July 4, 1619 Project, & Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings

Conversations That Matter

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

00:10

Welcome once again to the Conversations, I'm at a podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. Thankful to be here. Thankful also today, as I'm recording this on July 4th, to be in the

00:18

United States, to have the heritage we have, which has been very much influenced by Christianity. And it's forgotten in many ways.

00:25

It's unfortunate that we can look around us and see all the signs, I think, of decay and God's judgment.

00:33

And there's still some silver linings, as we saw a week and a half ago with the Supreme Court, but we still have, and we are reaping the blessings of a wonderful heritage.

00:43

And I think we can still celebrate that. And that's what I intend to do. Now, you're probably listening to this on July 5th, because that's when

00:49

I'm releasing it. And as I'm releasing it, actually, as you're hearing it,

00:55

I'm going to be either on my way to or in South Carolina. I'm wearing my South Carolina hat. I'll probably wear it the next week.

01:01

And I'll be in Charleston for about five days. And I'll be at a conference down there that I went to in 2017.

01:08

The Abbeville Institute puts it on. And they have a number of great, oftentimes, really thought -provoking history scholars.

01:18

And sometimes they'll have experts in literature and other areas come. And usually it's about Southern history or some facet of Southern history.

01:25

This time, though, I think it's gonna be a little broader. They're gonna be, we're gonna have some scholars talking about American history, specifically

01:31

Abraham Lincoln. And I'm looking forward to this. And one of the things, though, I wanted to mention this to you because one of the things I'm gonna be doing,

01:37

I mentioned this actually for the last year, is talking to a few of the scholars there about the 1607

01:42

Project. And I've talked about this. And there's conversations that have happened in the background

01:48

I haven't really updated people on, but it's gonna happen. It's gonna happen. It's in the works.

01:54

In the next few months, I should have a link for you if you wanna donate to this. It's gonna be great for homeschoolers. It's gonna be great for, hopefully, some

02:00

Christian schools out there. This is gonna be an alternative to the 1619 Project and also an alternative, in some ways, to the 1776

02:07

Project. And so one of the things that I wanted to share with you is just a brief sketch of what that might look like as we've had these conversations.

02:19

1776, 1619, I think there's some things in common here between the two that I find interesting that I think 1607 will address.

02:30

Now, some inadequacies that I think the 1607 Project is going to help just really supplement, but it's really more than supplement.

02:38

I think the 1607 Project is really where it's at. And here's my argument. Here's how I'm thinking about this.

02:44

And this is the conception that I had, really, from the beginning. So historians, think about it this way.

02:50

You have a river and you wanna trace its headwater, okay? We have this big, raging river. How did it become so influential, so big?

02:57

It divides a continent, the Mississippi. Oh my goodness, it's the lifeblood of this country. Well, where did it come from?

03:03

And you trace up and eventually, you're gonna come to a small stream. What's the headwater? How do you know which is the stream that started the

03:10

Mississippi River? Well, there's a lot of converging streams, right? How do we know which one it is? And I think it's the same way with history.

03:18

We have converging streams. We have converging influences that come in to form the present set of circumstances that we live in.

03:24

But nonetheless, it is important to kind of know definitionally what America is.

03:31

And it's much broader, I think, than 1776 or 1619. 1619 essentially says that America is this horrible, racist, oppressive place.

03:42

And we can see that from the beginning because in 1619, there were African slaves. Now really, they were indentured servants.

03:48

But I digress. A Dutch ship brought African indentured servants, quote -unquote slaves, to the coast of Virginia.

03:55

And that's when it all started. That's the foundation of the United States. It's in the DNA of the United States. It's definitional to the

04:01

United States. It's always been that way. And it serves a present political purpose. To define the United States as oppressive, we can then choose to overcome what the

04:10

United States is. Now, here's 1776. And what more conservatives, really more neoconservatives,

04:18

I think more Straussian, West Coast -type conservatives have given us in this project.

04:25

And I think what they're doing is a noble effort because what they're trying to do is hedge against 1619. They're saying, no, it's not an oppressive place, but here's how they're doing it.

04:33

And I want you to see kind of the weakness to this. America's not an oppressive place.

04:39

Actually, the seeds of freedom, liberty, and equality were planted in 1776 when we separated from Great Britain, but we had the

04:48

Declaration of Independence. And that celebrates the equality, and the freedom, and the liberty of this new, unique, grand experiment, this new people that...

05:00

And so it almost gives the impression that out of a vacuum or out of thin air, these ideas, these abstractions kind of took hold, and this has never been done before in human history.

05:12

And now it's just waiting every year for the revolution to continue. So you have a continuous revolution with 1776 project type stuff.

05:21

So essentially what... And of course, I'm taking it to its logical conclusion here.

05:28

I'm not saying that all the people behind that are necessarily giving... They're not saying all these things, though I'm sure some of them are.

05:35

But things like, let's say the freedom for slaves, okay? That's part of the seeds of liberty that were planted by the founders.

05:42

Of course, yes, they had slavery. Thomas Jefferson owned slaves as he penned the Declaration of Independence, but he sowed the seeds of what eventually would overcome slavery, okay?

05:53

And what would eventually overcome the chauvinism, misogyny, all these things, and give women the right to vote.

06:00

And for some, this is kind of a blank check. You could say, this also is what broke up the trusts during Theodore Roosevelt's time.

06:09

It's what brought us the freedom from want and freedom from fear during FDR's time in social security.

06:14

And it gave us the great society. And we have federally subsidized public education now and LGBT rights.

