whose only crime had been to break a teacup that had belonged to their mother.

JENKINSON: Jefferson reflects back upon his time with his wife and the losses that he had sustained in a wonderful letter to John Adams.

And he says, "I can accept all of the economy of life and all of human activities and human nature except one thing, what is the use of grief?"

I think that's one of Jefferson's unresolved concerns.

He believed in a providential universe.

He believed in a deistic god.

He believed that life was good.

He was a happy man, indeed an optimist.

But he could never come to terms with grief.

NARRATOR: In 1815, Jefferson was forced to sell his entire library of 6,487 books to help pay his bills.

The United States Government bought them, and they became the nucleus of the new Library of Congress.

But Jefferson could not resist buying himself another library.

"I cannot live without books," he told John Adams.

His bills continued to mount.

He now owed creditors nearly $100,000.

Monticello remained unfinished.

JENKINSON: In about 1815, when Jefferson realized that he was insolvent, he had to choose between living the life of a patrician and doing something about slavery which he had always said that he wanted to do.

And Jefferson, having looked in the face of that dilemma, chose to buy more Bordeaux wine and more books and more scientific instruments and to live in his comfortable way and not to emancipate.

NARRATOR: 36 years earlier, Jefferson had himself tried to have slavery forever barred from any new western territories.

He had lost then by only one vote.

"Thus we see the fate of millions unborn hanging on the tongue of one man," he'd said then, "and Heaven was silent in that awful moment!"

JENKINSON: He believed that we invited providential judgment because of our ownership of slaves.

And late in life, about the time of the Missouri Compromise, he said, "It's like having the wolf by the ears.

We can neither hang on nor let go," that we're trapped.

We're stuck with slavery and slavery is a poison which is getting at the heart of the American experiment.

ELLIS: And Jefferson, who recognizes that slavery is a threat to the stability of this new nation, also is prepared to acknowledge the right of slavery to spread into the territories.

He says that by spreading, it will diffuse, to which John Adams says, "My God if a cancer diffuses, it kills."

JEFFERSON: A good cause is often injured more by ill-timed efforts of its friends than by the arguments of its enemies.

The revolution in public opinion which this cause requires is not to be expected in a day, or perhaps in an age; but time, which outlives all things, will outlive this evil also.

My sentiments have been 40 years before the public.

Had I repeated them 40 times, they would only have become the more stale and threadbare.

Although I shall not live to see them consummated, they will not die with me; but living or dying, they will ever be in my most fervent prayer.

NARRATOR: Meanwhile, Jefferson's debts continued to pile up.

A scheme to raise funds by selling off some of his lands by public lottery failed and humiliated him.

He grew increasingly deaf.

He fell at age 78 and broke his left wrist and arm.

"Heaven," he told one grandson, "seems to be overwhelming us with every form of misfortune."

ADAMS: Dear Sir, I may rationally hope to be the first to depart; and as you are the youngest and the most energetic in mind and body, you may therefore rationally hope to be the last to take your flight.

John Adams.

JEFFERSON: Dear Sir, Crippled wrists and fingers make writing slow and laborious.

But while writing to you I lose the sense of these things, in the recollection of ancient times when youth and health made happiness out of everything.

I forget for a while the hoary winter of age, when we can think of nothing but how to keep ourselves warm, and how to get rid of our heavy hours until the friendly hand of death shall rid us all at once.

NARRATOR: By the spring of 1826, the flood of letters between Jefferson and Adams had slowed to a trickle.

Adams was so ill he could no longer hold a pen and had to dictate his letters.

Jefferson was 83, and also failing badly.

On May 22, he made his final notation in his day book.

JEFFERSON: A gallon lamp oil, costing $1.25, has lighted my chamber highly 25 nights, for six hours a night, which is 5 cents a night for 150 hours.

JENKINSON: You would think that the death of Jefferson would have been a melancholy event.

Slavery had spread into the American West.

We were now in a sectional tit-for-tat relationship with the bringing in of new states in the west which Jefferson said might be the death knell of the nation.

He was personally bankrupt and had been for a number of years and barely survived being thrown out of Monticello merely because his creditors didn't have the heart to do it.

His family was in some disarray.

He knew he wasn't going to be able to emancipate more than a handful of his slaves.

In many respects, the younger generation that was rising, represented for example by Andrew Jackson, did not fulfill Jefferson's aspirations of an enlightened citizenry which would be going about mild-mannered government.

And the farmers of the west, Jefferson's chosen people of God, were clearing the forests as fast as they could of trees and Indians.

And then finally, Jefferson's agrarian paradise was being changed into a manufacturing industrial nation.

So one might expect that Jefferson would die in deep disappointment.

Not so.

Jefferson remained optimistic until the end.

NARRATOR: When a letter came, asking him to come to Washington to speak on July 4th, at the 50th anniversary of his Declaration of Independence, he gently declined.

But he remained proud of what he had written in Philadelphia half a century before.

JEFFERSON: May it be to the world what I believe it will be to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all, the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government.

