Original subtitles

Previously on "Thomas Jefferson"...

Benjamin Franklin decides he's going to give up

his role as minister to France,

and Jefferson takes over for him.

Jefferson insists that his daughter Maria come to France.

And he says she should come with a careful Negro woman.

They send Sally Hemings.

Sally and Jefferson begin a sexual relationship.

She's 16 years old.

And then, when Jefferson returns home in late 1789,

George Washington wants Alexander Hamilton to be

secretary of the treasury and he wants Jefferson

to be secretary of state.

Jefferson believes that Hamilton

is restoring the British system to the United States.

But Washington agreed with Hamilton and not him.

That causes bad blood, big time.

In the summer of 1793,

Thomas Jefferson has taken on the role as America's

first secretary of state.

Though appointed directly by George Washington,

he finds himself constantly at odds with the president,

his vice president John Adams,

and his treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton.

The presidency, it's still an office very much in evolution.

People like John Adams and Alexander Hamilton

are constantly agitating for more titles, more pomp,

more circumstance.

Adams thinks that people need that kind of figurehead

to look up to, and there should be

some continuity between the kings of Europe

and an American president.

And Washington and Hamilton were

seeing the struggle to build a meaningful army,

to build institutions.

So they bring that to the federal government.

How do we build institutions?

Can you really trust the people to always do the right thing?

No, of course not.

Jefferson believes the exact opposite.

Jefferson believes that anything that

tends towards monarchy or British example

is a betrayal of the Revolution;

that this is supposed to be a country that's bottom up,

not top down.

But Washington, Hamilton, Adams

are much more concerned

that anarchy can turn to a new type of tyranny.

They see it happening in France.

Hamilton believes that Jefferson and the people

who will come to be called Jeffersonian Republicans

are adherents to the French Revolution.

He believes they want to overthrow all order.

Anarchy will be the result. Blood will run in the streets.

America's republican experiment will fail

and Britain will take over again.

After having been in Paris in the early years

of the French Revolution, Jefferson staunchly

supports the popular uprising.

Despite forming relationships with the French royals,

Jefferson says he stands for the toppling of all kings.

When it comes to the war between Britain and France,

Washington declares a policy of strict neutrality.

We are not going to get dragged into continental squabbles.

But Jefferson disagrees.

Jefferson unfairly says that neutrality

is a de facto endorsement of England.

And so he says Washington isn't

listening to him anymore.

And Jefferson resigns as secretary of state.

But of course, he doesn't retire entirely.

He's a political animal.

For over two years, he remains in touch with people.

He's writing letters.

And he's maintaining his networks, as we now say.

He's still agitating behind the scenes.

When Washington makes the truly revolutionary step

of announcing his intention to leave office

after his second term, setting the second term precedent,

it eases those monarchical concerns immediately.

It also sets off the first contested election.

Jefferson runs for president in 1796.

The 1796 election marks

the first official partisan election in the United States.

53-year-old Thomas Jefferson runs

as a Democratic Republican against Federalist John Adams.

Jefferson is the founder

of the Democratic Republican Party.

And it says that government shouldn't

be so federalized, that a lot of the power

should go to the states.

The federal government shouldn't spend too much,

shouldn't tax too much.

The Washingtonian party becomes the Federalists.

They were fighting for more centralized power.

It's an ugly fight.

Adams is cast as a puffed-up plutocrat,

a would-be monarchist, an elite

who's out of touch with the common people.

Jefferson is attacked as an effete intellectual,

who's an apostate and a radical revolutionary,

who has no faith, and is therefore immoral.

It's hard for us to imagine just how

acrimonious the 1790s were.

We sort of imagine people like Jefferson and Hamilton

as stiff.

But these are human beings,

who had emotions, who got angry,

who felt insulted, who didn't like each other.

The 1790s was a moment where

you really had two opposing parties form,

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

the American experiment would fail.

In 1796, the winner of the election

is the person who gets the most votes

in the electoral college.

But unlike today, the person who comes second

becomes vice president.

In theory, this is really nice.

You're going to reunite the nation after an election

and get people to transcend their partisan divides

by working together.

