The Monster of Monticello (NYT on Jefferson)

New York Times ^ | November 30, 2012 | Paul Finkelman

[nickcarraway]

THOMAS JEFFERSON is in the news again, nearly 200 years after his death — alongside a high-profile biography by the journalist Jon Meacham comes a damning portrait of the third president by the independent scholar Henry Wiencek.

We are endlessly fascinated with Jefferson, in part because we seem unable to reconcile the rhetoric of liberty in his writing with the reality of his slave owning and his lifetime support for slavery. Time and again, we play down the latter in favor of the former, or write off the paradox as somehow indicative of his complex depths.

Neither Mr. Meacham, who mostly ignores Jefferson’s slave ownership, nor Mr. Wiencek, who sees him as a sort of fallen angel who comes to slavery only after discovering how profitable it could be, seem willing to confront the ugly truth: the third president was a creepy, brutal hypocrite.

Contrary to Mr. Wiencek’s depiction, Jefferson was always deeply committed to slavery, and even more deeply hostile to the welfare of blacks, slave or free. His proslavery views were shaped not only by money and status but also by his deeply racist views, which he tried to justify through pseudoscience.

There is, it is true, a compelling paradox about Jefferson: when he wrote the Declaration of Independence, announcing the “self-evident” truth that all men are “created equal,” he owned some 175 slaves. Too often, scholars and readers use those facts as a crutch, to write off Jefferson’s inconvenient views as products of the time and the complexities of the human condition.

But while many of his contemporaries, including George Washington, freed their slaves during and after the revolution — inspired, perhaps, by the words of the Declaration — Jefferson did not. Over the subsequent 50 years, a period of extraordinary public service, Jefferson remained the master

[maxwellsmart_agent]

There seems to be a disparity in history and what is being said here.

[Captain Jack Aubrey]

“I respect Jefferson’s intellect, but I lost some respect for how he and Madison screwed over George Washington & to a lesser extent Hamilton.”

You are correct, Sir.

[Standing Wolf]

If it shows up in the New York Times, the odds are at least 99:1 it contains a few half-truths and irrelevant facts and a great deal of totalitarian propaganda.

[hinckley buzzard]

"Independent scholar Henry Wiencek" is a trust fund 70's Yalie lit-crit psychopath who couldn't even keep a job at TIME doing scut copy-editing. Just the guy I'd want to be analyzing the pantheon of American Founders.

[Spaulding]

My daughter came home from school with this Jerrerson nonsense, curiously coincident with the NYT review, so we read Jefferson's concise autobiography at dinner (when I have a captive audience). The NYT and the two authors have an unsurprising reluctance to refer to original sources. Of course they would claim that Jefferson cannot be trusted to tell about his own life because he has a vested interest.

Jefferson was voted to the Virginia legislature right out of his law studies with George Wythe in 1769. His first act in 1769-70 was to propose emancipation of Virginia's slaves. But rewriting history, and then burning the old books is the tradition of the left. Then they can claim whatever suits them and there is no contravening history to contend with.

[NKP_Vet]

Most slaves throughout history were white people.

[tet68]

They would take that which we hold spotless and shinning
up for the world to see, and make it tarnished and dull
to be hidden and put away for all time.

The sad thing is, it works.

[Political Junkie Too]

We have arrived at the "next phase" of the "takeover". Heretofore, the left was content to ignore our history and the founding fathers.

Agreed.

Next up is how George Washington married his wealth like John Kerry did.

-PJ

[GeronL]

yep. I want my reparations!

[LongWayHome]

I’m not excusing this modern day attack on Jefferson by our current elites.....folks posting here know what they are trying to do to our history & have stated so....but like you, I suspect, I’m none to pleased how things went down between Jefferson & Washington in the end.

[mo]

Of course he’s a monster....he stood in the way of central Federal Power.

That the NYT is so obviously still afraid of his mind is a testament to how right he was.

[NKP_Vet]

Not a day went by LBJ didn’t refer to blacks by the N word.
He was your typical southern politician who grew up using this word like all southerners used it, and as blacks still use it, and as most Americans still use it behind closed doors. And it was not meant to demean anyone. The Jesse Jackson race baiters of the world and the white liberals put the word on the same level as commiting murder. There is nothing further from the truth. Open up a copy of the American classic “Huckleberry Finn” to see how the word was used in American history. Oh, but I forget, it was such a bad word that most liberals have gotten the word edited out of the great American classic. The word negro means black.
How many clueless liberals even realize that. Try calling a black person a negro now and you’ll be charged with a hate crime.

[combat_boots]

This, from the newspaper that supported and spoke highly of both Hitler and Stalin, is no surprise.

[WVKayaker]

I just posted some prescient TJ quotes on another thread. They fit here, as well!

