Thomas Jefferson - How do people feel about him today?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What’s to know?

He’s a dead, white, male, cisgender, slave-owner. Full stop.

And our country, and the entire world, was blessed to have him. His wisdom was greater than all of ours.

(Maybe we should rethink all of our undeification of dead white males. Hmm?)

We can acknowledge his positive contributions WITHOUT deifying him. He’s also a man who made many unethical decisions.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What’s to know?

He’s a dead, white, male, cisgender, slave-owner. Full stop.

And our country, and the entire world, was blessed to have him. His wisdom was greater than all of ours.

(Maybe we should rethink all of our undeification of dead white males. Hmm?)

We can acknowledge his positive contributions WITHOUT deifying him. He’s also a man who made many unethical decisions.

He was uniquely awesome. You can't admit it though. SMH

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Years ago, I listened to a podcast about Thomas Jefferson and the main guest was a scholar who was a black woman and Thomas Jefferson expert. The host asked her if Thomas Jefferson should be “cancelled” because he was a white cisgender slaveholder.

The woman said no. She said we should continue to recognize his brilliance and judge him by the standards of the times in which he lived, which sadly were accepting of slavery and other horrors. The woman also said that she feels differently about people who still defended slavery later in the 1800s, because by then it had been denounced and abolished throughout most of the world.

It’s complicated, no?

Let's give credit where credit is due. You're likely referring to Annette Gordon-Reed, who's a scholar of the Hemings family. She'd done brilliant work, and I highly recommend reading her stuff.

I think many of us can recognize Jefferson for what he was--a seminal part of the founding of this country, who was also a hypocrite that lived beyond his means.

I mean, that describes the vast majority of Americans, 50% of Americans have credit card debt, for example, and almost everyone is hypocritical about something. Very few Americans are a seminal part of the founding of the country. None of us alive today can say that. So you're saying that he was a Founding Father, and also human. When we say deification, we don't literally mean elevate to godhood, everyone knows that the Founding Fathers were people, not celestial beings.

[Anonymous]

He was a human being, who therefore was neither an infallible saint nor a devil wholly committed to evil. Without a doubt, he committed acts of evil that should be condemned and not forgotten, but he also made contributions to our nation and our world which should be remembered and celebrated.

I appreciate the positive things he accomplished, denounce the evil he participated in, and recognize that he had a remarkable intellect, even if he sometimes employed it for reprehensible acts.

I think it is important that we judge the acts of individuals rather than naively trying to make summary judgements on rather a person is “good” or “bad”. Human nature is far too complex, and everyone (including ourselves) is inevitably some sort of mixture. By declaring others to be “bad”, we overlook the risk we each face of grave moral failures, ourselves. Sure, we like to think of ourselves as good - maybe we love our families, give to charity, vote and pay our taxes, etc. - I’m sure Jefferson did as well. By the standards of his day, he was probably seen as reasonably upright, at least enough to be elected President. But for all the good he did, he also did great evil, which is an object lesson for us all. We must never forget the capacity for evil that lies within all of us, even the “good” people, even ourselves. We must remain ever vigilant to recognize it and not allow it to take root.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What’s to know?

He’s a dead, white, male, cisgender, slave-owner. Full stop.

And our country, and the entire world, was blessed to have him. His wisdom was greater than all of ours.

(Maybe we should rethink all of our undeification of dead white males. Hmm?)

We can acknowledge his positive contributions WITHOUT deifying him. He’s also a man who made many unethical decisions.

He was uniquely awesome. You can't admit it though. SMH

He was just a man. Did some good stuff. And some bad stuff. Nothing more.

[Anonymous]

I dont think about him at all. Ever.

[Anonymous]

Any historian or credentialed intellectual would remind us to evaluate people during their time. Historical context matters.

Judging a person’s actions through a modern lens is just plain silly.

Similarly, artists judge art rather than the creator. A good song is a good song regardless of who created it and what they did (e.g., Michael Jackson).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What’s to know?

He’s a dead, white, male, cisgender, slave-owner. Full stop.

And our country, and the entire world, was blessed to have him. His wisdom was greater than all of ours.

(Maybe we should rethink all of our undeification of dead white males. Hmm?)

We can acknowledge his positive contributions WITHOUT deifying him. He’s also a man who made many unethical decisions.

He was uniquely awesome. You can't admit it though. SMH

He was just a man. Did some good stuff. And some bad stuff. Nothing more.

He participated in the worst form of chattel slavery. That’s more than some bad stuff and worse than most of the historical figures we admire

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Any historian or credentialed intellectual would remind us to evaluate people during their time. Historical context matters.

Judging a person’s actions through a modern lens is just plain silly.