But that doesn't happen.

Adams wins.

Jefferson becomes his vice president.

And actually, Adams makes overtures to working together,

but Jefferson rebuffs.

Jefferson thought he'd been there at the beginning,

and he wanted it to be the way he wanted it.

He thought that he was right.

He thought the Republicans are the nation.

That's the way he saw it.

He's already planning for a rematch.

Rather than watch Adams and the Federalists

move forward with an agenda he disagrees with,

Jefferson disengages from his role as vice president.

He comes back to Monticello a lot during this time

to his mistress.

Sally Hemings has her first child Harriet

in 1795 before Jefferson

becomes vice president.

And then, thereafter, every two or three years,

has another baby.

Meanwhile, in Philadelphia,

John Adams and his Federalist cabinet

receive fierce criticism and accusations of tyranny.

Adams signs the Alien and Sedition Acts,

which authorized the president to deport immigrants

and arrest any citizens who make what he deems to be

false or malicious statements about the federal government.

The Democratic Republicans staunchly oppose these acts,

which they believe are direct assaults

to the freedom of speech

guaranteed by the First Amendment.

A promise to repeal these unconstitutional acts

will be a tenant of Jefferson's

next presidential campaign.

The 1796 election, it's an ugly fight.

But the election of 1800 is even uglier.

You see the beginning of a vitriolic partisan press

that is full of misinformation

and half-truths and truths that are exaggerated.

I mean, Adams is accused of being a hermaphrodite.

It's widely reported by Federalists in New England

that if Jefferson is elected, he's an atheist

and he'll take your Bibles away.

The Federalists really believed that if Jefferson

was elected, you would have a French-loving anarchist

who is hostile to the Christian religion in power,

and he would threaten the stability of society

with all his wild-eyed ideas

of letting the people rule themselves.

Now, on the other side of this,

Jeffersonians had been broadly hinting

that if Jefferson didn't become president,

the Union was gone--

the experiment in Republican government would fail.

Jefferson and Adams become

highly polarizing

and polarized figures.

Paradoxically, because of the intense animosities,

you also have intense engagement.

We've seen this in our most recent election,

that that animosity in some ways can breed engagement.

Citizens are really coming out to make their will known.

So both the Federalists and Jefferson realize

that they need to appeal to voters,

and voters need to therefore be informed,

or misinformed as the case may be,

so that they'll vote for the right person.

And this is really important for American democracy

because the voters themselves are starting to learn

that they have a role to play.

And so in order to appeal to

and mobilize support in Virginia,

Jefferson says, in order for a republic to succeed,

its citizens should be small farmers,

farming their own land-- independent farmers.

There is this weird thing where

you have a wealthy person who is a champion

of supposedly the little guy.

But he is seen as the person who represents the common man.

He's against banks and the elites,

and he wants public education for people.

That kind of talk is galvanizing,

and makes him popular among artisans and farmers

and people who recoil at the Federalists,

whom they see as elitists.

In the election of 1800,

it's a confused and confusing election because it ends up

that New York Senator Aaron Burr and Jefferson,

both Republicans,

are tied in the electoral college.

And that means the outgoing House of Representatives,

which is dominated by Federalists,

has to decide the election.

And it takes Congress 36 tries to break that tie.

After two months of House re-votes,

lobbying, and backdoor dealing,

Jefferson's adversary Alexander Hamilton writes,

"In a choice of evils, let them take the least.

Jefferson is in every view less dangerous than Burr."

And so thanks to the support of his archrival,

on February 17, 1801,

Thomas Jefferson is announced as the third president

of the United States.

On March 4, 1801, after an extremely fraught

and ugly election, 57-year-old Thomas Jefferson

is elected the third president of the United States.

Jefferson gets it by the skin of his teeth.

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.

For the people have spoken, and they have decided

to elect a different president in response

to Federalist highhandedness.

And so this is a revolution because we had

a peaceful transfer of power.

This is a big part of what the American political tradition

is all about.

Thomas Jefferson is the first president to be inaugurated

in Washington, D.C.

Jefferson walks over into the old Senate chamber.

And in that chamber are gathered

our entire government.

