The Thomas Jefferson conundrum

Ravi

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Feb 27, 2008
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I was reminded today that in the original draft of the DOI, the following words (penned by Jefferson), were included:

he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemispere, or to incure miserable death in their transportation hither. this piratical warfare, the opprobium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. [determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold,] he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce [determining to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold]: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he had deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another
.

Africans in America/Part 2/Rough draft of the Declaration

Was Jefferson just talking out of his ass as a way to stick a needle in King George's eye? Because Jefferson himself owned slaves, refused to free slaves, and did in fact use them as collateral for loans.

Is old Tommy the world's biggest hypocrite?
 
The founders were liberal. The founding era, being a movement in liberalism, "failed to free the slaves, failed to offer full political equality to women, . . . failed to grant citizenship to Indians."*

So you explain to us why one of your liberal heroes was such a hypocrite.

Thank you.



* Peter C. Mancall, Valley of Opportunity: Economic Culture Along the Upper Susquehanna (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 232.
 
I was reminded today that in the original draft of the DOI, the following words (penned by Jefferson), were included:

he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemispere, or to incure miserable death in their transportation hither. this piratical warfare, the opprobium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. [determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold,] he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce [determining to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold]: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he had deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another
.

Africans in America/Part 2/Rough draft of the Declaration

Was Jefferson just talking out of his ass as a way to stick a needle in King George's eye? Because Jefferson himself owned slaves, refused to free slaves, and did in fact use them as collateral for loans.

Is old Tommy the world's biggest hypocrite?


They had to compromise with the Southern States and a few Northern States
Jefferson worked to oppose slavery in other ways.
Mainly the Northwest Territory that forbids slavery in any new States, but he also worked to get more States slavery free, by 1789, 5 of the Northern states had abolished slavery. By 1804 all the other Northern states had abolished slavery.

Congress Deletes A Fourth of Jefferson's Text of the Declaration of Independence

Over several days of debate, more than a quarter of the text was deleted, most notably a scathing denunciation of the slave trade. It was no secret that Jefferson resented those changes. He noted at the time: passages were “struck out in complaisance to S. Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves & who on the contrary still wished to continue it. Our northern brethren also, I believe, felt a little under those censures; for tho' their people have very few slaves themselves, yet they have been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.”
 
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I was reminded today that in the original draft of the DOI, the following words (penned by Jefferson), were included:

he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemispere, or to incure miserable death in their transportation hither. this piratical warfare, the opprobium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. [determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold,] he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce [determining to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold]: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he had deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another
.

Africans in America/Part 2/Rough draft of the Declaration

Was Jefferson just talking out of his ass as a way to stick a needle in King George's eye? Because Jefferson himself owned slaves, refused to free slaves, and did in fact use them as collateral for loans.

Is old Tommy the world's biggest hypocrite?


They had to compromise with the Southern States and a few Northern States
Jefferson worked to oppose slavery in other ways.
Mainly the Northwest Territory that forbids slavery in any new States, but he also worked to get more States slavery free, by 1789, 5 of the Northern states had abolished slavery. By 1804 all the other Northern states had abolished slavery.

Congress Deletes A Fourth of Jefferson's Text of the Declaration of Independence

Over several days of debate, more than a quarter of the text was deleted, most notably a scathing denunciation of the slave trade. It was no secret that Jefferson resented those changes. He noted at the time: passages were “struck out in complaisance to S. Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves & who on the contrary still wished to continue it. Our northern brethren also, I believe, felt a little under those censures; for tho' their people have very few slaves themselves, yet they have been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.”
Jefferson, no doubt more than other Americans because he has historically carried the mantle of the American character on his shoulders, is vulnerable to modern censure for his apparent contrasting views. He had an obsession with equality and natural rights, and hated slavery, and believed that the conviction of the American psyche by America's revolutionary principles would soon doom the institution. He himself tried unsuccessfully to facilitate the manumission of slaves in Virginia and also, as you say, in the new western territories.

