Mark Halowchak on Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson’s Moral Reflection, Virtue, and Optimism

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. We are talking today with Mark Halachak, who is, I probably should say Dr. Mark Halachak, an expert on Thomas Jefferson. And you're a philosopher, right?

Is that?

Philosopher and historian. I graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in their Department of History and Philosophy of Science and got to take some strange courses that other people, no other people in the world would have taken, like a course on Galileo, a course on the second century astronomer Ptolemy.

Have you ever heard of anybody having a whole course on Ptolemy?

Yeah, well, you're a man of many talents. You said you were the strongest man in Michigan at one time, too.

1992, strongest drug-free, yeah, so. And I did, believe it or not, in 2011, coach at the World's Strongest Man. Jadruna Savickas was the strongest man who ever lived. So I had that.

Wow, that's pretty impressive. So you've been writing about Thomas Jefferson, though, lately, and I went on Amazon. I wanted to read some of your books on it. I noticed there's a bunch of stuff, and mostly focusing on his philosophy.

Yes.

But you defend him, to some extent, from the charges that have been leveled today, like he had an affair with Sally Hemings or raped her, or some of the trying to kind of reduce Jefferson down to nothing more than a slave master and these kinds of things.

Why do you respect Thomas Jefferson, given some of the heat he's gotten?

First, I would correct you and say I'm not out to defend him. I'm out to follow the facts, and the facts strongly suggest that he didn't have an affair with Sally Hemings. You follow the course of this man's life.

Like I did, I was trained in Greek and Roman philosophy. Cicero, Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Tacitus, Livy. He read these ancients, and he loved these ancients. Now, I had to teach these people, and when you teach Seneca, imagine his epistles, for example, they're quite moving, and he said to Dr. Vine Utley, I think in 1819, prior to his death, seven years or so, he says, I seldom go to bed at night without having read something morally inspiring upon which to ruminate in the hours of night.

Now, having read these people, too, there's so much that really gives you goosebumps when you read Seneca or even Cicero sometimes, and the fact that Jefferson had what he called this self-catechizing habit of moral reflection before going to bed says something about the sort of person he was.

Not too many people do that. How many people do you know read something morally inspiring so that they can wake up in the morning and try to be a better person?

A lot of Christians do. They read the Bible, right, or something like that. They do, yeah.

But, yeah, it's rare.

I suspect how many of them go to bed, before going to bed, read a passage of the Bible?

They probably weren't watching TV, a lot of them, yeah, or something like that. So, you see virtue in Jefferson. I know you write about this a lot, that he strived for virtue and wanted a virtuous society and thought there would be an increasing virtue as time went on.

He hoped. He had profound optimism. He was a very sanguine person. He had profound optimism that the human condition was ever improving. And he used historical examples about how we treat, in his day, how people treat criminals of war.

He treated them very humanely and how we conduct battles and things like that. But he thought that the human condition was ever improving. And I think following his argument and the evidence that he puts forth to it, there's some reason to think that he was correct in that.

Historiography, Presentism, and the Jefferson Narrative

Now, I know you probably don't want to be speculative as a historian, that's a dangerous thing to do, but I know you know some of the people that are going after Jefferson. And I would just wonder if you could tell us what you think the motive or motives behind this is.

Because I think a lot of, especially working class people who learned positive things about Jefferson and his authorship of the Declaration of Independence.

Are confused.

Why go after him?

He's a good guy.

He's one of our founding fathers.

Well, I'm not interested in showing anybody to be a good guy or a bad guy, because that's just not what a historian's supposed to do. My job is to just create a veridical, a truthful narrative, insofar as the evidence allows.

And you can come up to your own opinion. Do you think he's a good guy or a bad guy? I don't start my work by saying Jefferson was a good guy, so let's marshal up all the evidence that shows. But that's what the Jeffersonian adversaries do.

