Cara Rogers Stevens on Thomas Jefferson and Slavery

Thomas Jefferson was a complicated figure. Essential to the start of our country and the university I attend, he is impossible to ignore. Yet, he held slaves, and at the same time said “all men are created equal.” What’s up with that?!

Yet, we need to be able to talk about him. We also need to be able to acknowledge the contributions he has made to the world, while also acknowledging the flaws in his character and behavior. His legacy is complicated, and he was a complicated person. We all are. So how do we reconcile these parts of him? Join us in our attempt to understand this. 

Today, we talk about Thomas Jefferson and his complicated relationship with slavery. Cara Rogers Stevens, professor of history at Ashland University and codirector of the Ashbrook Scholars Program, joins us to talk about this. She is also the author of Thomas Jefferson and The First Against Slavery, which informs much of our conversation.

Want to explore more:

• Read the Complete Works of Thomas Jefferson at the Online Library of Liberty.
• Hans Eicholz, 1776 and All That: Thomas Jefferson on Adam Smith, at AdamSmithWorks.
• Darren Staloff on the American Founding, a Great Antidote podcast.
• Understanding Jefferson: Slavery, Race, and the Declaration of Independence, a Liberty Matters forum at the Online Library of Liberty.
• Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, U.S. Slavery and Economic Thought, in the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.

Transcript

Juliette Sellgren

Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition. Hi, I'm Juliet Sellgren, and this is my podcast, the Great Antidote named for Adam Smith, brought to you by Liberty Fund. To learn more, visit www.AdamSmithWorks.org. Welcome back. As someone who goes to UVA, I am shocked at how little we talk about Thomas Jefferson at all. The good, the bad, the ugly. As a founder of our country, as a founder of the university, all of it, the slavery, just even his focus on education, particularly because that's why we're there. So today on January 3rd, 2025, for the first time on this podcast, I'm excited to welcome Cara Rogers Stevens to talk to us about Thomas Jefferson, his relationship with slavery, him as a person, how we talk about this kind of an all encapsulating thing. She is an associate professor of history at Ashland University and the co-director of the Ashbrook Scholar Program, which is kind of this civil education thing, which we'll talk about more. I hope. She's the author of the book, Thomas Jefferson and The Fight Against Slavery.So go check that out. It's wonderful. Welcome to the podcast.

Cara Rogers Stevens 

Thank you so much for having me. It's my pleasure to be here.

Juliette Sellgren (1:34)

Alright, so the first question, what is the most important thing that people my age or in my generation should know that we don't?

Cara Rogers Stevens (1:43)

Such a cool question. As I was considering what to say to this, I thought about a discussion I have with my students. Just about every semester, different groups of students come in and out of my classes, and I like to ask them whether they think that the world is getting better or worse, whether humans are getting better or worse. And we always have an interesting debate over this, and there's a lot of reason to think that the world that we live in now is completely new and different from anything we've ever experienced and that there's challenges that we're facing that are new and different. I think there's truth in that, but also there's this very, very, very old proverb from Ecclesiastes that says, there's nothing new under the sun. And the more that I study history, the more that I believe that that's actually also true, that humans have faced great crises before even just looking at the short span of American history. Americans have faced terrible challenges. We've gone through a civil war after the election of 1860.

We face horrible obstacles and humans actually face the same temptations and have the same vices, and the circumstances change. We make new inventions, we grow in really important ways, but there are ways in which humans have stayed the same and the issues that we face have remarkable similarities. And that's comforting to me, and I think it should be comforting to this current generation that we can really learn from the past. Because even if you go all the way back to ancient Greece, you're going to find people asking the same questions, wrestling with the same problems, dealing with the same temptations, and we can learn from what they got and what they got wrong.

Juliette Sellgren (3:44)

That is really comforting because let me tell you something a little personal. I was at lunch with a friend a little bit before this and we were literally talking about kind of almost like a noble lie type of situation. Why is it that our generation is so anxious? And even me, someone I consider myself to be not anxious, very stable, whatever, I can kind of feel this pull of what am I going to do? What are we all going to do? What is going on in the world? So we were talking about this and we kind of settled on the fact that at school, and not just at school, not just in universities, but kind of our whole lives, we've been told that you're going to do something great. The world is your oyster, the world is in your hands. And I'm sure that that's true, but the burden of that doesn't fall on any one person.

