Today's subject is maybe the most controversial president in history, Thomas Jefferson saying our third president is a time honored American tradition. Martha Washington once said that the worst day of her life was when her husband, George, died, and the second worst day was when Thomas Jefferson visited her house. But plenty of people defend him, too. They'll say, oh, you know, Jefferson might have been a slave owner, but he was just a product of his time.

He might have had personal flaws, but he was a virtuous leader. And to that I say, please listen to the rest of this episode. You have no idea how wrong you are. Welcome to very presidential APAs cast original, I'm your host, Ashleigh Flowers, you can buy all episodes of very presidential and all other cast originals for free on Spotify.

And if you like what you're hearing, reach out on Facebook and Instagram at Precast and Twitter at podcast network. Thomas Jefferson has a complicated legacy.

On one hand, he wrote the Declaration of Independence. He was the champion of freedom and equality. But on the other, he kept over 600 people enslaved at his plantation, including some of his own children. And he was willing to walk all over the Bill of Rights to expand his own executive power.

Coming up, we'll dig up the truth, so stay with us. Thomas Jefferson was a man with three faces and none of them very attractive on the surface. He was calm and soft spoken, a wise philosopher, someone who stood above the fray of politics. He was a man of the common people. He wore simple black suits or on casual Fridays, he would greet foreign diplomats wearing his bedroom slippers.

That was the public face which he wore during his presidency. But Jefferson was no simple farmer. He was born and raised among the elite. That's persona number two. He lived on a massive super fancy estate in Virginia where he kept hundreds of people enslaved and he was as arrogant as they come. Jefferson prided himself on being cultured, forward thinking. All in all, a little over the top, he invented the swivel chair. He served a rare Italian delicacy at his dinner parties.

Get this mac and cheese with a shot of bourbon thrown in. One guest described it as not elegant and not agreeable. This guy even rewrote the Bible seriously. He cut up pages of the New Testament to take out all the miracles and then glued the pieces back together. He called it The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. And if that last point sounds like kind of a red flag, it is in Jefferson's world. He was his own God.

He had very strong morals and ideals. Yes. But they only applied to other people. He would rail against his enemies for doing one thing and then turn around and do the exact same thing, because in his mind, his own actions were always justified. And that's the third Thomas Jefferson, the vindictive, hypocritical, cold blooded maniac who do anything to win. That's the side that Jefferson himself would not even acknowledge anything that didn't gel with his morally upright image.

He would deny, deny, deny publicly and privately until his dying day. Unfortunately, that's the Jefferson who got himself elected president.

Jefferson first ran in 1796, the year George Washington stepped down. He lost. But back then, whoever came in second place in the presidential election would become vice president even if they weren't on the same side politically. That's how Jefferson became the VP to John Adams, his former friend turned mortal enemy. Now, they don't agree on anything. They're four years serving together were a nonstop cat fight. So when the next election rolls around in 1800, Jefferson refuses to lose again, he's willing to get personal and completely destroy Adams reputation, if that's what it takes.

But at the same time, it can't look like he's going after Adams because negative campaigning is basically unheard of in these days. Openly criticizing the president is a huge, huge breach of decorum, especially when you're the vice president. So instead of speaking out himself, what he does is he hires this journalist named James Callendar. He's this fiery anti-corruption crusader who will go after pretty much anyone in power. Calendar isn't afraid of anything and I mean anything. His life is threatened.

His house is broken into, but nothing will stop him from writing. So Jefferson hits a calendar and asks, hey, do you want to write this like epic takedown of John Adams? And Callendar says, Of course I do. But there is one little thing I'm worried about the Sedition Act. With the election coming up, John Adams party had passed a law that made it illegal to say anything bad about the president. Basically, they were like rounding up journalists left and right, and it's definitely unconstitutional, as James Madison, author of The Bill of Rights, is eager to remind them.

