The Thomas Jefferson
Heritage Society will present a forum on April 11, 2015, at the University of
Virginia’s Jefferson Scholars Foundation titled, “Thomas Jefferson: The Man Behind the Myths.” In the past few decades, historical
scholarship has obscured the true character and thought of Thomas Jefferson. This forum will address misconceptions and
misunderstandings concerning the historical Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson was a man of profound
dimensionality. He was a statesman,
politician, philosopher, architect, meteorologist, farmer, philologist,
paleontologist, biologist, and inventor, among other things. Nonetheless, he is generally known to the
public today only as the writer of the Declaration of Independence and an owner
of slaves. This conference will explore
beyond this narrow perception of America’s third president.
Because
Jefferson wore so many hats, he is enshrouded in myths. The
Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society has invited scholars of excellent reputation
to explore the person behind those myths. Topics to be discussed include Jefferson’s
learning process, his conception of history, his
notion of the relation between the mind and body, his
importance as an architect, the influence on him of the Christian religion, and
the centrality of morality in his political philosophy.
The seminar will be held on Saturday, April 11, 2015, in Charlottesville, Virginia at the
University of Virginia’s Jefferson Scholars Foundation, located at 112 Clarke Court;
Charlottesville, Virginia, from 9:00 a.m. to 4:40 p.m. Admission to this
special event is free and open to the public.
The program will begin at 8:30 a.m., with morning welcome,
conviviality and refreshments for all participants; and will include periodic
breaks with a 12:00 Noon lunch hour for dining and fellowship at several popular
local restaurants within a few minutes’ walk of the Jefferson Scholars
Foundation facility. A public question-and-answer discussion
will be held by each of the speakers following their address.
The Morning Session will be moderated by Dr. White M.
Wallenborn, M.D., Past-President of the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society and
former Monticello Guide.
9:15
a.m. – Mark Beliles, “Doubting Thomas? The
Distorted Religious Legacy of Thomas Jefferson”
Currently,
most people regard Jefferson as a Deist or life-long skeptic who thought
religion and government should have nothing to do with each other; however,
recent evidence shows that this is not true. This lecture will draw from about
1100 religious letters and papers of Thomas Jefferson and provide a more
accurate context of the vast majority of his religious statements and actions. Beliles has recently put in print over 50
Jefferson letters that have never been previously published. In the setting of the unique religious culture
of Central Virginia, a more nuanced picture of Jefferson’s religious life
emerges that challenges both secular and religious scholars to reassess
Jefferson’s modern image that is a distortion of reality. Reasons will presented for the modern
distorted image and a description of that image dealing with his relationship
with clergy and churches, his views of the Bible and the doctrine of the
Trinity, and his views of separation of church and state. A more accurate religious life of Jefferson
will be presented that shows five distinct stages of development. A true religious legacy is discussed as well
that has blessed America and the world.
Mark
Beliles is author or co-author of several scholarly books including Doubting Thomas? The Religious Life and
Legacy of Thomas Jefferson (2014, Morgan James Publishers with Jerry Newcombe), and the Selected Religious Letters and Papers of
Thomas Jefferson (2013, America Publications). His
Ph.D. dissertation is Free as the Air: Churches and Politics in Jefferson’s Virginia
(2000, America Publications). Beliles founded the Providence Foundation
in 1983 and has convened several scholarly symposiums about Jefferson and
religion at the University of Virginia co-sponsored by the Virginia Foundation
for the Humanities. Residing in
Charlottesville, he served a dozen years as the Chairman of the Historic
Resources Committee for the city of Charlottesville and co-chairman of its 250th
anniversary held in 2012. Beliles has
also worked 36 years as a pastor. He
presently serves as president of the Global Transformation Network as a
lecturer, writer and leadership coach. In
this capacity he has traveled and spoken in over 40 countries and many cities
in the United States.
10:15
a.m. – J. David Gowdy, “Thomas Jefferson and the Pursuit of Virtue”
In
stark contrast to contemporary portrayals of him as a radical individualist and
libertine, Thomas Jefferson’s life and writings evidence a steadfast conviction
to precepts of virtue and morality.