And we were all told that you're going to grow up, you're going to graduate college and do something great, but what does greatness mean? And I think we all think it means we have to change the world, but the world seems to kind of change regardless of us because of us and regardless of us at the same time. I don't know if that's entirely true. Ask a philosopher, I guess. But I mean, you could ask a historian, I guess you could really ask anyone who studies anything and they'll all have a different answer or a different way of giving the same answer maybe, but it's just we, I don't know if we cracked it, but we felt like we settled on something, which is that we don't necessarily need to be the ones to change everything, and neither can we be those people. But I feel like what I'm kind of wondering is if you felt that personally, but also if that's new because part of what you were saying kind of made me feel like, okay, well maybe this feeling is new, maybe it's not. But the struggle of growing up and becoming an adult and having a career and taking care of all of this stuff, it might change in what it looks like, but grappling with purpose and with practicality and all of this stuff is going to be a perpetual problem. And we don't have a civil war, which is great.

Cara Rogers Stevens 

Yeah, thank goodness!

Juliette Sellgren 

Yeah, I think that that gives me a lot to be grateful for. But I don't know, I guess it just makes me wonder if, have we almost done a disservice to ourselves by saying We're going to all do great things when just being alive is a great thing that I don't know. 

Cara Rogers Stevens (6:38)

Wow, that was a lot. No, that's so good. And you're taking me back to all of the times that I don't think life lends itself to asking the same question as much as you get older, but when you're in your teens and your twenties and maybe even your thirties, that question, is my life going to make a difference? What is my purpose? Can I change the world? That was absolutely a driving force for me and probably one of the main reasons I went to graduate school. And I needed to believe that I could move the needle, that I could contribute to humanity in a way that would make my life not insignificant. I wouldn't have had the motivation to accomplish the stuff that I've been able to accomplish if I didn't believe it was possible for one life to make a difference. But I think maybe what I've learned and become more comfortable with over time is making a difference for me might look like a pebble being dropped in a pond.

It at first doesn't seem to make a huge change, but it sets off ripples and those ripples can go very far and can affect very many people. And I think I've become more comfortable with this idea that maybe I'm not going to have a New York Times bestseller, maybe I'm not going to be on CNN. Maybe there's not too many people whose minds I can change about Thomas Jefferson. But on the other hand, I get to interact with people every single day in a meaningful ways. And I never know how the ripples of my life might affect others and might ultimately change the course of history in some way or another. It sounds really arrogant to say or change the course of history, but hopefully that my meaning comes across that I still believe that my life can make a difference and that it's worth trying every single day to do things.

Juliette Sellgren (8:56)

Yeah, no, I mean, I literally said this earlier, and I wasn't sure if it was really a valid thing to say in terms of the English language, but I'm going to say it again. It's heartening to hear you say that. And I mean, I think I'm becoming more okay with the fact that you might not know or see what happens. I mean, I think about Hamilton, the musical and everyone, half of the people in the musical are like, why do you care so much about your reputation? And half of them are like, we care so much about our reputation, including Hamilton and well, Jefferson, although he seems to care a decent amount less, but I don't know if that's just the musical, but there's no way that Jefferson, this man who was so important could have known. There's no way any of them could have really known. You have to be, I don't want to say that people who think they can make a difference are arrogant, but you have to be confident enough to try and think you can, but also maybe humble enough to know that you might not, but to know that the effort is worthwhile.

Cara Rogers Stevens (10:06)

So, with that, and I think this ties in so beautifully that the topic of Thomas Jefferson. That he is somebody who made a huge difference. I mean just massive in the course of human events to quote the Declaration of Independence, really his life really did change the history of the world, the things that he wrote, the ideas that he propagated, the way that he led the country as president. And he really changed things. And I think he was aware of that at certain moments in his life of the significance of what he was doing. On the other hand, as we’ll I'm sure talk about here, he was not perfect, and he could not ultimately control the way that he would be remembered. And people have been fighting about his reputation ever since, even while he was still alive. And that's maybe something also that we have to be humble enough to come to grips with that no matter how much we want to change the world, no matter how significant our lives are, we're not in control ultimately of everything. There's only so much we can do.