All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man.

The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.

These are grounds of hope for others.

For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollection of these rights and an undiminished devotion to them.

(clock ticking) NARRATOR: Jefferson and Adams were both dying as the anniversary approached, but each hoped to live long enough to see it.

TRIST: He has been dying since yesterday morning and till 12:00 last night we were in fear that he would not live, as he desired, to see his own glorious Fourth.

NARRATOR: Jefferson fell in and out of consciousness.

Shortly before midnight on the 3rd, he stirred and called out "Is this the Fourth?"

JORDAN: But he would come out of it and in kind of a whisper, he would ask the same question: "Is it the Fourth?"

And he was told, "No, Mr. Jefferson, it is not the Fourth."

And then finally when the question was asked in a whispery voice, the answer was affirmative, "Yes, Mr. Jefferson, it is the Fourth."

NARRATOR: In Quincy, Massachusetts, at five in the afternoon on the Fourth of July, John Adams finally died.

His last words were "Thomas Jefferson still lives."

But Adams was wrong.

Jefferson had died a few hours earlier, in his alcove bed, in his downstairs room, at the heart of the great house he had never managed quite to finish.

WILL: American history is replete with miraculous moments that convince you that there's something really quite special about the American project and one of them is the simultaneous death, 50 years to the day after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

These great rivals, the crusty, awkward, not very lovable, frankly, New England Federalist and the graceful Virginia gentleman striking up this wonderful correspondence that becomes one of the treasures of American letters, dying simultaneously July 4, 1826.

And John Adams' last words were, "Jefferson still survives."

Indeed he does.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ELLIS: He remains in the end a mystery and many a historian who's pursued him has discovered that the pursuit of the historical Jefferson is much like the pursuit of the historical Jesus.

There's a simple but extraordinarily resonant message that Jefferson somehow symbolizes, namely "the future is going to be better than the past."

WILLS: I think the thing to remember from Jefferson is the power of the word.

That ideas matter.

That words, beautifully shaped, reshape lives.

That a person who has certain disadvantages and flaws and even crimes, like holding slaves, uh, can transcend his imprisonment within reality by casting out words that take you into a new reality.

JENKINSON: Jefferson is the enigma of American history.

He's indispensable.

It's often said that Washington was the indispensable man but it's Jefferson who's indispensable because he is mysterious, idealistic, pragmatic, misunderstood, complicated, paradoxical, hypocritical, he's the stuff of America and that's who we are and that's why Jefferson has to be the center of our national discourse.

FRANKLIN: The legacy of Thomas Jefferson is both a gift and a curse... he's a blessing in one way, for he gives us many important things that we can hold up as ideals but uh, he cursed us with a practice of inequality and of slavery and the denial of justice that can scarcely be erased by anything we could think of.

NARRATOR: After his death, Jefferson's family was forced to leave the property, his slaves were sold and sent to other plantations, his furniture and French wines, his scientific instruments, and his beloved books, auctioned to the highest bidder.

Monticello itself was neglected for a time, then bought by a Jewish family, who struggled to preserve it in gratitude for Jefferson's bill establishing religious freedom.

In the years to come, his country lurched inevitably towards civil war, each side claiming the master of Monticello as its mentor.

His words would arm the pro-slavery arguments of secessionists and give comfort to the armies of Jefferson Davis, but his words would also inspire Abraham Lincoln, a generation of abolitionists, and thousands of runaway slaves.

BURSTEIN: We should remember Thomas Jefferson as a man who loved his country deeply, who believed in the inherent wisdom of the people and the educability of ordinary citizens.

But I don't think he was convinced that America would be able to advance without fits and seizures, numerous torments.

He didn't know how to hold the union together but, in the end, I'm sure he felt that he had done his best, that he had lived up to his own dreams, that the decency which he felt in his dealings with other human beings would be a legacy that Americans could hold.

VIDAL: I don't know if Thomas Jefferson is a figure that's easy to hold to one's heart, as it were, in the way some people have managed to hold Franklin Roosevelt or Abraham Lincoln.

But I think that you can, with all his faults and contradictions, that you can hold him very close to your mind, and if there is such a thing as an American Spirit, then he is it.

JENKINSON: Jefferson essentially tells us that we cannot be complacent until two conditions are met.

Every human being born on this continent has a right to equal, indeed identical, treatment in the machine of the law, irrespective of race, gender, creed, or class of origin.

And secondly, everyone born on this continent has a right to roughly equal opportunity at modest prosperity.

And until those conditions are met, we cannot rest.

When those conditions are met, we may say, as Jefferson said he would, "Nunc dimittus," now you may dismiss me; my work is done.

JEFFERSON: I will not believe our labors are lost.

I shall not die without a hope that light and liberty are on steady advance.

And even should the cloud of barbarism and despotism again obscure the science and liberties of Europe, this country remains to preserve and restore light and liberty to them.

In short, the flames kindled on the 4th of July, 1776 have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism.

Thomas Jefferson.

(music plays through credits)