Sources of his virtuous habits and moral reasoning may be traced to: (a)
his Anglican upbringing and church attendance (tied to Anglican preaching in
the Colonial Era); (b) his private study and public endorsement of classical
texts such as Aristotle, Cicero, and Sidney, as well as Washington’s Farewell
Address (for use at the University of Virginia); and (c) his own teachings woven into his
letters to family and friends (not to mention his selections of poems,
literature and anecdotes chosen to be shared and remembered in his personal
scrapbook). Jefferson’s lifelong pursuit
may be defined by his statement that, “Happiness is the aim of life. Virtue is the foundation of happiness.”
J.
David Gowdy received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Kansas
State University, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, and received his Juris
Doctorate degree from the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young
University, graduating Cum Laude. He has practiced law and founded several
businesses and is a member of the Texas and California Bar Associations. He is the founder and President of the
Washington, Jefferson & Madison Institute in Charlottesville,
Virginia. The Institute provides continuing
education courses to secondary school government and history teachers, and
civic groups, on the principles of the Constitution and the lives and writings
of the Founding Fathers. He is the
author of “Seven Principles of Liberty” and “Jefferson & Madison’s
Guide to the Constitution.” He also serves on the Advisory Board of the
Center for American Studies at Christopher Newport University. He and his wife live in Crozet, Virginia, and
they have seven children and thirteen grandchildren.
11:15 a.m. – Richard
Guy Wilson, “Thomas Jefferson Architect: Myth and Reality”
Thomas
Jefferson is arguably one of the greatest if not the greatest American
architect. He helped to give the United
States a public image in architecture that relied upon the classicism of
Europe. But what was his intention and did the buildings contain political
meanings? Although he designed or was involved in many projects, he was
assisted by others who are frequently ignored. This talk will examine some of
his architecture works, some of the meanings behind them, and his collaboration
with other architects.
Richard
Guy Wilson holds the Commonwealth Professor's Chair in Architectural
History at the University of Virginia.
His specialty is the architecture, design and art of the 18th to the
21st century both in America and abroad.
He was a visiting fellow at Cambridge University (England) in 2007. He
was born in Los Angeles- the home of everything new-and grew up in a house
designed for his parents by the leading modernist Rudolph Schindler. He received his undergraduate training at the
University of Colorado and MA and Ph.D.
at the University of Michigan.
Wilson has received a number of academic honors, among them a Guggenheim
Fellow, prizes for distinguished writing, and in 1986 he was made an honorary
member of the American Institute of Architects (AIA). He received the outstanding professor award
at the University of Virginia in 2001. He has directed the Victorian Society’s
Nineteenth Century Summer School since 1979 that has been located in Boston,
Philadelphia and currently Newport, Rhode Island. He has served as an advisor and commentator
for a number of television programs on PBS, A&E, and sixty-seven segments
of America's Castles. A frequent
lecturer for universities, museums and professional groups, he has also
published widely with many articles and reviews to his credit. Wilson has been the curator and author for
major museum exhibitions such as The
American Renaissance, 1876-1917; The Art that is Life: The Arts and Crafts
Movement in America; The Machine Age in America, 1918-1941; The Making of
Virginia Architecture. He is the author or
joint author of 16 books that deal with American and modern architecture which
include studies of McKim, Mead & White; the Prairie School in Iowa;
Monument Avenue in Richmond; and the AIA Gold Medal principle author and editor
of the Society of Architectural Historians book, Buildings of Virginia:
Tidewater and Piedmont (2002). He has published extensively on Thomas
Jefferson and The University of Virginia. His book on Edith Wharton and her
architectural interests was published in 2012.
12:15 –1:30 Lunch Break and
Conviviality
The Afternoon Session will be moderated by John Works,
former President of the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society and former President
of the Monticello Association.
1:40 p.m. – M.
Andrew Holowchak, “An ‘Honest
Heart’ versus a ‘Knowing Head’: The Myth
of the Preeminence of Rationality in Jefferson’s Conceptions of Man and
Society”
It
is common today for scholars to note both Jefferson’s belief in a
moral sense and the great regard that he, as a disciple of the Enlightenment,
held for reason. Yet there is very little written on Jefferson’s view of the
moral sense, and astonishingly, even less on his conception of rationality.
What exists flippantly assumes that Jefferson was a keen and politically savvy
rationalist and that his moral sense was a faculty subservient to reason.