But Jefferson was also very human, even somewhat backward-looking in some regards (he didn't appreciate the sweeping economic changes occurring on this side of the Atlantic), and very complicated. He was an eighteenth century fellow, an intelligent, bookish, slaveholding southern planter who would have forfeited his rights to wealth and happiness had he personally abandoned slavery before any emancipation measures were passed. And he knew that day would come, for were it never to come, America's founding principles would forever be violated.
 
I was reminded today that in the original draft of the DOI, the following words (penned by Jefferson), were included:

he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemispere, or to incure miserable death in their transportation hither. this piratical warfare, the opprobium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. [determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold,] he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce [determining to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold]: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he had deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another
.

Africans in America/Part 2/Rough draft of the Declaration

Was Jefferson just talking out of his ass as a way to stick a needle in King George's eye? Because Jefferson himself owned slaves, refused to free slaves, and did in fact use them as collateral for loans.

Is old Tommy the world's biggest hypocrite?

The Declaration of Independence was a form of propaganda and to some extent it worked. One of the lessons of the Declaration would be to connect Jefferson's use of George III to politics today.
I think some slave holders of that era believed their slaves were safer and better cared for than perhaps even if they were granted freedom.
 
The founders were liberal. The founding era, being a movement in liberalism, "failed to free the slaves, failed to offer full political equality to women, . . . failed to grant citizenship to Indians."*

So you explain to us why one of your liberal heroes was such a hypocrite.

Thank you.



* Peter C. Mancall, Valley of Opportunity: Economic Culture Along the Upper Susquehanna (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 232.
He isn't my liberal hero. I think he was a phony.
 
I was reminded today that in the original draft of the DOI, the following words (penned by Jefferson), were included:

he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemispere, or to incure miserable death in their transportation hither. this piratical warfare, the opprobium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. [determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold,] he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce [determining to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold]: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he had deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another
.

Africans in America/Part 2/Rough draft of the Declaration

Was Jefferson just talking out of his ass as a way to stick a needle in King George's eye? Because Jefferson himself owned slaves, refused to free slaves, and did in fact use them as collateral for loans.

Is old Tommy the world's biggest hypocrite?


They had to compromise with the Southern States and a few Northern States
Jefferson worked to oppose slavery in other ways.
Mainly the Northwest Territory that forbids slavery in any new States, but he also worked to get more States slavery free, by 1789, 5 of the Northern states had abolished slavery. By 1804 all the other Northern states had abolished slavery.

Congress Deletes A Fourth of Jefferson's Text of the Declaration of Independence

Over several days of debate, more than a quarter of the text was deleted, most notably a scathing denunciation of the slave trade. It was no secret that Jefferson resented those changes. He noted at the time: passages were “struck out in complaisance to S. Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves & who on the contrary still wished to continue it. Our northern brethren also, I believe, felt a little under those censures; for tho' their people have very few slaves themselves, yet they have been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.”
that doesn't explain why he kept sllaves
 
I was reminded today that in the original draft of the DOI, the following words (penned by Jefferson), were included:

.

Africans in America/Part 2/Rough draft of the Declaration

Was Jefferson just talking out of his ass as a way to stick a needle in King George's eye? Because Jefferson himself owned slaves, refused to free slaves, and did in fact use them as collateral for loans.

Is old Tommy the world's biggest hypocrite?


They had to compromise with the Southern States and a few Northern States
Jefferson worked to oppose slavery in other ways.
Mainly the Northwest Territory that forbids slavery in any new States, but he also worked to get more States slavery free, by 1789, 5 of the Northern states had abolished slavery. By 1804 all the other Northern states had abolished slavery.

