the [applause] >> i want to thank edward and everybody here at garcia street books for inviting me to talk about the "the women jefferson loved" and all of you for bringing out the house and people who watch c-span that everybody in new mexico read many books. they probably think you need a

passport in order to get here. it is nice to have new mexico in the house and so many friends and family and lovers of books and i really want to thank you for promoting this event and what happens to me when i do a talk in the bookstore is go out with many more books than i came in with and lots of my books, all of those others things you picked up around here, check out with those two and we can say thank you to garcia street. my title is virginia scharff and that unlike a lot of comment. "the women jefferson loved". there were a lot of them. or how many were there? what i have learned talking about this book is everybody wants to know about thomas jefferson's sex life and everybody always has ever since he had one. but if that is all you want to know about that, this book will

disappoint you because it is also about what he did with his head and his heart. what i have found in my research about the women thomas jefferson loved and the women i talked about are his mother, his wife, his daughter's, patchy and paul e. his concubine, sally headings and the women of her family and i have a lot to say about them and his granddaughter's. all of these women where people for whom his love mental lot. it meant a lot to him not only for purposes of his private life but also his love for women shaved the way he worked in public. it shaped everything he did in politics. it shaped the legacy for which we revered him. this is a city of -- story about his private life and public accomplishments and how these two are connected. i have written a story based on

research into thomas jefferson and books about thomas jefferson are as rare as tuesday. what is this going to tell me that i don't know? the answer to that is tell you about the lives of these women, we used to say about women's history, you can't really find out about women. this is what we were told because the documents aren't there. if we did find women it is a boring story. made a couple puttings and put a collar on a dress. something like that. when i am here to tell you that we find out an awful lot about these women and even though someone burned every single letter between him and his mother, every single letter

between him and his wife, even those things have been burned and we have no letters, a woman who most historians believe board thomas jefferson at least one and probably six children, we have no letters between them. that is okay because what we have our patterns of things that are missing and what we also have is a wealth of other kinds of documentation that would blow your mind. everything from ideological evidence to public documents, private documents like wills and account books and things like that. many kinds of documents. and in fact there are letters between jefferson and his granddaughter or letters among the women of the family, his daughter's, granddaughters, sisters give us a very rich picture of these women's lives and these are not boring lives.

these women survived flood and fire and pestilence and two revolutions not incidentally. there were murders in their lives, murders of people close to them. a tremendous amount of domestic abuse, great joy and violence and coping with tragedy as well for all of the women in jefferson's life. so they had interesting lives. that is the first thing you need to know about the women jefferson loved. the second thing you need to know, i saw you looking at the family tree, the family tree we put together, jefferson, family tree, this has never been done before. most of them were blood

relations. who is the one woman we already know about? you asked me about this. sally headings, who was his slave. whose body belongs to him whether she wanted to or not. his granddaughter, jefferson's granddaughter was the leader of the effort to deny that this ever happened. in virginia among the senate, thomas jefferson, the denial of this story. it has been a cottage industry. and what alan coolidge said was this couldn't happen because it was a moral impossibility. you are laughing because you know there are a lot of things -- not that many in relationships that were

impossible. this was not a moral imperative. they were the second generation of women in the family. the second generation to have children together and they were not the last. what his granddaughter, free white granddaughter called immoral impossibility, was a family tradition. and something that shaped him for of her. there are two families are put together as one. this is a family that is a house divided. across this fiction, in the questions section i invite you to talk about this, how you put one story together between people whose interests are opposed by blood and terror and by money and everything else.

within this incredible regime in many questions of violence, intimacy and connection of a kind -- imagine being a woman who wakes up in the morning, half-sister was also your slave. imagine being that one of the first thing you are told in the morning, you will take my flops out now and i hurt my clothing in the ballroom. you are your aunt and slave and the woman sleeping with her father. think about the fact that he expect never to talk about this effect is possible.