They have the House of Representatives, the Senate,

and the Supreme Court.

Adams is bitter.

He bails on the inauguration.

After the swearing-in, Jefferson then turns

to read his inaugural address.

And it's the first great presidential inaugural speech.

It's his best piece of writing since the Declaration.

"Let us, then, fellow citizens,

"unite with one heart and one mind.

"Let us restore to social intercourse

"that harmony and affection, without which liberty

and even life itself are but dreary things."

The first inaugural is all about togetherness

and how beautiful the country is.

He is preaching the values of national unity,

saying famously, we are all Republicans,

we are all Federalists.

He defends the right of dissent,

saying criticism in a democracy is your birthright.

Our country is going to be strong enough to withstand it.

That's new.

But what's really stunning is when

he becomes a born-again Washingtonian

on the issue of foreign policy.

Remember, he has been arguing against neutrality,

saying it's a de facto endorsement of England.

Suddenly, he's in the presidential chair,

and he starts by extolling the virtues

of America's relative isolation from the problems of Europe.

We're insulated from those fights, he says.

We don't need to be part of them.

That's what Washington's been arguing all along

that he's been attacking.

"Let us stand with courage and confidence,

"pursue our own federal and republican principles,

"our attachment to union and representative government,

"kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean

from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe."

He's saying like, we're really lucky because

the Atlantic Ocean separates us from our greatest enemies.

And also, we're really fortunate because,

on the other side of us, to our west,

there's a bunch of forests through which

it's hard for enemies to come.

And then he does a better articulation

of Washington's vision of foreign policy for America

than Washington ever did, despite spending

the past decade fighting those principles.

"Equal and exact justice to all men

"of whatever state or persuasion,

"religious or political,

"peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations,

entangling alliances with none."

It shows how much that where you stand

is often a matter of where you sit,

that Jefferson is already being changed

and constrained by the responsibility

of the presidency.

A president has an obligation to think bigger.

But the address itself, nobody could hear it.

Because he basically had his text

and he mumbled his text to himself.

He literally reads it.

He holds it up this close.

He has his spectacles on, and he reads his inaugural address

very much like this.

They say that those seated beyond the second row

could not hear a single word he uttered.

So I argue Jefferson couldn't run for president today.

He doesn't have the skill set,

didn't like speaking in public, doesn't like conflict,

couldn't have a debate.

He has the wrong skill set to run for president,

not just today, but, frankly,

throughout much of American history.

As soon as Jefferson moves into the White House,

he begins to redefine the role of the presidency.

Washington was very aware of his dignity and gravitas.

And in many respects, this was very important

because this was a new government

and Washington was striving to give

that government legitimacy.

Jefferson, by contrast, was very critical of what

he saw as a kind of regal style around Washington,

and actively sought to push against that

in his presidency.

He walks to the Capitol to be inaugurated.

He doesn't take a coach.

He wears a plain brown suit.

Famously, in November of 1803,

he encountered the British ambassador Anthony Merry.

Merry was in his full diplomatic uniform,

and was dressed appropriately to meet a head of state.

And Merry commented with some disdain--

Jefferson, as he put it,

was wearing down-at-the-heels slippers.

He called him slovenly, even.

This wasn't an accident.

He also was making a political statement here.

In contrast to the imperial grandeur

that Merry represented, Jefferson was deliberately

attempting to cultivate a democratic sensibility,

and expressing that in the way he dressed

when he greeted Merry.

As president, Jefferson does not try

to dominate public debate.

He also governs in that dinner table diplomacy format

that hearkens back to his youth in Virginia.

Dinners at the Jefferson White House,

instead of having formal seating plans,

the seating was pell-mell, as they described it.

People were meant to just find their own seats.

And this is more democratic than the more formal style

of the Washington administration.

He knows he's not going to command a room

the way Washington did.

But he brings together people at his dinner table

for honest and frank discussion and debate.

He gains political intelligence.

He networks. He earns goodwill.

He doesn't necessarily combine the Republicans

and the Federalists at the same dinner table,

but the Federalists in Congress get to know him.

