Original subtitles

We hold these truths to be self-evident,

that all men are created equal.

Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence.

That they are endowed by their creator

with certain unalienable rights.

That's so powerful that it keeps reconstructing

the country down the line.

That among these are life, liberty,

and the pursuit of happiness.

Jefferson is the very icon of democracy.

Over two centuries later, people are quoting

what Thomas Jefferson wrote in that room.

That's power.

Jefferson also served as a diplomat.

He was the third president.

He was interested in religion

and the separation of church and state.

He loves luxury, food, wine.

But this is why he gets accusations of hypocrisy.

When it comes for his romantic ideals of liberty and freedom,

they are authentic, but they are at great odds

with how he lives his life.

Jefferson owned close to 700 people in his lifetime.

And there's Sally Hemings.

An enslaved woman--

she was involved with Thomas Jefferson sexually

at a very young age.

And so, we have to reckon

the apostle of liberty, Jefferson,

with the Jefferson...

whose legacy makes us uncomfortable.

We worry that if Jefferson was impure,

then our ideals are impure.

We worry that if Jefferson was wrong,

our nation is wrong.

But if the founding fathers

are the standard by which we judge leadership,

then we need to understand who they really were,

the good and the bad.

Self-righteousness in retrospect is easy,

also cheap.

The moral utility of history

is not to look down on the past condescendingly

or look up at it adoringly but to try to look it in the eye.

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.

All that stuff that really infuriates you

is inextricably entangled,

even worse, it is the same stuff as the good stuff!

We have to teach him as a full story.

We have to teach the duality of his legacy

in ways that would help us envision a better future.

In 1743,

the United States does not exist.

For more than 100 years,

settlers have forged new ways of life

in 13 separate colonies under British rule.

Colonists trade and farm in service of the crown...

As they navigate the challenges of living

in uncharted terrain.

Jefferson's born in 1743.

He was born into a world

that would be completely unrecognizable to us.

There are these 13 British colonies.

But the rest of the continent, it's Indigenous.

There are cities--

Boston, Charleston, Philadelphia, New York.

But the vast majority of Americans

are living in more rural, agrarian communities.

It is a farming-based society.

All of the colonies only has two million people.

These 13 British colonies

don't interact that much with each other.

They're all oriented

back across the water towards Britain.

It's a bit like all the buses run into the center of town.

They don't run from neighborhood to neighborhood.

Well, all the buses are running to London.

By the 18th century, when Jefferson comes along,

Virginia is

a tobacco-growing province.

Tobacco is very lucrative.

And so, of these 13 British colonies,

the largest, most populous, wealthiest is Virginia.

There are great families, particularly in Virginia,

and these families are famous,

and they have land, and they have power.

And even Washington

is not considered from a first family of Virginia,

but Jefferson is.

Thomas Jefferson is born at Shadwell plantation

on April 13, 1743

to Peter and Jane Jefferson...

Two of the most prominent names

in the most prominent British colony.

His father was surveyor and a plantation owner.

Surveying in colonial Virginia

meant access to land,

which meant potential income

as that land was developed.

And Peter Jefferson

holds almost the highest government office

that anyone in Virginia can hold.

He's well connected in terms of business,

in terms of social affiliations,

and he marries into one

of the most powerful families in Virginia--

the Randolph family--

a household of wealth, of privilege.

Thomas Jefferson spends his childhood

exploring the vast grounds of the Shadwell plantation.

He develops a great love for literature, music, and nature.

He liked to be outside.

He talked romantically about his best friend, Dabney Carr.

They would hike on the hills around Shadwell,

sit under trees.

They had a deal with each other that whoever died first

would bury the other one under their favorite oak tree

on what becomes Monticello Mountain.

Jefferson almost never talks about his feelings.

There's something cool, even cold, about Jefferson.

You can't really get that close to him.

But friendship was a very important thing to Jefferson

throughout his life.

He is clearly extremely smart.

He gets a great education growing up.

He reads everything.

He can read or write a number of different languages.

He can speak French fluently.

They ordered the finest clothing from England.

He played the violin.

It was a very genteel kind of situation for him.

Shadwell, it is a house that is set up

to enable this elite family

to perform in the way that an elite family performs.

The Jeffersons had a dining room

that could seat 20 people for dinner.

So there's potential there for entertaining.

As the oldest son,

Thomas carries a lot of responsibility

in the Jefferson household.