Juliette Sellgren (11:18)

So, if you'll allow me, I'm going to come at you for a second…Not necessarily in a way that I believe, but in a way that I think some people might be wondering about. Okay. Given that we can't control so much, and given that we can't even tell fully what our effect on the world is or what anyone's effect on the world is going to be, and we know now, and we've known for a while about Thomas Jefferson and what he's done, good and bad, good and bad, and In-between, why the need to study him, why the need to keep studying him, why the need to give a pedestal to someone who has done things that are not good, to someone who's not perfect. And I'm also going to say just in case anyone is thinking of taking a clip of this and framing me for something, no person is perfect. It's just physically impossible. And so I know obviously that would mean we couldn't talk about anyone ever, and that would be ridiculous, but why Thomas Jefferson?

Cara Rogers Stevens (12:33)

Yeah, that's a very valid question. I think Jefferson is worth studying because Jefferson represents core American ideas, and America is a living thing. It's a nation that is constantly changing and growing and adapting. And as new generations come into positions of leadership and wrestle through the meaning of America and the directions that America should take in the future, it is natural to look back and wrestle with the American past and reevaluate the founders and their ideas and try to determine whether those ideas were any good, whether the founders were hypocrites, whether there's anything of value that can be held onto, or if things need to be thrown out and reinterpreted or rewritten entirely. It's a project that will be ongoing. And something that's really heartening that I have found and hopefully will be encouraging to some of your listeners is just because a lot of books have been written about somebody or something does not mean that there's nothing left to uncover. And I thought it was a bit arrogant of me to try to write something about Thomas Jefferson when he's so famous and so well studied. But I found out new stuff as I did this work building on the shoulders of giants, but looking at new documents or asking new questions of those documents, asking new questions of figures in Jefferson's life that maybe haven't been studied as much. You really can find out new information and hopefully add more to the conversation that needs to keep going about the American past.

Juliette Sellgren (14:43)

I think that that is a great response. I also was kind of already convinced by this. I mean obviously he's a super complex dude.

Hopefully I'm not going to get in trouble for saying that. I do think, I mean human beings just in general are pretty complex, but he was particularly complex and he wrote a lot. So there's a lot of it to unpack. There's room for play. How do you go about, I want to get into your work, and I also just want to get into why it's even questioned as to why you would talk about him nowadays, but how do you go about studying someone who is so well [known] on the one hand, but he also produced a ton of stuff. He did a bunch of stuff. He basically has just like if he were a dog, he made America his park and he just marked himself all over the place. Thomas Jefferson is everywhere, and yet so many people have worked on it, as you mentioned. How do you even go about getting into that sphere?

Cara Rogers Stevens (16:02)

Oh, that's a good question. Well, I think you start by reading some of the great biographies. There've been some incredible scholars who literally dedicated their whole lives to studying Jefferson and writing about him. And so there are multi-volume biographies that are really good for grounding oneself in the scope of Jefferson's life and influence. I also tried to read what he read. Of course I failed because he was a voracious leader, a reader, and I don't have that many years in my life. But there was a while where I thought, I cannot hope to understand this man's mind unless I understand what he was engaging with. And so I tried to read some of the works that seemed to be the most important in his thinking, and that was really helpful because one mistake I think modern audiences might make when they try to understand a historical figure is they read backwards onto that person, modern values, modern ideas, modern perspectives on the world.

And they think because of where we have ended up, that historical figure must have contributed to where we are now and known the effect that their ideas and their writings would've had on the way that things have turned out. And I don't think that's fair to people in the past. I think we have to learn how to take them as products of their time and place and try to understand what was it like to be born in 1743 in Virginia? What did people feel about slavery and race and government and aristocracy and democracy? How was Jefferson understanding the world around him and what was possible for him to do and not do at the time? And that can really help make it so that we're not unmoored when we have these conversations about history, that we can evaluate people on their own terms. So it doesn't mean, I'm not suggesting everybody in the past should be excused for all of the bad things that they did because they were just products of their time. That's not it at all. Because again, I also believe that there's nothing new under the sun. I think if something was bad, then it's bad now. And people have a responsibility to be moral no matter what age of history they live in. But certainly the ways in which people understood their actions and their choices change over time and having that contextual knowledge is vital for doing history. 

Juliette Sellgren (18:52)

Well, so can you ground us in the history a bit? What was it like to be born in Virginia at that time? I feel like it is important to this discussion, especially since you've mentioned it.