this regime of tension and silence, that comes to grips with that story in a very real way. a story of families that shadowed one another throughout history. a story where one side of this family means the right family, denies and denies until very recently and the other side of the family can't say anything about it that they keep that memory alive in spite of denial. evidence comes out and we can talk about that as well in the questions section but that along with a million other historical evidence, these are people who are related by blood, intimacy

and secrets and silence. it is a controversial contention, i believe thomas jefferson loved these women and his love was powerful and he was strongly motivated by his love for the women, and depend upon him that he created an entire political order to the extent, all of his public accomplishments starting with his first public writings weather summary view of the right to british america to the declaration of independence. the northwest ordinances that establish a survey system and the louisiana purchase. every single one of these public accomplishments was intended to provide a platform, to pursue life and liberty liberty and happiness. they protect and provide for the women that they love. thomas jefferson did not believe

that men and women were created equal. he didn't believe that. he believed they were fitted by nature for complementary purposes. in turn, of the women and whoever was not quite free. they were made to nurture and obey and please. according to their natures they would be happy. you are laughing because you know real life gets away of ideals. they did this in the case of jefferson but he is not an idealistic guy in this regard. these ideals for the best thing included is another case. i am sorry to, what lived up to ideal of manhood of protection and provision broke his heart.

his only daughter of his marriage, he left destitute. when he died $100,000 in debt is daughter who was the woman i believe he loved most and longest and devoted her entire life to him in a really dedicated way was left to a place where was taken from her. of urban hurried human property had to be sold. the family treasures are put up along with the people they live with forever with certain exceptions. he could not keep that promise of providing and protecting -- it broke his heart and broke her is. the person to whom he did keep his promises most completely ironically is the person is legitimate family tried hardest

to deny which was sally having. he made promise to her. he said to heard -- just moving somebody out of the way here. it is standing room only. he said to sally headings in paris where he had gone and that is an interesting story to talk about how sally having got two parents. she made him promise that if she went back to america, with a first child, and the children we had. the only people freed in his will, and survive to adulthood, two walked away from the plantation with his approval and acceptance and assistance, two are freed in his will and

relatives, three other men were freed in his will. and soluble property was not available, had a little bit more. keeping his promise came at a cost for patchy randolph. thomas jefferson is not going to go around and say i love this woman. she will not be leonard dick capri of shouting get to the world. there will not be loyalty to the fact. according to madison amin's needed to be free. the other saying that this book taught me about writing this

book is how incredibly complicated love is. love can be lethal. his wife and eight pregnancies and died from them. the kind that had many children and survived it and the kind that had babies until they died. jefferson, and randolph. women who had a dozen children in their life, women who had eight children live to see one of them live to be as old as we are or did not live. his daughter patsy jefferson randolph had 12 children. eleven live to adulthood. it was pregnant for 23 years. if you think jefferson's

relationship with sally having as was complicated, you should know about patchy randolph and her crazy husband. that is a complicated relationship and i write a lot about it. love hills and it hurts. love is generous and love is possessive. love is kindly and love is brittle. you see all of the manifestations but we have to take law seriously in the life of a man who wrote so very many letters about love. i love you more than life itself. no one can make me so miserable or so happy as you. my love for you is the reason i do everything i do. he said this to his daughter facing a pregnancy that finished her off from the white house. i wish i could be at home in virginia with you but i can't be there because i am here doing something to ensure that all of

us can have the life i believe in for men and women and i am doing this out of love for you. people haven't taken that seriously before and i believe it is time to take thomas jefferson at his word. if he says i'm doing this for love that doesn't mean anything simple but it means he really means it. the problem that we had over so many years of denial of the shadow families across this is there are people who wanted to say to this very day and i have to say i get e-mails and started getting e-mails from them before the book was published. they get that google alert thing that, and they start writing to people saying couldn't have happened. moral impossibility. you are wrong, this is an invaluable. i don't care if you read every piece of paper out there are held his mother's family bible you are making this up.

