Thomas Jefferson?

[Anarcho-Socialist]

There has been something that is bothering me about Thomas Jefferson. I know that he is revered for his part in US Independence and writing the US Constitution.

It was his stance on slavery that troubles me. He was someone who owned a few hundred slaves. Despite being responsible for the sentence "all men are created equal", in subsequent years he wrote several treatises and made several speeches to remind people that it didn't refer to African slaves; he did believe in their inferiority.

In my opinion, I do see a conflict in regarding Jefferson as a liberal hero, due to his position on slavery. So this what I ask:

Should Jefferson still be revered as the founder of modern liberalism?
Does Jefferson's labor for US independence, outweigh his position as being pro-slavery?
Do you see Jefferson's position on slavery as just being "a person of his time"?


Please be concise in your answer and please try not to flame.

[iamtechus]

1. Jefferson planted the seeds of freedom with those words

I had to face the same questions when researching my family's history and decided not to judge those old guys by the same standards we live by today. My first ancestor in this country settled in Virginia in the early seventeen hundreds. He held slaves but, as far as I can determine, there were no slaves in the family a couple of generations later.

Back then, black slavery was not the only injustice that they were guilty of. The English sent shiploads of criminals to this country and they were sold at auction as indentured servants. They were treated as property by their owners until their term of servitude was up - 7 years I think (temporary white slavery). Also, women had few rights. They were a notch or two above slaves but were legally subordinant to men. Native Americans were sometimes treated no better than wild animals that could be driven from land that white men wanted.

It took a long time to eliminate at least the worst of these injustices but traces of them linger still. We have been going through a slow process of "enlightenment" which continues to this day. I guess that we can condemn most of our white ancestors for being less than perfect or we can applaud them for slowly but steadily becoming enlightened. Were our ancestors evil or ignorant?

[artfan]

2. interesting questions

yes i also see a conflict and jefferson himself struggled with this problem in his writings he often argued against slavery while he kept slaves. i wish i could pass it off as him being a person of the times in which he lived but the question of slavery was a hot topic even at this time. washington freed his slaves because he felt it was wrong to speak of slavery and hold slaves. in brief my personal answers are

1 he should be revered as a founder of liberalism but understood he was more a man of ideas than action.

2jefferson was of two minds on the slavery issue his writings often were antislavery. he argues both sides of the issue. i think social conditioning did play a role in his position but i also think that the value of the slaves was also and issue. most of his slaves came from his wife and i wonder if he was just too weak to give up the personal comforts of having slaves or if he considered the slaves his childrens property and he needed to keep them as their legacy.in my opinion it is a wash he was weak,wrong and a hypocrite on the slavery issue but he ideas regarding independence etc. set the foundation to elevate many people

3no, it is a factor but to say he was just a person of his time is making excuses for behavior that he himself was not comfortable with


i wish that he had freed his slaves and opposed slavery it would have made him much more heroic in my eyes. i want to be able to defend him because i admire his mind but it glaringly obvious he was wrong when it came to slavery.

[Tsiyu]

3. Hard to Reconcile, I agree.

I too have to struggle to overcome the fact that he owned slaves. I have to struggle with the fact that Martin Luther King allegedly had affairs. That Clinton did. That people aren't perfect.

Hell, I'm about as flawed as anybody can get.

There are more noble men and women to canonize and better writers can be found, but the way this one man approached politics and religion and the way his mind worked in helping form our system of government have always been models for my own political thought processes.

Many of his ideas would be considered terroristic today. That's the most intriguing aspect of the man and what he represents now. We can say that his slavery would now be ( and should be ) a criminal act. But if I am going to be honest, I would say that I purchase items that perhaps are made in unethical ways by virtual slave labor. I eat in restaurants where the workers probably aren't paid a living wage. I live on land the Cherokee were forced to leave to the White Man on the Trail of Tears. I try to look at what Jefferson created and not his flaws.