Congress Deletes A Fourth of Jefferson's Text of the Declaration of Independence

Over several days of debate, more than a quarter of the text was deleted, most notably a scathing denunciation of the slave trade. It was no secret that Jefferson resented those changes. He noted at the time: passages were “struck out in complaisance to S. Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves & who on the contrary still wished to continue it. Our northern brethren also, I believe, felt a little under those censures; for tho' their people have very few slaves themselves, yet they have been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.”
that doesn't explain why he kept sllaves

One of the rules of history is that one should not import values, beliefs and practices of the present into the past. Someday citizens may question why we allowed red and green lights to control our use of automobiles. At the time of Jefferson slavery was being questioned and yet sixty years later Americans have to fight a war to end the practice.
 
I was reminded today that in the original draft of the DOI, the following words (penned by Jefferson), were included:

he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemispere, or to incure miserable death in their transportation hither. this piratical warfare, the opprobium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. [determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold,] he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce [determining to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold]: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he had deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another
.

Africans in America/Part 2/Rough draft of the Declaration

Was Jefferson just talking out of his ass as a way to stick a needle in King George's eye? Because Jefferson himself owned slaves, refused to free slaves, and did in fact use them as collateral for loans.

Is old Tommy the world's biggest hypocrite?

The Declaration of Independence was a form of propaganda and to some extent it worked. One of the lessons of the Declaration would be to connect Jefferson's use of George III to politics today.
I think some slave holders of that era believed their slaves were safer and better cared for than perhaps even if they were granted freedom.

Foolishly so, yes, however, many of our far right citizens would probably do better today in a benign indentured servitude. Their children would at least be decently educated.
 
They had to compromise with the Southern States and a few Northern States
Jefferson worked to oppose slavery in other ways.
Mainly the Northwest Territory that forbids slavery in any new States, but he also worked to get more States slavery free, by 1789, 5 of the Northern states had abolished slavery. By 1804 all the other Northern states had abolished slavery.

Congress Deletes A Fourth of Jefferson's Text of the Declaration of Independence

Over several days of debate, more than a quarter of the text was deleted, most notably a scathing denunciation of the slave trade. It was no secret that Jefferson resented those changes. He noted at the time: passages were “struck out in complaisance to S. Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves & who on the contrary still wished to continue it. Our northern brethren also, I believe, felt a little under those censures; for tho' their people have very few slaves themselves, yet they have been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.”
that doesn't explain why he kept sllaves

One of the rules of history is that one should not import values, beliefs and practices of the present into the past. Someday citizens may question why we allowed red and green lights to control our use of automobiles. At the time of Jefferson slavery was being questioned and yet sixty years later Americans have to fight a war to end the practice.

One should always, yes, be careful against 'present-ism,' but that principled does not prevent us from objectively and correctly condemning the KKK or the Nazis.
 
I was reminded today that in the original draft of the DOI, the following words (penned by Jefferson), were included:

.

Africans in America/Part 2/Rough draft of the Declaration

Was Jefferson just talking out of his ass as a way to stick a needle in King George's eye? Because Jefferson himself owned slaves, refused to free slaves, and did in fact use them as collateral for loans.

Is old Tommy the world's biggest hypocrite?


They had to compromise with the Southern States and a few Northern States
Jefferson worked to oppose slavery in other ways.
Mainly the Northwest Territory that forbids slavery in any new States, but he also worked to get more States slavery free, by 1789, 5 of the Northern states had abolished slavery. By 1804 all the other Northern states had abolished slavery.

Congress Deletes A Fourth of Jefferson's Text of the Declaration of Independence

Over several days of debate, more than a quarter of the text was deleted, most notably a scathing denunciation of the slave trade. It was no secret that Jefferson resented those changes. He noted at the time: passages were “struck out in complaisance to S. Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves & who on the contrary still wished to continue it. Our northern brethren also, I believe, felt a little under those censures; for tho' their people have very few slaves themselves, yet they have been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.”
that doesn't explain why he kept sllaves

Because he inherited them from his family and from his wife's estates, and he mortgaged them to keep up his life of the idle rich.
 
Ya gotta love Jefferson, a man who condemned his own bastard children to slavery for life! What a guy!

