Why stop at Jefferson. There were 12 US Presidents who were slave owners, including Northern Presidents.
Being a slave owner is not why statues are being removed. Some people are just dense, I guess.
Lost in all this ideological wilderness is that neither the statues, monuments etc or the people and events they represent, are really the point.
This wave of monumenting and statuing was all going on roughly one hundred years ago, give or take a decade, during, and as a direct result of, the enormous degree of racism and general bigotry of that time, a time when the Klan was resurrected out of extinction, an infamous film "Birth of a Nation" was showing nationwide, Jim Crow laws and attitudes were being developed and shored up, and vigilante lynchings were rampant.
Our history schoolbooks kind of forget to mention all that but that was the tenor of the time, and that's what this wave of statue/monument erection
represents ---- regardless who's on the statue or monument. Check the dates. Turn of the century into the 1920s (the Klan reached its peak about 1925).
One example -- exactly 100 years ago May 1917, the Daughters of the Confederacy attached a plaque to a building in Pulaski Tennessee, commemorating its place as the building where the Ku Klux Klan was first conceived, with the founders' names. They thought Pulaski had been slighted in "Birth of a Nation" since it was not mentioned (of course the film in typical Hollywood fashion had taken all sorts of liberties with the facts anyway).
That plaque is still on the building today, although it now faces backward so it can't be read. When the building changed hands to a new owner in the 1990s he had it reversed. And nobody complained.
They don't date from the Civil War nor do they represent it. They represent the period of hyperbigotry that birthed them. Their purpose in being erected was to substantiate and rationalize that bigotry, those Jim Crow laws, those lynchings. That's what their wording would say if it were honest.
The nation needs to do what that building owner did with that plaque --- turn its back on that legacy. Show its blank side so it's obvious that something used to be there --- and now it's gone. Because we turned it away.