06:21

And oh my goodness, it can give you so many things. And this is all coming from the seed of liberty that was planted by the founders.

06:29

And so that's something that I would push back on. I don't think the founders were thinking in their heads, yeah, and I don't think anyone is saying this, but yeah,

06:37

LGBT rights. But I don't think even the concept they were introducing was meant or intended to, or either thought to, or even logically could do what some today are saying it does.

06:50

And so really you have, I think, two wings of progressivism here. With 1619, you have

06:55

America bad. Okay, it needs to be, it's fundamentally flawed. We need to fundamentally remake

07:01

America, as Obama said. With 1776, America good, okay?

07:07

And so we can say, hey, plus one, America is good. But why is it good? Well, it's good because it's got all these problems that, and the true

07:15

America is this idea. It's not a place, it's not a people, it doesn't have to speak English, it's an idea.

07:21

So it's an abstraction. That's what America really is. And that's why America is good, it's because it's the idea of freedom. And it can be detached from the cultures that brought it here.

07:31

And it actually, that idea is what kind of tills the soil to make way for this place of equity, inclusion, diversity.

07:39

And it really does tend that direction. I mean, a progressive can really take hold of that and say, okay, we're gonna have the progressive idea of this, the progressive narrative.

07:50

And it's not gonna be America fundamentally flawed, it's gonna be America good, but really the thing that we're narrow, the scope of America is these ideas.

07:58

So we're narrowing what America actually is down to this, synthesizing it into just these narrow abstractions that can then be applied to all these other problems.

08:07

And so the founders can be heroes because they introduced the ideas that have led to the revolution we're in. And the revolution though never really ends.

08:14

I don't know if you've noticed that, but there's always something new. It's gonna be free healthcare, right?

08:19

We haven't achieved that yet. I mean, we're on the way, but that's the next rung on the ladder.

08:26

So I think it's kind of, it's a Trojan horse, I think, to go down the 1776

08:31

Project Road. I think it sounds really good in the front end of it. There's some really good things and there's some really true things,

08:37

I think, that are said by many of the scholars there. I think though that ultimately though it can lead to and it can be wielded by progressives in such a way that it tells the positive story of the

08:52

United States, but it doesn't really get what the United States is right. It gives you a part of it, ideas are important, but it takes it two steps farther that these ideas then lead to all these other things.

09:04

And these are consistent with those ideas. And it's so the ideas are, the abstractions are so narrow, but the applications are so broad.

09:14

So here's my radical idea, I guess, right? It's not radical at all.

09:20

It's really, I think, the way that many Americans have thought about their history for a long time up until recently.

09:28

And that's that America is really just an extension of what came before.

09:34

So if you're looking for where the stream, the headwaters of the stream, you're gonna see converging streams.

09:40

You're gonna see the Dutch influence in New York. You're gonna see French Huguenots. You're gonna see

09:45

Africans and their descendants coming in and they have had a profound influence, especially in places like the

09:52

South. You can see Spanish influence in Florida. I mean, you can see all these things, right?

09:59

And you see the French, right? You see all these different European peoples, but primarily the headwater and what's influenced our country's legal system and our culture and all these other things.

10:11

If you wanna say that there is a unique kind of broad American culture, it's

10:18

English. It's Albion Seat. It's David Hackett Fisher's book, Albion Seat. It's these different parts of Great Britain that have had the primarily at the beginning at this very formative period in our country's history, they've had the most amount of people coming and they've exerted the most influence and furthermore, they were the first.

10:35

Now, I know the Spanish were in Florida, but I mean, during our war for independence, that was still, they were out of it.

10:40

That was Spanish. So when you think of the United States itself, it's English.

10:46

So it would have started really sequentially with the

10:53

English coming here, 1607. So there's a great importance, I think, to this. And I think

10:59

Virginia becomes one of the primary definitional states to this country because Virginia obviously claimed a lot more land than it does now.

11:09

I mean, but so many explorers and presidents and Supreme Court justices and just influential people, generals in the early years, the formative years came from Virginia.

11:19

And so the 1607 project is really looking at this differently, I think, than the 1619 and 1776.

11:25

1619 is gonna be primarily focused on this. It's an abstraction. It's the idea of enslavement, the idea of oppression.

11:34

And that's what is, that's in the DNA of America. And the 1776 is saying, no, it's the idea of freedom and liberty, that's what

11:41

America is. And 1607 would say, it's not an idea. There's ideas attached to this, but it's not an idea that makes

11:47

America what it is. It's a culture and it has language. It has religion,

11:54

Christianity, okay? We're gonna focus on Christianity in the 1607 project. It's got music and food and cuisine.

12:04

It's got, there's flavor to it. There's all kinds of, there's architecture. All these things, these rich things are actually what make

12:13

America what America is. And so that's, and of course, other parts of the country are gonna be mentioned, but we start at the headwater.

12:21

We started at 1607 with the Jamestown colony. And really, even the

12:27

Pilgrims, right? They were coming, why don't you talk about the Pilgrims? Well, Pilgrims came much later, right? I mean, not much, but 1607, 1620, okay, they came later.

12:35

But where were they trying to get to? Virginia, they were trying to get to Virginia. It was because of Jamestown that you had these other groups coming over.

12:44

The Dutch, of course, they came over right after 1607, but they were aware of the

12:51

English presence. And so I think starting there, and with the assumption that it's really culture that's the really formative thing here, that even ideas like freedom and liberty and what those meant in context, which isn't egalitarianism, but what they meant in context at the time,

13:10

I call it Secession Day sometimes, July 4th, breaking away from Great Britain because of its unconstitutional, tyrannical abuse of authority, that traces back to a history in Britain that goes back to the

13:23

Magna Carta. I mean, this is, their concept of these things didn't just fly out of thin air in 1776.

