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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]To be clear, while a PP wrote about other contemporaries freeing their slaves, manumission was a very difficult process, legally as well as financially.  George Washington did not succeed in freeing his slaves, during his life or on his deathbed, although he wanted to.  It was too difficult.  And very few slaveowners ever did, not because they were evil people but because the system was designed to prevent it.  Many people thought it was an evil thing and would have done so, which was why the system was designed to prevent it.[/quote]

I agree it was made difficult to institutionalize the system … but there were still a lot of people who did it, especially after the revolution.  It wasn’t a possibility for someone like Jefferson because he repeatedly did things oke mortgage his enslaved people to build a bigger house—if he had lived more frugally, he could have done it.  There was a great finding your root episode where one of the guests had their lineage traced back to Virginia and a town that was filled with enslaved people freed after the revolution — I think maybe on the eastern shore?.  There were a fair number of people that took the ideals of liberty to heart and didn’t think slavery was compatible with the new America.  I think Dickinson, who wrote the famous letters from a farmer, was one of them.   So it’s a cop out to say “that’s just the way it was.”

Jefferson strikes me like so many people who had ideals in their youth. And as they age and realize what those ideals would mean to their life, they make all sorts of rationalizations for why their ideals are not practical.  He probably had a string of rationalizations in his head.  If you read the Smithsonian article posted above it’s clear he thought he was a “good” slave owner but then endorsed  all sorts of awful things that were in no way benevolent.

I went down a rabbit hole last night and researched the Black man featured in the Smithsonian article who Jefferson freed but who had to watch his teen children auctioned off because Jefferson did not free them.  He was reunited with at least two of them, and one of his great-grandchildren helped found the NAACP.  
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