The idea that all men are created to be treated as equals under the law of the United States has held to some degree - if you are white and male. It has not been fully extended to women and minorities, but now women and minorities will be the majority and the US is our oyster.

Unless it is altered by corrupt men, that Constitution (with a little help from Jefferson) and our government (with the aid in its infancy of the same Jefferson) will work for all Americans.

But I keep thinking, he would have been locked up for the last three and a half years. It's amazing that we've come so far to keep so little......

[Deja Q]

4. America was ruined the moment it was "discovered", yet alone signed.

Columbus was a butcher.

We stole from the Native Americans, and gav them blankets contaminated with small pox. Westerners civilized? I think not...

The Salem witch trials, brought about by the people whose offspring wrote the Constitution, no less.

Not to mention all the hypocrisy in the Constitution that makes the US look like a long-running Hypocracy.

As I vaguely recall, somebody of the time noted the bogus line "all men are created equal" and decided that slaves were only 3/5ths men. Officially because it allowed the writers to maintain the charade that they were promoting freedom.

While our country has improved in many ways over the centuries, we have a long way to go to make it even remotely like a 'perfect union' and in some ways (money, greed, corporate power, opportunists, neocons, et al) we've made it far WORSE.

There is no such thing as a "person of his time". We are people in action. We either set the rules, follow the rules, or break the rules. Jefferson helped solidify rules he never bothered to honor because he kept slaves. If Jefferson treated his slaves like royalty as payment for their efforts and building of this country for the white man, the story would be slightly different.

[Blue Wally]

6. Why is this always taken out of context?

"As I vaguely recall, somebody of the time noted the bogus line "all men are created equal" and decided that slaves were only 3/5ths men. Officially because it allowed the writers to maintain the charade that they were promoting freedom."

The context of this provision of the Constitution relates to congressional apportionment. The anti-slavery states wanted to count "indentured servants" (read black slaves) as ZERO men. The slave states wanted to count them as FULL men (but not allow them to vote). In other words, the votes of the franchised whites in the slave states would be made more powerful, because their representation was weighted by the disenfranchised slaves. In the end, in order to get to a consensus Constitution, the three/fifths counting rule was implemented. It was an artificial number arrived at in a compromize just like the 27.5% oil depletion number.

[alphafemale]

5. He not only owned people. He mortgaged them.

Then "sold them South" to settle debts even though he'd long promised that he would free them before he died.

And this was while he still had plenty of gadgets and books he could have sold.

Jefferson's moral contradictions go well beyond merely participating in human bondage because "everyone else was doing it."

That said, he was the one who gave an eternal voice to the basic human yearning for Liberty.

Conflicted? Yeah, you could say that.

[gottaB]

7. I don't believe Jeffereson was an ardent supporter of slavery

at least in his writings.

http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/P/tj3/writings/slavery.htm

That essay makes clear that he had some racial prejudices, although he was willing to discard them if they proved to be unreasonable. His hope for a "total emancipation," and his view of emancipation within the context of the Revolution suggest that he is indeed a liberal and that his ideas about personal liberty and democratic government were meant to apply to everybody. Perhaps that made him uncomfortable. I imagine for a person like Jefferson, that kind of discomfort would have been preferable to admitting that his ideals were bogus.

As for his deeds, he could have set a better example. That *is* a problem. Whether or not that negates the value of his ideas, I suppose that depends on how you see things.

:shrug:

[MUSTANG_2004]

8. No, Yes, and Yes

1) As someone who dies almost 200 years ago, I don't think Jefferson be considered the founder of modern liberalism.
2) Absolutely. The ideas in the Declaration of Independence helped lead to the abolition of slavery, more-so than his personal ownership of slaves contributed to the continuation of slavery. Besides, he wasn't precisely pro-slavery. If you read his Notes on the State of Virginia, you'll see he was not in favor of slavery.
3) Yes, and actually, as someone who grew up with slaves and lived in a slave-based society, his attitudes were probably more enlightened than what most of us would have held if we'd been in the same circumstances.