DS: 00:00:00 Good day, Thomas Jefferson Hour podcast listeners, and welcome to this week's edition and it's a real fun one, and it's long.

CSJ: 00:00:08 Well we added some extra content because I was on the road in a concert edition of the Jefferson Hour. Sometimes public radio stations around the country do a live, as if live, performance of the Jefferson Hour where there's a local host in this case, it was a man named Dustin Treiber in Pittsburg, Kansas and they go on because this is an evening when 500 people have driven to this performing arts center

DS: 00:00:34 the University of Kansas at Pittsburg

CSJ: 00:00:37 and Pittsburg without an "h", so the US postal system at one point tried to eliminate confusion, so they took the "h" off of this Pittsburg. It's an old coal mining district, beautiful part of southeastern Kansas, I actually flew to Springfield in Missouri and then drove in a rental car through some of the most beautiful farm country in North America.

DS: 00:00:58 You were amazed at this new facility. It's just a world class -

CSJ: 00:01:03 I go all over and I perform in all sorts of places and I'm always happy in a small theater or a ramshackle old proscenium theater, town hall in, in Seattle. And so every sort of venue that you can imagine. So I didn't have very high expectations because - an auditorium is an auditorium, and they take me there and it is this world class gleaming aluminum and glass place.

DS: 00:01:28 Well, I, I can say as an audio guy, the, the recording of the performance that they sent to us to, uh, to broadcast this week was just pristine and one of the best ever.

CSJ: 00:01:41 It was so much fun to be on that stage and look out. And I thought, oh, it's a tiny place in southeastern Kansas. A couple of hundred people might come, maybe you know, and there were 500 people and the energy you can say you can feel -

DS: 00:01:56 And yeah, like I said earlier, you really good at this. I mean, I can, I can understand why you're in such demand to do this, but um, I, I need to follow up on that recording and, and I don't know who to to thank, but I, I, I really do appreciate them -

CSJ: 00:02:14 The good folks at KRPS did the engineering and Dustin Treiber is one of their people and the Jefferson Hour is, is, is not exactly his portfolio, but he rose to the challenge and it was fantastic.

DS: 00:02:26 Let me take this task away from you and pitch may I? You do these kinds of fundraisers, live performances all over the country and you're really good at it. And if people are interested, they should go to Jefferson Hour.com and contact us and somebody will get, get back to you

CSJ: 00:02:46 And let me say about the cultural tours. January - two of them are mid January, Lochsa lodge, this fabulous resort west of Missoula, Montana. It's not cold. There's no wind. It's Balmy, almost. Open fires around the campfire every night out amongst the great pine tree - first one water in the west.

DS: 00:03:08 And program alert a couple of weeks from now. We're going to have an interview with Char Miller and the third edition of Ogallala -

CSJ: 00:03:16 the aquifer out in Kansas, but this is about the Colorado water project. Marc Reisner's, great book, Cadillac Desert, the whole world of the future of water given global climate change and the population surges in the American southwest,

DS: 00:03:29 And then Shakespeare

CSJ: 00:03:29 and the Missouri River. And then the next one, this is the next one. They're back to back at this lodge. They're four days each and the next one is Shakespeare without tears back by popular demand and people - Some people say, is this going to be intimidating as - you know is - I don't want to go to something where it's going to be like, I feel like I'm stupid. No, these are so informal. There's a ton of laughter. We have the greatest possible time and it is not intimidating and it's just open discussion about important themes in American history through the lens of these books about water in the West and then four or five of Shakespeare's -

DS: 00:04:03 And then you and Russ Eagle

CSJ: 00:04:04 Going to Monterrey in California for the second Steinbeck trip. March two through eight. Two thousand 19 out in California.

DS: 00:04:13 And then lastly

CSJ: 00:04:16 Jefferson and France

DS: 00:04:17 which we about half of the email we get now is about -

CSJ: 00:04:21 That will be in October. We're just pricing it.

