OAH Distinguished Lecturer's Point of View

There’s one sure thing I’ve learned from going on the road for the OAH Distinguished Lectureship Program: Jefferson gets people jumping.

Last fall, I drove over to Savannah, one of my favorite southern cities, to give a talk on “The Contradiction of Slavery in the Era of the American Revolution.” It’s a standard lecture I give in my undergraduate survey course, but when freed from the shackles of curricular requirements, it’s also something that I’ve found very accessible and engaging to other (and older) audiences—including, this time, the hundred or so people who took their seats in an aging but very comfortable theater for this session sponsored by the Coastal Heritage Society.

These days, Savannah is probably best known as the setting for John Berendt’s 1994 noir narrative, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. But last fall, the Coastal Heritage Society organized a very lively series of public lectures and performances to highlight Savannah’s significant place in the American Revolution, and my talk came about midway on the menu. Since I always think it wise to connect the lecture to the locality, I opened by noting the remarkable mix of people in Revolutionary-era Savannah—certainly as diverse as the crowd I was addressing that night.

As is always the case, though, the talk soon turned to Thomas Jefferson, the man who best embodied the contradiction of slavery—that is, the revolutionary movement’s fine language about the rights of liberty and equality, but also the founders’ failure, even outright refusal, to extend those rights to slaves. By the time we got to the question and answer part of the proceedings, Jefferson had become the main topic of everyone’s attention. “That man was a pedophile!” exclaimed one woman, pressing her point about Jefferson’s salacious relationship with Sally Hemings. “Sure, slavery was a problem,” a man said a little later, “but on the whole you have to admit that Jefferson was a pretty remarkable guy—and that the United States turned out to be a pretty remarkable nation.” And so it went for over a half-hour, lots of comments, lots of questions, and certainly lots of controversy, all of which continued informally once the scheduled session came to a close.

Looking back, the thing I liked best about this lecture experience was the energetic, occasionally even passionate, reaction of the audience. These were mostly grown-ups, people who came to learn something, but also people who brought some learning with them to the lecture. They graciously accepted me as an academic authority, but they also asserted their own authority as citizen-students with positions and opinions. It was quite a satisfying situation for a visiting scholar: no tests to give, no grades to negotiate, no sleepers to wake, nothing but people listening and then talking—and talking not just to me, but to each other. I like to think that some of them kept talking to each other long after the lecture ended.

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