They start with the assumption that this is a monstrously egregious person, and what we're going to do is look for evidence to prove all this. And in doing so, what you do is you take a lot of quotations out of context, or you don't even have a faithful rendition of something Thomas Jefferson said.

So I don't try to do that. But I can't quite answer that. I think a lot of it is that it's the times in which we live. I think we live in a time where people don't take history seriously. I do a lot of writing on historiography, and most historiographers, historiography is the history of history.

And most historiographers always say we live in a post-modernist phase, where there is no truth, and one person reading a text gets something out of it, then another person reading the same text. Your own values, your own experiences cause you to read something one way.

Mine caused me to read it. There's no objectivity in reading a text. And it's even worse when we go back to something that happened 200 years, even worse, 2 ,000 years ago. So you get progressive historians, like in the 1930s would say, we can't know the truth about anything.

So what we do is, Peter Onuf, the Jefferson scholar, last Jefferson scholar said, we craft stories that are informative or pleasant. You can't really get at Thomas Jefferson. We can't know who he is. And secondly, I'd say there's probably a sense of extreme exhilaration that certain mediocre people get by taking a great person.

And when I mean great person, I don't mean normatively, in terms of his morality, though I do believe he was a morally exceptional person, but he was a highly intellectual person. If I'm a person who can't meet Thomas Jefferson on that intellectual plane, well, I can do some damage by calling him a racist, a rapist, and everything.

And in some sense, I can get my name on the cover of Smithsonian Magazine or in the news. And all of a sudden, I have a tenure job somewhere, or they invite me to speak at Monticello, so long as whatever I say is nothing too flattering.

And that's the scary part, is that there's an acceptable, there's almost like a ministry of truth on Thomas Jefferson, that you have to stay within the boundaries of a certain narrative in order to be published, keep a job, get all the accolades that come with being a Jefferson scholar.

A ministry of truth, John, let me give you an example of that, and I can give you concrete. Andrew O'Shaughnessy shared an email. He's now the vice president of Thomas Jefferson Foundation. He runs the Smith Center in Beck.

And I was always sort of taken aback by the notion that so many people that have been invited to do scholarship and get stipends to work, and I said, why was I never invited? I've published 20 books on Thomas Jefferson now.

His comment was, you don't dig in the same garden as the rest of us. My implication is that, as I take it, and I think it's the right way to take it, we have an official narrative, and this is the way.

And I think they know their narrative is false, but I could have easily made it had I gone the route of slamming Thomas Jefferson. I was brought up at University of Pittsburgh, was the number two philosophy department in the country at the time, to respect integrity, ingenuousness, truthfulness, and I couldn't do that.

Of course, I'm paying the price for it. Now, Peter Onuf, who was the Thomas Jefferson Foundation scholar for some 30 years at University of Virginia, when I first contacted him, called me, and I have this in my memoirs, a book that got published last year, called me the most promising new Thomas Jefferson scholar in the world.

And yet, I am blacklisted from Monticello. Not one of my 20 books, nothing on Jefferson's philosophy of education, nothing on Jefferson's political philosophy, his moral sense theory, the world's only critical commentary in Thomas Jefferson's Bible.

None of those books are at Monticello for sale. And I emailed them on several occasions. One time, they emailed me back and said, well, we have a committee, and we didn't think they were relevant. Another time, last time, I think two years ago, or a year ago, I emailed them, and I just didn't get a response back.

So that's, I mean, this goes along with some of the cancel culture stuff that makes it to the news. This is the same kind of thing that's happening here. And in fact, in the historical discipline, it's very concerning to me.

Jefferson’s Breadth of Genius and Intellectual Curiosity

You mentioned that Thomas Jefferson was a great man. And oftentimes, I think in the popular imagination, the Declaration of Independence is the only thing people know about Thomas Jefferson. He authored that, and they think that he was now with Sally Hemings.

That's about it for people who don't know a lot about Jefferson. Can you tell us some more about Jefferson, and just what a great man he was, what kinds of things he achieved?

