This is what I have often said about Thomas Jefferson. He could wax eloquently about how bad it was to keep people as slaves, but he kept his own slaves.
Suppose he freed them, what would have happened to them?
Just askin’
There really aren’t any clean hands in the situation, even probably up to and including the abolitionists themselves. For one, let’s start out with the fact that many of the abolitionists themselves were either current at the time or recent former slave owners. I mean, let’s be real. The guy who wrote the song “Amazing Grace” was a former slave trader too.(as an aside) All 13 of the colonies were slave colonies. All of them. The only way you get abolitionism in any form is with the aid and support of at least some slave owners. Benjamin Rush was a slave owner. So too was Benjamin Franklin. I don’t say that to be provocative, it’s simple historical fact. The colonies were a society in transition being held back from transition by the pen of the king.
The earliest abolitionists themselves knew they couldn’t stop slavery, which is why if you read their writings they all had a laser focus on only the slave trade separated from slavery. It’s not that they didn’t oppose slavery, but they were trying to strategically focus on what they thought they could accomplish. That’s both to their credit as well as (let’s be real) their detriment in realistically ignoring the larger issue of the enslavement of persons brought across the sea against their will.
King George’s veto is King George’s veto. It denounces itself. Moving on.
Jefferson and other(perhaps moreso) Founders had an extremely hard line to carry. 13 colonies were required to win against the King. Not 12, not 11, not 8. All 13. There was no other way than to accept it in the short term and achieve Liberty for some first. This is after all the exact same thing that the Jamaican Maroons did in their fight against the Brits. They didn’t free all the slaves either. That’s the reality of fighting against a super power. You win where you can.
Yes, that’s to the Founders and the Maroons’ detriment. The fact is, they didn’t free everybody all at once. But at the end of the day, who was trending where?
The Founders were trending abolitionist, and the Maroons were trending abolitionist as well. This is absolute. We have the king’s vetoes of colonial laws, we have the Founders writings, we have some of the laws the passed pre-indepedence, we have the colonies/states themselves (starting in 1780 with Penn.) who started actually passing abolitionist laws post-independence when there was no more veto that could be a threat. They followed through after the fact. This was (at least in some places) important to them.
Even with Jefferson, to get specific here. The fact remains that even though he failed in his personal life(some of which was due to the restrictions of Virginian law) he was to my knowledge a life-long legislative abolitionist. At every instant that I am aware of, as a legislator from the earliest days of the Burgesses up to the presidency, the NW Ordinance is also worth mentioning - Jefferson was against either and/or slavery and the slave trade. I’m not aware of one single time where he promoted nor authored nor signed laws designed to strengthen slavery.
He was always against it. Can you show me the opposite? I’ve looked and never ever found anything in Jefferson’s works. I’d like to know the specifics of the opposite in the case it does exist.