"a new Jefferson biography" Topic

link

Interesting. I took a seminar on Jefferson at his university (U.Va.) led by Merrill Peterson, who was at the time (1972) the leading Jefferson scholar and biographer. He made the same general point that this review does: we will never fully understand Jefferson, who was a "playful intellectual" who could entertain and enjoy opposite ideas simultaneously. It is very easy to quote Jefferson against Jefferson.

I'm working on selecting documents for a curriculum, and we will be using probably a dozen or more of Jefferson's. But we could select a different set and give a quite different sense of the man.

Final selections are still pending, but I do hope to use both Jefferson's instructions to George Rogers Clark for the campaign against the British in Illinois, and also his instructions to Lewis and Clark.

We will certainly use his analysis of the evil of slavery in NOTES ON VIRGINIA. But do we put more weight on that or on the fact that he never freed his? Yes.

I think just as interesting facet is where his wealth came from.

Okay, except neither Burr nor Vidal even comes close to being a reliable witness.

Of course he was a hypocrite on slavery. Hardly news, and we point that out to students. But "hypocrisy is the compliment vice pays to virtue." The question is how he and many/most others could see an evil so clearly and yet cling to it. "He was a hypocrite" is doubtless true enough, but it isn't really a very helpful aid to understanding.

The whole world was (and still is) hypocritical on slavery.
For the record, the first law abolishing slavery was passed in Massachusetts in the 17th century. The British Crown refused it.
The First Nation to legally abolish the international slave trade was… the United States of America. It began by making it illegal (in 1794) for American ships to engage in the slave trade, and then in 1807 with the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves— which took affect on Jan. 1, 1808 in keeping with the guidelines of the US Constitution, Article 1, Section 9 (this allowed the British Parliament to get their own similar act in earlier, but the US law was passed first). It was President Jefferson himself who pushed for the passage of this act in his 1806 State of the Union, and called the slave trade a "…violation of the human rights…" of "unoffending inhabitants of Africa."

Was he a hypocrite? Yes. But did he try to do many right things? Yes. And did he recognize what the truly right thing was? Absolutely. Only someone who did could write "We hold these truths to be self-evident— that all men are Created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights, that among these rights are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." (Yes, I know he originally wrote ‘property'— I do not hold an unrevised manuscript against a man.)

"If men were angels, no government would be necessary."— James Madison.
Alas, Jefferson was no angel. But then, neither was (or is) anybody else.

Fascinating article, Doc. Have you read this biography? What do you recommend as the best Jefferson biography for the lay reader?

Just saw the review so no, haven't read it yet. I plan to.

Peterson's is still well-regarded but it is 50 years old. I'm not really up on the more recent (past several decades!) Jefferson scholarship. I suspect it is a minefield to be entered with care.

Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation: A Biography (Galaxy Books)
by Merrill D. Peterson | Jan 1, 1975
4.1 out of 5 stars 37
Paperback
$86.61 USD

I left U.Va. in 1974 (an all-but-dissertation Ph.D. student with a new baby) but I'm pretty sure we read drafts of this in the seminar.

I don't know if he is just a hypocrite. He was a terrible businessman and was barely a float when he died. The only thing of value he had were slaves to give to his daughters.

"It is very easy to quote Jefferson against Jefferson."

I would say that this makes Jefferson….a human. People are complex creatures and someone can say contradictory things during the course of their life without being bad/evil/a hypocrite.

"The question is how he and many/most others could see an evil so clearly and yet cling to it."

Because they were forced to support slavery or be left destitute?

Dn Jackson is correct.

And Gus, no, hypocrisy is not a virtue. "It is the compliment vice pays to virtue." That means that the hypocrite acknowledges the CLAIMS of virtue, otherwise he would not pretend to it.

Far worse are those who have no shame.

Did not most make some decisions based on their own self interest or agendas? I would be more surprised if they didn't. They were products of their times, just as we are.

