A 48-year-old Jefferson in 1791, in a portrait by Charles Willson Peale
As America celebrates 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, few founders have been claimed, reshaped, and rejected as often as Thomas Jefferson. On this episode of Big Blend Radio's Way Back When History Podcast, Lisa D. Smith talks with historian Francis D. Cogliano, professor of American history at the University of Edinburgh and co-author with Peter S. Onuf of Thomas Jefferson Survives: American Independence in His Time and Ours (Liveright, 2026).
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Big Blend is an independent media company, aligned with neither the left nor the right, and this conversation sets the labels aside to look at Jefferson in his real historical context. It also hits close to home. The historic Jefferson Highway, the 1915 auto trail from Winnipeg to New Orleans that Lisa and Nancy have traveled for years, was named for Jefferson because it runs right through the Louisiana Purchase.
About the Book
Thomas Jefferson Survives isn't a typical biography. It grew out of more than a decade of summer seminars Frank and Peter led for American school teachers through the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and it captures the spirit of those discussions in three interrelated essays: "Generations," "My Country," and "The People." Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed, who encouraged the project, wrote the foreword.
Key Conversation Highlights
Claimed by both parties. Frank contrasts Franklin Roosevelt, who dedicated the Jefferson Memorial in 1943 and called Jefferson an apostle of liberty during World War II, with Donald Trump's defense of Jefferson at Mount Rushmore in 2020. Both invoked Jefferson, but toward very different ends.
Why the left stepped away. Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal while enslaving more than 600 people over his lifetime. Frank explains how that contradiction, along with his relationship with Sally Hemings, led many on the political and academic left to distance themselves from him this century, from the end of Jefferson-Jackson Day dinners to New York City's 2021 vote to remove his statue from the council chamber.
The Empire of Liberty and its cost. Jefferson envisioned a continental republic, engineered the Louisiana Purchase, and sent Lewis and Clark west. Frank is clear that this vision came at the expense of enslaved people and Indigenous nations, even though the phrase "Manifest Destiny" wasn't coined until the 1840s, after Jefferson's death.
Judging the past without distorting it. Frank tells his students that every one of us is wearing or carrying something made under conditions we'd find unacceptable. The questions we ask of history are shaped by the present, he says, but we shouldn't let the present distort our understanding of the past.
A coat he wore as a boy. Jefferson believed a constitution should grow with the people, and that we shouldn't be bound by our "barbarous ancestors," a phrase in which he included himself. Frank shares the story of James Madison sending Jefferson the new Constitution in 1787, and Jefferson's lukewarm reply, worried that without a Bill of Rights a president might become a king.
The earth belongs to the living. Jefferson's phrase, written to Madison in 1789, sits at the heart of the book. Each generation faces its own challenges and has a responsibility to pass the republic on in better shape than it found it.
The deleted slave trade clause. Jefferson's draft of the Declaration condemned the transatlantic slave trade and spoke of the rights and liberties of a distant people. Congress cut it. Frank argues that the clause makes "all men are created equal" a far more universal and radical statement, one of the few points where he and Peter Onuf slightly disagree.
A kitchen table conversation. Lisa describes the discussions the book sparked between her and Nancy about Jefferson's failings on women and the questions that still surround Sally Hemings: what she felt, and whether history ever let her tell her own story. Frank's response: this is exactly the kind of conversation the book hopes to start, and there's no teacher's edition with the answers in the back.
History from across the pond. Frank reflects on teaching American history in Scotland, where students from around the world see the reach of American power in ways many Americans don't, and shares the story behind the Whiskey Rebellion podcast he co-hosts with fellow historian David Silkenat.
"Jefferson is America writ small. He embodies our promise and the promise of the country, and its limitations, and the things we have to reckon with."
The book's key takeaway, as Frank puts it, is that Jefferson had more faith in future generations than we often have in ourselves. He handed down principles, not answers, and trusted each generation to take on its own problems. At America 250, that may be the most useful thing he left us.
Thomas Jefferson Survives authors Francis D. Cogliano and Peter S. Onuf
Resources & Links
Francis D. Cogliano is professor of American history at the University of Edinburgh and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He is also the author of A Revolutionary Friendship: Washington, Jefferson, and the American Republic. Peter S. Onuf is the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia.