{"id":48461,"date":"2013-07-07T17:29:39","date_gmt":"2013-07-07T16:29:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/rethinking-thomas-jefferson\/48461\/"},"modified":"2013-07-07T17:29:39","modified_gmt":"2013-07-07T16:29:39","slug":"rethinking-thomas-jefferson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/rethinking-thomas-jefferson\/","title":{"rendered":"Rethinking Thomas Jefferson"},"content":{"rendered":"

Americans are proud that their Declaration of Independence was also a declaration of universal rights. But the hard truth is that, in 1776, the words were mere propaganda cloaking the fact that a third of the signers were slaveholders, including the famous author, Thomas Jefferson, as Robert Parry recalls.<\/em><\/p>\n

Thomas Jefferson is admired for his elegant prose in the Declaration of Independence, but he\u00a0was a world-class hypocrite. He wrote, \u201cWe hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness\u201d \u2014 but he didn\u2019t really believe any of that.<\/p>\n

In his thoroughly repugnant book, Notes on the State of Virginia<\/em>, Jefferson even engaged in the pseudo-science of measuring the skulls of African-Americans to prove that not all men were created equal. Some of Jefferson\u2019s white supremacy nonsense survives to the present day in the views of unreconstructed segregationists.<\/p>\n

Because of his racism \u2014 and his undeniable political skills \u2014 Jefferson also ranks among the Founders\u00a0as perhaps the most responsible for putting the United States on course for the Civil War. In the years after the Constitution was ratified, he pushed a highly constrained view of federal power, supporting the interests of white Southern plantation owners who feared that a strong central government would eventually doom slavery.<\/p>\n

To promote that position, Jefferson injected a nasty factionalism that demonized George Washington\u2019s Federalist allies, especially Alexander Hamilton and John Adams, in the 1790s. Hamilton, Adams and Washington believed\u00a0that a vibrant central government was crucial for the nation\u2019s development.<\/p>\n

However, Jefferson and other Southern slaveholders saw an effective central government as an existential threat to slavery. Thus, they ramped up their angry insistence of \u201cstates\u2019 rights\u201d and concocted an extra-constitutional theory about the power of the states to \u201cnullify\u201d federal law.<\/p>\n

Jefferson was the driving force in this movement, creating what became known as the Virginia Dynasty, a string of three consecutive two-term U.S. presidents from Virginia, starting with Jefferson in 1801 and continuing through James Madison and ending with James Monroe in 1825. By then, slavery\u2019s roots had dug down even deeper across the South and spread into new states to the west.<\/p>\n

It would take the bloodbath of the Civil War to finally pull slavery out of the soil of the South, but Jefferson\u2019s weed-like political legacy would keep resurfacing, first after Reconstruction with the South\u2019s reassertion of \u201cstates\u2019 rights\u201d and white supremacy. The South again would resist federal authority and repress blacks under Jim Crow laws and segregation.<\/p>\n

Even today\u2019s anti-government extremism from the likes of the Tea Party and \u201clibertarians\u201d can be traced back to Jefferson, a common thread from the days when Jefferson\u2019s pro-slavery \u201cnullificationists\u201d tied up the pre-Civil War Congress to today\u2019s anti-government extremism that has made Congress again a laughingstock of dysfunction.<\/p>\n

Fearing Slave Rebellion<\/strong><\/p>\n

So, as Americans admire Jefferson\u2019s soaring words \u2014\u00a0first read to the American people on July 4, 1776 \u2014\u00a0they shouldn\u2019t forget that Jefferson and many of his fellow delegates at the Continental Congress considered their African-American slaves as mere investments, albeit potentially dangerous ones who needed to be kept in line with whips, guns and nooses.<\/p>\n

A major impetus toward the Revolution in Virginia came when the tough-minded Royal Governor, the Earl of Dunmore, responded to colonial insults and insubordination in 1775 by threatening to \u201cdeclare freedom to the slaves.\u201d This perceived British encouragement of slave rebellions scared Virginia\u2019s white aristocracy and created a financial incentive for plantation owners to join the drive toward independence, much as\u00a0Britain\u2019s blockade of Boston\u2019s port did for the colonial ruling class of Massachusetts.<\/p>\n