13:31

America, or what we know of as of the United States, it existed before that. And so, and everything's on a timeline here.

13:39

So if we're gonna, but if we're gonna jump in to say, here's the date, here's when the, you really wanna talk about the seeds of America being planted.

13:46

I think it's 1607. And I think it's gonna be a great resource. So there's gonna be a really good video that is gonna go along with this.

13:56

There's gonna be a number of essays, and I'll have more information for you soon. But in that vein, in that historical vein,

14:02

I wanna talk to you about Thomas Jefferson a little bit today, and some things, I've been aware of this, but it's interesting to me to see kind of what's happened.

14:15

What's happened to Thomas Jefferson is very similar in my mind to what's happened with Confederate monuments. So Confederate monuments have become, it's the issue that no

14:26

Republican with any national clout seems to wanna touch.

14:31

Even if they agree they shouldn't come down, they're not gonna fight for it. You see Governor Youngkin of Virginia, who just recently, by the way, hosted an

14:38

LGBT pride event. I mean, this guy, he's not a conservative.

14:43

I've said that forever, but people are very excited. Youngkin's this great guy. Well, Youngkin, there's no will with Youngkin to bring back any of these monuments that have been taken down.

14:56

And I think many who voted for him thought that he would do that. He doesn't have any intention of doing that.

15:04

And most of the Republican governors in states where this stuff is happening, sometimes they're even behind it.

15:10

But if they are against it, they're gonna whisper, whisper behind closed doors. They're afraid of being called racist.

15:15

It really is what it is. And so it's become, it's a weird situation, I think, where you have the majority of populations in these states from the beginning, and even now,

15:26

I think, dead set against. I remember when I was in Virginia, I guess this would have been two years ago.

15:34

No, it was a year ago. When the election results came in, there was a number of counties that they were voting.

15:40

Should we get rid of our monuments in these particular counties? And it was coming back 70, 80%, 85 % no, keep these monuments in place.

15:51

It was like 60, between 60 and 85 % in most of these counties. And to me, this just, it shows that the population, now the population's gonna shift as they keep getting indoctrinated, now by both sides, really.

16:05

It's by the, both the Democrats and the Republicans are jumping on this to try to be the ones that, we're against these monuments to racism.

16:14

Well, they never, what's promoting the idea that these are monuments to racism? Well, it has to be a critical race theory type assumption that you're making to connect these.

16:23

You have to, because they're gonna just jump into some kind of, here's a secession document from Mississippi, and look at the, they talk about wanting to secede because of slavery and extension into the territories, and they didn't want, they want slavery to be allowed in the common territory of the

16:41

United States, that kind of thing. Therefore, they seceded over this, and that's, that means that these monuments are racist.

16:47

And of course, you have to make logical jumps to get there. You don't see anything on the monuments that would designate that.

16:54

They were, they weren't put up for those reasons. The soldiers who fought, really primarily in defense of their homes, weren't thinking, yeah,

17:02

I really just wanna, I never have owned slaves. I would never have a hope of owning slaves, but that's what I'm fighting for.

17:07

You know, none of that stuff is there. These are monuments to soldiers who fought bravely, not to slavery, or to white supremacy, or to governments that want to enshrine that as the fundamental thing they're about.

17:23

They're not to those things, but you have to make the connection. Now, here's the thing, though. We've gone down this path with this in the

17:33

United States, where the elites who represent these areas don't wanna touch it with a 10 -foot pole.

17:38

Even though their constituents say, we don't want these things removed, the elites are like, no, and we're gonna remove them anyways or we're gonna allow that to happen.

17:46

What you've done is you've taught the population that this is, that anything that can be connected somehow, even if it's like two or three steps to connect something to oppression, slavery, racism, et cetera, that it's now, it's soured.

18:03

It's something that we shouldn't be proud of. It's something that we should be ashamed of. We should take it down.

18:09

It shouldn't be in the public eye. It's a spectacle. It's a pariah. And I think

18:15

Donald Trump made the great observation in 2017, I think it was, that where does this end?

18:22

You're going to, if you do this here, you can also do it with Thomas Jefferson. You can do it with George Washington.

18:29

You can do it with many in the founding generation. You can basically, the 1619

18:34

Project is going to define everything in America as racist because it can connect everything by two or three steps to racism somehow.

18:43

They have some way of doing it. So that's the world we live in now. And it's like, we're watching every year.

18:50

What's next to fall? What's next, you know, what's, and corporate America's enforcing it too.

18:56

So I think that was the first, that was low hanging fruit. Take out those monuments. And Thomas Jefferson though was kind of concurrent with this, was this idea that Thomas Jefferson raped

19:09

Sally Hemings. And this has become, just like I think with Confederate monuments, this has become part of the official narrative now of Thomas Jefferson's biography and of it's now brought up commonly in relationship to the

19:30

Declaration of Independence and 4th of July. This is, this is really just, it's not even something that's debated is really my point.

19:42

Just like Confederate monuments really aren't debated in elite circles in places of academic influence or political influence.

19:48

It's just assumed that all they must be racist. It's the same things with Thomas Jefferson now.

19:54

Thomas Jefferson must have raped Sally Hemings. There's no really debate about it, hardly at all. I mean, it's just now locked in.

20:01

It's baked into the cake. And every year it's like something else gets baked into the cake.

20:07

And so I wanna talk about this and I wanna challenge this because John really wants to be politically incorrect.