And they find that, on an interpersonal level,

he's almost impossible to dislike.

He's interesting. He listens.

That's something that most politicians are terrible at.

But while Jefferson gains a reputation

as a charming politician in Washington,

in Virginia, he gains a reputation for something else.

Two years into his presidency,

Thomas Jefferson is popular.

He's established America's first military academy

at West Point and has repealed

a number of controversial taxes and laws,

and let the unconstitutional

Alien and Sedition Acts expire.

But though he is a political success,

rumors fly about his personal life.

People who knew Jefferson noticed that

when they come to dinners at Monticello,

that there seemed to be a number of mixed-race people

who kind of resembled Thomas Jefferson around.

Over the years, there are some blind items in newspapers

clearly talking about Jefferson

and his addiction to golden affections,

meaning mixed-race women.

So we get a sense that

people are talking about this in his area.

Then, in September 1802, a bombshell article

is published by popular political writer

James Callender.

Callender had really come to the fore

for attacking Alexander Hamilton

on behalf of Jefferson in the 1790s.

He also wrote some really nasty things about John Adams

in the past, which Jefferson ends up supporting.

So Callender is one of the people who got jailed because

of the Sedition Act, and Jefferson promised

to pardon all of those people if he were elected.

And when Jefferson is elected,

Callender was one of those individuals.

Callender was looking to restart his career.

And he had asked Jefferson for an appointment as postmaster,

but Jefferson declined to give him that post.

So Callender turns on him.

It's James Thompson Callender

who will publish and make public the allegations

that Jefferson had had a longstanding relationship

with one of the people he enslaved, Sally Hemings.

He writes that Sally Hemings only has a child

nine months after she has been

in close physical contact to Thomas Jefferson.

When Thomas Jefferson is away in Washington,

Sally Hemings isn't getting pregnant.

When Thomas Jefferson is away in Philadelphia,

she's not getting pregnant.

When Thomas Jefferson is at Monticello

and Sally is at Monticello, she's getting pregnant.

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.

He refers to her as a slut as common as the pavement.

It's pretty vile stuff.

This is grist for the political mill

of Jefferson's opponents.

The Federalist press in particular picks up on this,

and there are derisory cartoons mocking Jefferson and Hemings.

So in response to this,

Jefferson has to adopt a media strategy, effectively.

And his strategy is to say nothing.

So there's just silence.

Silence.

He was not going to give people the satisfaction

of responding, as if this were their business.

It never gained any traction.

I mean, it's something that people talk about,

but it's not something that people get very upset about.

So it kind of comes and goes.

It doesn't have the kind of effect

that James Callender wanted.

People think that this is going to sink

Jefferson's presidency.

But it doesn't.

People didn't care.

The scandal doesn't sink Jefferson,

but his resolve to ignore it solidifies America's belief

in the First Amendment and the press's right to attack

any sitting president.

And like any scandal,

the Hemings story becomes old news

when President Jefferson's next move dominates headlines.

In 1803, Jefferson turns his attention

to the Louisiana Territory,

an area comprised of more than 800,000 square miles.

Jefferson says this is the most

important spot on the globe for us because of geography.

And whoever controls New Orleans

basically has a knife to our throat

because the United States at that time

extended from the Atlantic Ocean

to the Mississippi west of the Appalachian Mountains--

just a rapidly growing part of the United States.

That growing population west of the mountains

can't get their produce to market

easily over the mountains.

So what do they do?

They go down the Ohio River to the Mississippi,

down the Mississippi to New Orleans,

through the Gulf of Mexico, and to the wider world.

And so if you have a hostile power

controlling access to New Orleans,

then you have several problems.

One is the trade down the Mississippi River.

The other was it wasn't clear that the Americans in the West

would remain loyal to the nation,

and Jefferson's dream of an expanding empire could falter.

He thought America should have the entire continent.

In 1803, the Louisiana Territory

is controlled by France

and its notoriously erratic leader,

Napoleon Bonaparte.

Originally, Napoleon had grand plans to establish

a North American empire.

But around the same time he acquires Louisiana in 1800,

he begins to embroil France in battles all over Europe.

