That perplexing paradoxical patriarch, Thomas Jefferson

[sphipps]

My favorite American to study, Thomas Jefferson, has confounded and perplexed me for more than 30 years. Call him a sage or call him a hypocrite, just don't call him boring. Here is my take on Jefferson's paradoxical nature.

Thomas Jefferson, Perplexing Paradoxical Patriarch (or, Ain't That America)

 

[regent]

What is interesting is that with a population of four million we got a Washington, a Jefferson, and a Madison and now with 300 million we get a whatever. Is that because we allow lesser people to vote today or our education system has not kept up or there are no more Washingtons or Jeffersons?

 

[sphipps]

If there are any, they are too smart to run.

 

[williepete]

On Slavery:

"Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever."




THOMAS JEFFERSON, a denunciation of slavery, 1785:

The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it…. The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances. … If a slave can have a country in this world, it must be any other in preference to that in which he is to be born to live and labor for another … or entail his own miserable condition on the endless generations proceeding from him … Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.



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[Unkotare]

He would have approved of the Loving v Virginia decision, had he by some magic lived that long.

 

[whitehall]

Jefferson was a true renaissance man in many ways. A study of Jefferson, the man and the Founding Father, would be a monumental task. The mistake (liberal) historians and politically biased legal minds make is in interpreting the Constitution based on what they think was on Jefferson's mind based on his correspondence. The modern version of "Separation of Church and State" as written by a former KKK member and Supreme Court Justice Black wasn't based on Constitutional law but rather some obscure correspondence by Jefferson. The dumbing down of generations of American kids to the point where today's college kids think "Judge Judy" is a member of the supreme court plays into the hands of ruthless politicians who would trample over the Constitution.