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New Books in American PoliticsAuthor: New Books Network
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150 channels and browse our 28,000 episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork Language: en Genres: Government, News, Politics Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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Jefferson’s Wolf: A Founding Father’s Troubling Answer to the Problem of Slavery with Christa Dierksheide and Nicholas Guyatt (Belknap Press, 2026)
Episode 2359
Sunday, 25 October, 2026
In this episode, Matthew Mason (Professor of History at Brigham Young University) interviews Christa Dierksheide (Brockman Foundation Jefferson Scholars Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia) and Nicholas Guyatt (Professor of North American History at the University of Cambridge) about their important new book, Jefferson’s Wolf: A Founding Father’s Troubling Answer to the Problem of Slavery (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2026). Jefferson’s Wolf offers a decisive reassessment of Thomas Jefferson’s long-debated views on slavery, showing that his chief antislavery strategy was racial exclusion: the removal of emancipated Black people from the United States.Toward the end of his life, Thomas Jefferson made his most famous statement about American slavery: “We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.” Presenting abolition as both necessary and perilous, the remark has long been relied upon to explain an apparent paradox: despite publicly opposing slavery for four decades, Jefferson had made no progress toward Black freedom in his political career by the time he died in 1826. Nor had he done so in his expansive household, where he enslaved more than 600 people, including Sally Hemings and the four children he fathered with her. Dierksheide and Guyatt argue that the key to understanding Jefferson’s antislavery position is his commitment to racial exclusion. Jefferson believed that the principal reason to abolish slavery was the threat of a massive slave revolt, but he viewed the presence of free Black people in the new nation as no less dangerous. To avert racial violence, Jefferson argued, the gradual abolition of slavery had to be paired with Black exile. Even when challenged by white and Black contemporaries with more expansive views of American belonging, Jefferson held fast to his vision for a white republic. Neither an egalitarian antiracist nor a proslavery apologist, Jefferson became the most influential advocate for racial separation in the early United States. Charting the evolution of his thought across the nation’s formative decades, Jefferson’s Wolf is a surprising and provocative account of the problem of slavery in the founding era. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