Where do I start? I've seen scholars that have written a book or two on Jefferson say, you know, Palachuk, how do you do that? Well, he was such a deep thinker, number one. Number two, he was such a broad-minded thinker.

He had his hands in everything. He would be the sort of person, John, if you and Thomas could go for a walk in the countryside, you'd be going for a walk, and you'd be talking, and then you'd look, where did he go?

And he's off looking at some flower he's never seen before. He'd say, wow, I've never seen this, or what is this? You know, he was so adept, he was called the world's, not the world's, but America's foremost architect, in terms of bringing neoclassical Palladian architecture into the United States.

He studied botany. Meteorology was perhaps the earliest American meteorologist in the country, was networking, getting up at four, taking temperatures of the coldest part of the day, the warmest part of the day, and networking with people in other cities.

Archeology, philology, study of language. He collected Native American languages to study it. He thought there was a connection between the Native American people right at Kamchatka, and people in that part of Russia at the time.

And he was correct, but he got the causation backwards. It was the Russian, the Kamchatkans Russians that came through in North America, not the North Americans that came into. But he studied everything.

Anything that was of any practical significance for the betterment of the human condition, anything like that interested him. So how do you not, I just picked up, I want to write a book on Jefferson and war and revolution.

And I want to write a book on Jefferson. I did The Natural Bridge, which I thought was fairly interesting. I want to write a book about, I just started this week, a book on Thomas Jefferson and Maria Cosway, an Italian, she lived in England.

She was a married lady who was an artist, musician, and he fell madly in love with her in 1786.

Wow.

Jeffersonian Republicanism, Agrarianism, and Liberty

Yeah, I didn't know a lot of what you even just mentioned. I know in political philosophy, I mean, there is this term Jeffersonianism, usually against the Hamilton and his views. Do you see that affecting American politics even today?

And what would Jeffersonianism be? What does that look like?

Were he alive today, he would say, get your musket and let's overthrow the government.

You think so?

We have lost control. He believed in small government. He believed in his Kentucky resolutions. He talked about state's rights. He believed in government representative of the interests of the majority of the citizenry.

And what we have right now is partisan bickering, where, and I'm not picking on the right or the left, but both sides are, as John Calhoun noted, he says, we gotta worry about the position where one party's worried about getting the presidency and dominating the Senate or the House, and the other party's doing the same thing.

When do you stop to consider the interests or the well-being of the country in the interest of citizenry? He wasn't a partisan thinker in the least, even though he was noted to be the father of Jeffersonian republicanism.

I say that because he did not see it as a political party. He saw it as a philosophy of politics. Government by the people has to be done a certain way.

And agrarianism was part of that, I know.

Very much so.

Sufficiency.

He sort of gave up on that to some extent by the time he was in Washington's cabinet. Not philosophically, he gave up on that because he saw the people. I think he came to realize his sort of utopian view of the people was false, that as they prospered economically and fiscally, they wanted some of the goo-gaws in toys and trinkets that people in England had for sale, and they had, it's no different than us today.

Yeah, human nature didn't change.

But he had a vision for agrarianism. He says in his notes on Virginia, we can make a decision whether we're completely agrarian or we devote half of our energy to manufacture, half to agrarianism. Let's go for the former.

The latter, agrarianism, excuse me.

Life, Liberty, Equality, and the Pursuit of Happiness

I wanna quote, if I can, from your book. This is obviously Jefferson's most famous line today from the Declaration of Independence, and you talk about it. This is what you said. You said, the Declaration of Independence, Abraham Lincoln says, is a standard maxim for free society, constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated.

You say that standard comprising life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is the received view of the document today. Nonetheless, it is not the view that Jefferson or any of the forefathers had in mind when the Declaration of Independence was framed and signed.

What did you mean by that?

Good question.

Yeah, because it's used by both parties and by everyone, right?