20:13

No, John just likes the truth. I just wanna give you what we know, what we can prove historically, and then give you the limitations of that, what we can't.

20:23

And we cannot prove this historically. And so I'm gonna show you a video at the end of this, but I'm gonna start here.

20:29

This is a comedian just a few days ago, or well, this is, yeah,

20:35

July, June 30th. America has a long history of forcing teenage girls to bear the children of the men who raped them. Just ask

20:40

Sally Hemings. Over 2 ,000 likes. And of course, this is right before July 4th.

20:47

And so he posts this. And you'd think, okay, well, this is just, this is baked into the cake.

20:54

It's just the way that people think out there. But I noticed this. Thomas Kidd, and he wrote a book.

21:02

I haven't read the book yet, but it's Thomas Jefferson, A Biography of Spirit and Flesh. Now, Thomas Kidd, for those who don't know, he's one of the evangelical elites, one of the evangelical scholars, he's in academia.

21:15

He, actually, I think now he's adjunct teaching, or at least part, I don't know if they call it ad, I don't think it's adjunct, but he teaches.

21:22

He has some relationship with Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is, he's written for the

21:28

Gospel Coalition. So he's got, but he also has credibility from outside of evangelical circles.

21:37

And so, I mean, evangelicals love that. When you have credibility outside their circles, but then you come in and you can be kind of important in their circles as well.

21:46

And so Thomas Kidd has a lot of influence. Historically, he's got tremendous amount of influence in evangelical circles.

21:52

And a number of the historians in evangelicalism are the ones that are promoted. I've been very disappointed in, to be honest with you.

22:00

Thomas Kidd, here's the thing about Thomas Kidd, though. I actually like Thomas Kidd's, what I've read by Thomas Kidd, I read a few of his books.

22:06

I actually like his books. And here's one of the things I like about Thomas Kidd, is Thomas Kidd, like if you read his book about the

22:14

Great Awakening, okay, he will separate, when he talks about things, social issues, he will separate his opinions.

22:21

You know that it's Thomas Kidd giving you his opinions versus here's what actually happened. He tries to not allow, as much as he can, his opinions, his moral judgments, to influence his telling the story.

22:38

And of course, we know to some extent that might influence what he emphasizes and what he doesn't.

22:44

But he does his utmost to just use the objective tools of historical analysis, and then to, as much as he can, kind of like the principles of hermeneutics, if you're studying the

22:57

Bible, try to use these principles of historiography, and then kind of separate, here's my opinions on this.

23:03

Here's what I think about, here's how do we deal with Jonathan Edwards and slavery, or George Whitefield and slavery, right?

23:09

So that's what I appreciate about him, is because he doesn't really bring the preachingness into the narrative as much.

23:16

And he's not overly preaching anyway. He's in academia. If you're in academia, 98 % of historians today, just 95%, they're on the left, okay?

23:28

It is really weighted towards the progressive left, like super weighted. I could comfortably say any books written within the last 15 years by major historians,

23:40

I would just be skeptical of them right away, and they're probably influenced by some kind of critical theory, because that's what historiography, or historians, that's the pool they're drinking out of.

23:51

That's what they're in, that's the world they're in, that's how they get acceptance. That's how they get, if you're innovative, and especially if you push social justice, you are accepted more in the guild.

24:02

You have accolades, and you get speaking. And these people, I'll just tell you straight up, because I've been around a number of these people, these people live for that.

24:12

They live for the, just the approval of their peers, the sense of accomplishment they get.

24:22

And if you take that away from them, many of them are some of the most insecure people I've ever met in the world. Like that is who they are, that's their identity.

24:29

And so it kind of is, it forces you, if you wanna survive in academia, and flourish in academia, and have respect as a good historian, because who's gonna listen to you other than other historians, and sometimes nerdy people,

24:42

I'll just be honest with you. I can say that because I'm one of them, right? You're going to kind of push the envelope.

24:48

You're going to push towards that social justice direction. You're going to emphasize things. You're going to fudge things even sometimes, to get these ridiculous narratives sometimes.

24:57

Well, this is one of the narratives that frankly should never have taken root as deeply as it has.

25:04

And it's become now the official narrative, and Thomas Kidd buys into it. I know Thomas Kidd because he's in academia.

25:11

And because I've seen other tweets from him, and things he said in the Gospel Coalition. Yeah, he's more progressive in my mind.

25:18

But he's a historian. So probably in the historical world, he's way on the right in their minds. But he's a

25:23

Christian, so they have to look at him probably with a suspicious eye a little bit. But then when he does good research, and then he comes to them, and he's got semi -progressive ideas on some things, he'd be more accepted.

25:34

And it's just kind of how it works. But in most of, probably many of you who are listening, who are

25:41

Christians, who are conservative, he would be to the left of you, definitely. And so anyway, but I'm just saying, even though he's to the left,

25:52

I think his historical research a lot of time is really good. I don't, I would say, yeah, read a Thomas Kidd book. Just make sure you realize that he might give you some of his opinions on things.

26:00

But if you separate those two, which he allows you to do, then you're fine. Here's his article recently. June 7th.

26:07

Should we judge Thomas Jefferson by his ideas or his actions? His ideas or his actions? A new biography maps out the moral tensions that tormented his mind and tainted his legacy.

26:16

Now, this is, in the context, this is coming out in 2022. You know,

26:21

Thomas Jefferson is, it's just assumed that he had this, not only affair, but a rape, really, with Sally Hemings.