Cara Rogers Stevens (19:08)

Yeah, absolutely. So my study of Thomas Jefferson started with the question, how could the guy who wrote,” All men are created equal,” also have owned slaves? Doesn't that make him the ultimate hypocrite? So to try to answer that question, I think it's really important to know that when Jefferson was born in 1743, slavery was legal just about everywhere in the world. It was practiced by Native Americans, it was practiced in Asia, it was practiced in Russia, it was practiced in South America, it was practiced in Africa. People had been enslaving one another as long as there had been people just about. And there was not yet and organized anti-slavery movement. It just hadn't happened. The massive body of writings on human rights did not exist at the time. And so Jefferson was born into a world that didn't question hierarchy, that didn't start from the belief that all people should be free.

And when Jefferson was 14, his father passed away and Jefferson inherited several dozen human beings in his dad's will because he was the son of a fairly wealthy Virginia man. And nobody would've questioned that, either. And I try to imagine, what the heck would that feel like to be 14 years old and own other human beings? And what's then amazing about Jefferson, if you start from that perspective, is that by the time he was in his late teens, he seems to have really rejected the world that he had grown up in, the hierarchies that he had grown up in. And he seems to have started embracing a natural rights enlightenment philosophy, embracing the idea that slavery is unnatural and violates human rights, violates natural rights, and that he had started pointing his life in the direction of freedom. And obviously that doesn't mean that he was perfect or that he shouldn't have ultimately done more on behalf of freedom in his life, but it certainly does change the starting evaluation. If I think of him as somebody steeped in that world of inequality and somebody who was actually far ahead of his time in imagining a world of equality.

Juliette Sellgren (21:56)

I mean, it kind of makes it easier to imagine him as a trust fund kid, but like a 1740s trust fund kid. 

Cara Rogers Stevens (22:08)

Absolutely. And there's a ton of nepotism going on. If your daddy was rich, your daddy maybe had a position of political leadership, you're probably going to get one too. And so Jefferson didn't have to work very hard to be elected to the Virginia legislature, for example. He achieved that pretty early in life just because of the position that he was born into. But what he then chose to do with that role, that's where things get really cool.

Juliette Sellgren (22:39)

Yeah, so I kind of like what you said. I mean, obviously I liked all that you've said recently, but what you said when you said something about imagination, what he could imagine, and so it just makes me think about everything he wrote. I mean the man, not only when you read the Declaration, I mean, you can obviously read a lot of what he was reading into there, right? There's [John] Locke maybe comes to mind very clearly among others just because the one phrase we always say is basically ripped from Locke and then changed a bit in a very important way, I might add. 

He is talking about a world that doesn't exist is almost the vibe that I get, and a lot of his writing is so out of the box. And so I think something that's kind of difficult in talking about Jefferson, but even in thinking about Jefferson is just that he was, I constantly thinking about things that about, I don't know about the nation's problems, about his own stuff. He was into botany, which I found out, which is like, I mean, I like plants, but so I don't know. He kind of did everything. He was a mix between an idealist and kind of a practical guy who worked in the physical world. And so how does that kind of influence the way that we should think about him? Because obviously it comes from a place of privilege. He didn't have to do all the other things that people have to do in the way that some people today don't have to do things that most other people have to do. But it, I don't know. He did something that it seems like not many people today do.

Cara Rogers Stevens (24:40)

Yeah, there's this great story about Jefferson. I'm not sure if it's apocryphal, but I believe there was an incident in the White House where President Kennedy had gathered together a bunch of Nobel Prize recipients and he was having dinner with them, and he looked around and he said, this is the most genius that's been gathered in this White House dining room ever, with the exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone. And I think it's something that people don't maybe know or appreciate about Jefferson is he truly was a genius who contributed to multiple scientific and sociological fields. He's been called the father of modern archeology. He meticulously tracked weather patterns. He was into botany, as you point out. He was an inventor and an adapter of other people's inventions even more so. You are absolutely right. He was so in his head and so imaginative and so visionary.

And also he never balanced his checkbook. So what he would keep detailed accounts of money but never actually add up the columns to find out how much he had in his accounts. And so he really stunk at managing a farm in real life. He was great at imagining future farming techniques and improving the soil, but he was really bad at making Monticello a successful plantation. So unlike George Washington, who was able to become an extremely wealthy and successful planter and eventually be financially secure enough to free all of his enslaved workers and his will and leave them provisions so that they wouldn't be destitute when they started their lives. Thomas Jefferson died deeply in debt. And debt actually was this horrible thing that really was a deep shadow over the last years of his life that he was constantly afraid of leaving his daughter and his grandchildren destitute.