Some of Jefferson\u2019s modern defenders argue that he shouldn\u2019t be criticized too harshly for his hypocrisy on\u00a0slavery, saying\u00a0he should be judged by the standards of his time. But Jefferson \u2014 more than most people today \u2014 knew the horrors and degradations of slavery. He made that clear in his first draft of the Declaration of Independence when he included a segment <\/a>blaming the King of England for the slave trade:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cHe has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it\u2019s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium ofinfidelpowers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe has prostituted his negative [his veto] for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce; and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die. He is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of whichhehas deprived them, by murdering the people for whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against thelibertiesof one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against thelivesof another.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This section was largely deleted by slaveholding delegates of the Continental Congress \u2014 only the phrase \u201cHe has excited domestic Insurrections among us\u201d survived \u2014 but Jefferson\u2019s attempt to place the blame for slavery on the King, rather than on the colonists who owned slaves, reveals that he was well aware of the evils involved in the slave industry. Ultimately, a third of the signers of the Declaration of Independence owned slaves, including Jefferson.<\/p>\n

Fighting the Federalists<\/strong><\/p>\n

After the Revolutionary War was won, the country floundered under the Articles of Confederation, which declared the states \u201csovereign\u201d and \u201cindependent.\u201d To save the nation\u2019s fragile independence, George Washington and his then-prot\u00c3\u00a9g\u00c3\u00a9 James Madison devised a new Constitution in 1787 that concentrated power in the central government.<\/p>\n

However, this major change was fiercely opposed by key Southerners, such as Virginia\u2019s Patrick Henry and George Mason, who warned that the federal government would eventually come under the control of the North and would demand the end of slavery \u2014 thus intruding on the \u201crights\u201d of white Virginians to own black slaves. Despite these warnings, the Constitution won ratification, albeit narrowly in Virginia. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “The Right’s Dubious Claim to Madison<\/a>.”]<\/em><\/p>\n

During this period of the writing and ratification of the Constitution, Jefferson was outside the country serving as the U.S. representative to France. His input into the debate over the Constitution was limited to several letters to Madison in which Jefferson criticized the dramatic power shift but did not advocate rejection.<\/p>\n

When Jefferson returned to the United States in 1789 \u2014 and then\u00a0served as\u00a0President Washington\u2019s Secretary of State \u2014 he grew worried about Virginia\u2019s interests within the new constitutional framework and became harshly critical of Treasury Secretary Hamilton\u2019s ambitious plans for creating a financial system and building the nation.<\/p>\n

The charismatic Jefferson also began pulling his Virginia neighbor Madison out of Washington\u2019s orbit and into his own, a shift in allegiance that caught Washington and Hamilton by surprise. Soon, with Jefferson secretly funding newspaper attacks on the Federalists \u2013 and them returning the favor \u2013 the young United States\u00a0began descending into the bitter factionalism that Washington had feared.<\/p>\n

A gifted wordsmith and impressive intellectual, Jefferson also proved\u00a0adept at playing these power games as he shaped his small-government political faction into the Democratic-Republican Party. In 1800, from his perch as Vice President, Jefferson succeeded in ousting President John Adams amid such acrimony that it left lasting scars in the two men\u2019s relationship which stretched back to Adams recruiting Jefferson to write the Declaration of Independence.<\/p>\n

Jefferson considered his election in 1800 the \u201cSecond American Revolution\u201d in that it pushed back against the strong nationalism of the Federalists and replaced it with a new constitutional interpretation that emphasized \u201cstates\u2019 rights.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jefferson succeeded in selling his movement as the essence of democracy, relying\u00a0on industrious small farmers and their common wisdom. But his real political base was the aristocracy of Southern plantation owners. It was their vast investment in slavery that was protected most by Jefferson\u2019s resistance to an activist central government.<\/p>\n

Through the first quarter of the Nineteenth Century, with the federal government constrained and with Virginians\u00a0at the helm, the cataclysmic fear of Jefferson\u2019s fellow slaveholders \u2014 Patrick Henry and George Mason \u2014 could be deferred; a weak federal government would not soon infringe on their \u201cliberty\u201d to own other humans.<\/p>\n

The \u2018Black Jacobins\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

But fear of slave rebellions was never too far beneath the surface of Jefferson\u2019s thinking, coloring his attitudes toward a slave revolt in the French colony of St. Domingue (today\u2019s Haiti). There, African slaves took seriously the Jacobins\u2019 cry of \u201cliberty, equality and fraternity.\u201d After their demands for freedom were rebuffed and the brutal French plantation system continued, violent slave uprisings followed.<\/p>\n

Hundreds of white plantation owners were slain as the rebels overran the colony. A self-educated slave named Toussaint L\u2019Ouverture emerged as the revolution\u2019s leader, demonstrating skills on the battlefield and in the complexities of politics.<\/p>\n