By 1802, he has lost interest in North America

and needs cash to fund his military campaigns in Europe.

Jefferson sees an opportunity.

He also thought that one of the purposes

of the American Revolution was to take the United States

out of European conflict.

He thought that if you could have an ocean on one side

and an ocean on the other side, you could have peace.

So it was about national security.

Jefferson sends a trusted dignitary to France

to negotiate a sale with the volatile dictator.

The negotiations were undertaken

by Robert Livingston.

But Robert Livingston is aging,

he's deaf, and he didn't speak French.

French was the language of diplomacy

at the turn of the 19th century.

It was also the language of France...

At the turn of the 19th century, and remains so.

And Jefferson's worried about this.

And so he dispatches James Monroe to assist.

Monroe had served in France before as a diplomat.

His French was better than Livingston's.

And Monroe was the luckiest diplomat in American history

because he turns up virtually at the same moment

Napoleon has decided to sell Louisiana

to the United States.

Napoleon offers to sell the entire Louisiana Territory

to the United States for $15 million--

about $388 million today.

Jefferson, in the 1790s, and certainly

when he was secretary of state,

had been an advocate of what was called

strict construction of the Constitution.

If something is not stipulated,

if it's not specified in the Constitution,

he said, look, you can't do it.

Well, nowhere in the Constitution

does it authorize the president of the United States

to buy hundreds of thousands of square miles of territory

just because it's a good deal.

Jefferson talked about maybe we should float the idea

of a constitutional amendment to authorize it.

And his secretary of state, his old friend James Madison,

said, look, if you dither, Napoleon could change his mind.

We don't have time for this.

Think back to his governorship.

One of the things he learned was

you can't dither when you're making decisions.

Because if you do, disaster can happen.

So Jefferson's advisors convinced him, look,

just do it.

And so, presented with this opportunity,

Jefferson seized it with two hands

because he believed this was essential

for the economic future of the United States.

And so, in October of 1803,

Jefferson authorizes James Monroe

to accept Napoleon's offer,

and effectively increases America's size by 140%.

It becomes one of the most intense

and significant actions the federal government

has ever done, to more than double

the size of the nation by buying land.

It was a great real estate deal.

But the Jefferson who purchases Louisiana

despite constitutional scruples

is acting like a king,

the very thing he supposedly despised.

If Alexander Hamilton had tried to buy Louisiana,

Thomas Jefferson's head would have exploded

because it would have been this massive overreach

of constitutional power.

But Thomas Jefferson as president does it.

So he's willing to embrace his inconsistencies

when it helps achieve larger goals.

As he said, you can believe something in principle,

but act differently in practice.

That's the nature of politics.

Despite its hypocrisy, the Louisiana Purchase

is the biggest accomplishment of Jefferson's presidency.

But let's not forget that land is occupied.

So that expansion,

that necessary growth as he sees it,

will come at the expense of Indigenous people.

And in the southern part of that,

where slave-based agriculture is being practiced,

much of the labor is going to be provided by enslaved labor.

Expanding the size of the country

opened up that territory for slavery.

Acquiring the Louisiana Territory

gives the United States large tracts of land

ripe for the cultivation of cotton,

which in 1802 accounts for nearly

20% of American exports.

However, the profitability of cotton

relies entirely on unpaid labor.

This vision of his,

it's coming at the expense of others.

The Louisiana Purchase is a major victory

for the Jefferson administration.

The acquired land more than doubles

the size of the country.

Just seven months later, on May 14, 1804,

Jefferson sends Meriwether Lewis and William Clark

on an expedition to explore and survey

not only the newly acquired 530 million acres,

but the uncharted mountains and Pacific Northwest beyond.

Jefferson was also very interested

in issues around exploration.

And he's got some bizarre ideas.

For example, he thinks there might still be woolly mammoths

west of the Mississippi River because he's not sure

how natural history might have unfolded there.

Meriwether Lewis and William Clark

have four dozen men with them.

And so it's a huge expedition, called the Corps of Discovery.

As they're going up the Missouri

and they're carrying all of this equipment,

they are instructed to keep journals

to give to Thomas Jefferson.

