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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]What’s to know?

He’s a dead, white, male, cisgender, slave-owner.  Full stop.[/quote]

So tired of people elevating these historical figures and not speaking the truth of who they were outloud.[/quote]

I mean the “full stop” is silly.
Your descriptors make him sound like  my Uncle Ted (if he had owned slaves). My Uncle Ted is pretty unremarkable, and Thomas Jefferson contributed 100x more to our great nation than anything my Uncke Ted ever did. 
Just—-the full stop omits essentially everything about Thomas Jefferson that explains WHY we even know who he is, much less why we celebrate him! (Hint: it’s not for his whiteness or cis-ness or his death or his maleness. Nor is it for the fact that he owned slaves. It’s for his visionary brilliance and [b]commitment [/b]to the ideals of what a nation could be if people began to claim their rights were bestowed on them by their creator rather than through edict from a benevolent king or queen. This was literally a revolutionary concept of its time. And this is why we celebrate him.)[/quote] It’s the commitment I am questioning. Yes, he was part of our great experiment and helped shape the nation, but at the same time, he was not so committed as to apply those ideals to his personal life.  I think we are capable of seeing both the ideals he espoused and the man himself. [/quote]

He lived in the system, and envisioned something different, something better.

He couldn't have married Sally Hemmings and been as successful as he was, wouldn't have had the power and respect that he did to make changes. Would it have been more admirable for him to have lived outside the system, with Sally Hemmings as his wife, freed, and broke and socially outcast?  It's an interesting thought experiment but I prefer the choice that he made, for myself and the country overall.[/quote] Where did I say he should have married Hemmings?  The way he treated [i]everyone[/i] and only took his personal comforts into consideration.  He did not look after his children from his legal wife either.  Plenty of people in his time did that.  He was a spoiled rich boy who loved being lord of the manor despite what he wrote.  [/quote]

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