DS: 00:04:23 You're going to have to do two or three

CSJ: 00:04:24 Or 10. Well, I can't wait to take our listeners to Jefferson's France, but they should warm up with these winter encampments at Lochsa Lodge and let me just say I'm not going to go far with this, but Russ Eagle, you mentioned, you remember on a program, I said I hauled him up a mountain. Remember that? Well, he took umbrage and he has now challenged me. He hired a lawyer, another listener by the name of Joe from Texas. Joe has sent me a demand letter saying that I must either apologize or disappear forever into the mist. Russ, I just saw last week at Monticello and Russ said, alright, buddy. Grudge match.

DS: 00:05:07 They can go see the steinbeck thing and then witness, uh, like a Hamilton/Burr duel.

CSJ: 00:05:11 No, it was worse. He wants a return hike up Mount Whitney - if he wins - I have to give him my 13 volume addition of the Oxford English dictionary

DS: 00:05:25 To be continued

CSJ: 00:05:28 If I win he has to get me the obelisk clock from the foot of Jefferson's bed, the replica, at Monticello, it's a grudge match. And, and so now we're training.

DS: 00:05:35 Hey, you're breaking up.

CSJ: 00:05:37 Yeah, but you see what happens. Insult Crisler. You don't get the gifts. If you insult Russ, even though - then he gets all out of shape and Joe Lovell's calling me with demand letters.

DS: 00:05:51 So here we go. Now to Kansas. It's a real fun show. I hope you enjoy it. And again, we will say we, we, it's a long one because the performance was about 90 minutes and we decided not to edit it down, but just run the whole -

CSJ: 00:06:04 Gamut of it.

DS: 00:06:06 And so we hope you enjoy it. And a quick program alert. Next week we're going to be rejoined by our good friend, the Pulitzer Prize winning author and the National Book Award Winner, Joe Ellis, who personally told me to call him Joe.

CSJ: 00:06:20 American dialogue. The founding fathers and us -

DS: 00:06:23 He has a new book coming out in the next week or two.

CSJ: 00:06:25 You have a. You have a pristine copy in front of you.

DS: 00:06:28 I do because his publicist sent me -

CSJ: 00:06:29 I got this little blue thing, the draft,

DS: 00:06:34 It's a great book, American dialogue, and that'll be next week's show just so if you're interested.

CSJ: 00:06:39 Thanks for listening. Let's go now to the show.

DT: 00:06:45 Well thank you ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Thomas Jefferson Hour. You're a weekly conversation with President Thomas Jefferson. Mr Jefferson is portrayed by humanitarian scholar, author and creator of the Thomas Jefferson Hour Mr Clay Jenkinson. My name is Dustin Treiber. I'm the KRPS program director. I'll be your host today and we're recording live at the Bicknell family center for the arts. We are on the beautiful campus at Pittsburg State University in Pittsburg, Kansas - the extreme southeast Kansas, for those listening who don't know where we are, so without further ado, I want to welcome President Thomas Jefferson.

DT: 00:07:39 Good day, Mr Jefferson.

CSJ as TJ: 00:07:40 Oh, good day to all of you citizens. I must say. I am so pleased to be invited to this deep into the American west, as you know, I'm regarded as the foremost architect of our westward expansion, but I never traveled farther than 75 miles west of my birthplace in Virginia. And so I bought Kansas but I never saw it. And so it's a, it's a real pleasure to be able to be here and to greet all of you. I have one concern as I begin. And I, I thought a lot about the American west. I wrote extensively about it and I actually believed that any creature once created probably still existed. I did not understand evolution and I did not believe in extinction. And so I actually urged Meriwether Lewis and other of my explorer friends, to look for the woolly mammoth in the American west or the mastodon or the megalonyx and hope that they would find evidence that those creatures still grazed somewhere on the great plains. They unfortunately did not bring back any evidence of the mammoth or the mastodon. But you can imagine my surprise when I arrived here and learned that you still have gorillas here. My young friend, Meriwether Lewis, did not describe that.

DT: 00:09:29 We're very proud of our gorillas here at Pittsburg State University. Mr Jefferson are our topic tonight that we'll be talking quite a bit about is the Louisiana purchase. So you purchased Kansas along with, uh, our, our KRPS listeners. Here's in Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma. So we're smack Dab in the Louisiana territory, which I think most people remember back in high school is, was New Orleans stretching up to the Canadian border and doubled the size of the United States. It was bought from France, from Napoleon for 15 million dollars. And was one of your huge accomplishments during your presidency and that's probably about all I remember about, but there's an amazing chain of events that caused all this to benefit the United States. So in, in your words, Mr Jefferson, can you tell us a little bit about this major purchase of Kansas and the surrounding area?