And the law in Virginia said you could not free your enslaved workers if you had debts. Your enslaved property had to be sold to pay your creditors before you could think about freeing them. Jefferson was able to get the Virginia legislature to make exceptions for five people in his will, but all of the rest of his enslaved property had to be sold off. And it devastated the Jefferson family. Obviously, it was even more devastating to the enslaved people whose lives were ripped up when Jefferson died. But I think that's a really one good example of where Jefferson spent his whole adult life arguing against slavery sometimes more loudly than others, but consistently saying slavery is wrong. It's a violation of rights. Emancipation needs to happen. It must happen for the future of this country. And yet when it really came to the rubber meeting the road, he for several different reasons failed to be able to fully live out his ideals in the lives of his own enslaved workers. And that's maybe one of the tragedies of his life, that he couldn't control circumstances as much as he envisioned a good future for the country, as much as he envisioned equality and liberty being fully lived out, he couldn't find ways to fully live it out himself.

Juliette Sellgren (28:41)

It's kind of heartbreaking, but also I think it kind of complicates things for classical liberals, people who study the Enlightenment and love the Enlightenment and point towards that sort of stuff. I don't think in a way that kind of invalidates it, but if the guy with all the ideas, if he was right, if he couldn't do it, I mean obviously he wasn't perfect and none of us are, but how are we supposed to do stuff like that if the guy who apparently got a lot of that stuff couldn't even do it himself? I think that's kind of difficult, which is why maybe I think it's easier to just say that he was this racist slave owner guy that we should just not talk about or think about. But I don't know, maybe that's just mankind.

Cara Rogers Stevens (29:42)

Well, here's something even more complicated about Jefferson. I think that he was both a proponent of natural human equality and a racist at the same time. That kind of sounds right. And it's really challenging in 2024, 2025, I guess, since today is January the third, to reconcile those ideas. But the more I study him, the more I saw both strains in his thought and in his writings, and maybe this is a good reminder again, that he was living in Virginia. He was surrounded by a slave holding society. He grew up with inequality all around him. He grew up with prejudiced ideas. He read very prejudiced scientific works that were being produced by French Enlightenment scholars on race. And he imbibed and repeated a lot of racist stereotypes, and yet he also insisted one of my favorite letters that Jefferson wrote about slavery in 1809, he specifically gave the example of Sir Isaac Newton and said, just because Sir Isaac Newton is more intelligent than everybody else, that doesn't give him the right to rule others in the same way. It doesn't matter whether or not there are inferiorities of race, no person should have the right to rule over another without their consent. And so he was very clear on when he said, All men are created equal.

He really meant it in the sense of all men having the same natural rights and could hold onto that with one hand and hold onto racist stereotypes with the other hand and not see inconsistency the way that we can now, maybe that's a good, again, I think we can learn from looking back and seeing his error, and hopefully one of the lessons we can take from that is that it is possible to be a brilliant visionary genius and also be really blind about our own flaws. And that makes me want to take a second look at my own beliefs and my own problems and try to be honest with myself whether I'm really living up to what I think I believe.

Juliette Sellgren (32:17)

Yeah, no, it really does. And it almost begs the question of how do we actually learn? How do we actually become aware of these sorts of blind spots? He might've died not realizing the inconsistency, but we figured it out. I mean, maybe because the people themselves advocated and died and put their lives on the line, and maybe that's necessary sometimes as awful as that is to get the right outcome. But it's kind of hard. I mean, the thing is, I said this earlier, I think it was a messy time and he was a messy guy, and we're all kind of messy in this way. Maybe that's just part of human nature.

So I don't know. It's hard not to become reflective, I think, when talking about someone who was so brilliant and yet made kind of this fatal error because if he could do it. So a lot of your work also focuses on kind of the way that he's been viewed throughout history, the way his arguments have been construed, if I'm not mistaken. So I want to get to the present, but how did his stance on all of this, his contradictory statements and views, how has that kind of made its way through time? What is the legacy there?

Cara Rogers Stevens (34:03)

Well, for quite a long portion of American history, scholars didn't criticize Jefferson for owning slaves or for his writings on race. There are several older biographies that you can read of Jefferson that gloss over this issue, and there were some critics of Jefferson in his own lifetime. But you have to be careful when you read those because for example, sometimes Federalists would criticize Jefferson for being a slave owner, or they would throw around the name of Sally Hemings, but they didn't do so out of genuine concern for human rights, but rather as a political strategy to just attack Jefferson and try to destroy his reputation or produce fear among Southerners that Jefferson would abolish slavery if he could. So his reputation at the time of his life is complicated. You have to kind of read it carefully to try to figure out what people genuinely cared about at the time.

