ASSAULTS ON THOMAS JEFFERSON IGNORE HIS COMPLEXITY AND HIS
CONTRIBUTIONS TO AMERICAN FREEDOM
By
ALLAN C. BROWNFELD
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Thomas
Jefferson is coming under increasing attack, even at Monticello, his
estate, now a museum near Charlottesville, Virginia. The main focus
seems to be on slavery, not on Jefferson’s many unique accomplishments.
According to the New York Post, “Books by critical race theory
proponents Ibram X. Kendi and Ta-Nehisi Coates enjoy pride of place in
the visitor center’s gift shop, while the smaller Farm Shop store
displays five titles on Jefferson’s slaves—-and a single biography of
the man himself.” In New York City, a statue of Jefferson was removed
from City Hall after being displayed for 187 years.
In
an important article in The Smithsonian Magazine, “The Dark Side of
Thomas Jefferson,” historian Henry Wiencik is highly critical of
Jefferson’s role as a slave holder. But he recognizes Jefferson’s
historic role in advancing freedom even, eventually, for those held in
slavery. He writes: “With five simple words in the Declaration of
Independence—-‘all men are created equal’—-Thomas Jefferson undid
Aristotle’s ancient formula, which had governed human affairs until
1776: ‘From the hour of their birth, some men are marked out for
subjection, others for rule.’ In his original draft of the declaration,
in soaring, damning, fiery prose, Jefferson denounced the slave traders
as an ‘execrable commerce…this assemblage of horrors,’ a ‘cruel war
against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life
and liberties.’ As historian John Chester Miller put it, ‘The
inclusion of Jefferson’s strictures on slavery and the slave trade would
have committed the U.S. to the abolition of slavery.”
Indeed,
that was how it was interpreted by some of those who read it at the
time. Massachusetts freed its slaves on the strength of the Declaration
of Independence, weaving Jefferson’s language into the state
constitution of 1780. Wiencek notes that, “The meaning of ‘all men’
sounded equally clear to the authors of the constitutions of six
Southern states that they amended Jefferson’s wording. ‘All freemen’
they wrote in their founding documents, ‘are equal..’. The authors of
those state constitutions knew what Jefferson meant, and could not
accept it. The Continental Congress ultimately struck the passage
because South Carolina and Georgia, crying out for more slaves, would
not abide shutting down the market.”
Historian
David Briton Davis declares that, “One cannot question the genuineness
of Jefferson’s liberal dreams. He was one of the first statesmen in any
part of the world to advocate concrete measures for restricting and
eradicating Negro slavery.” Later, laments Davis, “the most remarkable
thing about Jefferson’s stand on slavery is his immense silence.”
It
is interesting to recall Jefferson’s harsh analysis of slavery, which
had an important impact of the American society, despite his inability
to live up to the values he promoted in his personal life, as is often
the case with imperfect and fallible human beings. Jefferson broke new
ground in advancing freedom in a variety of ways. Consider the Virginia
Statute for Religious Freedom, written by Jefferson, calling for
freedom of conscience and separation of church and state. This was
unique in the world. Elsewhere, Catholics were persecuted in Protestant
countries and Protestants were mistreated in Catholic countries. Jews
suffered under disabilities almost everywhere. The Virginia General
Assembly passed Jefferson’s statute on January 16, 1786. It is a
forerunner of the First Amendment’s protection of religious freedom.
Because of Jefferson, America led the world in providing freedom for men
and women of all religious persuasions.
It
is interesting to consider Jefferson’s role with regard to slavery. In
his original draft of the Declaration of Independence , one of the
principal charges made by Jefferson against King George III and his
predecessors was that they would not allow the American colonies to
outlaw the importation of slaves. When Jefferson was first elected to
the Virginia legislature at the age of 25, his first political act was
to begin the elimination of slavery. Though unsuccessful, he tried to
further encourage the emancipation process by writing into the
Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.” In his
draft of a constitution for Virginia, he provided that all slaves would
be emancipated in that state by 1800, and that any child born in
Virginia after 1801 would be born free. This, however, was not adopted.
In
his draft instructions to the Virginia delegation to the Continental
Congress of 1774, published as “A Summary View of the Rights of British
America,”. Jefferson charged the British crown with having prevented the
colonies from abolishing slavery in the interests of avarice and greed:
“The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire of
these colonies, where it was, unhappily, introduced in their infant
state. But previous to the enfranchisement of the slaves we have, it is
necessary to exclude all further importations from Africa. Yet our
repeated efforts to effect this by prohibition, and by imposing duties
which might amount to a prohibition , have been hitherto defeated by his
Majesty’s negative.”
In
his autobiography, Jefferson declared, “Nothing is more certainly
written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free.” In
1784, when an effort was unsuccessfully made to exclude slavery from the
Northwest Territory, Jefferson was one of its leading supporters.
Finally, with the passage of the Northwest Ordinance in 1787, slavery
was indeed excluded from these territories—-a further step along the
path to the final elimination of slavery, and a clear indication of the
view of slavery which predominated among the framers of the
Constitution.
In “Notes
on the State of Virginia,”. Jefferson wrote: “The whole commerce
between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous
passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading
submission on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate
it, for man is an imitative animal…With the morals of the people their
industry also is destroyed…And can the liberties of a nation be thought
secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the
minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they
are not to be violated but with his wrath?”
In
the end, while many criticized the framers of the Constitution for not
eliminating the slave trade immediately, others understood that they had
set in motion an opposition to slavery that would bear fruit in the
future. When the Constitutional Convention met, slavery was legal
throughout the world. Not a single country at this time had outlawed
slavery. Many of the framers wanted to eliminate slavery from the
beginning. Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton were ardent
abolitionists. John Jay, who would become the first Chief Justice, was
president of the New York anti-slavery society. Rufus King and
Gouverneur Morris were in the forefront of the opposition to slavery and
the slave trade. In the end, to keep South Carolina and Georgia in the
Union, compromises were made. Still, Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut
declared, “Slavery, in time, will not be a speck in our country.”
Thomas
Jefferson is a complex figure whose contribution to America’s creation
and to American freedom is notable. He understood the evils of slavery,
yet, being a man of his time and place, he did not separate himself
from it. To ignore his extraordinary achievements and focus only upon
his shortcomings, as his critics now do, is to be guilty of what the
Quaker theologian Elton Trueblood called “the sin of contemporaneity,”
finding men and women of the past guilty of not holding the values of
our contemporary society.
Sadly,
from the beginning of recorded history until the 19th century, slavery
existed in every historical period—-in Ancient Greece and Rome and in
Biblical times. The teachings of the Hebrew Bible and the Apostle Paul
and the Patristic Fathers all support the idea of slavery. The current
assault on Thomas Jefferson tells us more about the narrowness and lack
of historical perspective of his detractors than it does about Jefferson
himself, a flawed but extraordinary creator of the very idea of
America.