26:29

It's assumed that he was, he had all these contradictions, and to some extent he did,

26:34

I guess. But the thing, that's what's emphasized now, that Thomas Jefferson was, despite the fact that he was a genius, that he was such a seminal figure in the founding of our country, in so many areas, he was a

26:48

Renaissance man. Those things aren't focused on. It's more social history and what

26:53

Thomas Jefferson's social views were and the things that he notes that he took, private letters, those kinds of things, now are being emphasized.

27:04

And really, Thomas Kidd is even saying this. Is it his ideas that he wrote down, or is it what he actually did that we should use to define him?

27:12

And I say actions are more important than words, but there's social historians all over Thomas Jefferson trying to find all these politically incorrect views he held and really to present him as just this mired, confused figure.

27:27

I mean, there's a lot of psychological. I mean, that's what you have today. You have social history and psychological analysis of history.

27:35

You don't really have much in the way of diplomatic history or the other fields that you used to have in history.

27:42

They're just not as important anymore. So that's kind of what's happening. And it's in this environment Thomas Kidd writes this.

27:49

Here's the disappointing thing. Thomas Kidd says, or here's the article opens. It says that much of, okay,

27:59

I'll start here. Thomas Jefferson continues to inspire and divide Americans. He still ranks in the top 10 in C -SPAN's

28:06

Presidential Historian Survey. Recent years have witnessed Thomas Jefferson's name and image removed from schools, libraries, and halls of government, and that's true.

28:13

I mean, when I was in Virginia, they were trying to rename Thomas Jefferson High School. I remember this. Jefferson's statue at his own University of Virginia served as a rallying point for white supremacists during the summer of 2017.

28:23

All the while, Daveed Diggs, flamboyant portrayal of him in the musical, Hamilton, was winning acclaim on Broadway.

28:30

So there's two different Jeffersons and there's some truth to this you have, but they're two different Jeffersons of mostly a progressive -minded imagination.

28:41

The Thomas Jefferson who implanted the ideas of liberty that gave us now LGBT, and then the

28:47

Thomas Jefferson that is super racist and misogynistic and a horrible person.

28:55

And so these are two Jeffersons that are really the creations of the minds of progressive leftists.

29:01

Well, this article is in Christianity Today, if I haven't mentioned that, but it goes on. It says, much of this controversy stems from Jefferson's dual identity as the author of the

29:09

Declaration of Independence and his status as one of the nation's most prominent slaveholders. Add to this the unsettling reality, the unsettling reality that Jefferson fathered at least six children with an enslaved woman,

29:23

Sally Hemings, and it's little wonder that many Americans find themselves wondering how such a man could have penned the words, all men are created equal.

29:32

Now, if you just understand the times and what Jefferson was trying to say, it's not really that much of a mystery how he could have penned this and what he meant by it.

29:43

But notice what they say here about what Jefferson said and what the author says about Sally Hemings. That in this review of Thomas Kidd's book, that it's a reality, an unsettling reality.

29:57

Now, what it should say is, add to this, if they're gonna say anything, the unsettling possibility.

30:04

If they said unsettling possibility, okay, but it's reality. That means this is not to be questioned.

30:11

This is part of the narrative. Now, if you look at the book here by Thomas Kidd, on the first page, in the introduction, it says this.

30:20

It says, it makes the same assumption. It says, Thomas Jefferson, his relationship with Sally Hemings produced at least one and perhaps as many as six children.

30:29

So it's just an assumption. And I noticed in the bibliography at the end, there's a lot of quoting

30:34

Gordon Reed and Gordon Reed is the one that spearheaded this narrative. And so I haven't read the whole book, but first page, you're seeing already this assumption is being made here.

30:44

So is it any wonder that you have in Christianity today, this is now being just, this is just assumed.

30:53

And so it's not so much that I'm just wanting to defend everything

30:58

Thomas Jefferson's ever done. And I think he's a perfect man. I don't think that at all. It's not even that I'm, that I know for 100 % fact that he didn't have this relationship with Sally Hemings.

31:08

I don't know that for 100 % fact. But it's given the tools of historical analysis, it is very unlikely given what we know.

31:19

And we only have a part of the evidence. We don't have everything, only God knows. But what we do have points to the idea that it's not

31:27

Thomas Jefferson, it's someone else in his family that had this affair with Sally Hemings. And we don't know that it was a rape.

31:33

And so that's, of course, this possibility, possibility of a possibility has now streamed into the mainstream of American culture to the point that you just can't even question this.

31:46

This is just part of the narrative. And so it makes things on July 4th, there's even a little bit of tension there.

31:53

Like, well, this is a guy who authored the Declaration of Independence and this is what he did. There's kind of this, there's an undercurrent here and it doesn't need to be there.

32:02

That's my point is it just doesn't need to be there. There's no reason for us to just make these assumptions. But this is the wedding of the

32:10

BLM stuff with the Me Too stuff in a way, because what this does is without the sufficient evidence, with just the mere accusation, we just assume that that's what happened and that it was in fact a rape, that that's what

32:25

Thomas Jefferson did. And so you have almost like a Me Too element there. It's guilty until proven innocent. And then you have the

32:31

BLM thing with, well, this is just how black women were just treated. This is, in fact, here's a clip.

32:39

This is from, this is a few years ago, but this is Curtis Woods. He was the chairman of the resolutions committee that gave us

32:45

Resolution 9 that viewed critical race theory as an analytical tool in the Southern Baptist Convention.

32:51

And he for many years taught at Southern Seminary. This is what he said. And I think what happens is we forget that race is a victim.

33:00

It is an imaginary idea. It is imaginary.

33:06

Though it's real and it has real implications, nonetheless, it was created, socially constructed, in the same way ethnicity was, but worse because it was a prohibition.