They discovered 178 new kinds of plants,

122 species of animals.

Lewis and Clark depart from St. Louis, Missouri,

and over the course of two years,

travel more than 8,000 miles to the Pacific Ocean.

They are often touted as lone adventurers,

taming uncharted territory.

But in reality, they elicit the help

of hundreds of Indigenous people

throughout their journey.

Lewis and Clark meet something like

50 different tribes, handing out these peace medals--

like medallions.

Lewis and Clark told the native leaders,

you are friends with Thomas Jefferson.

The difficulty in world history is always in shared space,

and that's where he begins to change his ideas

about the rights of Native people.

Jefferson believed that

there were stages of human development,

and that Native Americans

had the potential to be equal to European Americans,

but they were at a different stage of development.

It was all tied up with this notion of

America and North America and the New World

having inherently good things in it.

And Native Americans were part of that.

But Africans were never supposed to be here.

So Jefferson says Blacks are intellectually inferior.

And because of that, Jefferson's Indian policy

was to cultivate Native people

so that they would become "more civilized."

Jefferson said that Native Americans

had to adopt European ways.

They had to farm like Europeans.

They had to bring their women in the house.

In many Native American cultures, women worked.

And he said we should intermarry,

our blood should mingle.

So that was his solution for Native Americans.

He thought they could become the equal to whites--

at the cost of their culture, of course.

He lamented, as he saw it,

that they would probably never catch up.

But he allowed for the possibility that they might.

But also, Thomas Jefferson

wants to really kind of keep them at peace.

He believes that, if we keep them at peace,

we then can later bargain for their lands.

And so trading posts are set up by Jefferson

and the government, and owned by the government,

not individuals.

That's key.

Jefferson's strategy for western expansion,

first laid out in a letter to William Henry Harrison

in 1803, is quite clear--

"to promote this disposition to exchange lands,

"which they have to spare and we want,

"we shall push our trading uses,

"and be glad to see the good and influential individuals

"among them run in debt.

"We observe that when these debts get beyond

"what the individuals can pay, they become willing

to lock them off by a cession of lands."

He sees, the more that they become dependent

upon American goods, then they will build up debts,

then they will need to pay with their lands.

It's maneuvering. It's exploitation.

It's taking advantage.

He admired Native peoples,

but he believed they were passing from the scene

because that was the price of progress.

For Jefferson, the fact was there were

two possible solutions for Native Americans--

assimilation or annihilation.

In November 1804, fueled in part

by his successful acquisition of the Louisiana Territory,

Jefferson is reelected in a landslide victory

over the Federalist candidate Charles Pinckney.

His second term is largely uneventful,

until 1807, when he is yet again faced

with a delicate foreign policy issue.

As Britain and France duel in a series of battles

surrounding Napoleon's attempts

to annex Italy and Germany,

despite its distance, America is caught in the crossfire.

Britain and France are at war.

And the United States benefits from this because

the United States trades with both sides.

The United States is neutral,

and Jefferson believes in free trade.

He said, we should be able to trade with anybody we like.

The British and the French say, you can trade with us,

but you can't trade with our enemies.

Also, since Britain hasn't always recognized or respected

American independence, the British Navy

has a habit of engaging in what's called impressment,

where they stop American merchant ships

and review their crews.

And if they identify anybody they believe

is a deserter from the Royal Navy,

they take them off the ship.

And then, in 1807, there's an incident

off the coast of Virginia, when a British Navy ship,

the HMS "Leopard,"

stopped a United States warship,

the USS "Chesapeake."

So not a merchant ship-- and this is important--

just within international waters.

And there are actually deserters on the "Chesapeake."

So the British forces them into the Royal Navy.

And the "Leopard" fires on the "Chesapeake."

And there's a widespread call to declare war on Britain.

There's also a widespread belief

that the British are encouraging

Native peoples in the West to attack American settlers.

And these are the issues that are going to become

the justification for a declaration of war in 1812.

But Jefferson recognized that the United States

was not in a position to go to war in 1807.

And so he proposed an embargo.

He said, the United States will not trade with anybody.

We're taking our ball and we're going home.