Then there was kind of silence on the issue of race and slavery in the 1970s with the Civil Rights movement. Historians really started to uncover the voices and the stories of African-Americans and bring those to the forefront and evaluate people like Jefferson, or not just what they were able to do for the country for the sake of liberty, but also what they failed to do. And this was a much needed reckoning and a very important, and had been a long time coming. And now I think in some cases it seems as though the pendulum has perhaps gone too far the other direction, and people are more likely to just write Jefferson off because they've heard that he owned slaves, and we now understand how much of a crime against human nature this is. And so it's understandable. Humans here, he own slaves, and so they kind of immediately want to put him in a pile of bad guys.

But what we missed then is everything that Jefferson said and did against slavery, the laws that he tried to get passed, the Constitution for Virginia that he wrote, that would've ended slavery, the Northwest Ordinance, that he came within one vote of getting slavery abolished in all federal territories, the book that he published in which he argued that God would be on the side of the slaves if there was a slave uprising. All of these things that Jefferson did and said that make the story a lot more nuanced and complicated, that tends to be overlooked at the moment by a lot of historical kind of writings. And I'm hoping that over the next decades, perhaps the story can become even more nuanced, that now that the voices that have been silenced for so long are recognized and are finally able to speak up, and we can read all about the Hemmings family and learn all about the enslaved people at Monticello and recognize the voices of African-Americans in the past, perhaps we can now fully integrate their story with Jefferson and his complicated situation, trying to envision a better future, and also deal with living as a prejudice person in a prejudiced time.

Juliette Sellgren (37:57)

Yeah, I think what's interesting about what you just said is that it highlights the importance of actually talking about Jefferson, because if you don't, then you don't get to talk about the rest of it. It's not that it loses its meaning entirely, but part of the significance of the lives of the people who were enslaved under him is that he struggled with this and that the world was not a perfect place. If we don't talk about it, if we don't talk about, well, the good, the bad and the ugly, then you can't really talk about them.

Or you can try to, I was telling you before we started recording that whenever we talk about Jefferson at UVI, it's almost entirely in conjunction with talking about the people who built the university, the slaves of his that basically laid every brick and the architectural stuff that he did and the way that hurt them, the way all of that, the way that we're lucky because we now live in a time, all of that is great, but they almost want to limit it seems they, I don't know who was on the other side of the they. Maybe it's the university. In part it's people my age, whoever's at college now, who doesn't really want to talk about it. We just don't talk about Jefferson, which both limits our understanding of the man himself and all that he did basically for us, even though he couldn't have done it actually for us, we didn't exist and didn't know that the university would last this long. But also, it limits the amount that we talk about, the people who actually built the school, which just seems like a disservice to us and to all of them.

Cara Rogers Stevens (40:07)

It's an interesting thought exercise to look at one's own cell phone, for example, and to do a little bit of investigating into the components of a cell phone and whether or not all of them were produced ethically and with free labor, or if parts of it were produced with the assistance of unfree labor or child workers, people being forced to work by tyrannical regimes or punished for their ethnicity or their religious beliefs. And if you were to find out that your cell phone was produced unethically with the assistance of enslaved labor, essentially, would you be willing to throw that cell phone away or would you say, I need this for my life. It's part of the society in which I live. I have to keep it. And I say, this is an interesting thought exercise because I think youth is idealistic, and that's good, and it should be that way.

People, especially when they're starting out in life, once they realize that something is right or wrong, they go after that wholeheartedly. But I think coming back to that humility piece that we've been touching on in this conversation, people need to not have unrealistic expectations for the figures of the past or else they're going to end up having unrealistic expectations for themselves. And they're going to be really disappointed one day when they realize that they themselves are deeply flawed, or the society in which we live is deeply flawed, or the future generation is going to judge us just as harshly as what we look back and we judge people in the past. So I don't know if that all makes sense, but I think that's been helpful to me when I get really frustrated with Jefferson, when I get mad at him, when I get mad at heroes that I used to have, and I want to kind of throw them out, and I feel quite superior to them in a way because I'm so frustrated by their flaws. If I think about the things that I maybe do, the ways that I am complicit, the ways that I am not fully living up to my own values, that helps. It gives me a little bit more of a realistic, I think, sense of expectations for what people are capable of doing, what I can expect from people where I need to maybe give some grace and where it's worth continuing to have hard conversations and not just totally ignoring people when they fail to live up to moral standards.