33:18

It circumscribed a person's destiny on earth. So when we say black lives matter, here's what's happening.

33:27

For so many centuries in American history, in the American political economy, black lives did matter.

33:35

You could kill a black man and not even worry about it. You could rape that black woman and it not be considered a crime.

33:45

You could have a president by the name of Thomas Jefferson who rapes a 16 -year -old child in France by the name of Sally Hemings, who was the half -sister of his wife.

33:56

This is history, y 'all. And have 10 children with that woman and then historians call her his concubine.

34:05

I'm driving up the bridge, right? She can't be a concubine if she's an enslaved

34:11

African woman. Concubine, if you're a concubine, that connotes the idea of consent, right?

34:19

No, she was raped by a sitting president of the United States of America.

34:27

So here's why when you think black lives matter, we hear things like, let's make America great again.

34:35

About what you mean when you say that? Because it wasn't great for everyone who existed in it.

34:42

So why do black lives matter? Because legally in this country, for centuries, it didn't.

34:47

So that was Curtis Woods, who was the chairman for the Resolutions Committee in 2019 for the Southern Baptist Convention.

34:54

Well respected, or was at least up until recently in the SBC. And this is what he says on panels.

34:59

And he says it on other panels, too. This isn't unique to him. I mean, I've watched a number of them.

35:06

So this kind of thing, though, is not uncommon. And he uses, as an example here,

35:11

Thomas Jefferson. Why do black lives matter? Because they didn't matter. And guess what? They didn't matter to Thomas Jefferson because while he was a sitting president, this is what he did.

35:20

And of course, he gets some things wrong. It wasn't that Thomas Jefferson was doing this as a sitting president. It was rumors to prevent him from becoming elected.

35:27

I mean, politics has always been dirty. There are people saying he's gonna make everything atheist if he's elected. I mean, there was all kinds of things going on, but rumors and just mud being slung.

35:39

But it wasn't 10 children. It was at most six and as little, possibly one,

35:45

Esten. But he's saying all this to just make a point that this is how black lives have been treated.

35:52

This is the 1619 Project, basically. And this isn't accurate. This isn't across the board accurate.

35:58

It's much more complicated than what he's simplifying it into that's just how it was. That's not just how it was.

36:04

And the example, the primary one he's using is at best dubious. It's not, it should not be taught as a fact.

36:12

And he presents it as a fact, it's just history. Well, I wanna present to you right now, I wanna show you, as promised,

36:18

I did an interview with Mark Halachak a few weeks ago, I think, or maybe it's more than that.

36:23

Maybe it's more of a month ago, I think I released that. And we talked a little bit about Thomas Jefferson. And in the comments,

36:29

I remember some people were, how can you say that Thomas, or how can Mark Halachak say that Thomas Jefferson, it's unlikely that he fathered children with Sally Hemings?

36:39

I mean, this is just erasing American history because that's how accepted this is now. And this, again, this is kind of, this is the same assumptions that critical race theorists make are being made here by historians to get to the point of, it's a fact that Thomas Jefferson did this.

36:54

Why is it? Why is it a fact? Where's the evidence for it? Well, we don't really have hard evidence for it.

37:01

So, in what sense is it a fact? How can we say that? Well, I'm gonna give you now the rest of the story, as Paul Harvey would say, because I said,

37:10

I know there's more coming out. There's a video coming out about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. And here it is.

37:16

And I'll put the link in the info section. If you wanna just go get the standalone video, so you don't wanna link to this podcast, you want just what

37:22

I'm about to play by Mark Halachak, the link is in the info section. You can go check that out. Here we go, though.

37:28

Here's Mark Halachak on Thomas Jefferson and whether or not he fathered children or a child with Sally Hemings.

37:40

Good afternoon. I'm Dr. Mark Andrew Halachak. I'm a Thomas Jefferson scholar. And I'd like to talk to you today about Thomas Jefferson and his avowed affair with Sally Hemings, his slave.

37:52

Now, I wanna start off with Jefferson scholar. She's known to be the world's foremost authority on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, Annette Gordon -Reed from Harvard University.

38:02

And she says, symbolically, it's tremendously important for people as a way of inclusion.

38:08

Nathan Huggins said that the Sally Hemings story was a way of establishing black people's birthright to America.

38:15

If you look at the flip side of it, rejecting the story is a part of the rejecting of black people's birthright in claims to America.

38:22

So again, this smacks of what goes on with the 1619 thesis. The whole idea is that there have to be some way of including

38:31

African American people in the story of the founding of the country here. So she's doing it by having

38:38

Thomas Jefferson father children with his slave. Now, let's go to a brief history here.

38:44

Fawn Brody in 1974 writes, Thomas Jefferson, an intimate history.

38:50

1979, Barbara Chase Rebo writes, Sally Hemings, a novel. In 1995,

38:57

Jefferson in Paris is a movie that comes out and shows Sally Hemings to be a young, beautiful, elegant woman.

39:04

Then comes the DNA study in 1998, spearheaded by Eugene Foster. The DNA study shows that the final child of Sally Hemings has the

39:14

Thomas Jefferson Y chromosome. And if you know anything about biology, all that means is

39:22

Jefferson could have been the father of Eston, was born in 1808, or any male in Jefferson's line could have been the father of Eston Hemings.

39:32

Now, Nature Magazine came right out and said, Jefferson fathered slave's last child.

39:38

There never was such a sea change in historical opinion as there was at this time.