Well, you know, I continue, having written so much about Jefferson's liberalism, I continue to think about that. I was interviewed on the radio not long ago, and one of the things I said, I don't think there's any person in the world at the time who embraced liberalism in terms as a political, as a philosophical ideal more than Thomas Jefferson.

His declaration was a manifesto for life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. One of the things I wanna say is that, unlike other people, he didn't view liberty as an end. In other words, we're not fighting so that people can go on and live freely.

We want to live freely so we can live happily, meaning he bought into the Greek notion of epidemonia, which meant good life, which meant virtuous living, in effect, and he thought he was not a relativist like a lot of people think.

Adrian Coke and even Dumas Malone, the great Jefferson historian, thought Jefferson was a political relativist. He wasn't. He wanted people to, he wanted to have a society where people were free, but he thought when we wed liberty to science, in other words, to free presses, to pursuit of knowledge, there's going to be a direction in which we go.

We're going to get smarter. We're going to learn more about the way, you know, you've got Newton, the law of gravity, three laws of motion. You've had Galileo, the law of falling bodies, and Boyle, inverse law of pressure and volume, and all things that are going on in the sciences.

It's a very exciting time in which to live. So liberty was in the service of human thriving, which meant people would, he hoped, focus on agrarian living, simple living, avoidance of the goo-gaws and the things you don't need in life and work towards communal betterment.

So liberty was a concept that was not an end in itself, but it was instrumental for virtue and human happiness. Communal living.

Well, that's actually a fascinating idea because it means that he wasn't trying to sacrifice the conditions in which we live for the sake of some status we're trying to achieve. And in other words, it sounds like he was actually, the end of the pursuit was the conditions.

We want a good condition, a good life for everyone. And a certain kind of political status that guarantees freedom will actually secure that better. So it's kind of cart and horse thing.

Yeah, yeah, liberty was, we always talk about liberty today and we speak flippantly about it. We don't understand what a novel and strange concept. Same with equality. Equality was a very weird concept at the time because the thing is, life, we talked about everybody being equal in the Declaration.

What does that mean?

Well, today they say it means transgender rights. Some people do. And Thomas Jefferson sowed those seeds that are growing today.

Well, I mean, are you and I equal in any obvious sense? Am I the equal of another person? No, I mean, if you look at any two people, you're gonna see that inequality reigns and someone's smarter than the other, someone's better looking, someone has more money.

Jefferson meant equality of opportunity, number one. And he also meant moral equality. He thought all of us were moral equals of each other. So that's what he really meant.

Egalitarian kind of equality then or?

Well, egalitarianism makes sense if you understand moral egalitarianism. We're all equal as moral beings. We have the same moral sense that can see right or wrong. We have the same capacity for good action, for right action.

So we're moral equals. And he wanted to create a society in which we get rid of entails primogenitor. We have educational reforms, wholesale educational reforms, religious freedom, so that we level the playing field and the wealthy, the aristocrats that were from England or France or whatever, we're not gonna have that sort of social stratification.

And that's what's unique still to America. We have people that we hold higher, but we usually do that because you got more money. You got more cars than I do. You got a better man cave. But Jefferson, his revolution was really in that direction.

I think if you'd have seen the implications of it, he would have been aghast, but that's where we're at.

Slavery, Emancipation, and the Limits of Presentism

Yeah, so was he, did he want to flatten? I mean, it sounds like he did wanna flatten some kind of hierarchies or get rid of them, but it wasn't a, he believed in a social order at the same time, he believed in our natural order.

So these things weren't in conflict in his mind, that there was a natural order at the same time he wanted a certain level of equality.

Yeah, well, there had to be a certain level of quality for his notion of republicanism to work. In other words, we had government of and by the people. The elected leaders were not political or moral betters.

They were in Latin primus inter pares, which meant first among parity, first among equals. So if you become a governor of the state of Virginia, you govern not as someone who's better, you govern as someone who has been awarded the privilege to be governor.