Despite his shy nature, he is often thrust

into conversations about philosophy and politics

with his father's influential friends.

But Shadwell is also the plantation

that housed the largest number of enslaved African Americans

in colonial Albemarle County.

The white people on the plantation are outnumbered

by about six to one by enslaved African Americans.

His first memory is of being held by a slave on horseback

on a pillow.

Each of the Jefferson children,

one brother and six sisters,

were assigned at birth an enslaved person

who was their same sex and roughly their same age

who was going to live with them their entire lives,

which means in the Jefferson household,

two-year-olds own other two-year-olds.

A man named Jupiter Evans is born in 1743,

the same year as Thomas Jefferson.

And Jupiter's mother, Sal, was the wet nurse

to the Jefferson children.

So they have this intimate relationship

from the moment they're born, and they grow up together.

All of the things that come along with figuring out

who you are as a person are wrapped up

in learning to be either the master of enslaved people

or someone who serves them.

He had all of the things that would have given him

an advantage during that time period.

He was literally the person who was the master,

and that's the term they would have used.

I know we use "enslaver" now.

But I think this conveys his sense of himself,

the master of people, of human beings.

And so there you get the seeds of the contradictions

of Thomas Jefferson.

He is a wealthy populist.

He becomes passionate about freedom,

but slavery, it's what he's always known.

Jefferson is raised in a society

built on enslaved labor.

However, he will spend the next decade of his life

constructing radical views about liberty

and stoking the flames of revolution.

Growing up, Thomas Jefferson is taught

by the finest tutors in Virginia.

But despite the experts at his disposal,

there is no greater influence on young Thomas

than his father, Peter.

There is a story

that when Thomas Jefferson was a young boy,

three enslaved individuals at Shadwell plantation

were instructed to go out and pull down a wooden shed.

And try as they might, they were unable to do that.

And Peter Jefferson, in this somewhat mythical idea

of the great Sansom,

single-handedly pulls the shed down and away.

He tells his grandchildren that his father

would go off for weeks in the back woods

and fend off wild animals.

So Peter Jefferson is painted by Jefferson

as this great explorer that has superhuman

or hyper-masculine strength.

I believe that Thomas Jefferson's admiration

for his father was amplified

because Jefferson only knew his father for a very short time.

He passes away when Thomas Jefferson

is only 14 years old.

It's a momentous event in his life.

Many years later, of the death of his father, he says,

"The whole care and direction of myself

"was thrown on myself entirely

"without relative or friend

qualified to advise or guide me."

Jefferson inherits his father's estate

at the age of 14.

For the next two years, Jefferson works

with his father's executors on the farm ledgers

and becomes the patriarch to his mother,

sisters, and younger brother.

But at 16, he persuades the executors

to grant him a look at life beyond the hills of Shadwell.

So, in the winter of 1760,

young Thomas Jefferson, only 16 years old,

travels 120 miles to the east to Williamsburg.

He enrolls in the College of William & Mary.

William & Mary is the second-oldest institution

of higher education in the colonies.

Harvard was first.

And Jefferson's friends say

that he was hard to tear from his studies.

But he does take part in the social landscape

of Williamsburg.

There was drink.

There were dances

with music and conversations about books,

taverns and pubs and libraries.

Williamsburg is a cultural mecca for him in these years.

He has access to some of the most well connected

and brightest minds available in the colonies.

Williamsburg was also the colonial capital.

You have professors and lawyers

and judges and legislators

who were cultured people.

And for a young man of great appetite and great ambition,

it was exactly the right place to be.

And in Williamsburg,

Jefferson has the good fortune to fall under the tutelage

of Dr. William Small.

There's the man.

Though Jefferson is quiet and rarely speaks up

in classroom debates,

his eloquent writing catches Small's attention.

Jefferson writes of William Small

that he had gentlemanly and correct manners,

an enlarged and liberal mind,

and a happy talent of communication.

"Perhaps more than any other,

he fixed my destinies."

William Small is a proponent of the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment is an intellectual movement

that took hold in Europe in the late 17th century.

Scientists and philosophers spread ideas about freedom,

equality, and the pursuit of knowledge

through reason and logic instead of religion.

William Small teaches him how to make observations

and make hypotheses about the world.

William Small is the one who introduces Jefferson

to the writings of John Locke

and Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton.

These are people whose writings shaped cultures

and shaped world empires.