CSJ as TJ: 00:10:22 Well, first let me say that I don't take particular credit for the Louisiana purchase. It happened on my watch. It happened in 1803 while I was serving my first of two terms as president, but I hadn't actually intended to buy that territory from Napoleon. When I became president, I inherited a foreign policy problem and that is that the Mississippi river was being closed periodically by the French or the Spanish or both. And it seemed to me that under natural law the river should stay open. But it certainly was important to our economy. Fully three eighths of our territory was watered by the Mississippi River. And you need to understand that in my time rivers were roads and roads were rivers. So our produce, our wheat and our corn and our tobacco and our cattle and our timber and so on were finding their way to market down the Ohio and the Tennessee and, but particularly the Mississippi and if there is a foreign power like France or Spain in New Orleans and they can shut the river off at any point that could strangle the American economy. And so I felt, under the commerce clause of the constitution, that I had a duty to try to open the river. So I actually convinced Congress to be willing to spend $6,000,000 to buy the village of New Orleans. If we could buy New Orleans, we could station troops there and we could keep the river open. Or if the French or the Spanish were not willing to sell, then perhaps we could buy another port somewhere in the delta of the Mississippi. Well, I sent my young protege, James Monroe over to France to work with our ambassador there are, our diplomat there, a man named Robert Livingston. And they offered to buy New Orleans for up to 6 million. Napoleon in this very odd counter offer, instead of selling me New Orleans for $6,000,000, offered to sell me the Louisiana territory for 15.6 million. So I was going to buy a village for 6 million. Instead, I bought an empire for liberty for three times that amount. I bought 575 million acres for three cents per acre. Think of that. I bought 575 million acres for three cents per acre, 828,000 square miles, as you said, it doubled the size of our Republic, it meant that our eastern shore was the Atlantic and our western boundary was now the continental divide of the rocky mountains of the West, and so I don't take any particular credit because I didn't really intend it. I knew that in the long run the Americans would control everything from the Atlantic to the Pacific, that it's. It was inevitable that, that, that our extraordinary experiment in self-government would find its way from Frontier Ridge to frontier ridge all the way to the Pacific. But I saw that as hundreds of years down the line, and I will tell you in all honesty that I'm - I hope you are too. I'm a strict constructionist. I want our constitution to be literally in narrowly interpreted and it seemed to me that the Louisiana purchase was probably unconstitutional. So I fretted about this. I didn't know whether to turn down the offer, but James Madison, my secretary of state, always a more pragmatist than I was. He said to me, Mr Jefferson make the purchase on behalf of the future of human liberty and we will finesse the constitutional question somehow, um, but, but I did not like that because if you, if you move into Mr Hamilton's world of broad construction, implied powers and so on, then you may as well write your constitution on wax and stretch it into any shape that pleases you from moment to moment. Our peculiar security is having a written constitution and to take a single step beyond its boundaries is to enter a world of, of metaphysics. And so I actually wrote two draft constitutional amendments that summer in 1831 to authorize the purchase and the other one to authorize the incorporation of these places by way of New Territories and eventually do states like Kansas. And I was wanting to let the people decide, let you the sovereign decide if you wanted to expand the constitution for this, what I called fugitive occurrence. But as I say, Mr Madison said, I don't think anyone is going to be sorry that you did this. And so on that basis I accepted it. [Inaudible question from the audience.]

CSJ as TJ: 00:16:01 Yes, but, but the minute, I hope you will agree with me, the minute your national government begins to look for loopholes and to find ways to do things that weren't intended by the founding fathers and to stretch this and to twist that, then you begin to live in a, in a, in a society where there are no controls on the size of government and I hope you all agree that that government is best which governs least, and it's in our interest to make sure that government does not begin to do things that we have not as a people authorized it to do.

DT: 00:16:42 And just playing devil's advocate though, sometimes - it worked out for the best, I guess is the best way of saying it though. It is kind of a necessary evil almost.