he was a man who would never have done such a thing. i have thought about that a lot. the attempt to try to defend thomas jefferson against the charges that he had a complicated life. that he had a complicated family. i love talking about this in front of people in new mexico because if anybody knows complicated families we know about it out here. i gave a book talk in albuquerque and could look out and there is this really good friend of mine who found out when she was 35 years of the of the brother she thought was adopted was her mother's illegitimate son. there but six stories i could tell about the people standing in that room, families where people have married across lines of ethnicity. that is will be due for a living out here. i told this story and talked about this book, a really lovely

women's glove. in one of our big cities. all of these well-dressed women with really interesting questions and everyone of them appeared to be kind of lofty. they were served lunge by researchers who are uniformly african-american. at lunch was being served by could see the women who were seated and eating their lunches but were really riveted. there was room in back selling books, the service was finished and i expect they would go to the kitchen and they didn't go back. they stood behind women and all looked at me and as i was telling this story they were

listening. what i finally realized as i was talking, they knew what i was going to tell them which is what do we lose if we stopped denying that thomas jefferson had a multiracial family? what about the fiction that real american history is what american history? and jefferson had a shadow family that he cared about these people and women in his life, he loved them for better and worse. we gained a founding father who truly is a founding father for all of us. to belong to, that was the lesson that i learned from writing this book so i would be happy to take questions.

[applause] who wants to go first? >> speak about the dna. >> in 1998 the result of a dna study were released by dr. eugene foster and some collaborators. what they had done is go to a direct descendant of sally having this's youngest son who later called himself aston jefferson and lived as a white man in wisconsin at the end of his life. what they discovered was there was a gene that came from a jefferson mail. they traced a direct line to 8 jefferson mail. this did not mean that it was thomas jefferson specifically so they were able to narrow down

the ancestry to the jefferson lineage. a very rare gene. there is other evidence that the digest that thomas jefferson was that jefferson mail. what is interesting is throughout the history of the case for denial, white jefferson descended claim the western nephews who were protegees of jefferson and the hands of his sister who was his favorite sister. that would disprove it also by the dna study. they ruled out the car brothers. now weather have to do is find another culprit. they have gone to jefferson's who less gifted brother randolph. there is a very slim book, letters between randolph and thomas jefferson. randolph jefferson was no thomas jefferson. which is not to say he wasn't necessarily the father of these

children but we cannot establish that he was there when these babies were conceived. the only jefferson mail who was definitely and certainly on site when they were conceived was thomas jefferson. shi'ite never conceived when he wasn't there and he was gone a lot. she stopped conceiving at the age of 38 when jefferson is 63 and she stops conceiving children at that point. at 38, patch the randolph who was a year older than sammy having this -- sally having said four more days after this. babies after this. you have to look at this. a little complicated. they like to have people marry their cousin and that sort of thing. one genealogist referred to as this looks like a tangle of fish hooks. that is a wonderful metaphor for

it. historical evidence, evidence of likelihood, she never conceived except one he was round and stopped conceiving when he would have stopped being a part of it and also when patchy moved into the house. she had no children apart from this. along with the dna evidence and the fact that he freed the children, a powerful historical case. we don't demand this much proof of most of the things we assume to be true. >> a lot of history work is detective work and you have done a lot of detective work in this book. from your comments you work the lot from what is there but you also used some of the holes in the evidence to generate clues. can you give us an example of that? >> i would love to give you an example of that.

when historians say the documents aren't there, we have to assume that anything that is not documented didn't happen. i could tell you from my own life there are certain things i don't document. maybe all of you do. it is all on youtube now but not for me. in the case of jefferson there are moments when the burning starts, black parts of a or shock test. -- a roszak test. he has got to be ambassador to france and left behind his two younger daughters, one of whom is very tiny and was the baby that led to the death of his beloved wife martha. she dies of whooping cough and he decides little pauley, leads her to come to paris and he will never see her again. very sad thing. they have to figure out how to

get sourly from virginia to paris. they start doing this in 1784. it takes two years to figure out how to do this. let us go back and forth. he says i want a mature woman, preferably a man would do if he is very responsible chaperone. i need somebody who is much more and has been inoculated against smallpox. letters and letters and letters. fortunately thomas jefferson did a kind of documentation none of us do. kept a journal of every letter in or out and when you read the paper it is like missing letter. every time there was a discussion about who is going to bring her over, this slave isabel has a baby and gets sick and can't go even though we never inoculated her but we send her with this frenchman. suddenly she is on a ship and

guess who she is on a ship with? little sally having. 9-year-old paul jefferson going with a 14-year-old girl who is by no means a mature woman and has not been inoculated against smallpox and there is no place in this correspondence where you can find the name sally having source sally will bring her. it is not there. but many letters are missing. in some places pages of letters have been yanked out. just at that moment she goes missing. that is where you can say he or somebody after him sanitize the record and it is just as likely it was one of his granddaughters because in many ways that is when a kind of victorian memory takes over and victorians take custody of jefferson. they make him even more a marble statues and i would. >> since the book came outthan .