But of course, anyone who criticizes the law gets tossed in jail, too. Usually something like this wouldn't stop James Callander. But being a journalist barely covered the bills, and he was recently widowed with four young kids to support. So if he went to prison, they would be left with nothing. But Jefferson says, listen, don't worry about that. Here's what you need to do. Just move to Virginia. This is my home state. This is my stomping ground.

And no judge here is going to enforce the Sedition Act. I'll get you a job and I'll personally pay you in advance for this smear campaign against John Adams. Calendar is desperate. So he says, OK, I'm going to trust you on this one. And that was a bad mistake when he publishes his pamphlet, which is two hundred pages of glorious trash talk about the president calendar is pretty much immediately arrested after a trial that was all for show.

He sentenced to nine months in jail and a substantial fine. What a tragic turn of events, right? Oh, no. This was all according to plan. Calenders pamphlet itself was pretty divisive, but his trial transcript is the best propaganda in campaign history. Jefferson supporters spread it everywhere. Calendar is called a heroic martyr of liberty, the innocent victim of an unjust law signed by a tyrannical president, John Adams. The only way to stop him is to vote for the virtuous defender of freedom, Thomas Jefferson.

And it works. Jefferson wins over a thousand people packed into the Senate chamber to hear his inauguration speech. But missing from the crowd was the heroic martyr James Callander. Jefferson had promised to repay calenders fine as soon as he got out of jail. Well, Callendar was released two days before the inauguration, but in the past nine months, all he'd heard from the president elect was radio silence. The inauguration goes by, then another week and another. And he's got no word on when he's getting his money back.

He has three kids to support. The fourth had died while he was in jail. So he's getting pretty impatient. After a few months, calendar heads to DC himself, visits the White House and asked to see the president. Jefferson will not talk to him, but he does see Jefferson's secretary and tells him that if he doesn't get his money soon, Jefferson's going to regret it. Callander has dirt on everyone and he's not afraid to use it. All that does is make Jefferson furious.

He's not handing over any money to someone who's going to blackmail him. He basically says, screw you, goodbye and good luck. So Callendar goes back to Virginia empty handed, but with a plant. He opens his own newspaper and he writes all about how Jefferson paid him for those mean things he said about John Adams. And he says that he has the actual receipts to prove it.

This is hugely embarrassing for Jefferson, his whole non-partisan peacemaker image is at stake, so he takes the traditional path, deny everything he tells everyone, even his closest friends. He had nothing to do with Callendar.

He gave him a little bit of money as charity ones because he's just so concerned about the free press. But that's it. But then Callander brings out all the letters he'd gotten from Jefferson. Not only was he paid specifically for the pamphlet that got him arrested, but Jefferson had read and approved the draft before it was published at this point. Jefferson is trapped publicly. He just ignores the whole scandal like it's too ridiculous to pay any mind to. He's the president.

He doesn't have time to respond to all these lies and forgeries, but he has plenty of loyal journalists who do. Pretty soon for every newspaper that spreading the scandal, there's another that's just straight up attacking calenders, reputation. There's no way to prove that the letters are forgeries because they aren't. But they can paint Callendar as an unhinged maniac. The things they say about him are pretty awful.

He's a liar, an alcoholic. He has lice. One article said that his wife had died of an STD while Callendar was getting drunk and their children were starving. That's the last straw. Calendar says, OK, you want to make this personal, let's get personal. Thomas Jefferson, your virtuous and honest president, has a whole secret family and keeps them enslaved on his plantation. Coming up, we'll look at what's going on at Monticello. Hi, listeners, here's a series I think you're really going to like, we all know that medical professionals are trained to give exceptional care, but what about those who use their skills not to heal but hurt?

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Now back to the story. Thomas Jefferson is the reason why Washington, D.C. is where it is. Nobody likes a long commute. So when the plans for the new Capitol were being drawn up, he brokered a backroom deal to make sure it was close to home. Specifically about a hundred miles away from his personal estate, Monticello. This was Jefferson's utopia, a beautiful mansion at the top of a mountain, all white columns and domes surrounded by 5000 acres of gardens and fields.

