The Chris Moeller Archives

The Father of American Contradiction

 

All things considered, Thomas Jefferson doesn’t have to endure that many punches today. He’s a United States of America “Founding Father” alternately claimed by the "liberal" Democratic Party and by Southern anti-government(/anti-federalist) “individualists” on the Right. Modern sentiment regarding his sexual relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings, seems to range, oddly, only between general forgiveness and acceptance-- even admiration-- for his supposedly “forward” thinking on miscegenation.

His biographer, Joseph J. Ellis, the author of American Sphinx, wrote that any attempt to lift Jefferson out of the context of his time and move him to the present “is like trying to plant cut flowers.” Ellis argues that historians have preferred, through the years, to make the mistake of protecting the purity of the past than commit “the sin of presentism”—that is, holding the third President of the Republic to the scrutiny of modern standards.

What we rarely hear about, at least in establishment circles, is the reality that Thomas Jefferson was a white supremacist. It’s a well-known fact that he was a slave owner, but we often hear that admission coupled with a defense that the man’s writings condemned the institution even before the ink was dry on the Declaration of Independence and that his memoirs contend he went to his death in 1826 with the full knowledge that slavery was the unresolved-- and unsolvable-- issue for the nation he helped establish.

Jefferson’s worries on slavery, though, seem to have been more tightly wrapped in how the end of that institution might impact the well-being of the white race. As President, he believed that the slave uprising in Haiti that established the first black-majority government in the Western Hemisphere at the beginning of the 19th century should be condemned because of the violent example the rebellion could prove to be to slaves residing in the much larger country to Haiti’s north. He was unable to resolve the slavery issue in his mind not because of its moral implications so much as that he couldn’t solve the paradox of how Africans and their descendants could be freed upon the continent without that emancipation leading to violent reprisals against former slavemasters. To say that Jefferson was anti-slavery in thought obviously is betrayed by the fact that he owned slaves to his dying day, but the contention also fails to acknowledge that, regardless of his views on slavery, he was still clearly opposed to racial integration.

Historians tell us that, as a retired statesman living in his mansion on a hill in Virginia, he was troubled by “the Missouri Question,” perhaps the key political challenge to the nation during the 1820’s. The western part of the United States that Jefferson had annexed with the Louisiana Purchase was filling with people and the fight over slavery was being touched off with violence in that region. Ridiculously, Jefferson argued at that time that allowing slavery to expand in the West would “dilute” the institution, a reading which, to me, is nothing more than that of an old man-- deep in debt as he was personally at the time-- abandoning his legendary idealism for a little political and financial expedience.

When Jefferson’s 100-plus slaves were sold at auction upon his death, Sally Hemings was among them. This revisionist idea that theirs may have been some sort of epic love story is betrayed by the fact that he never wrote about her once in any of his vast and accumulated writings, and that she was not granted her freedom at his death when others at Monticello were given theirs. The theory that her sexual consent in the relationship is somehow implied by the “troubled” thoughts Jefferson had about slavery in his memoirs is beyond absurd, akin to arguing that Jerry Sandusky should be excused because he was “troubled” by the idea of young boys growing up in fatherless homes. They are both predators. Sally’s consent is an empty concept in and of itself in the light that she was his property. It’s conceivable that she gave her consent, but the only thing we’ll ever know for certain is that he didn’t need it.

Jefferson can be judged harshly even against the standards of his time. In Paris, where Jefferson lived extensively between the War for Independence and his inauguration as President in 1801, slavery was already perceived widely as the original sin of the new republic across the ocean. In the academic circles of the Northern states, it was hated with much vehemence. Among the signers of the Declaration of Independence, they may have been almost to a man white supremacists, but some were virulently opposed to slavery, and Jefferson was not perceived as being especially progressive on the issue by either the Northern contingent of convention delegates or the Southern. On matters of race, he was already a relic as a young republican revolutionary.

The author of the establishing declaration that “all men are created equal” had a very distinctive idea of who was a “man” and exactly who wasn’t. He was not including women in his intent, of course. He felt they were out of place in the company of decision-making men. He admirably opposed the popular idea that only land-owners should have voting rights, but as we’ve established, he never would have felt that slaves descended from Africa should be included as equal partners with Anglo-Saxons in the governance of the republic. He believed that these individuals were forever incapable of being equals even if slavery could be logistically repealed.

His cornerstone idea of a minimalist government was finally murdered more than a century later by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who stepped in during the 1930s to correct the disaster that had been wrought by the Jeffersonian ideal. So smitten was Jefferson, in fact, with the idea of no government at all except for the contradictory notion of "self-governance," he even opposed Judicial Review, a concept that was established with Marbury v. Madison during the Jefferson presidency, and is today probably the most inscrutable element of the separation of powers construct.

Jeffersonian America, with its unlimited freedom for the individual white man and its faith in a government acting least acting best, had evolved into full-scale myth decades before FDR came along. By the late 19th century, the West was closing for further expansion and the Industrial Age was unmasking and worsening economic inequality. We still cling to the founding myths, but it’s Jefferson’s anti-government rhetoric that’s actually been the most enduring legacy through the generations. It's the one that lingers with us most acutely, the one we pay for with little bits of our soul every time we watch a political candidate claim to despise the federal government he or she is campaigning to lead.

posted by CM @ 7:37 PM