Juliette Sellgren (43:06)

Yeah, that totally makes sense. And I mean, you've led by example here. You've been the epitome of balance and humility, and I mean curiosity and honesty, which I think is kind of the way to go. But I, as an educator and as someone who studies this topic, do you have any advice, guidance, anything for me for people trying to pursue these sorts of conversations and kind of attempt to be the puddle, the pebble, that kind of equilibrates the stream at least a little bit in, I don't know, restoring a sort of balance in pushing the pendulum a little bit back to, well, I guess to a more balanced place. What have you seen that works in trying to pursue these sorts of conversations and what can we do?

Cara Rogers Stevens (44:15)

Well, first of all, thank you. I'm really honored. You're very kind in what you say about me. I think one thing that's helpful is travel. So I think Americans can be very hard on themselves and on America because we can have really high standards for ourselves here. And we're kind of raised on these ideas of equality and liberty and civil rights, and our heroes are the people who fight for those values. And if somebody never leaves America, or never reads widely about the history of the world or other places in the world, it can be easy to lose the perspective that what has happened in America over the last few hundred years is absolutely incredible in the history of the world, that this is the freest place. And maybe I had a little bit of an advantage because I was born in South Africa, and my family has been living in South Africa for generations.

And so I lived there during the time of apartheid, which was basically like Jim Crow, but way worse. So the government was a government of avowed white supremacists who had a very racist system of legalized segregation, controlling everybody's lives. And when I got to America, one of the first things that I noticed, even though I was a little kid, was the ability to become friends with somebody of any race. And the fundamental belief that everybody shared, that we were all equal and deserved to be treated with respect. And from the time I've been a little kid, I have loved that about this country and treasured it and realized that it can be taken away, and that racial division and racial hatred is so pernicious to a society. So trying to understand Thomas Jefferson is really personal to me because I don't want America to lose its value for equality and liberty and for the dream of Martin Luther King. To put it another way, this vision of a future where people can pursue the same values together, that I know that that's rare in the history of the world, and it's fragile and we can lose it, and it's worth fighting for that kind of a society, the society that Jefferson maybe couldn't even fully imagine himself. But his ideas helped start this country on the road in that direction.

Juliette Sellgren (47:27)

Wow. Thank you so much for sharing that. It's so touching and moving, and maybe we can do another episode and just talk about that. But I would love to have you on again to talk about all of the nitty gritty of his life in more depth, some specific relationships, stuff like that. But thank you so much for taking the time to have this conversation about where we're at, who he was, how we talk about him, all of that. I really, I've learned a ton, and I know my listeners will as well. I have one last question for you, if that's okay? Okay.

Cara Rogers Stevens 

Yeah, absolutely.

Juliette Sellgren 

And that is, what is one thing that you believed at one time in your life that you later changed your position on, and why?

Cara Rogers Stevens (48:19)

So shocker, it's going to be Jefferson related. The example that came to my mind with this is that when I started grad school, I genuinely thought that Thomas Jefferson, it's one of the big controversies I'd heard about in my young adult years, was that Jefferson was not an atheist, that he was actually an Orthodox Christian, and that kind of political debates had distorted his reputation and made him out to be more of an atheist than he actually was. I genuinely believe that was true. And I had read some books that really convinced me about this. And then I got to grad school and I learned how to do archival research and how to really dive deep into primary sources. And I tried to prove my belief to be correct by reading all of the primary documents. And I found that I couldn't do it, that while Thomas Jefferson was a man of faith and he did call himself a Christian, he did not have many of the beliefs that most Orthodox Christians would identify as core Christian beliefs. And I learned that by just doing the hard reading myself. And so what I learned from that is even if you read a really convincing history book, never trust it. Always go back to the primary documents, read them yourself if it really matters to you, and maybe you'll find that the truth is more nuanced than what you started out thinking.

Juliette Sellgren 

Once again, I'd like to thank my guests for their time and insight. I'd also like to thank you for listening to The Great Antidote Podcast means a lot. The Great Antidote is sound engineered by Rich Goyette. If you have any questions, any guests or topic recommendations, please feel free to reach out to me at Great antidote@libertyfund.org. Thank you.