Despite the atrocities committed by both sides of the conflict, the rebels \u2014 known as the \u201cBlack Jacobins\u201d \u2014 gained the sympathy of the American Federalists. L\u2019Ouverture negotiated friendly relations with the Federalist administration under President John Adams. Alexander Hamilton, a native of the Caribbean himself, helped L\u2019Ouverture draft a constitution.<\/p>\n

But events in Paris and Washington soon conspired to undo the promise of Haiti\u2019s emancipation from slavery. Despite the Federalist sympathies, many American slave-owners, including Jefferson, feared that slave uprisings might spread northward. \u201cIf something is not done, and soon done,\u201d Jefferson wrote in 1797, \u201cwe shall be the murderers of our own children.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the chaos and excesses of the French Revolution led to the ascendance of Napoleon Bonaparte, a brilliant and vain military commander possessed of legendary ambition. As he expanded his power across Europe, Napoleon also dreamed of rebuilding a French empire in the Americas.<\/p>\n

In 1801, Jefferson became the third President of the United States \u2014 and his interests at least temporarily aligned with Napoleon\u2019s. The French dictator wanted to restore French control of St. Domingue and Jefferson wanted to see the slave rebellion crushed.<\/p>\n

President Jefferson and Secretary of State Madison collaborated with Napoleon through secret diplomatic channels. Napoleon asked Jefferson if the United States would help a French army traveling by sea to St. Domingue. Jefferson replied that \u201cnothing will be easier than to furnish your army and fleet with everything and reduce Toussaint [L\u2019Ouverture] to starvation.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Napoleon had a secret second phase of his plan that he didn\u2019t share with Jefferson. Once the French army had subdued L\u2019Ouverture and his rebel force, Napoleon intended to advance to the North American mainland, basing a new French empire in New Orleans and settling the vast territory west of the Mississippi River.<\/p>\n

Stopping Napoleon<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 1802, the French expeditionary force achieved initial success against the slave army, driving L\u2019Ouverture\u2019s forces back into the mountains. But, as they retreated, the ex-slaves torched the cities and the plantations, destroying the colony\u2019s once-thriving economic infrastructure. L\u2019Ouverture, hoping to bring the war to an end, accepted Napoleon\u2019s promise of a negotiated settlement that would ban future slavery in the country. As part of the agreement, L\u2019Ouverture turned himself in.<\/p>\n

But Napoleon broke his word. Jealous and contemptuous of L\u2019Ouverture, who was regarded by some admirers as a general with skills rivaling Napoleon\u2019s, the French dictator had L\u2019Ouverture shipped in chains back to Europe where he was mistreated and died in prison.<\/p>\n

Infuriated by the betrayal, L\u2019Ouverture\u2019s young generals resumed the war with a vengeance. In the months that followed, the French army \u2014 already decimated by disease \u2014 was overwhelmed by a fierce enemy fighting in familiar terrain and determined not to be put back into slavery.<\/p>\n

Napoleon sent a second French army, but it too was destroyed. Though the famed general had conquered much of Europe, he lost 24,000 men, including some of his best troops, in St. Domingue before abandoning his campaign. The death toll among the ex-slaves was much higher, but they had prevailed, albeit over a devastated land.<\/p>\n

By 1803, a frustrated Napoleon \u2014 denied his foothold in the New World \u2014 agreed to sell New Orleans and the Louisiana territories to Jefferson, a negotiation handled by Madison that ironically required just the sort of expansive interpretation of federal powers that the Jeffersonians ordinarily disdained.<\/p>\n

However, a greater irony was that the Louisiana Purchase, which opened the heart of the present United States to American settlement and is regarded as possibly Jefferson\u2019s greatest achievement as president, had been made possible despite Jefferson\u2019s misguided \u2014 and racist \u2014 collaboration with Napoleon.<\/p>\n

\u201cBy their long and bitter struggle for independence, St. Domingue\u2019s blacks were instrumental in allowing the United States to more than double the size of its territory,\u201d wrote Stanford University professor John Chester Miller in his book, The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery.<\/em> But, Miller observed, \u201cthe decisive contribution made by the black freedom fighters \u2026 went almost unnoticed by the Jeffersonian administration.\u201d<\/p>\n

Without L\u2019Ouverture\u2019s leadership, the island nation fell into a downward spiral. In 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the radical slave leader who had replaced L\u2019Ouverture, formally declared the nation\u2019s independence and returned it to its original Indian name, Haiti.<\/p>\n

A year later, apparently fearing a return of the French, Dessalines ordered the massacre of the remaining French whites on the island. Jefferson reacted to the bloodshed by imposing a stiff economic embargo on Haiti. In 1806, Dessalines himself was brutally assassinated, touching off a cycle of political violence that would haunt Haiti for the next two centuries.<\/p>\n