39:44

Almost all historians who thought Jefferson didn't father any of Hemings' children now change their mind and say, okay,

39:51

Jefferson did father Eston Hemings and presumably fathered all the children. The key event for me, what brought me to Lynchburg is in 2018, the pundits at the

40:03

Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello said that Jefferson definitely fathered all of Sally Hemings' children.

40:11

Even though none of the evidence had changed, nothing had been added, all we had was DNA evidence that showed

40:17

Jefferson could have fathered Eston, no genetic evidence of anything else. Primary source evidence, that is eyewitness claims, people whose testimony could be admitted in a court of law.

40:29

In terms of Jefferson's, the pro -paternity case, that Jefferson was the father of all the children, there are zero bits of primary evidence that show

40:41

Jefferson fathered, they have nothing. Evidence against paternity, there are four bits of evidence and one of which is the testimony of Thomas Jefferson himself in 1805.

40:54

Jefferson, presumably when he was a young man, not yet married, his neighbor and friend,

41:01

Thomas Walker, had some affairs to conduct with the Native Americans miles and miles away and he asked

41:08

Jefferson to look after his wife. Thomas presumably did more than look after his wife and made a pass at her or presumably consummated a sexual affair with her.

41:19

I suspect that there was no sexual affair but he admits to having made a pass at her. In 1805 while he's president he says, you will perceive that I plead guilty to one of their charges, that when young and single

41:31

I offered love to a handsome lady. I acknowledge its incorrectness.

41:36

It is the only one founded in truth among all their allegations.

41:42

Now by implication when he says the only one, this rules out the Sally Hemings affair.

41:47

Sally Hemings affair had been circulating quite robustly at the time. There is another testimony by overseer

41:55

Edmund Bacon who in 1862, he's talking about some male leaving

42:01

Sally Hemings' room at Monticello early in the morning. Bacon is responding to a suspicion that Jefferson freed

42:11

Sally Hemings' daughter, Harriet Hemings, because she was his daughter. And Bacon says she was not his daughter, not

42:18

Thomas Jefferson's daughter, she was Blank's daughter. I know that.

42:24

I have seen him come out of her mother's room many a morning when I went up to Monticello very early.

42:30

So we have primary evidence of someone who sees someone other than Thomas Jefferson coming out of Sally Hemings' room.

42:38

Very important evidence. Then there's the testimony of slave Isaac Jefferson which implicates to some extent

42:45

Thomas Jefferson's brother, Randolph Jefferson. He says something to the effect, he says, oh

42:50

Masa Randolph, he used to hang around the slaves at Mulberry Road till all hours in the morning, fiddle and sing all hours of the night.

42:59

He says, he ain't got no more sense than Isaac, in other words, myself. So we have testimony that puts

43:06

Jefferson's brother at the scene of the crime. Lastly, we have the testimony of Abigail Adams when

43:12

Jefferson's daughter Maria or Mary comes to France. She first goes to England and Abigail Adams takes care of her.

43:20

And in two separate letters to Thomas, she says, talking about Sally Hemings who had accompanied

43:27

Mary Jefferson on the boat ride. And Sally is 14, Mary's eight at the time.

43:33

And Abigail says in two separate letters that the woman accompanying the child wants more attention than the child.

43:42

By implication, again, it's very suggestive that if Mary is eight at the time, then woman

43:49

Sally Hemings, who is supposed to be taking care of her, is acting at perhaps a level of maturity at seven years of age.

43:58

Now it's a very credible testimony, Abigail Adams. The complete case for the people at Monticello rests on the

44:07

Madison Hemings testimony at 1873 where he said Jefferson was my father. That testimony is secondary testimony and Gordon Reed goes on to say at one point, this testimony is so critical to our case that it needs to be used and taken as primary source of testimony.

44:27

So by fiat, she wants to claim secondary witness, secondary testimony needs to be taken as primary, which is something you just can't do in scholarship.

44:38

Lastly, I'll leave you off with a quote from Gordon Reed, who's the main player here and she's talking about people who come and visit

44:47

Monticello and are put off by the notion that they're gonna hear about Sally Hemings.

44:53

She says, some people come here, in other words, Monticello, and say, I didn't come here to a slave plantation to hear about slavery.

45:02

There's nothing to do, she says, but to keep pushing back. That's the notion here.

45:08

Whether you wanna hear it or not, we're gonna talk about Jefferson's racism, we're gonna talk about him possibly raping

45:14

Sally Hemings, even if the evidence is not suggestive in the least. That's the agenda and it seems to me that the

45:22

Thomas Jefferson Foundation has what I call a racist agenda, an agenda where they're going to use race to work towards racial equality, which

45:32

I think is a fine thing, but in the process, we're going to drag Thomas Jefferson through the mud, which

45:39

I don't think is a good thing. History is about veridicality, it's about truthfulness. So you say,

46:05

John, what does this have to do with the topics that you normally cover? This isn't about social justice and evangelicalism, is it?

46:14

Well, hopefully I've shown you that, yeah, this is just one of the things, one of the tentacles that gets into even evangelical circles and it's streaming from some bad assumptions.

46:24

It's just not, it's not Christian to, it's not even just gossip, it's slander.

46:32

It's not Christian to slander someone, to potentially lie about them, to say things.

46:37

And this is one of the things, this is one of the contentions I have, is it's equally slander if you do it about someone who's dead, right?

46:45

I think there's a sense in which some people think it's not slander because the person's died and they've been dead maybe hundreds of years, maybe thousands of years, but they're not here to defend themselves.

46:57

So there's no, they can't push back, but it's still wrong. We can only go where the evidence leads us and we can only go as far as the evidence leads us.