He designed the whole house himself, and it was a monument to everything. He wanted to be refined, worldly, innovative and above all, unique. The entrance room is full of portraits and maps and sculptures. There's Native American art and a jawbone of a mastodon. Two on one side of the room. There's a huge bust of Jefferson himself on a green marble pedestal. Now, directly across from it is a much, much smaller bust of his number one enemy, Alexander Hamilton.

Yeah, he was that petty. And then there's the dining room. Jefferson threw a mean dinner party. He went all out on everything, even the serving. He had a little revolving door in the dining room that would bring in plates of food directly from the kitchen. And he had this pulley system installed to bring up bottles of wine from the cellar in seconds. But this wasn't just for the dramatics. It was also a way of keeping his enslaved servants out of sight.

Nothing ruins a meal quite like finding out it was made with slave labor. Sure, everyone knew Jefferson owned slaves, but as long as they were hidden away in a closet, it was almost like they weren't really there. Right. At least that's how Jefferson handled the problem. On paper, he was morally opposed to slavery. In his first draft of the Declaration of Independence, he actually wrote that it was an assemblage of horrors and a cruel war against human nature itself.

But if it wasn't for the hundreds of enslaved people working his land for free, he'd be broke. So obviously he can't just let them go. What was he supposed to do, move out of his massive mansion and get a real job? You're right.

He'd rather just sweep that problem under the rug and pretend it doesn't exist.

Over the course of his life, Jefferson enslaved six hundred and seven people. They didn't just work in the fields.

He created a whole little industrial village called Mulberry Road.

There was a cabinetmaking shop, a textile factory, a dairy. He had mechanics, blacksmiths, carpenters, you name it. He enslaved people to do it, and not just adults. At age 10, the little boys started working in the nail factory. At the end of every day, Jefferson personally weighed out how many nails each boy had made.

The fastest workers were rewarded with extra food and special uniforms, and the boys who didn't work hard enough were whipped. That definitely sounds like a horror movie, but the most troubling things were going on inside the mansion.

A lot of the household servants were members of the Hemings family. The matriarch of the family, Betty, was born into slavery and she belonged to Jefferson's father in law, John Wales. Over the years, Betty had 12 children and six of them were fathered by John Wales.

Under the law since Betty was John slave, so were their children, meaning he kept his own kids enslaved. Now, obviously, John Wills didn't openly acknowledge the Hemings children as his own, but everyone in the household knew they were treated better than the other slaves. But still, they were slaves and their lives were completely different from their half siblings. John's legitimate children.

Anyway, when John dies, his daughter Martha and her husband, Thomas Jefferson, inherit some of his human property, including the whole Hemings family, the youngest child who is still a baby is Salli. By some accounts, Sally looks a lot like Martha. I mean, they are half sisters after all. And that becomes especially disturbing when you consider what happens next. About nine years later, Martha dies at the age of just 33. On her deathbed, she makes her husband promise that he'll never remarry.

And Jefferson keeps that promise. But five years later, he's serving as the American minister to France. This is in 1787, a few years after the Revolutionary War ended. Some of his slaves had come with him to France, including Sally, who is now 14. And during that time, in the words of Sally's son, she became Jefferson's concubine. Now, there's a lot to unpack here. First of all, Jefferson is 44 at this point.

Sally is a 14 year old child. Second, he literally owns her. So the concept of consent is just out the window. Worst of all, he's also technically her brother in law and like the main male authority figure in her life, which makes it super uncomfortable all around. Unfortunately, we'll never get to know Sally's side of the story. Many historians hesitate to use the word rape. They'll say maybe they were in love. Maybe this teenage girl wanted to sleep with this guy who's basically her creepy uncle turned captor.

But let's be clear. That's insane. There's basically no possible scenario where this wasn't rape. And to make things even worse, by the time they were about to leave Paris, Sally was pregnant. Here's why that was so complicated. Any enslaved person who entered France could petition the court for their freedom. And in Paris, the courts always sided with the enslaved person. If Sally wanted to, she could walk away at any point and become legally free.