And having been awarded that privilege when your governorship is done, you step back, become one of the citizens again. So it's a sort of signal honor in some regard, but on the other hand, when people were governing at the time, they're giving up your livelihood, you're neglecting your farm, your plantation.

And when Jefferson came back from his presidency, his place was a mess, complete mess. He realized it's gonna take years to get things back. The overseers weren't taking care of things as much as he thought they would.

Let me ask you this, because this always comes up, today at least, when talking about this line from the Declaration. So how could a man who writes this, how could he have slaves? How is that possible that he would hold slaves and believe in life, liberty, pursuit of happiness and equality, and yeah, how do you reconcile that?

What's he gonna do? He was born into them, number one. Number two, in Virginia, it was against the law to free your slaves. Number three, where are you gonna go? Now we always have these narratives that, okay, so-and-so freed his slaves and they went on to Ohio and they lived happily ever after.

Does anyone ever follow up on this happily ever after story? Was it happily ever after? Okay, you lived in the North, you were free to vote, but if you did vote, you would get beat up, more than likely.

You, you know, if you were dark-colored, you lived in black communities. Jefferson was intent on that he freed a few slaves in his lifetime and thereafter. They needed to be, one, light-skinned, because he was aware of the problem.

Two, they needed to have sufficient skills, like joinery or being an accomplished chef so that you can make a living in white culture, as presumably as a white person. So, I mean, we have this whole notion that anybody who owns slaves somehow, you know, I always say this syllogism, slavery is bad, Jefferson owned slaves, so Jefferson is bad.

Well, you can plug anybody who owns slaves in and that's what people want you to do. In Lynchburg, how many black people owned slaves?

Yeah, there's a number.

There are a number. Judge Daniels, I looked at his records during the War of 1812, they had a taxer. He had two white slaves. They showed me that. And it was funny, I was being toured around at the Point of Honor and the young African American was talking about his slaves and all that.

And I said, well, what about the two white slaves? He goes, there were no white slaves at the time. I said, but that's funny because your people here told me. They showed me the records where he had to pay taxes on two of his white slaves.

And yeah, so we don't talk about stuff like that. And then early on, it wasn't, you know, unlike what they want you to believe with the 1619 thesis, it wasn't just, it wasn't skin color in slavery. It was, you know, when they shipped over to Jamestown, the first colonists and other people, these were, to a large extent, people that were willing to experiment, people who were not the firstborn, not gonna get inheritance, people who were prisoners, people, you know, later on, people who were prostitutes, people who were street urchins.

You're not sending your best citizens to Jamestown because you don't even know, for example, you're gonna survive the voyage. It was that perilous. And there are a number of chronicles of people on voyages where the ship gets tossed and lost for a while.

They run out of food. Some people die and the others survive through cannibalism. No one talks about stuff like that.

Yeah, no, you don't hear about that.

That was not uncommon. It was a very dangerous journey. And Jefferson, for example, when he starts talking about his paternal heritage, goes back and he says, well, I think they came from Wales. You know, and you look at the records, there's no record of anybody coming from Wales.

So that line might, but I mean, he doesn't talk very much about his paternal line. It could just be because there was nothing, you know, worth talking about. No dignitaries or great people in his line.

So who knows?

Yeah, so I think what you're saying is that there's a presentist understanding that's being imposed on the past and they're not understanding the circumstances that Jefferson lived in. And he would have wanted them to be self-sufficient before being freed.

Jefferson’s Religious Views: Deism, Unitarianism, and Moral Improvement

And so one of the things too that comes up sometimes is there seems to be different versions of Jefferson, just like there are of Lincoln and pretty much any famous historical figure, but the atheists have their Jefferson, right?

You have like the David Bartons of the world have their Jefferson who's like almost an evangelical Christian. And, you know, if you read Jefferson, it seems like he's neither of these in these categories.