The point, Gus, is that a man can be right about his ideals and fail to measure up to them.

Tell me, Gus, do you think lying is wrong? I do— I suspect you do, too.
Now, even thinking that, have you ever lied? I have— and I suspect you have as well.
Should we then dismiss our opinion of the virtue of honesty because we ourselves are not always honest?

Let us measure a man by his times, not ours. In Thomas Jefferson's time, practically the whole world owned slaves— in fact, the majority of slaves brought over from Africa were captured, enslaved, and sold as slaves by other Africans. It was a common element of African warfare to treat defeated members of other tribes as slaves. And of course that practice goes back to ancient times— the Sumerians did it, the Egyptians did it, the Babylonians did it, the Persians did it, the Greeks did it, the Romans did it, the Celts did it, the Goths did it, the Germanic tribes did it, the Huns did it, the Mongols did it, the Chinese did it, the Indians did it, the Japanese did it, the Polynesians did it, the Incas did it, the Mayans did it, the Aztecs did it— in fact, it's unlikely you can point to any world culture for the last 10,000+ years which did not do this as a matter of course— and those enslaved were just as likely to have been the ones doing the enslaving to others, or would have done so had they been able to. But somewhere along the way a culture began to develop which suggested that this Was Not Actually A Good Thing. And that idea began to rise into prominence largely with the translation of the Bible into the common tongues of ordinary men, and the rise in literacy that accompanied this. Abolition as an idea arose among the Quakers of America, and was spreading among the common people and the intellectual elites of New England, and also made its way back across the Atlantic to England.
Thomas Jefferson was brought up in this environment, coming to age as a young man when the thought of abolition was a very new idea in the world. His family owned slaves because that's how things worked on large agricultural concerns of the day; and those slaves were largely African because the tribes of Africa were technologically inferior to Europe, and thus not able to effectively resist the plundering of their populations, especially when this was abetted by tribal warfare.
So in Jefferson's time, and what he could see around him growing up, slavery essentially just existed— it was a thing that was all but universal; a given element of life. It is to Jefferson's credit that he began to even entertain the thought that it might be wrong, not just in the specific but in the whole, and then to carry it further to condemn it in such terms. One must also understand that it was essentially innate to the cultures and economies of the world, like using horses as beasts of burden— every civilization of note throughout history had relied on slavery to even exist, much less grow, and whole economies had it as a core element. How did one expect to end it and not cause a disastrous upheaval of things that were arguable very good indeed? Today we can see that slavery is not only wrong, it is economically foolish, but we thrive in an environment with great technological capability to transmit ideas and debate, not to mention more easily (and literally) look at things as they are, which drives impetus for change. But our ancestors did not have these things. They were thriving in a time where mass communication came in the numbers produceable by a hand-operated printing press on hand-made paper, delivered at the speed of a horse. Ideas were indeed transmitted with remarkable dispersion and rapidity, but ideas and ideals are not always so easily shaped into actions, much less ones which demand and produce sweeping change. I suspect that Jefferson did not free his own slaves not only out of fear of financial ruin, but out of a lack of ability to conceive of what the practical result would be. What would become of his farm, the source of income of his family? What would the freed slaves do? Where would they go? He knew they should be free— he did not know how to go about creating a future in which they were free and in which both his family and they survived (literally). For a remarkably insightful man, he failed to have the insight that freedom itself would answer that question. And it would take a half a century before that solution truly came to anyone's mind.

It is far too easy and facile to say "He owned slaves, therefore he was evil," and then assume one can reject everything Jefferson thought or fought for because of this simplistic statement. If one applied that to everything, then one would have to cast aside much of the good in the world— not the least of which is liberty itself. Quite ironically, if it weren't for Jefferson's ideals and his very words, the slaves of America might NEVER have been freed— because it was indeed his words which shamed the nation into living up to the ideals which formed it. Without those ideals, we would not value freedom. Without those ideals, none of us would be free.

Parzival has it precisely correct.

@parzival +1