She would never have to go back to Virginia again. And at first that's what she wanted to do. But now put yourself in her shoes. You are a 14 year old girl in a foreign country across the ocean from the home where you've spent your entire life. And soon you'll have a baby that you have to take care of. If you stay here alone, your life is going to be a nonstop struggle. Or you can go back home to your family, to the place that, you know, inside and out.

You'll never be in control of your own life. But if you play your cards right, you might have some control over your situation. Jefferson knows Sally is thinking about staying in France, which gives her leverage to negotiate. He promises that if she comes back to Virginia, he'll make her life easy. He'll give her special privileges. And he swears that when her children turn 21, the age where emancipation becomes legal, he'll free them. Sally may never know freedom, but her descendants would eventually.

She agrees. Sadly, there are no records of what happened to Sally's first child, but it's believed that the baby died soon after being born. Over the next 20 years, though, Sally gave birth to six more of Jefferson's children, but only four of them survived past the age of two. Jefferson didn't show his kids any fatherly affection. He did allow them to learn skilled trades like carpentry and weaving instead of working in the fields. But still, any sort of child labor kind of disqualifies you from being father of the year.

But Jefferson made good on his promise. Eventually, when the kids came of age, they were freed and they didn't ever speak to him again. To answer the big question, yes, everyone noticed that the servants at Monticello looked suspiciously like Thomas Jefferson.

But this kind of thing was so taboo that no one in polite society would even whisper about it. But no one ever accused James Callendar of being polite. This brings us back to 1882, halfway through Jefferson's first term as president. A story runs in calenders newspaper under the short and sweet headline. The president again quote, It is well known that the man whom it delighted the people to honor keeps and for many years past has kept as his concubine one of his own slaves.

Her name is Sally. And quote, now, some of the details were a little off, but the story still spread like wildfire. It was the perfect storm of scandal, sexual misconduct, the controversy of slavery, the general hypocrisy from Jefferson who insisted that black people were inferior and yet had mixed race children. And in response, Jefferson was completely silent. He apparently learned from the first go around, you can't call calenders bluff if you deny it, he'll just dig up some evidence to prove that he's right.

The only way to deal with this story was by pretending it doesn't exist. But the story keeps spreading. There's no end in sight. So eventually Jefferson has to pull out a trick he learned from John Adams tossing journalists in jail. That's right. Remember the Sedition Act, which Jefferson had campaigned on overturning? It was gone by this point, but a lot of states still had their own libel laws on the books, and Jefferson encouraged them to make use of them carefully.

Of course, he wrote in a private letter that he wanted, quote, Not a general prosecution for that would look like persecution, but a selected one calendar, of course, was off limits. You don't want to make a martyr of him twice. Instead, Jefferson finds a patsy, a journalist in New York named Harry Crosswell. Just a week after the Sally story broke, he wrote an article about calenders, previous accusations that Jefferson had funded his pamphlet about John Adams.

A few months later, Crosswell was arrested for libel. Now, the only way to defend yourself against a libel charge is to prove that the statements you made were true. And the only person who could do that is James Callander. He still had all the letters he'd gotten from Jefferson that was enough to establish in a court of law that Jefferson was the mastermind behind the dirty campaigning. The defense fully intended to call Callander as a witness. But a week after the trial started, Callendar was found dead, floating in three feet of water in a river outside of Richmond, Virginia.

You might ask, how does a grown man drown in three feet of water? Supposedly he fell in and was too drunk to pull himself up. But then you might ask, what was he doing wandering around the river on the outskirts of town in the middle of the night? No one's really been able to answer that one. Not like there was much of an investigation. The coroner took one look at the body and ruled it an accidental drowning. And Callendar was in the ground that very same day.

Interestingly, the coroner of Richmond had been appointed by the governor of Virginia, who was Jefferson's close personal friend, not saying that there was a conspiracy here, but it definitely raises some eyebrows, especially since now the calendar was out of the way. Everything was smooth sailing for Thomas Jefferson. Harry Crosswell was found guilty of libel and none of calenders. Accusations were ever proven in a court of law, not the election scandal or the Sally Hemings scandal. By the time re-election rolled around in for all, the drama surrounding Jefferson had just quietly evaporated.

