Prof. Christa Dierksheide & Prof. Nick Guyatt, ‘Jefferson’s Wolf: A Founding Father’s Troubling Answer to the Problem of Slavery’ (Harvard University Press, 2026)

“The wolf is a metaphor for race war, and we mean race war on a genocidal scale.”

We release this episode at a historic moment. This Saturday, 4 July 2026, marks the semiquincentennial of America's founding.

Few historians are better placed, with their complementary research expertise, to reassess the legacy of what is commemorated each year—and especially this year—as Independence Day.

Our guests are Professor Christa Dierksheide (Brockman Foundation Jefferson Scholars Foundation Professor of History; Director, Center for the Study of the Age of Jefferson, University of Virginia) & Professor Nick Guyatt (Professor of History, Fellow of Jesus College, University of Cambridge).

They are the co-authors of Jefferson’s Wolf: A Founding Father’s Troubling Answer to the Problem of Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2026).

Their book takes its title from a letter (1820) in which Thomas Jefferson famously described the nation as holding slavery like "a wolf by its ear....and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.”

For Dierksheide and Guyatt, that metaphor points to something much larger than Jefferson's personal anxieties as an enslaver.

It reveals a sustained effort, since the Revolution and over the course of his career, to imagine the future of the United States as a white nation — a reality dependent on racial exclusion, demographic engineering, and the forced removal of Black Americans.

“It's not [Jefferson’s] understanding or his version of the Declaration that we now understand, today."

"...This document, and its central idea [all men are created equal], was reimagined by African-American descendants of Monticello and a whole generation of Black activists in the 20th century. They rejected this exclusionary, narrow vision of American belonging, and reimagined and redefined this document and [the] core American creed as something based on inclusivity, and a broader claim to belonging.”

Co-Hosts:

Megan Renoir - fourth-year PhD candidate

Megan’s research examines the history of U.S. land institutions, nineteenth- and twentieth-century federal Indian policy, and violence against the NCRNT. Her work expands our understanding of the relationships between federalism, Western property institutions, and intractable land conflicts.

Charlie Colenutt - first-year PhD candidate

Charlie studies British and American multinational construction firms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He uses these companies as a way into meatier debates about the nature of late imperialism, the emergence of global capitalism, and the transition from a British to an American world order. Colenutt is the author of ‘Is This Working? The Jobs We Do, Told by the People Who Do Them’ (Picador, 2025).

Production:

Daisy Semmler (MPhil, 2025; PhD candidate commencing October 2026)

Referenced in Discussion:

[01:44] Jefferson's "wolf by the ears" letter:

Thomas Jefferson to John Holmes, Monticello, 22 April 1820.

[06:10] Prof. Guyatt has been on the podcast before! Hosted by Caleb Woodall and Hugh Wood:

Prof. Nick Guyatt, ‘Writing American History in Uncertain Times’ (2023)

[08:30] 1970s book on Jefferson and anti-slavery:

John Chester Miller. The Wolf by the Ears : Thomas Jefferson and Slavery / John Chester Miller. New York: Free Press, 1977.

[20:00] Notes on the State of Virginia, available at Library of Congress:

NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA. BY THOMAS JEFFERSON. (LC BOSTON: PUBLISHED BY LILLY AND WAIT, 1832)

[27:48] Prof. Guyatt’s book on Indian removal and Jefferson:

Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation (First edition.; Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2016)

[41:51] Oral histories - descendants of formerly enslaved people from Monticello:

Getting Word Project - African American History at Monticello