47:08

We can't go beyond that. And that's exactly what's happening here. There's going really against some evidence and then going beyond whatever little evidence there might be that suggests that there could be a relationship between Jefferson and Hemings.

47:21

And then going the extra step of it's a rape. That is what we call a slander. There's just no reason.

47:27

There's no, at best you can say, well, there's a slim possibility this may have happened and it could have been a rape, this thing.

47:35

Or there's a possibility that Jefferson and Hemings had children together. And here's the things that might point to that.

47:41

And here's the things and also present. And there's also evidence that seems to not point to it, but primary source evidence primarily points away from it that it didn't really, that it most likely did not happen.

47:52

So I wanted to present this to you because I'm concerned that it's not just this, but a lot of things like this are just being baked in to our national mythology.

48:04

That what we think of, and we have flaws in this country. We have people, every man is flawed.

48:10

There's going to be things, but we don't need to bend to a narrative that just sees the whole thing as fundamentally flawed and definitionally evil and oppressive.

48:22

And therefore we need to now, we need to suppress actual facts, actual information we have in order to serve the narrative.

48:32

And that's what's happening. Truth is being sacrificed at the expense of a political narrative, a modern political narrative.

48:40

And make no mistake, these are the kind of people, they don't want to stop with Confederate monuments. They want to go way farther than that.

48:46

They would love to take down Thomas Jefferson. I just read just recently, Abraham Lincoln. It was one of the colleges here in New York.

48:54

There was a bust of him, an Abraham Lincoln bust with the Emancipation, I think, no, actually it was, I think it was the Emancipation Proclamation if I'm not mistaken, but behind him.

49:01

But it was Lincoln and either his inaugural or the Emancipation Proclamation at one of the

49:07

SUNY schools. I'm trying to remember which one it was now. I think it was SUNY Binghamton maybe.

49:13

Or no, no, it wasn't a SUNY school. It was Cornell, I believe. It was Cornell University. They just recently took it out.

49:19

No explanation. Why is it gone? Well, someone complained, that's the only thing. Someone complained. But we've seen

49:26

Lincoln being taken out of Boston and Lincoln's statue defaced in Portland, Oregon.

49:31

And I believe in Chicago, there was an attack, if I'm not mistaken, on a Lincoln statue. And I mean, you don't think that this narrative is starting to eat into other areas.

49:40

Think again. And I can pull up you a bunch of quotes from Abraham Lincoln that you would, in our modern day and age, consider to be remarkably racist.

49:49

That doesn't mean that he's not a very important figure to our country and someone that we need to understand.

49:58

And so, and someone who accomplished very important things.

50:03

And that's part of the issue with all this is things are being fundamentally redefined according to a negative.

50:10

And when we don't have enough of a negative, we just make stuff up. We just, we make the jump.

50:15

We make the connection, even if the connection's not warranted. And that's what's happening with Thomas Jefferson. Even if the connection's not warranted, we make the connection to Slanderham.

50:25

And look, Jefferson was a slaveholder, okay? You can say that, and that's accurate. He had slaves, absolutely.

50:31

You can say that Jefferson, as Mark Alachek just said, once had, it was possible that he may have had an affair.

50:41

He at least had lustful thoughts about another woman. I mean, you could say that about Thomas Jefferson. He wasn't an

50:46

Orthodox Christian, certainly. You can say that about Thomas Jefferson. I mean, he believed in the teachings of Jesus, but he wasn't, he was more deistic, for lack of a better term.

50:57

You could say that about, there's a lot of things you could say about Thomas Jefferson that would be negative for a Christian.

51:02

But you can't say stuff that didn't happen. And that's my point. That's what we can't be doing. And I've noticed that there's an effort to take people who had some great flaws and make them just the best.

51:16

Make them, honor them. They are great. I mean, Martin Luther King Jr.

51:22

is like this. Nelson Mandela's like this. Gandhi's like this. I mean, you take these figures and like, read about what

51:28

Gandhi did with boys. Read about what MLK did with women. Read about what

51:36

Nelson Mandela did as far as terrorism is concerned. Okay, all these guys have really bad, and that should probably be part of the narrative, you'd think.

51:44

I mean, if we're gonna be accurate about the guy, at least mention these. Those things are, you can't really mention them in most settings.

51:51

We just have to only focus on the mythology of how great these people are. Because guess what?

51:56

They forwarded the next rung on the ladder for what the left really values. And what conservatives also value to some extent in some places,

52:04

I suppose. But they're heroes to the left primarily. And that's why that you can't question them.

52:11

But then you take people like Thomas Jefferson, and we can ignore all the positive things or the unique contributions, the important things, and just focus on the negative.

52:22

That's using unequal weights and measures. God hates that kind of thing. And that's what's happening. It's happening in evangelicalism, and it shouldn't be happening in evangelicalism.

52:31

We need to be people of the truth. And I know we're people of the truth of scripture, but we should just be people of the truth in general.

52:37

If we're gonna be of the truth of scripture, let's be of all the truth. And so that's why I think the 1607 Project is important, because we want an accurate history as much as possible.

52:47

And one that also, I think, hits the right notes, emphasizes the right things, the things that are actually are important to the state of affairs that exist today, where we've come from.

52:58

So anyway, hopefully that was helpful for some of you. Possibly more coming later in the week. I'm not exactly sure.

53:03

There's just a lot going on. There's things in evangelicalism I also wanna talk about, but I have so much going on this week.

53:10

I'm not sure to what extent I'll be able to drop a podcast, but I hope this was helpful for you, especially on the heels of July 4th.