And Jefferson gets not only a reverence

for the Enlightenment

and for a kind of rationalistic approach to the world,

but he also gets a taste of their style.

The people that he reads when he's a very young man

really change the course of everything in his life.

If he has a Holy Trinity,

it's not Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

It's Locke, Newton, Bacon.

The Enlightenment is his gospel.

William Small gave him those tools

for thinking about the place of man in society.

And because he impressed his professor so much

and also because of his family connections,

he is invited to attend dinners

at the governor's palace with William Small,

Governor Francis Fauquier, and George Wythe,

who will later be Jefferson's mentor in law.

And Jefferson described these dinners

as a little piece of paradise.

A small table of people sharing good food and big ideas

is happiness to him.

The room was warmed with one fireplace crackling

through the evening, with the table set by candlelight.

Wine is flowing.

They're eating oysters and ham

and some of the best foods available in Virginia.

They ate French cuisine and French wine.

Remember, everything had to come through England.

So to be able to sample an elegant bottle of Bordeaux

was quite the privilege and opportunity.

20 years old, he's a kid, whose abilities

have been recognized by these older men

who bring him into their world.

And he talks about that kind of school of sociability

that he went through.

And this will serve him very well decades later.

And over dinner, people debated freedom

and enlightenment thinkers and American identity.

Everybody's talking about liberty and freedom.

But one doesn't discuss Jefferson

if one doesn't have an appetite

for a certain level of irony.

Let's not forget, of course,

enslaved people will be in the room serving them.

White Virginians start questioning and debating

freedom as it applied to tyranny.

But the economy and the culture

has been created around slavery.

It is a society rife with contradictions,

and Jefferson embodies all of that.

In 1769, Jefferson's political life

begins when he is elected

to the Virginia House of Burgesses.

He is just 26.

The House of Burgesses

is the state legislature of the time.

Being elected to the House of Burgesses has as much

a sense of obligation as opportunity to it.

It's what you did if you owned land and you were of society.

It's almost an entitlement that Jefferson and his friends

are going to step into these roles.

It's like, if you are wealthy today,

you're on the boards of museums

and of arts organizations.

That's how you have political and social power.

The Virginia of this period

was being reshaped in many ways.

The Seven Years' War, the French and Indian War

had ended, but British troops were staying.

Royal authority,

which had ceded the power

to pursue land titles,

had taken that power back.

And the kinds of men that Jefferson would have been with

would have been affected by that.

And so there's an entire redefinition,

an entire reordering

of what it meant to be a colonist

in exactly the years that Jefferson is in Williamsburg.

And Jefferson distinguishes himself

in the House of Burgesses by being a radical,

rejecting the idea of British authority

and passionately railing against the British Empire,

because to Jefferson,

given the distance of the Atlantic Ocean,

the distance of the king, inevitably, at this point,

the British Crown seems incredibly out of touch

in the colonies.

And the sentimental attachments that some

of the older generation had begin to wipe away.

You start to get that resentment start to itch,

start to eat in those debates.

He was experiencing the debates

as they unfolded,

beginning to be devoted to the ideal

of liberty in that argument.

But he wasn't a leading indicator

of revolutionary sentiment until a little bit later.

He's enormously intellectually confident,

very passionate, but insecure

when it comes to actually speaking in public.

He is a weak speaker.

He is shy. He is soft-spoken.

Some people say he has a nasal voice.

He'd been quiet, but Jefferson made it clear

that he believed in progress.

He's very much interested in Enlightenment values

and thinking that he could bring those to Virginia.

He is motivated by the desire to want to shape his society.

In a part of Jefferson's biography,

he even mentions that when he was in the House of Burgesses,

he and another member

wanted to have a plan of emancipation.

In his autobiography,

which he wrote 52 years later,

Jefferson states that in 1769, he and his cousin

proposed a bill that would shift control of emancipation

from the general court over to slave owners themselves.

But he says the House of Burgesses

kills the bill immediately.

He says once he saw how people responded

to plans for emancipation, basically shut them down...

he left it alone.

The weird thing is,

there is no other evidence

other than Jefferson saying this,

that such a bill was ever proposed.

The records of the House of Burgesses

don't reflect this.

Now, it could be that the records are simply incomplete.

Having said that, other historians

have made a pretty strong case that this didn't happen

and that he's making it up in his autobiography.