For his life, not theirs. He trained them in professions and they were freed by his will.

Of course, their mother remained a slave after he died, because she belonged to the estate, first, of her half-sister and then her half-niece, who hated her with a passion.
 
I was reminded today that in the original draft of the DOI, the following words (penned by Jefferson), were included:

he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemispere, or to incure miserable death in their transportation hither. this piratical warfare, the opprobium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. [determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold,] he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce [determining to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold]: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he had deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another
.

Africans in America/Part 2/Rough draft of the Declaration

Was Jefferson just talking out of his ass as a way to stick a needle in King George's eye? Because Jefferson himself owned slaves, refused to free slaves, and did in fact use them as collateral for loans.

Is old Tommy the world's biggest hypocrite?

He was a politician, and a propagandist, so yes, he was just talking out of his ass. The myth around him is grossly overblown. He wrote about whatever suited his allies and his own needs were at the time he said anything, which is why just about anybody of any ideological lean can cherry pick something he said and pretend it's some appeal to authority. He never hesitated to trash and ignore the Constitution whenever it interfered with his political goals, and was the first President to use Federal troops against Americans. As 'Mr. Neutrality' he was the first to go to war against a foreign enemy as well. His second term was essentially a dictatorship.

So, yes, he was never the shining example of libertarianism, rights, and democracy he has been made out to be. He burned most of his letters, as well as all of his wife's letters, and just left the ones he thought made him look good, so nobody knows what he really thought about anything. He was out for himself and his own interests and nobody or anything else, as most politicians are and always will be.
 
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He isn't my liberal hero. I think he was a phony.

he never freed any of his slaves, and in fact had no compunctions about breaking up slave families by selling them off to raise money when he was short of cash, unlike many other slave owners of that era, so the myth that he 'hated slavery' and that he was morally tortured by it doesn't really bear up to scrutiny. A book called Master of the Mountain came out recently that shed a lot of light on Jefferson's estate management practices, including his approving the purchase of spiked collars several times by his overseers, and hiring overseers notorious for their beatings and whippings of slaves.
 
The founders were liberal. The founding era, being a movement in liberalism, "failed to free the slaves, failed to offer full political equality to women, . . . failed to grant citizenship to Indians."*

So you explain to us why one of your liberal heroes was such a hypocrite.

Thank you.



* Peter C. Mancall, Valley of Opportunity: Economic Culture Along the Upper Susquehanna (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 232.
He isn't my liberal hero. I think he was a phony.
He wasn't a "lefty," either. Yet I thought maybe you might not disagree with me, and then fail to defend his "hypocrisy."

Nor was he a phony. He didn't hide his apparent contrasting views.
 
I was reminded today that in the original draft of the DOI, the following words (penned by Jefferson), were included:

he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemispere, or to incure miserable death in their transportation hither. this piratical warfare, the opprobium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. [determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold,] he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce [determining to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold]: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he had deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another
.

Africans in America/Part 2/Rough draft of the Declaration

Was Jefferson just talking out of his ass as a way to stick a needle in King George's eye? Because Jefferson himself owned slaves, refused to free slaves, and did in fact use them as collateral for loans.

Is old Tommy the world's biggest hypocrite?

The Declaration of Independence was a form of propaganda and to some extent it worked. One of the lessons of the Declaration would be to connect Jefferson's use of George III to politics today.
I think some slave holders of that era believed their slaves were safer and better cared for than perhaps even if they were granted freedom.


The Declaration of Independence was not propaganda.
It was a legal document that Declared War against England and was sent to the King of England.
Every single one of those men who signed it put their lives and their possessions on the line if they had lost the war.
When the war was won that legal document was used to form the bases of our Constitution.
Who taught you this incorrect information? :eek:
 
he never freed any of his slaves

What an uneducated remark

His will freed his five children

Jefferson was no saint, he was a man of his time, and there is a lot of present-ism being presentensd as accurate commentary here
 
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