Thomas Jefferson - How do people feel about him today?

[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.

People regularly got married at 14 during this time. Fourteen year olds were not considered children as they are today.

[Anonymous]

I don't think of him at all. He lived in a different time with different social norms. I'm glad we are not living like that anymore but I won't judge him through today's lens.

[Anonymous]

The two facts that he had a room with the world's most important men and included himself and that he had a years long relationship with his slave and wrote over 1k words a day and never mentioned her, who did have his children too, says it all.

Dbag

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The two facts that he had a room with the world's most important men and included himself and that he had a years long relationship with his slave and wrote over 1k words a day and never mentioned her, who did have his children too, says it all.

Dbag

So how many of those other guys did not also have mistresses?

[Anonymous]

Slavery was very much an actively-discussed topic at the time, and Thomas Jefferson was educated and open-minded enough to be very well aware of the opposing views on the subject. So he participated in these debates, and not only chose the wrong side but in his personal life took advantage the very worst forms of this power imbalance.

I think this is a very big black mark that has to be set against any good that he did.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Slavery was very much an actively-discussed topic at the time, and Thomas Jefferson was educated and open-minded enough to be very well aware of the opposing views on the subject. So he participated in these debates, and not only chose the wrong side but in his personal life took advantage the very worst forms of this power imbalance.

I think this is a very big black mark that has to be set against any good that he did.

Sure, we can judge him. But I'm very grateful that we had him. Without him, our country would be very much the worse.

Are we ready to be done tearing down our country and go back to elevating our ideals? I am.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Slavery was very much an actively-discussed topic at the time, and Thomas Jefferson was educated and open-minded enough to be very well aware of the opposing views on the subject. So he participated in these debates, and not only chose the wrong side but in his personal life took advantage the very worst forms of this power imbalance.

I think this is a very big black mark that has to be set against any good that he did.

Sure, we can judge him. But I'm very grateful that we had him. Without him, our country would be very much the worse.

Are we ready to be done tearing down our country and go back to elevating our ideals? I am.

Is it not possible to elevate the ideals without glorifying the hypocrite?

[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.

Sally Hemmings was also the half-sister of Jefferson's deceased wife. This definitely makes the relationship even more "complicated."

[Anonymous]

I think he was a product of his time and viewing him through a modern lens doesn’t really do much good. Some day our views will likely be viewed as archaic too, despite our best efforts to be on the “right side of history.”

He should be applauded for the good he did, while the things we now know to be unacceptable, should be learned from. We can express gratitude for what he gave us, both the good and the things that taught us how now to be.

[Anonymous]

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-dark-side-of-thomas-jefferson-35976004/

This is a great article that demonstrates how very intentionally brutal and financially motivated Jefferson was. I highly recommend reading it. The disillusion meant surrounding Jefferson really came to ahead when his descendants finally had to admit that Sally Hemings was in fact, the mother of multiple children fathered by Jefferson.

Sally was an enslaved person; consent does not even enter the conversation. She did not wish to leave France and only did so to secure freedom for some of her family. And who were her family? They were Jeffersons family as well. Not only did he enslave Sally, but Sally was his dead wives, half sister. The Hemings family related in multiple way to Jefferson and his wife, yet, Jefferson subjected them to the same wicked punishments and sold them off as well. His flesh and blood.

Well, it may not be fair to compare Jefferson to somebody living today. It’s certainly fair to compare him to George Washington and other of their contemporaries who recognized the evils of slavery. Washington wanted to end slavery and freed his own slaves. He recognized the dependence of the southern economy on slaves and believed the best way to end slavery was to reform the southern economy.

If you go to the library of Virginia and comb through documents of their contemporaries, you will find many, many manumission documents and wills devising freedom, and they cite the evil inherent in slavery.

Jefferson wrote beautifully about beautiful ideals. Ideals that would only be available to white men. Ideals that he did not live. Now, more than ever it is important to understand the truth about our history and development as a nation.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-dark-side-of-thomas-jefferson-35976004/

This is a great article that demonstrates how very intentionally brutal and financially motivated Jefferson was. I highly recommend reading it. The disillusion meant surrounding Jefferson really came to ahead when his descendants finally had to admit that Sally Hemings was in fact, the mother of multiple children fathered by Jefferson.

Sally was an enslaved person; consent does not even enter the conversation. She did not wish to leave France and only did so to secure freedom for some of her family. And who were her family? They were Jeffersons family as well. Not only did he enslave Sally, but Sally was his dead wives, half sister. The Hemings family related in multiple way to Jefferson and his wife, yet, Jefferson subjected them to the same wicked punishments and sold them off as well. His flesh and blood.

Well, it may not be fair to compare Jefferson to somebody living today. It’s certainly fair to compare him to George Washington and other of their contemporaries who recognized the evils of slavery. Washington wanted to end slavery and freed his own slaves. He recognized the dependence of the southern economy on slaves and believed the best way to end slavery was to reform the southern economy.

If you go to the library of Virginia and comb through documents of their contemporaries, you will find many, many manumission documents and wills devising freedom, and they cite the evil inherent in slavery.

Jefferson wrote beautifully about beautiful ideals. Ideals that would only be available to white men. Ideals that he did not live. Now, more than ever it is important to understand the truth about our history and development as a nation.

Washington and the slave teeth always seems more dreadful https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/health/washingtons-teeth/george-washington-and-slave-teeth

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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.

Agree. The lack of imagination by people is disappointing. There are tons of things we are doing now that future generations will likely look down on us for: our destruction of the environment (if you aren’t farming off the grid and living in a sod house then you are a part of the problem), eating animals and factory farming, buying products made by de facto slaves in developing nations, the objectification of women… I could go on and on. I think TJ was about as decent a man as a man in the South in his time could be.

[Anonymous]

This is actually one of the more intellectually driven high quality threads I’ve ever seen on DCUM. I tend to fall into the camp of like many of us, he was a complicated man in complicated times. Brilliant with a capability of foresite and action that has made millions of lives better today than they otherwise ever would have. Also capable of hypocrisy and evil.

Maybe the wisest thing I have heard about history is that “it is so often a pack of tricks we play upon the dead.” That cuts in every way possible.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The two facts that he had a room with the world's most important men and included himself and that he had a years long relationship with his slave and wrote over 1k words a day and never mentioned her, who did have his children too, says it all.

Dbag

+1. Jerk and windbag.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I honestly get him confused with Abraham Lincoln.

WOW