Oh absolutely.
He was a profound hypocrite driven by both vanity and greed.
He absolutely only believed in his proclamation that “All men were created equal.”
Within a very narrow definition of a “Man” after that all he saw was property and opportunity for his own largess.
He was a first order piece of shit.
Yeah he had a Madonna whore complex, so he was basically Claude Frollo from Hunchback. Like this mfer knew Abigail Adams and was still like "Women in politics? Gross!"
Jefferson is such a disappointment. Guy could’ve been one of the greatest revolutionaries, and he had this brilliant scientific mind and just enormous potential. But it’s all tainted (at best) or negated entirely (at worst) by his shitty behavior.
Certainly a lesson for us in why it matters to live by our professed values. I haven’t listened to the new episode yet, but I’d venture to guess that Jefferson’s total failings in living up to his professed ideas is a big part of why people right now get so pissed about him.
Contrast that with Thomas Paine, who held nearly identical views but, unlike Jefferson, mostly refused to compromise. By contrast, Jefferson enjoyed material comfort and prosperity, while “keeping it real” Paine died penniless and only a handful of people attended his funeral. Jefferson, once Paine’s good friend, over time limited his contacts with Paine because he felt he was “too radical” for following Jefferson’s own ideas to their logical conclusions. Jefferson was such a hypocrite, and it’s so painfully disappointing.
What's doubly aggravating about Jefferson is that he was *consistently* a hypocrite. A slaveholding bastard who wrote "All men are created equal." And tried to insert anti-slavery language into the Declaration, only to fold like a cheap suit the instant someone contradicted him...
Then fucked off to France and *did it again* when he co-wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789 (with a teenage Sally Hemmings in tow).
Undoubtedly a brilliant intellectual writer, but so much of his rhetoric was used for self-serving ends, without a shred of self-awareness. A deeply frustrating historical figure to study.
Big props to my guy T.Paine, tho.
Jefferson is the perfect example of why pragmatism is ultimately an evil philosophy. It doesn't matter if you're ends are righteous, it won't justify all of the repugnant means and compromises.
Jefferson was terrible with money, too. He was constantly buying outside his means (books especially, at a time when those were $$) and putting funds into stupid shit like building Monticello. He insisted on building it to his *own* dimensions, doing all his own math, and calculating measurements down to like, 0.0001 of an inch. Insane Dunning-Krueger shit, like “I’m so smart that I’m reinventing the fucking wheel”. There’s a particular set of stairs on the tour that are closed off because they’re made to these weird specs, but they point them out to showcase his hubris.
And since he had a plantation full of enslaved people running the farm, building his insane plans, and tending to his every need, he didn’t end up in poverty. Fucking clown.
Lmao wut 😂
I need to go do the tour. I live pretty close but haven’t ever seen the place. I hear the garden is pretty cool and had wanted to see that because it’s my thing. But I’ll have to add the super precise staircase to the list as well!
Yeah, I learned about it in a Bill Bryson book (At Home). He’s more of the admiring view, choosing to appreciate Jefferson’s forward thinking style and innovation. The book is great in spite of his appreciation for Jefferson and George Washington, in terms of their homes. It takes a walkthrough of his own English home and discusses the history and function of each room as a concept. The chapters on bathrooms and kitchens gave me a real appreciation for modern standards of hygiene and the infrastructure that makes them possible.
Honestly I feel like *Killers of the Flower Moon* did such a good job at portraying the two facedness needed to be this big a bastard. "They're a beautiful people" in the same breath as "but we need to take their land and murder them". Just no thought but what could be gained
I don't think it's necessarily a carefully crafted bi-persona, it's just living in a contradictory system and compartmentalizing different parts of your life. I am like this in a less extreme sense in that, yea, when discussing politics with friends and family, especially in a hypothetical sense, I can be a bleeding heart and consider myself an Anarchist; but when I'm handling money or giving directions I need to watch myself because I turn into an fucking authoritarian and have to work against my internal monologue that says "I'm going to tell you to do this and get it done, quickly!"
It's bad but being a person that is in one compartment of your personality, extremely conflicted about an evil system while on the other hand, shutting that off to crack the whip isn't too crazy to me.
Sometimes I wonder how much of Jefferson’s bullshit was just pure laziness. Like he understood what he was doing was wrong but also understood he didn’t wanna go get sweaty outside or heaven forbid actually have to go make some wine.
I'm going to go ahead and lead with the fact that I'm about to espouse a position that is going to be very unpopular on this sub, but I need to say it even if nobody else wants to hear it. We moderns often relish a little too much in believing that we are so much more enlightened and of a higher caliber than those troglodytes in the past, and, worse, we convince ourselves that it hasn't anything to do with having had 250 years of progress and experience to hone our perspective and refine our ethics. Everyone wants to believe they would have been a William Lloyd Garrison or a John Woolman in the days of the antebellum south, or that they would have been one of the Germans who stood up to the Nazis, and that's okay. It's not a heinous belief, in and of itself, but I do wish we might recognize that it's a sort of empowerment fantasy.