So then we have to ask ourselves,

why is he saying this when he's compiling

his autobiography 50 years later?

When we think about autobiographies,

people are constructing a version of their past.

And he wants to create a narrative to show

that both he and the United States

were troubled by slavery

and sought to do something about slavery

as a problem from the very beginning...

True or not.

While the truth of these statements

will never be known,

it is clear that young Jefferson embraces his role

in the House of Burgesses.

As he learns to navigate

the politics of Virginia government,

he takes on the social aspects of the job as well.

When the House of Burgesses is in session,

the city of Williamsburg becomes a social event.

It's the beginning of his engagement with

and entrée to that kind of world of urban sophistication,

which he claimed throughout his life to disdain,

but he actually liked.

The balls around political programs

are part of how elite Virginians reinforce

their bonds with each other.

But when Jefferson is young, he is anxious.

And he's just uncomfortable around women.

We are able to read in letters of his early loves

and, in particular, one Rebecca Burwell.

She evidently has quite a number of suitors.

Jefferson thinks, quite proudly,

that he's prominent in that lineup.

So Thomas Jefferson decides that it is time

that he will formally propose.

Remember, it was a different kind of world.

They didn't date in the way we think of dating people.

If you are involved with people,

at some point you expected to be married to them.

He stayed up the entire night composing

and memorizing this proposal.

The next evening, he would find himself in a holiday soiree

and dance.

On the floor with his fair Rebecca,

he begins his proposal.

And he says...

the words fall out in a great disarray.

He can remember one or two sentences that he memorized.

And then, suddenly, not only had everyone left the floor,

but so had his fair Rebecca.

And he said, the day never saw a more miserable creature

when the sun rose that next morning.

So, evidently, he blew it.

I mean, he's not good with women,

at least in his early days.

I mean, he's awkward.

But he's in his early 20s.

And I don't know how many heterosexual men

in their early 20s are necessarily smooth with women.

Slowly, Jefferson becomes more comfortable

in the ways of romance,

just in time to meet a young woman

from a wealthier family than his own.

Now at 27 years old, Jefferson believes the future

he yearns for is possible.

By 1770, Thomas Jefferson has established himself

as a respected lawmaker

in the Virginia House of Burgesses.

He has also begun to clear land

and develop his own estate on Monticello Mountain,

about five miles from the Shadwell plantation

where he grew up.

His plans for Monticello are grand.

And Jefferson is eager for someone to share it with.

But at 27 years old, he has gained a reputation

as a consummate bachelor,

having spent most of his 20s

pursuing unavailable women, including the daughter

of a powerful colleague.

John Wayles, an English immigrant,

who has done very well for himself

and amassed quite an acreage.

He's a planter and a lawyer

and a slave trader.

Jefferson was a lawyer, and John Wayles was a lawyer.

There's references to him going to John Wayles's home.

So it was from their business associations

that Jefferson met Martha.

Martha Wayles is the eldest of the four daughters.

She's sought after by many a male in Williamsburg.

But in 1766, Jefferson loses out

to a man named Bathurst Skelton.

Great names in the 18th century.

But Skelton dies in 1768.

And in 1770, Jefferson takes a second shot.

Martha Wayles-Skelton was a very attractive widow

because she was young and she was wealthy.

Jefferson is riding down the Duke of Gloucester Street

in Williamsburg when he hears the melody of a spinet

coming out of a parlor window.

Jefferson runs up onto the porch,

and there through the window,

he sees the form of the Widow Skelton

seated at the spinet.

Well, he quickly goes to his horse satchel

and gets his miniature violin.

Jefferson knocks on the door.

And the Widow Skelton and he have a musicale

for, oh, maybe an hour or so.

And it's clear that she has accepted his courtship.

And then they're playing this duet,

and another suitor comes to the house

and hears them playing,

and then just turns and leaves.

And he says, we're too late.

Jefferson's gotten here before us.

On January 1, 1772...

Jefferson and Martha Wayles-Skelton

marry on her father's farm in Charles City County, Virginia.

After the celebration,

they head to Jefferson's burgeoning plantation.

They start out for Monticello,

which would be about maybe a four-day ride

in regular weather.

Well, within a day or two, they're caught in a snowstorm.

This is the largest blizzard yet recorded

in Virginia history.

They have to abandon the carriage,

make the rest of the way on horseback.

But then, eventually, through the snow,

they come to that cottage,

which is just one small building

that has a kitchen

and just a single chamber above stairs

on the oldest part of Monticello.