What was Jefferson's religious views in a nutshell? What did he believe?

Good question. I've written two books on this.

I knew you were a person to ask about this.

Yeah, I've written more on this than anybody in the world. Jefferson was always very personal when it came to his own religious views. He says, religious views are always a matter between a person and his God.

And he had respect for the atheist as well. So he called himself a Unitarian. And what he meant, Unitarianism was not, it was a religious sect like a lot of them, but it was a religious sect with a great deal of radicalism in it.

If you look at some of the Richard Price and Joseph Priestley at some of the Unitarians, they disagreed with each other radically in terms of what their views were, who Christ was. And the thing that they had in common is that there was one God, that was Unitarian.

And Jefferson was a Unitarian only and he believed that there was one God. He believed God created the world. He was a deist, not a theist. He did not believe in divine intervention. He says, following Lord Bolingbroke, whose views he followed when he was early and maintained throughout, to think that God would create the world, then send Jesus as the son of God to sort of repair things, undermines God's powers.

I mean, it's a pretty interesting argument, is it not?

It was a popular one at the time.

Yeah, and if God knows what he's doing, he's gonna get it right. He doesn't have to send Jesus as his son to fix things and he's not gonna have to intervene. He's a carpenter who builds the world and does a very good job the first time, doesn't have to go ahead.

So he believed, his views were simple. He believed that there is a God, one God, and you had duties to God. I'll get to those in a bit. And then you had duties to fellow human beings, namely to act virtuously, to act benevolently.

Now, how did you fulfill your duties to God? He went to church at times, donated money to churches. He sang and prayed with them. He didn't say his prayers before he went to bed. He didn't even take his Flintstone vitamins that I know of.

But he gave money to churches and he befriended clerics because they were good people. And he didn't respect sectarian religion for all that. But you respected God. Imagine having a beautiful bicycle that was handmade by some person or having a beautiful painting there by the artist, a painting on the wall.

You have no idea who that painter is. And you look at it and you say, my goodness, is that extraordinary? And in a sense, you look at that and it moves you all day long. And you keep thinking, that is sort of how Jefferson was moved by God.

God's not gonna hear your prayers. You can't supplicate God, he's not gonna intervene. The universe is much too large for any of that. And there's nothing for God to do. But in some sense, because you had the privilege of being birthed and you're part of this creation, once you understand how marvelous it is, you worship God in that way.

So how do you worship? Grow a garden. You bring new plants from Europe to United States, introduce them, let them thrive. You didn't know anything about invasiveness. You study Newton, the universal law of gravity.

Bodies are attracted to each other according to their masses and inversely proportioned to the squares of distance. The force goes off in inverse square ratio. So you study physics. You study the world.

You study different species of animals and plants. And that's how you praise God. And this is not a God that's gonna sit back and say, oh, Jefferson's looking at my world. But that's how you

Is that deism then?

What is the term?

Yeah, deism roughly just means that God doesn't intervene. God creates and sit back and everything. But his deism was unique to him in a sense that he loved this creature because, if I imagine, if I'm just so enamored with that painting or anything that that artist does, I'm gonna love that artist without having met the person or even if the person never gets to know me.

I mean, it's just a remarkable talent, I might think.

He could see, he could recognize teleology and the design of creation and say that that says something about the creator behind it. Now, one of the things that I think some Christians will, like the David Bartons of the world might look at and try to emphasize is his relationships.

As you mentioned with various ministers, including Charles Clay. I think he secured funds to even build Charles Clay's churches. So he saw a place for religion that didn't fit his views.

Is that correct?

No, I think he was sort of like the Marxist view that people needed sectarian religion. But what he saw is that in most religions that they all had a couple of things in common, love of God and love of fellow human beings.

So he enjoyed sermons by many ministers. He collected sermons by Laurence Stern and Massillon and Bordelieu, for example, by ministers, French ministers. And I have read some of these, I've read their sermons and some of them are metaphysically out there but they're just, they're moving.

