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To: DJ MacWoW
I think I spoke to soon...Perhaps the better definition of what Jefferson was trying to say can be explained by the early definition of Roman Citizenship....voters, land ownership, generally excludes women.....

It wasn't a slip...it was to become the future definition in our constitution. Betcha Madison caught it....

9 posted on 07/03/2010 9:32:39 AM PDT by Sacajaweau (What)
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To: Sacajaweau

I think it is simply the difference between those that are ruled and those that are self-governing.


10 posted on 07/03/2010 9:39:51 AM PDT by DJ MacWoW (If Bam is the answer, the question was stupid.)
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To: Sacajaweau

He did it intentionally and it definitely was not a slip.

It’s true that when it came down to voting, Jefferson excluded black males and, as for women, they weren’t even a blip on the horizon and nobody had even considered including them.

As for black slaves...the Spanish returned to St Augustine, Florida in 1784 after a brief period of British rule after the French and Indian war. The Spanish policy had been to permit runaway slaves who made it to Spanish Florida to be freed, and they also refused to return slaves to the English colonies in Georgia and South Carolina (for which reason St. Augustine was attacked several times by those colonies). And it was Jefferson himself who refused to permit the Spanish to continue with this policy.

Jefferson did what was within his intellectual and moral capacity to do: he set the groundwork for the way an American citizen would relate to the national government.

Obviously, the definition of citizen (in the sense of voting citizen) could be extended, and now blacks and women are full voting citizens. But the fact that Jefferson wasn’t thinking in these terms does not devalue his basic idea.


14 posted on 07/03/2010 9:50:22 AM PDT by livius
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