CSJ as TJ: 00:16:52 That cannot be your constitutional theory.

DT: 00:16:54 Sure.

CSJ as TJ: 00:16:54 It worked out for the best. I take your point.

DT: 00:17:00 Um, if we can go back to a little bit of the history of the Louisiana territory, it switched hands. It was discovered in, I guess, claimed by the French

CSJ as TJ: 00:17:09 Or the French and the Spanish, a number of, of, of different foreign - This was called the doctrine of discovery, so when the French arrived or the Spanish arrived with English arrive, they would plant a flag and do a ceremony and build a stockade and then this would give them under international law claims to these territories. And so we had never claimed the Louisiana territory. Um, when, when the, when the revolution ended, the treaty brought us everything up to the Mississippi River, which was a huge Republic. We thought it would take decades, maybe centuries to fill that republic. It did not. I'm sorry that it didn't. I know I'm getting ahead of you, but I was, I was involved in a project in 1784 to create a plan for the new states that would come from the west. We had the original 13 and then beyond the Appalachians, it was inevitable. The new states would come and it seemed to me that we hadn't yet developed them and we could do this rationally. And so I actually laid out a plan that when there was the minimum population number, that place could become a territory. And when it reached the population of the least populated existing state it could sue for statehood and it had every republican form of government and so on and so forth. There would be school land set aside for public education. But here's what I thought was so, so interesting. I laid down the rectangular survey grid system that you all live under where the square miles and the townships and 640 acres and 40 and so on. That rectilinear grid is one of the great rational moments in human history. From Monticello, I laid down this geometric grid and essentially every acre in Kansas has been determined by that moment of rational plannin. On the old metes and bounds system. If you and I were next to each other and the boundary was the tree and the tree was blown over in a tornado, we might be in a dispute, but under my system, if we got into a dispute, we'd call in a geometrician and he would tell us instantly whose property is which. And so this is rational. Well, I wanted to go farther actually said to George Washington now it would be the time to adopt a decimal metric system. If we do it now. Don't you agree? If we had done it then think how much happier you would be if you had a decimal metric system, and I said every state west of the Appalachians can now be a square and identical in size because you know the. If you've studied the constitutional convention, the big problem was the big states versus the little states, Rhode Island versus Pennsylvania, and it nearly broke down several times over this issue - Virginia, the most populous state, the largest state, and then you know, pitiful little Delaware. We eventually had to give them two senators to cheer them up, which is not one man, one vote at all. And so I thought we can fix this in the west. Every new state will be identical in size and perfectly square. Imagine how rational that would have been. And I actually laid out the first 14 in the Ohio valley and gave them names from classical literature and from native American Culture. Pelisipia via Metro Batavia and Metropotamia, Polypotamia, Michigania, Sylvania. Perfectly Square. And the only problem then was the irrationality of the Great Lakes because you can imagine, I actually said we could work with Britain to square them off above the lakes, but if you look at a map of the United States, as you move west, it gets more rational until you get to Colorado and Wyoming and four corners here in Kansas, as you know, you are almost a rectangle and I personally don't know how you sleep at night knowing that there is a sinuous border that does not lend itself to geometry. But you see my point,

DT: 00:21:45 Well that's on the north side of the state. It doesn't really matter to us

CSJ as TJ: 00:21:48 You know, you think I'm joking but I wanted a square America.

DT: 00:21:56 That's ambitious. It really is. So I. it's very good because we do have that squared. Well from most part in Kansas. And it probably helped. I mean Kansas had to be easy to do that too because you know, we just discovered trees.

CSJ as TJ: 00:22:10 It was Meriwether Lewis, my friend went up the Missouri River in 1804. He had been my private secretary in the White House. His mother was a friend of mine. Her name was Lucy Marks, and she raised Turkeys and Hams for the tables of Monticello and she was an herbalist. She, she knew the folk medicine of the Appalachians and taught her son some of that, but at any rate, he. He became my private correspondence secretary when I began serving as president and in February of, of 1801. And I had been dreaming of a reconnaissance mission up the Missouri for most of my life. So I sent him and I urged him to examine the western territories and to determine their suitability for agriculture and to meet the native peoples and to and to enter into peac