>> since the book came out -- have deniers influenced reviews -- >> not since the book has come out but 3 days before the book came out when they were publicizing another book talk i was going to give, got an e-mail from one of the chief deniers, the policeman of the internet. he got an e-mail -- virginia scharff's inaccurate books. i have not bought this book. i will not baez's book. i understand it makes this case and you should not believe it because this could have happened. it was randolph. the latter-day randolph, kind of came out. i am sure they will go after it. it has 3-1/2 starnes on amazon

because they will keep posting those zero star reviews but if you're going to tackle one of the titans you have to be role with that and be ready for it. there is no longer any point in asking whether this happened. the most important thing we can do is ask -- what business does it make that we know that to be our history? that we have a more complicated history. that is a more interesting history. >> it is the white, just as denying -- relatives were always a vociferous about this. i saw this on tv on the history channel. the others thing is other history like indian history, oh, let's start denying. you know it is only part of the population that is denying this.

the indigenous people know the story. >> however many decades or years, they are the ones who got to be in charge of what was true. now we have a lot more people participating in the conversation about the american past. you really have to hand it to people for keeping this memory alive by hook or by crook against all of the heavy weight of denial in the most august authority and turning out to have been right. ..

>> certainly if you are going to be a story in you have to do that. to see the ways in which, you know, i guess the road to destitution is paved with the best intentions. >> i'm looking forward to reading the book, but i am intrigued. you alluded that there might be a relationship between jefferson , you know, magnificence, and the women that he loved. can you expand on that a little bit? >> i will try to be as safe as a

possibly can. which peace to a want -- i guess i want to talk about the idea that what he intended to do -- we all know that he bought louisiana. we know he was the one who invented the wonderful grid survey system. he did this because he believed in the idea that dispersed farmsteads would give us a virtuous republic. he also believed that was the best way for men to be able to protect the women in their lives. there is a map i had made in this book of all of the places these women lived. if you look at that map and what a wonderful cartographer did is to make much furloughs. he believed that you have to be able to have these kind of secure bastions that are like little pot -- private patriarchies. that is how you establish a virtuous and happy and

beneficial republic for everybody. this foundation of equality for white men is based on the notion of the patriarchy at home. i don't put it in quite those affected the local terms, but i can trace it through this, the summary view of the rights of british americans. i can trace it into the louisiana purchase and in the northwest ordinance is. there are other things that i've found, little pieces of the declaration of independence that were actually deleted by the congress, one of which is a kind of surface, the fact that he was so terrified of what was happening, and particularly afraid that the insulate people on his plantation would rebel and kill his white family. he writes about that in the declaration. they think that out. his mother died in march of 1776. this is a long story that i won't go into.

but historians for a while thought that he hated his mother. i think instead when i found both in the passage of the declaration that is deleted and the letter to the road, clear evidence of his love for his mother. so you can feel this going forward, but it really has to do with the idea that you don't even -- it may be going on behind your back. he said over and over again i want to build this ideal republic because this will be the best way i can have an ideal family and every man like me can have one as well. >> kind of curious. one of the grave relationships of that time between a man and woman, john and abigail adams. i am wondering if you look into how their relationship might have had some kind of as a -- influence on jefferson and his

relationships between men and women. >> i think if it did it would have been like, i don't want to be like them. he was a great admirer of abigail. they were good friends. he just shows up in this book. it is actually abigail adams. when they finally put jefferson and sally on this boat it does not to paris where he is, but instead to london. abigail, is there. so he collects them off of the boat. he trusted her. they were already friends. he did not anything approaching and the liggett geothe egalitarian connection. she was his wife, half-sister. he likes to keep things in this family. one of his daughter married a third cousin. the other married a first cousin. his notion was he wanted women who would be pleasing, obey him,