Similarly, artists judge art rather than the creator. A good song is a good song regardless of who created it and what they did (e.g., Michael Jackson).

He wasn’t clueless about societies without slavery- he travelled to Paris and lived it first hand. You can easily condemn him through the lens of his own time

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Any historian or credentialed intellectual would remind us to evaluate people during their time. Historical context matters.

Judging a person’s actions through a modern lens is just plain silly.

Similarly, artists judge art rather than the creator. A good song is a good song regardless of who created it and what they did (e.g., Michael Jackson).

He wasn’t clueless about societies without slavery- he travelled to Paris and lived it first hand. You can easily condemn him through the lens of his own time

The French peasants might disagree about the “progressive” nature of their country.

[Anonymous]

Jefferson started sleeping with Hemmings when she was 14. I can't even with these "he was a complicated man" posters. FOURTEEN.

[Anonymous]

His $2 bill is useless.

[Anonymous]

Horrifically racist. We need to reconsider anything he was involved with.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Jefferson started sleeping with Hemmings when she was 14. I can't even with these "he was a complicated man" posters. FOURTEEN.

I don’t think that’s necessarily true. She went to Paris to watch his children when she was 14. But she wasn’t pregnant with his first child until she was 16, which would have been a pretty normal age for a girl to be married and pregnant in the 18th century. If he started sleeping with her at 14, she probably would have been pregnant almost immediately. It’s all creepy but hard to judge how creepy it is. In the 1&th century, married women (even white) had no legal personage under the system of coverture — their husban owned all their property, they could not sue in their own name, it was legally impossible for a husband to rape his wife because her body was his property. So it wasn’t nearly as bad as slavery, but it wasn’t exactly what we’d consider a relationship of equals in which the women could consent to sex. Arguably, nearly all sex in the 18th century was coercive and non-consensual. Sally actually could have freed herself in Paris, under the laws of France at the time. She negotiated for freedom for her future children as a condition of returning to America with Jefferson. So she definitely had some agency in the relationship.

Another thing many people don’t know about Jefferson—his initial draft of the Declaration included an indictment of transnational slave trade — basically saying how terrible it was that England had saddled America with this awful system. He would have abolished the slave trade immediately. Other members, who had a lot of money in the slave trade, forced him to take it out.

My take on Jefferson is that he was a very very smart person with a high degree of cognitive dissonance that allowed him to live a very comfortable lifestyle under a system that he found to be abhorrent, on a cognitive level. It’s a good reminder to all of us to think about all the places where we compromise our values in order to live comfortable lives where we get along well with our social circles.

Id also say that the argument that slavery was widely accepted , so we should give him a pass on that, is bunk. Sam Adam’ was an abolitionist. So was Thomas Paine. A lot of the founding fathers were. John Dickinson freed his enslaved people after the revolution, and there were many others that did as well. (I watched a great Finding Your Roots where one person traced the lineage back to a community in Virginia of enslaved people freed after the revolution.). Jefferson himself wrote about the evils of slavery, but then somehow managed to convince himself that it was okay for him to keep people enslaved, and even on his death I think he only ended up freeing his own children. Does that make him worse, because he knew it was wrong and did it anyway? Arguably yes.

Personally, I don’t think there’s value in canceling him. There’s more value in discussing all the complexity of him. I think it’s olay to remember the good things he brought to this country, while also acknowledging he was no saint and did some terrible things.

Unlike someone like stonewall jackson or Jefferson Davis — I’m fine just canceling them.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Years ago, I listened to a podcast about Thomas Jefferson and the main guest was a scholar who was a black woman and Thomas Jefferson expert. The host asked her if Thomas Jefferson should be “cancelled” because he was a white cisgender slaveholder.

The woman said no. She said we should continue to recognize his brilliance and judge him by the standards of the times in which he lived, which sadly were accepting of slavery and other horrors. The woman also said that she feels differently about people who still defended slavery later in the 1800s, because by then it had been denounced and abolished throughout most of the world.

It’s complicated, no?

Let's give credit where credit is due. You're likely referring to Annette Gordon-Reed, who's a scholar of the Hemings family. She'd done brilliant work, and I highly recommend reading her stuff.

I think many of us can recognize Jefferson for what he was--a seminal part of the founding of this country, who was also a hypocrite that lived beyond his means.

I mean, that describes the vast majority of Americans, 50% of Americans have credit card debt, for example, and almost everyone is hypocritical about something. Very few Americans are a seminal part of the founding of the country. None of us alive today can say that. So you're saying that he was a Founding Father, and also human. When we say deification, we don't literally mean elevate to godhood, everyone knows that the Founding Fathers were people, not celestial beings.

Lol, yes, let's equate credit card debt to an estate built via slave labor.