Reply to Thomas Jefferson - How do people feel about him today?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=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[/quote]
So how many of those other guys did not also have mistresses?  [/quote]

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 [/quote]

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.  [/quote]

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