It's near midnight.

He brings his bride over the threshold of his hermitage.

He goes to make a fire.

Mrs. Jefferson busies herself among some of the books

he has on the shelves.

They say she discovers a bottle of wine.

And that is where they begin their family.

For the first year

of Jefferson and Martha's marriage,

the couple lives quietly

in the modest honeymoon cottage

at the top of Monticello Mountain

as work continues on the rest of the property.

They welcome a daughter, and Jefferson practices law,

specializing in land cases.

And then her father, John Wayles, died.

When John Wayles dies, Jefferson inherits

about 11,000 acres and 135 people--

enslaved people, including the Hemings family.

Like many planters,

John Wayles has two families.

He has children by his recognized wife, who died,

but he also has family by a woman he enslaved,

Betty Hemings.

Unfortunately, this is not unusual in colonial Virginia.

When Betty Hemings arrives at Monticello in 1774,

she brings her 12 children with her,

6 of whom are thought to be fathered by John Wayles.

Jefferson never says,

I know that these are John Wayles's kids,

but his treatment of them indicates

that they are a group apart from other enslaved people.

Many women whose fathers or brothers

had children with enslaved women,

were very hostile towards them and would sell them.

Martha does the opposite.

She installs the Hemingses in the household

as favored servants.

The men are the ones who get to travel

and hire out their own time and keep their money.

They're not supposed to do that.

That was actually against the law during that time period.

The women did not go to the fields.

They cooked. They sewed.

They did the kinds of things

that white farming women would do.

Betty Hemings is an older woman by that point.

She's given almost private quarters.

And she's given the role at her house

of running the preschool.

Critta Hemings works as a nursemaid

to Jefferson's daughters.

James Hemings does joinery and makes furniture,

including some pieces that are in the house today.

And the other Hemings had access to skills,

training for skills, and some degree of autonomy

within the plantation system that sets them apart.

They're allowed to do things that other people

aren't allowed to do, But they're still enslaved.

Jefferson comes across as a very benevolent person.

In his writing, he recognizes slavery as a moral failing.

He thinks this is something

that will ultimately tear apart the Union,

that is a threat to democracy.

He understands that.

But, also, he's complicit. He's a slaveholder.

As Jefferson continues to expand his family and home

in Virginia,

the British continue their fight

to defend their empire against France,

the Netherlands, and Spain.

Britain is involved in conflict around the world.

And as a consequence of that,

Britain has a substantial public debt

that has to be paid.

And it looks to the colonies for revenue.

For years, Parliament has been taxing

the American colonies and using the proceeds

to fund military campaigns around the world.

One of the most egregious taxes

is the Stamp Act of 1765--

a direct tax on all printed materials,

from newspapers to playing cards.

The Stamp Act was the fourth

in a series of taxes that infuriated the settlers,

particularly Virginia's elite.

In the years following these taxes,

resentment amongst the colonists grows.

We have to ask ourselves, why do these Virginia elites,

why do wealthy people like Jefferson and Washington

become revolutionaries?

We expect the poor and the desperate

to take up arms and become revolutionaries.

Why do they do it?

They do it because they believe that their authority

is threatened by this British assertion of sovereignty

over them.

And so, the issue very quickly moves

from one of raising revenue to one of political power

and autonomy.

And Virginians,

especially elite Virginians like Jefferson,

highly value their autonomy and their power.

The Stamp Act would constitute an assault

on the fundamental liberties of these people

because American Patriots

in the 1760s

worried about recognizing their equal standing

within the British Empire.

The Sons of Liberty start as a particular group in Boston

in response to the Stamp Act.

And then in the late 1760s, early 1770s,

the phrase Sons of Liberty

will spread through the colonies.

It's almost like a brand or a hashtag, right?

Throughout the late 1760s and early 1770s,

tension between Britain and the colonies

continues to escalate

and eventually erupts into violence.

And then in 1773,

to protest taxes on tea...

The Sons of Liberty board a group of merchant vessels

one night in Boston Harbor, seize the tea,

and dump it into the harbor

because the tea cannot be taxed

if it is not loaded onto shore.

But as soon as the tea is offloaded,

then the colony is responsible for the taxes.

The Boston Tea Party is an eruption

of a long-slumbering resentment.

It basically says, taxation without representation.

We're being treated as a society

that is being taken from and being given little.