Jefferson thought moral improvement was so important and by moral improvement, he didn't mean that you needed to hone your moral sense faculty in terms of work it to perfection. We all know what's right or wrong, but we're lazy at times.

So we need to read things that inspire us to do stuff. Okay, we know right or wrong. Okay, but so oftentimes, but it makes sense, doesn't it? Something bad is going on and yeah, I know it's bad but I'm gonna sit back and have my Hershey's bar and watch Oprah reruns.

And Jefferson will say, no, do something. Change the world, get out there and enact. So don't just sit back and consent or assent to this being the right or wrong thing. Go out there and try to change the world for the better.

Why Jefferson Still Matters for Historians and Readers

On that note, maybe in closing too, how would you, well, what would you say to maybe a young historian or just to inspire really anyone to dig into Jefferson? How is that gonna be a good study for them?

Why should they know about them?

I don't know if I can answer that straightforwardly. What attracted me, do I find him the most fascinating person whom I can study? No, there are more intelligent people, Immanuel Kant, whom I've read and studied, David Hume.

There are probably better people, Jesus and Gandhi, but he's, I sort of stumbled into Jefferson because I wanted to write, work on a project with my older brother who dabbled in history. And I found him to be a fascinating person.

And at some point, I'm an old fart, meaning I don't know how many years I have left. I'm really quite good at what I do with Thomas Jefferson. I enjoy doing Thomas Jefferson. And unlike Freud, whom I have done for 30 years, I stopped liking Freud because I found him to be a really bad scientist and not such a nice person.

And that means something to me. I mean, I am morally imperfect as the next person, but I like to read morally inspiring literature like Jefferson. I taught morality, I don't know how many years. And it's, for me, unlike doing history, history, I just try to get out and tease out a true story.

But when I read, teach morality, I do that with my students, but it moves me on the side. I'm thinking, wow, this is really pretty cool. I can kind of think about this.

Where can someone pick up. Maybe, I don't know which book they should start with of yours, but where can they find it? Where can they find your writings or videos or whatever you have publicly available?

On any of the Barnes and Noble, Amazon, you can pick up some of my stuff. Unfortunately, with the state, the riotous state of the publication industry, some of the books are, my favorite book is Thomas Jefferson's Psychobiography of an American Lion, which is, in which I do my own psychoanalytic diagnosis of Jefferson.

Unfortunately, the book sells for over 200 bucks. So don't start there.

Oh my goodness.

Well, publishing companies have to do what they can to stay afloat. Because you sell a certain number of books, the books go to the used book market, and then after selling maybe 200 books to the general public, those books go to the used book market and someone can buy the book for 10 bucks.

So a lot of publishers get around that by charging a very inordinately large rate for the book at first purchase. So if they'll say, I'll sell the book for 150 or $200, and if I sell 200 books, it's not a lot, but it covers publication costs.

Yeah.

Well, which one would they start with then if it's not that one?

The book you are reading. What is that?

Oh, yeah, I have actually.

What is the title of that? That's my first of a.

It's called Thomas Jefferson, Uncovering His Unique Philosophy and Vision. So I made the right choice.

Yeah, it's a nice, that book was the first, my first book was Dutiful Correspondence, Philosophical Essays on Thomas Jefferson, and I was sort of dabbling and had a bunch of essays on philosophical essays, and I just threw them together in a book and it worked.

And I thought, well, let's have a book where I talk about some, have something to say about Jefferson's worldview, his cosmology, his notions of God in the first part, second part, the other three parts would be long, his political philosophy, then his views on morality, including religion, and then his views on education.

And then after I finished that book, it occurred to me, there's so much more to say on each of these three. So what to do? I decided to make, have a trilogy of books, starting with Jefferson's educational philosophy, then his political philosophy, then his moral, his views on morality.