not pushovers or dummies. he educated his daughters to be ideal plantation mistresses, but to be educated women. i indicated my dollars above their sex because i calculate their chances of marion a blockade at 8-1. so we better do this. i don't they he was really influenced. he thought they were yankees. to him that was an exotic species. he admired abigail adams. he wrote in a very touching letter. at the end he says i remember meeting her. with sally had means long after the whole scandal. the horrible things that jefferson had caused the journalists to write about john adams. you know, i never thought that i would be writing you a letter because we are so estranged. my heart goes out to you because

i remember pauli's so well, and i remember meeting her under circumstances most peculiar. she is reminding him. >> was sally handlings common knowledge? >> oh, yes. this is the first great american presidential sex scandal. when he was in the white house, 1804, he had to run for reelection. 893 there starts to be an inkling of, our president is involved with somebody. then there is this journalist named james thompson calendar. an english radical who had been jeffersons creature. jefferson had been paying him to say horrible things. a hermaphrodite that is not even a woman and this kind of stuff. but he turned on him when he refused to give him the post

office. he was in virginia and had been collecting dirt on jefferson. so he publishes these things saying, you know, our president has this enslaved black mistress, children who are running around monticello and look just like him. and at that point you say, all right. what should he do? the first thing he does is say nothing. i did not have sex with that woman. but what he did do is to things. the first thing he did was he insisted that his daughters come to washington, which they had never done and were unwilling to do. he is like we will buy you some weeks. they had to go to washington and do this.

so they had to go and fly the flag for him. he kept them out of public life except for that. we did this for you once and are not doing it again. phone us later. we are not doing it. so he made them fly the flag for him. and then the second thing that he did was, of course, they are certainly letting him know even if they are not saying directly, get rid of for. madison and monroe at this point, you know, it's like you could sell her. center to another plantation. he would not center anywhere. he sent her to her mother's house which was 200 yards from the big house. so he kept her around through the scandal. i think that says something about his loyalty to her anywhere. i got a feeling -- we are running out of time.

i think you very much. thanks. banks. thanks so much. they keep. they keep. >> stake you all. >> virginia scharff is a history professor at the university of new mexico and holds the woman of the west chair. for more information visit her website. >> hugh pope, where did you get the title "dining with al-qaeda: three decades exploring the many worlds of the middle east"? >> it was better than eating chinese with al qaeda which apparently some people thought might have been unrealistic. it recounts an episode where i am in riyadh. very soon after the september 11th i was sitting down with a missionary from the al qaeda camps had been.

the dinner was awkward. i'm going to kill you. i said i do assure you that's not necessary. i speak arabic. after about half an hour i convinced them that i was a person who wanted to hear his story. in those days you could still be innocent in the middle east. i learned a lot about the way that he talked and what he told me but his kids. very difficult for americans to believe that people have normal lives back home. trying to humanize the middle east, not to justify terrorism, but to explain what the context is. >> how would you say you hooked up with him? >> as usual, these things are quite random. i had a friend to give me a contact. at a certain point they drove me

to the outskirts of town and suddenly someone is introduced. i was lucky. i was with the "wall street journal" just a few months later and did something that was a little bit more like an ambush, but still not much different from that. he had his head cut off. i feel very lucky that i got a way to tell the story. >> what did you learn? >> i think i learned that the reason that he wanted to kill me that the start of the interview was that he thought i wanted to kill him. that is the key day. he must remember that in most complex it always feels much more. that is the main lesson. we are conducting military exercises. we should be aware that it is felt quite deeply by the people there. it is not just what is being

felt. >> are you still in contact with anyone associated with al qaeda? >> now, partly the reason i gave up journalism. twenty-five years in the field. after the war, whatever is the only correspondent for mondays piper going to and trying to claim why the war was pointless, logically and sound and would blow up in their face literally, not being taken seriously at all. journalism makes a difference. i am happy that i was a journalist. ultimately i could not go on with the old system. the have a british passport. i worked for the "wall street journal" which supported this war. i am going up to ordinary people

saying talk to me, tell me your story, and it will make a difference. i felt that it did make a difference. i stopped believing it. >> i resigned. luckily enough two years later i joined the international crisis group. i am feeling much more happy with my work now. >> hugh pope is the author of "dining with al-qaeda: three decades exploring the many worlds of the middle east." take you, sir. >> you are watching book tv on c-span2. here is our prime time lineup. alan taylor with a history of the war of 1812 and his book.