He easily won a second term, and that gave him more time to focus on his main priority as president, dismantling the entire U.S. economy. Coming up, I'll take a look at the most damaging part of Jefferson's legacy, the Embargo Act. Now back to the story. Jefferson's politics, like his personal life, were a mess of contradictions, but everything he did, at least in his opinion, was to prevent America from backsliding into a monarchy. And in the era of the Boston Tea Party, everyone knew that the most dangerous tool of the British monarchy was taxes.

Jefferson's whole platform was taxes are bad, banks are scary, economics is witchcraft. And the national debt is going to kill us all. Ironic for a man who was deeply in debt his entire life. The truth is Jefferson just didn't really seem to understand how money works. He lived beyond his means to the extreme. Monticello was constantly undergoing renovations during his time in office. He spent more money each year on wine than the average person today spends on housing and food combined.

And he didn't keep any sort of budget or ledger. He just did the math in his head and figured it was all fine. So you may wonder why a guy so terrible with money would be so hellbent on reforming fiscal policy. The thing is, for him, this issue wasn't just political, it was personal and it was petty. The whole financial system had been set up by Jefferson's least favorite person in the world, Alexander Hamilton.

Jefferson was convinced that the former treasury secretary was leading some evil conspiracy to take over the government and crown himself king, which is just as crazy as it sounds, but a lot of people believed it.

We know this because of Jefferson's greatest gift to posterity, a journal called the Anice.

This was basically his Burne book. He wrote down any gossip he heard about his enemies. There are 45 entries about Hamilton, most of which are either second hand rumors or crackpot conspiracy theories. One rumor even said that if Hamilton's plans for a monarchy didn't work out, the British had promised to give him asylum. So the moment he gets into office, Jefferson tells his treasury secretary, Albert Gallatin, we're going to tear down this entire corrupt system, go through the records and uncover the truth about Hamilton's, quote, blunders and frauds.

Gallatin comes back and says, well, actually, the Treasury Department is pristine. No corruption, no fraud, not a single miscalculation. He called it the most perfect system ever formed. In fact, any changes they made would actually make it worse. Obviously, that's not what Jefferson wanted to hear. He's a little disappointed, but he agrees not to dismantle the entire financial infrastructure. He will, though, get rid of most of it. He slashes spending guts, government programs and offices and shrinks the Navy down to a fleet of just six ships.

He repeals almost all taxes and completely abolishes the tax commissioner's office. A lot of Congress members try and point out to him that if they get rid of taxes, there won't be any money coming in to pay off the national debt, which was supposedly the top priority.

But Jefferson sure that it will all work out as long as he only spends money on the really important things, really important things like Lewis and Clark's voyage across the continent and the Louisiana Purchase, that patch of land cost the equivalent of about three hundred forty five million dollars in today's money. For once in his life, though, Jefferson's budget math is actually working. The national debt is going down. Everybody loves not paying taxes and the government is still bringing in money from import duties.

Foreign trade is the backbone of the economy in these days, and it's where more than 90 percent of the government's revenue is coming from. So everything's going fine until Jefferson signs the Embargo Act, which bans all foreign trade. You heard me all of it. With a few exceptions, there's a blanket ban on any U.S. ships traveling to any foreign ports anywhere. Why, you ask, it was supposed to be an act of aggression against Britain and France, both of which had been targeting American ships.

Jefferson didn't want to respond with military force, and it's hard to blame him since he'd shrunk the Navy down to six little gunboats. Instead, he wanted to pressure them into backing down by cutting off trade. Jefferson was warned even by his own Treasury secretary this was a bad idea. An all out war would do less damage to the U.S. in the long run. But Jefferson does not listen. He thinks what's the worst that could happen? Well, for Britain and France, two of the biggest empires in the world, the embargo didn't do much.