***********

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826, 3rd POTUS, ) .Jefferson will always be celebrated for articulating the American national creed, the fundamental and universal principles of self-government that he set forth in the Declaration of Independence.

A few quotes:

Was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now.

To take from one because it is thought that his own industry and that of his father’s has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association—the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.

I think myself that we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious. (Back then!)

Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon want bread.

God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty.... And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure

He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.

To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.

It is better to tolerate that rare instance of a parent’s refusing to let his child be educated, than to shock the common feelings by a forcible transportation and education of the infant against the will of his father.

... and finally:

I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.

[VitacoreVision]

Thomas Jefferson and Slavery

Monticello.org

Thomas Jefferson was a consistent opponent of slavery his whole life. Calling it a “moral depravity” and a “hideous blot,” he believed that slavery presented the greatest threat to the survival of the new American nation. Jefferson also thought that slavery was contrary to the laws of nature, which decreed that everyone had a right to personal liberty. These views were radical in a world where unfree labor was the norm.

At the time of the American Revolution, Jefferson was actively involved in legislation that he hoped would result in slavery’s abolition. In 1778, he drafted a Virginia law that prohibited the importation of enslaved Africans. In 1784, he proposed an ordinance that would ban slavery in the Northwest territories. But Jefferson always maintained that the decision to emancipate slaves would have to be part of a democratic process; abolition would be stymied until slaveowners consented to free their human property together in a large-scale act of emancipation. To Jefferson, it was anti-democratic and contrary to the principles of the American Revolution for the federal government to enact abolition or for only a few planters to free their slaves.

Although Jefferson continued to advocate for abolition, the reality was that slavery was only becoming more entrenched. The slave population in Virginia skyrocketed from 292,627 in 1790 to 469,757 in 1830. Jefferson had assumed that the abolition of the slave trade would weaken slavery and hasten its end. Instead, slavery only became more widespread and profitable. To try to erode Virginians’ support for slavery, he discouraged the cultivation of crops heavily dependent on slave labor—tobacco—and encouraged the introduction of crops that needed little or no slave labor—wheat, sugar maples, short-grained rice, olive trees, and wine grapes. But by the 1800s, Virginia’s most valuable commodity and export was neither crops nor land, but slaves.

Jefferson’s belief in the necessity of ending slavery never changed. From the mid-1770s until his death, he advocated the same plan of gradual emancipation. First, the transatlantic slave trade would be abolished. Second, slaveowners would “improve” slavery’s most violent features, by bettering (Jefferson used the term “ameliorating”) living conditions and moderating physical punishment. Third, all born into slavery after a certain date would be declared free, followed by total abolition. Like others of his day, he supported the removal of newly freed slaves from the United States. The unintended effect of Jefferson’s plan was that his goal of “improving” slavery as a step towards ending it was used as an argument for its perpetuation. Pro-slavery advocates after Jefferson’s death argued that if slavery could be “improved,” abolition was unnecessary.

Jefferson’s belief in the necessity of abolition was intertwined with his racial beliefs. He thought that white Americans and enslaved blacks constituted two “separate nations” who could not live together peacefully in the same country. Jefferson’s belief that blacks were racially inferior and “as incapable as children,” coupled with slaves’ presumed resentment of their former owners, made their removal from the United States an integral part of Jefferson’s emancipation scheme. Influenced by the Haitian Revolution and an aborted rebellion in Virginia in 1800, Jefferson believed that American slaves’ deportation—whether to Africa or the West Indies—was an essential consequence of emancipation.

Jefferson wrote that slavery was like holding “a wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.” He thought that his cherished federal union, the world’s first democratic experiment, would be destroyed by slavery. To emancipate slaves on American soil, Jefferson thought, would result in a large-scale race war that would be as brutal and deadly as the slave revolt in Haiti in 1791. But he also believed that to keep slaves in bondage, with part of America in favor of abolition and part of America in favor of perpetuating slavery, could only result in a civil war that would destroy the union. Jefferson’s latter prediction was correct: in 1861, the contest over slavery sparked a bloody civil war and the creation of two nations—Union and Confederacy—in the place of one.

[Mrs. Don-o]

`

[DoughtyOne]

Damn straight!

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Can we look at Lenin and Stalin and Mao and Castro and Che' through this same lens, please?

[Bigg Red]

How many people currently receiving social security checks are railing against the government for getting involved in the retirement business?

&&
Let’s see, do you mean the people who are collecting the money that they were forced to “put aside” for their retirement all during their working years?

[E. Pluribus Unum]

To emancipate slaves on American soil, Jefferson thought, would result in a large-scale race war that would be as brutal and deadly as the slave revolt in Haiti in 1791.

That will come to pass, if Hussein and Eric have anything to say about it.