Jefferson believed

Americans could show France and England

that their economic interests

lay in peaceful free trade.

So the solution was to hold all American ships in port.

I don't think this is necessarily as naive

as it's often portrayed.

I think it's the least bad option available to him.

However, it's a disaster.

Jefferson imposes an embargo.

He closes all U.S. ports to exports,

and severely restricts imports from Britain.

The embargo wrecks the American economy.

American exports collapse.

It led to protests.

It led to one of America's first secession movements.

New England Federalists met and talked about the possibility

of leaving the Union.

The authority of the government

is called into question.

Western farmers, who are Jefferson's core constituency,

they suffer really, really badly as a result of this.

Smuggling is rife.

So because of this, he goes through a period where

he's not as popular as he was before.

And he's pretty thin skinned, very thin skinned.

He didn't like criticism.

Desperate to revive his public image,

Jefferson turns to

the controversial business of slavery.

The cotton harvested by unpaid labor

had nearly doubled since the Revolution.

In 1808, the Southern United States

is home to more millionaires per capita

than any other region on Earth.

And so despite Northern sentiments

moving towards emancipation,

national abolition is out of the question.

Instead, Jefferson makes a calculated move.

There was a compromise made

at the Constitutional Convention in 1787,

where Congress couldn't outlaw American participation

in the transatlantic slave trade for 20 years.

So going back to 1806,

President Jefferson goes to Congress and says,

in 1808, we can end the slave trade.

Let's pass a law now so that the slave traders know

that on January 1, 1808,

the slave trade will be illegal,

and they won't bring any more slaves in after that.

We've got to give them advance notice.

This is the most concrete step he took

during his long public life in opposition to slavery.

And it is a significant step,

but it's a relatively moderate step.

In the North, the gradual abolition of slavery

had been rolling out for decades.

Even in the Deep South, they're not really worried

about importing slaves from Africa anymore.

People have a lot of slaves.

Look, almost everyone agrees at the time

that the transatlantic slave trade

is just a terrible, terrible, terrible crime.

And so for slaveholders who want to demonstrate

their anti-slavery credentials,

that's the position they can take.

Now, we look at that and say, well, that's ridiculous,

because obviously slaves are going to increase here.

They're going to reproduce.

Abandoning the transatlantic slave trade

only makes American slavery more lucrative.

Jefferson, in his ledgers, at one point

does calculate that there's a guaranteed 4% rise in value

over time of slave women, who are going to reproduce.

He sees women are valuable in Virginia precisely because

you're thinking about selling their children.

Years later, Jefferson writes,

"I consider a woman who brings a child every two years

"as more profitable than the best man of the farm.

"What she produces is in addition to the capital,

while his laborers disappear in mere consumption."

After the abolition of the slave trade,

the value of domestic slaves is actually going to go up.

So this also simply makes Jefferson much richer.

And there's one more piece of this,

which historians don't talk about very much.

Under Jefferson's law, if you import slaves

to the United States and you're caught--

you're smuggling them-- the Africans will be seized

and they are given to the governor of the state

where they're brought in.

And the governor gets to sell them

for the benefit of the state.

So the state makes money,

and Jefferson doesn't have to worry

about freeing Black people.

And so the governments of the states

will become involved in the very slave trade

that we're supposed to be suppressing.

As President, Jefferson has the opportunity

to untangle America from its dependence on slavery.

Yet his actions only ensure that the country continues

to rely on slave labor for another 57 years.

In 1809,

Jefferson has no interest in serving a third term.

Washington had set the precedent

of a president serving two terms.

And so he would only serve two terms.

He is somebody who is happy to have the job,

but is also ready for it to end.

And so, after 40 years in public service,

he said, probably one of the greatest pleasures

was to leave eight years of a splendid misery.

He is putting the federal government

that he built in the hands of some very close friends.

When he leaves office, he is succeeded

by his friend James Madison,

and then James Monroe.

So he has sort of an extended term

even after he's gone because his acolytes take his place.

And he is confident that the political program

of the Democratic Republican Party,

of which he was the head, would continue.

But though his political career ends

in 1809, Jefferson's story is far from over.