But within a couple of months, the U.S. economy was decimated, the GDP plummeted, unemployment was through the roof, and children were literally starving to death. But did Jefferson take a look around and admit he was wrong? Oh, no. He was convinced that the embargo was working and that the people liked it.

Sure, they had to make some sacrifices, including a few starving children.

But it was better than going to war, right. Pretty soon, though, the embargo is going so badly that Jefferson has to call in the military after all. But he's not sending them to Britain. No, he's declaring war on Vermont. The only reason the economy hadn't completely collapsed is because most traders decided to just ignore the embargo and smuggle their goods anyway. So in response, Jefferson declares that the region around the northern border is in a state of insurrection against the United States.

He tells the military to stop the smugglers by all the means in their power, by force of arms or otherwise. And then came the Enforcement Act. This law gave unprecedented, possibly unconstitutional power to one person, in particular the president of the United States.

No ship could set sail for a port even close to foreign shores without the express permission of the president. Any ship that was even suspected of foreign trade could be seized by the Navy without a warrant. And the person who could authorize their release was the president. And the president was allowed to use the military. However, he wanted to make sure the restrictions were enforced. Nobody was sure whether the enforcement act was even constitutional. At the very least, it violated the Fourth and Fifth Amendments.

Now, this is the same Thomas Jefferson who threw a fit over the Sedition Act, the same one who thought a sales tax was a step toward tyranny. And now he had put himself solely in control of all foreign trade in the United States.

As Jefferson learned, though, you can't deal with a national crisis the way you deal with, say, an enslaved mistress or a rogue journalist. You can't just hide the problem away and pretend it's not real. Even if you refuse to see it, everyone else still will. After six months of embargo, the protests had reached a breaking point. Jefferson had the honor of being burned in effigy at a Fourth of July gathering in New York. Even some of his own supporters were turning against him.

This was the last year of Jefferson's term and way before any of this embargo stuff happened. He'd already announced that he would follow Washington's example and not seek a third term, which gave him a convenient out. While the pressure was mounting. He kept doing what he always did deny any wrongdoing and let the next guy deal with the fallout. In his last State of the Union, he asserted that even though the embargo had hurt American citizens, it had shown them, quote, the necessity of uniting in support of the laws and the rights of their country, end quote.

He was right. By the end of his term, everyone was united in support of their rights and in opposition to the Embargo Act. It was repealed by Congress three days before the end of his term. Jefferson signed the bill, but he went home to Monticello, still convinced that he'd done the right thing. At some point over the course of history, we all came around to believe Jefferson's side, not on the embargo act. That's universally seen as a failure.

But most historians remember Jefferson for his bold rhetoric about democracy and liberty and states rights. They forget about how he abandoned all of those principles the moment they inconvenienced him.

Jefferson died on the Fourth of July 1826, 50 years to the day after the Declaration of Independence was approved. That same day, his lifelong frenemy, John Adams, was on his deathbed. You at about one o'clock, right after Jefferson passed, Adams sputtered out Thomas Jefferson and the rest of the sentence was impossible to understand. Those were his last words. His son thought that he was trying to say Thomas Jefferson survives, which is eerie, to say the least.

He was right, though. Jefferson died, but his legacy lives on. And apparently that thought was enough to scare John Adams to death. Thanks for listening, if you want to hear more episodes of very presidential, you can find them all for free on Spotify.

Very presidential was created by Max Cutler and Ashley Flowers in his Apakan Studios original, starring Ashley Flowers. It is executive produced by Max Cutler, Sound Design by Carrie Murphy with production assistance by Ron Shapiro, Carly Madden and Joshua Kern. This episode of Very Presidential was written by Kate Gallagher. To hear more stories hosted by me, check out Crime Junkie and audio check originals.

Killer nurses, deranged doctors, mad scientists, don't forget to check out the new podcast, original series, Medical Murders every Wednesday night, the worst the medical community has to offer men and women who took an oath to save lives, but instead use their expertise to develop more sinister specialties, follow medical murders free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.