In this essay, Holowchak shows the opposite is the case. Jefferson consistently held that “an honest
heart,” given to all, was a blessing much greater than “a
knowing head,” given to few. Holowchak shows also how Jefferson’s notion
of a schema for republican governing is built upon the notion of moral
superiority. Finally, Holowchak fleshes out some other of the unexpected
implications of reason’s subservience.
M. Andrew Holowchak teaches Philosophy at Rowan University in
Glassboro, New Jersey. He has published over 90 peer-reviewed papers in areas
such as ethics, psychoanalysis, ancient philosophy and science, philosophy of
sport, and social and political philosophy and has authored/edited 26 books
including six books on Thomas Jefferson. Of his most recent book, Taking Things by their Smooth Handle:
Jefferson on Morality, the Moral Sense, and Good Living, an anonymous
reviewer writes, “This is yet another genuinely remarkable achievement in the
field of Jefferson studies offered by Doctor Holowchak, who has fast
established himself as the world’s foremost expert in Jefferson’s philosophical
thought.” He has also recently received acceptance of his
entry, 'Thomas Jefferson,' for the prestigious Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. When not teaching or
writing, Holowchak enjoys strength training (former super-heavyweight
powerlifting champion), biking, gardening, travel, cooking, brewing and
consuming beer, and polite conversation. He lives in Lindenwold, New Jersey.
2:40 p.m. –Brien
Steele, “Thomas Jefferson’s
Embodied Mind: Bodily Decay, a Material God, and Human
Immortality”
In his bill for religious freedom, Jefferson boldly asserted that
“Almighty God hath created the mind free” and later declared his own eternal
hostility to every form of tyranny over the mind of man. But, as he aged,
he understood through experience what he had long known to be true: that the mind’s freedom was intimately
connected to the health of the body. This paper explores the intersection
of Jefferson's later thinking about the body-mind problem with his somewhat
unconventional materialism, which insisted upon the existence of God and the
afterlife.
Brian Steele specializes in American intellectual and
political history with a particular emphasis on the American Revolution and
Early American Republic. His book Thomas Jefferson and American Nationhood
(Cambridge, 2012) was a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize and was named a 2012 notable
title by the Society for
US Intellectual History. He received the Dean’s Award for
Excellence in Teaching in the College of Arts and Sciences in 2010 and was
named “Outstanding Teacher” by the graduating class of 2014 in the University
Honors Program. He is currently working
on two book-length projects, one on the significance of the public memory of
George Washington- and the uses to which his decidedly non-partisan image was
put by decided partisans- in the years immediately surrounding his retirement
and death; and another that will re-consider religious thought and practice
during the “American Enlightenment,” reading the work of America’s most
prominent philosophes in that larger
transnational context, restoring to a narrative that has been preoccupied with the
twentieth-century debate over church-state relations in the U.S., a clearer
sense of the religious striving that characterized the thought and practice of
Jefferson, Adams, Rush, and even
Paine. Both of these projects are
interested, as is his first book, in the relationship between the production of
historical narratives and national memory.
3:40 p.m. – James Thompson, “Thomas
Jefferson Today and Thomas Jefferson
Tomorrow”
Since
Professor Annette Gordon-Reed published her controversial book about Thomas
Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings in 1997, Thomas Jefferson has
existed as two contradictory people. The
first is Professor Peter Onuf’s iconic father of human rights. In this persona, as Professor Onuf suggests,
Jefferson, is a timeless and god-like beacon that guides us toward a more
perfect society. The second is Professor
Gordon-Reed’s self-indulgent father of his slave’s children. In this persona, as Professor Gordon-Reed
asserts, Jefferson is a racist who symbolizes what is wrong in American
society. Thompson contends that this
schizophrenic character is a manufactured bore. Who is interested to know or follow a deified
social reformer who discriminates against people according to their race? This rendition of Thomas Jefferson has become
irrelevant. Thompson traces how the
false persona of the Jeffersonian deity formed and identifies a disqualifying
error in Professor Gordon-Reed’s portrait of Jefferson the racist. Thompson’s purpose for doing these things is to
clear the way for a new, coherent, and relevant Thomas Jefferson. In his closing comments, he describes the
characteristics of the new Thomas Jefferson. The time has come to get back to the real man.
