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And we return to our American stories.

Thomas Jefferson was a man of both extraordinary words and astonishing

contradictions. While he wrote the Declaration of Independence that called all men equal,

he would go to the grave without freeing his slaves. But what kind of a man would write those

words in the first place? You'd tell the story of Jefferson's views on slavery and the equality of man is Cara

Rogers Stevens, a history professor at Ashland University.

Let's get into the story.

Now Jefferson inherited enslaved people when he was 14 years old and his dad died.

Jefferson inherited something like 52 enslaved human beings.

And two years later, he shows up at this small little provincial college,

one of the best schools in the South, College of William and Mary,

and he got there at the perfect moment.

The college had been founded as a seminary, but there had been a lot of controversies

between the Anglican establishment and Virginians.

And at the moment that Jefferson arrived, there was a real shortage of professors.

But one person had just shown up from Aberdeen, Scotland,

and Marshall College, a professor named William Small. And William Small had been

tutored by the founders, the fathers of the Scottish Enlightenment. And he took all of these

notes on their moral sense philosophies, and then he showed up in Virginia and became

the primary professor for Jefferson. He taught mathematics, physics, literature, rhetoric,

astronomy, meteorology. He was the first to introduce scientific experimentation and observation

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