The white men who participated in the Tea Party

dressed as Native Americans that night

to be dramatic and to draw attention,

to say, okay, maybe we are different.

Maybe we are not British subjects.

Maybe there's a new American citizen here

that is no longer a subject.

Then in 1774, to punish Boston,

British Parliament passes a series of laws

known in the colonies as the Intolerable Acts.

These acts greatly curtail the independent governance

of Massachusetts

and stoke further resentment.

Then the colonies begin to write to each other,

saying, we are being treated unfairly.

In what ways are you being treated unfairly?

And are we going to band together to stand as one?

Are we going to accept this as a single event,

or are we going to see this as a long train of abuses?

Jefferson becomes a powerful colonial voice,

speaking out against Britain.

In 1774, he writes,

"We do declare that these,

their natural and legal rights,

"have in frequent instances been invaded by the Parliament

"of Great Britain,

"that all such assumptions of unlawful power are dangerous

"to the rights of the British Empire in general

and should be considered as its common cause."

What had been small bursts of discontent

began to take root as the seeds of revolution.

As a response to the so-called Intolerable Acts

of 1774...

The 13 colonies

that previously had little in common and little interaction

begin banding together against British oppression.

And Jefferson continues to write,

railing against British tyranny.

In Virginia, the House of Burgesses

have received letters from their colleagues

in Massachusetts explaining what happened.

So the high-ranking members

propose a day of fasting and prayer.

And Jefferson and the Burgesses

vote to support Massachusetts.

They go up the street to the Raleigh Tavern

and assemble and pass their agreement

to have this day of fasting and prayer

to demonstrate a gentle form of protest.

It's a public statement of solidarity with Massachusetts.

On the 1st of June,

they are going to go to their churches,

and they're going to pray

for the people in Massachusetts.

They're going to show their allegiance in that mark.

It's basically saying, hey, we need to sacrifice.

We need to make a political statement

by fasting and praying.

They are deciding upon a day of religious observation.

But that can only be decided upon by the royal governor,

because the royal governor is not only the representative

of the Crown, he is the colonial representative

of the Church of England.

When he learns

that the Burgesses gathered in the Raleigh Tavern,

they've decided to do this amongst themselves,

well, it's his prerogative

to dissolve the House of Burgesses

at his will.

So there you have Jefferson and an elected body

now officially in a state of rebellion.

It's political activism.

Jefferson's not just writing letters anymore.

As discontent escalates,

so does the British response.

British troops are marching in New York.

They're mustering threateningly in other places.

The public gunpowder stores are seized

in Massachusetts and Virginia.

The gunpowder is supposed to be there

so that if the royal governor calls up the militia

to fight a war against Native Americans

or a slave uprising,

there is ammunition for public protection.

But the royal governor seizes the powder,

takes it to a ship waiting offshore.

And so the royal governor is saying,

I am not going to protect you anymore.

You are the enemy now.

And so, in 1774, there you have Thomas Jefferson

in that group of former Burgesses

gathered in the Raleigh Tavern.

They're standing there arguing, debating,

and bickering and trying to decide...

are we really going to forget ourselves

as Virginians and a sovereign colony

and light the spark of revolution?

Absolutely.

Still to come on "Thomas Jefferson"...

Now the hard work begins.

They need to win the war.

Thomas Jefferson is voted in as the governor

when the war is making its way more directly to Virginia.

The British dragoons seek the capture

of the governor of Virginia.

It's a chess match.

Jefferson is the prize.

And then Sally Hemings becomes

the maid for his daughters.

Jefferson's in his 40s.

His wife has died.

It's clear that Sally and Jefferson

begin a sexual relationship.

Historians were hostile to the story.

They said, this is impossible.

Jefferson would never do anything like this.

But if you look at who is at Monticello at the time

that Sally Hemings conceives all of her children,

it's Thomas Jefferson.

In 1801, Thomas Jefferson is the first president

to be inaugurated in Washington, D.C.

At the same moment, Napoleon's decided to sell Louisiana

to the United States.

The Louisiana Purchase is the biggest accomplishment

of Jefferson's presidency.

Jefferson's words, arguably,

are the most powerful words

ever originally rendered in English.

The Declaration of Independence

is an address to a candid world.

It signals that the rebellious colonists

are not going to reconcile with Britain.

We're here.

We are the United States of America.

And we're not going anywhere.