James Thompson studied Philosophy as an undergraduate and
graduate student at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia. As a graduate student, he lived across the
Rivanna River from Monticello on the farm of Jefferson's eldest daughter,
Martha Jefferson Randolph. During his
four years there, he began what has been a continuing investigation into
"the philosophy" of Thomas Jefferson. Mr. Thompson cultivated his interest in the
History of Ideas teaching courses in Philosophy, Religion, and Ethics and in
Western Civilization at Strayer University in Alexandria, Virginia. He has written six books, including The Birth of Virginia’s Aristocracy
(2009); The Dubious Achievement of the
First Continental Congress (2011); Thomas
Jefferson’s Enlightenment – Paris 1785 (2014); Thomas Jefferson’s Enlightenment – Background Notes (2015); The First Revolutions in the Minds of the
People (2105); and George
Washington’s Mulatto Man – Who was Billy Lee? (2015). He completed the research for his first book,
Beyond the Veil of Reason - Thomas
Jefferson's Early Political Initiatives, as a Batten Fellow at the
Jefferson Center for International Studies at Monticello. Mr. Thompson is the publisher of Commonwealth
Books of Virginia and lectures on the topics he discusses in his books. He has spoken at the Naval Academy, the
Virginia Historical Society, Stratford Hall, Gunston Hall, and Wilton House. He has presented
lecture series for the continuing education programs at the University of
Virginia, William & Mary, George Mason University, and the University of Delaware.
4:40 p.m. – Closing
and Conviviality
About
the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society:
The Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society ( http://www.tjheritage.org )
is a Charlottesville, Virginia-based nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization which has
a four-fold purpose: to further
the honor and integrity of Thomas Jefferson, and to promote his vision and
ideas, and their application in our times and in the future; to
pursue truth in all matters that touch upon the legacy of Thomas Jefferson; to
promote the principles of freedom, patriotism and truth, which were hallmarks
of Thomas Jefferson's life; and to sponsor and perform research in matters
pertaining to the private and public life of Thomas Jefferson. Additional detailed
facts documenting the work of the independent Scholars Commission and other
distinguished scholars can be referenced at the Thomas Jefferson Heritage
Society web site.
Directions to the Jefferson Scholars
Foundation, 112 Clarke Court, Charlottesville, VA 22903:
From Charlottesville-Albemarle Airport:
• Exit the airport and proceed
approximately ¾ mile on Airport Road towards US Route 29.
• Turn right onto US Route 29 towards Charlottesville.
• Proceed 6.0 miles. At the intersection with the US 29/250 Bypass, go
straight, following the signs for Emmet Street.
• Proceed another 1.9 miles on Emmet Street.
• When the road splits, bear right onto Stadium Road, passing Scott
Stadium.
• Turn left at the stop sign onto Maury Avenue.
• Take the first left onto Clarke Court. Destination will be on
the left. Visitor parking is provided in the main lot, and passes can be
obtained at the front desk.
• Total distance from Charlottesville-Albemarle Airport to the Jefferson
Fellows Center is approximately 9.8 miles.
From points east and west via I-64:
• From I-64, take Exit 118-B (US Route
29 North).
• Proceed north on US Route 29. Take the first exit and turn right at
the bottom of the ramp onto Fontaine Avenue.
• Make a left turn at the first light onto Maury Avenue.
• Take the first right onto Clarke Court. Destination will be on
the left. Visitor parking is provided in the main lot, and passes can be
obtained at the front desk.
From Washington, D.C. and points north:
• Take US Route 29 to Charlottesville.
At the intersection with the US 29/250 Bypass, go straight, following the signs
for Emmet Street. Proceed another 1.9 miles on Emmet Street.
• When the road splits, bear right onto Stadium Road, passing Scott
Stadium.
• Turn left at the stop sign onto Maury Avenue.
• Take the first left onto Clarke Court. Destination will be on
the left. Visitor parking is provided in the main lot, and passes can be
obtained at the front desk.
From Lynchburg and points south:
• Take US Route 29 to Charlottesville.
After crossing under I-64, take the first exit and turn right at the bottom of
the ramp onto Fontaine Avenue
• Make a left turn at the first light onto Maury Avenue.
• Take the first right onto Clarke Court. Destination will be on
the left. Visitor parking is provided in the main lot, and passes can be
obtained at the front desk.
