Thomas Jefferson - How do people feel about him today?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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?

I don’t think I would think of the 42 year old man who owned me and raped me when I was 14 as my “affair partner”. Technically he took a child abroad for sex which makes him both a pedophile and a human trafficker

[Anonymous]

Just revisited Monticello in September. I had not been there in over 30 years.

I came away not liking him. He was a spoiled rich boy who had a flair for writing. While he definitely talked the talk, he never walked the walk. He cared more about himself and his books than anything.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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?

I don’t think I would think of the 42 year old man who owned me and raped me when I was 14 as my “affair partner”. Technically he took a child abroad for sex which makes him both a pedophile and a human trafficker

Buy historically many women did. It's still done today, even, to a lesser extent.

[Anonymous]

BAMF

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Just revisited Monticello in September. I had not been there in over 30 years.

I came away not liking him. He was a spoiled rich boy who had a flair for writing. While he definitely talked the talk, he never walked the walk. He cared more about himself and his books than anything.

So their new and improved site was a success. They showcased his villainy, just what some posters in this thread want to see.

[Anonymous]

Yes, he was a slave owner and fathered children with a slave. But, he was also a founding father laying the groundwork for the constitution and so many other things. Washington had slaves as did many others of that time. Mark Anthony said about Julius Caesar “The good outweighs the evil….”. Is the country going to demonize Martin Luther King who was a notorious womanizer. No. Heck, Trump is a convicted sexual abuser, racist and he could get re-elected!

[Anonymous]

Hypocrite

[Anonymous]

He introduced and grew fruit trees, vegetables, and herbs. He designed a magnificent garden.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I dont think about him at all. Ever.

Same. Never have.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Why don't you form your own opinion, UVA grad?

lol! What a shocker! Actually read and learn and come to your own opinion!

[Anonymous]

Rapist

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Rapist

By today’s definition, almost every man of the 18th century was. Most women did not have the ability to choose marriage partner, once married they had no legal personage and could be raped and beaten (within reason, whatever that meant), as a matter of marital right, and were basically stripped of all their property. You can’t really fully consent to sex in such coercive circumstances, but that’s what marriage was.

[Anonymous]

As an architect, he was way too derivative. Too much brick and white columns as well.
As a person, kind of a hypocrite.
In a later century, he would probably be a champagne socialist.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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?

I don’t think I would think of the 42 year old man who owned me and raped me when I was 14 as my “affair partner”. Technically he took a child abroad for sex which makes him both a pedophile and a human trafficker

16, which I think was the usually age for women to get married then. She was 14 when she went to Paris to watch his daughter, but was not pregnant until she was 16 and returning to Virginia with him. Unlikely they were having sex without her getting pregnant. Also, under French law, she could have left him and essentially manumitted herself. She chose to return to Virginia with him in exchange for a promise that the baby she was carrying, and any other children they had, would be freed. He did do that, and freed them all as teenagers. I’m not saying this is a great situation but I think your view stops her of some of the agency she had.
Jefferson himself advocated for the abolition of the slave trade in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence but others made him take it out. He also greatly criticized slave holding as an institution, but then failed to manumit his own enslaved people (other than his children). He obviously had a really high degree of cognitive dissolvable that allowed him to live in a way that he wanted and be accepted by his peers, within a system that he found morally abhorrent and which victimized people that he apparently cared about. Does that make him worse than someone who was very pro slavery? I don’t know. But it certainly makes him more complicated. And Sally herself was obviously a complicated person. I think she lived in her last days with one of her children that passed for white—-unclear if she also passed or not. She had three European grandparents so probably very light skinned.

[Anonymous]

[img]

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.

That is a great article — I couldn’t stop reading! So sad to think about those boys and the missing nail stock, or tje father watching his teen daughters being sold away from him and never find them. I would sort of love A Finding Your Roots genealogy study that manages to find the descendants of that man’s daughters. I wonder if that could be done.

It’s a small issue but I think you have the chronology wrong on Hemings and France. Her children were not born at that point so she wasn’t forced to return to America to obtain the freedom of enslaved family members. She certainly had enslaved siblings at that point but I don’t think she got their freedom — only that of her unborn children. From today’s perspective it’s a weird choice to make but I guess choosing between being a free but penniless person in 18tj century France (which almost certainly meant prostitution) was less attractive than having enslaved children who would occupy a privileged position and ultimately be free, with one of the most famous men in America. She was very savvy to use the negotiating power she did have, since ultimately he was such an A$$ about freeing other enslaved people that he supposedly valued.