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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Jefferson started sleeping with Hemmings when she was 14.  I can't even with these "he was a complicated man" posters.  FOURTEEN.[/quote]

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.  
[/quote]

Agree. The lack of imagination by people is disappointing. [b]There are tons of things we are doing now that future generations will likely look down on us for:[/b] 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. [/quote]

That's a really important thing to mention. I'm not a vegetarian/vegan and eating meat is part of human evolution (slavery is not) and I am a low-level consumer--partly because I don't have the money but also I've never had much interest in buying stuff--but pretty much every one of us is participating in actions that have terrible effects on other humans and future humans. [/quote]

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