\n

Hand-Wringing over Slavery<\/strong><\/p>\n

On a personal level, Jefferson might occasionally wring his hands about the evils of slavery and express his earnest wish that something could be done. But he also viewed his slaves as investments. He considered his child-bearing female slaves particularly valuable because they could boost his \u201ccapital\u201d via reproduction.<\/p>\n

\u201cI consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man of the farm,\u201d Jefferson remarked. \u201cWhat she produces is an addition to the capital, while his labors disappear in mere consumption.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though considering blacks inferior to whites and rejecting the possibility that free blacks could live peaceably with whites, Jefferson reputedly bedded one of his teenage slave girls, Sally Hemings.<\/p>\n

Jefferson\u2019s many apologists either deny the evidence of this sexual relationship or they insist it was consensual, amounting to something like a historic love story. Some Jefferson apologists also excuse his failure to free his slaves in his will \u2014 as George Washington and some other Founders did \u2014 because of his financial difficulties. Jefferson only allowed a few slaves from the Hemings family to go free.<\/p>\n

Jefferson\u2019s defenders also whitewash much of his political legacy, arguing that \u201cJeffersonian democracy\u201d was the paragon of liberty, with its supposed reliance on the simple wisdom of hardworking family farmers. But the hypocrisy of \u201cJeffersonian democracy\u201d was largely the same as the hypocrisy that\u00a0pervaded the Declaration of Independence.<\/p>\n

Jefferson\u2019s Democratic-Republican Party was controlled by slave-owning elites, not common\u00a0farmers and surely not citizens who were serious about setting African-Americans free. Indeed, Jefferson\u2019s political promotion of states\u2019 rights, including \u201cnullification\u201d of federal law, helped set the stage for Southern secession after Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860 as an anti-slavery candidate.<\/p>\n

Yet, even after the bloody Civil War, many Southern whites continued to embrace Jefferson\u2019s political hostility to a strong central government, leading to the decades of Jim Crow repression of blacks and surviving to the present day with the racism that bubbles just beneath the surface of the Tea Party.<\/p>\n

Virginian First<\/strong><\/p>\n

Arguably, Jefferson\u2019s greatest weakness as a national leader \u2014 and why modern Americans should view his legacy with particular skepticism \u2014 is that he was a Virginian first, an American second. Like many of his contemporaries, he grew up considering Virginia his country, just as many Bostonians saw themselves\u00a0primarily as citizens of Massachusetts.<\/p>\n

Some colonial leaders, especially George Washington, overcame their parochial interests and came to see themselves as Americans first. For\u00a0Washington and his aide-de-camp Alexander Hamilton, that transformation was aided by their involvement in fighting up and down the length of the\u00a0nation. But Jefferson was not a soldier and spent most of the war in Virginia.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

As historians Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg note in their 2010 bookMadison and Jefferson,Jefferson \u2014 and\u00a0his later ally Madison \u2014 were, first and foremost, politicians representing the interests of their constituencies in Virginia.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is hard for most to think of Madison and Jefferson and admit that they were Virginians first, Americans second,\u201d Burstein and Isenberg note. \u201cBut this fact seems beyond dispute. Virginians felt they had to act to protect the interests of the Old Dominion, or else, before long, they would become marginalized by a northern-dominated economy.<\/p>\n

\u201cVirginians who thought in terms of the profit to be reaped in land were often reluctant to invest in manufacturing enterprises. The real tragedy is that they chose to speculate in slaves rather than in textile factories and iron works. \u2026 And so as Virginians tied their fortunes to the land, they failed to extricate themselves from a way of life that was limited in outlook and produced only resistance to economic development.\u201d<\/p>\n

So, while it\u2019s understandable why Americans would celebrate Thomas Jefferson\u2019s famous words in the Declaration of Independence, they should not forget the history. Those noble words about the \u201cself-evident\u201d truths \u2014 that \u201call men are created equal\u201d endowed with \u201cunalienable Rights\u201d\u00a0\u2014 were simply propaganda in 1776. They were given substance only by a long struggle against the political machinations of, among others, their author.<\/p>\n

Republished with permission from: Truth Out<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Americans are proud that their Declaration of Independence was also a declaration of universal rights. But the hard truth is that, in 1776, the words were mere propaganda cloaking the fact that a third of the signers were slaveholders, including the famous author, Thomas Jefferson, as Robert Parry recalls. Thomas Jefferson is admired for his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-48461","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48461","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48461"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48461\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}