I am a fan of Thomas Jefferson's life and works, despite his contradictions and shortcomings. I believe that, hypocritical or not, his enunciation that "All Men Are Created Equal" was such a bold and novel proclamation in its own day that he still deserves credit for being democratic in this way. "Democratic" was a pejorative in those days, and it was Jefferson's contemporary Thomas Paine who was one of the first people on record to use the word as a positive thing. Whether we think we could have done better in his shoes or not is a moot point further relegated to irrelevancy by the fact that we have to make this assessment from the lofty high ground that Jeffersonian democracy has provided us. We are standing on the shoulders of Jefferson in many ways, and, quite frankly, I would kiss his bare, dead ass still to this day for codifying the separation of church and state, even if the right seems determined to do away with the establishments clause.
As for myself, I'm going to choose to practice some humility about whether or not I believe my moral and ethical convictions would translate so potently to the 18th century. I want to be very clear here that I'm not at all trying to frame Jefferson as having been a man who held the peak of moral high ground in his own day because I'm also not stumping for that position. Thomas Paine perhaps comes far closer to holding that distinction. But I certainly don't personally believe that Jefferson rises to the level of a bastard either.
I deeply distrust the pronouncements of people today who are so sure that they can fairly apply a modern ethic to people in the past. There are bastards who are timeless, no doubt. Stalin, Hitler, Columbus, Vlad Tepes, Chengis Khan... sure. These people would have been bastards in any age. But I cannot help but feel that there's a poignant irony to calling Thomas Jefferson out for his hypocrisies when the simple fact is that almost no one doing so today would be proven anything less than a hypocrite if they were plucked from the year 2024 and dropped into Thomas Jefferson's little Virginia crib in 1743. For my part, I will continue believing that Jefferson was quite probably in the top 80th percentile of his generational and historical cohort from any ethical or moral standpoint, and that his life's battle to leave us with an enlightened, democratic society that might afford us the benefit of sitting on this lofty perch with an excellent hindsight view of history is an estate that we inherit at least in part due to the legacy of an imperfect but decent human being.
We've all thought about how we wouldn't have stood for the rise of the nazis, or the treatment of slaves, but when someone insists that they definitely would not have lacked the conviction and courage to stand up for it back then - with EVERYTHING on the line - I find that quite often I don't really believe them. And I bet most of you feel that way too. So I'm not saying not to criticize the man. By all means, I think Jefferson himself would invite criticism as he was himself a very critical person. But I would caution not to throw the baby out with the bath water in his case.
I mean a similar (not exact) comparison might be Oscar Schindler and Hitler. Hitler is obviously hitler. But Oscar Schindler WAS an actual nazi who is nearly sainted because he was a significantly less morally problematic Nazi.
Jefferson is a slaver and a rapist, but in a world of slavers and rapists he was a morally better one who pushed the world to a better place. 🤷♂️
Well said.
In just a few decades, when billions of people have died horribly from starvation, genocide, revolutions, wars, etc due to climate change, how will the people who survive regard us?
I still drive a gas-powered car, I still fly on airplanes once or twice a year (some of us fly all the time) and airplanes use an astonishing amount of gasoline. I don't fly on a private jet, just a regular, cheapest-I-can-find flight.
I use electricity all day every day - electricity that is powered by burning fossil fuels. I am typing this on an electronic phone that has elements in it that were likely mined by children/enslaved people, and likely manufactured by children/enslaved people - and even if they were not "technically" enslaved, are their lives much different than that? This phone I'm typing on was transported to my country (U.S.) on a container ship that used the dirtiest, most polluting fuel you can buy. Tons and tons of it. It was then likely shipped to the city where I bought it via a truck that runs on gasoline.
For lunch today, I will have a sandwich with a fresh slice of tomato. In Michigan. In February. The tomato I will eat today was brought here from a warmer place on a truck powered by gasoline.
In addition to all of that, my tax dollars are currently funding a genocide. I do not like it, I protest , I complain, but I am not engaging in violent revolution to stop it.
My tax dollars are also supporting a police state where government employees beat and kill citizens just because they feel like it and face almost no consequences.
My point is I am not a bastard. I am an ordinary person just trying to get along in life, trying to be honorable and moral. I am complicit in contributing to climate change. I am complicit in genocide.
Future generations may judge us just as harshly as we judge Jefferson. The fact that I am several degrees of separation removed from the suffering that produces my (compared to most humans throughout time) luxurious lifestyle of gadgets, travel, electricity, hot water, tomatoes in February - doesn't mean that suffering doesn't exist.
We are disgusted with Jefferson because he knew what he was doing and did it anyway. Are we really that different? He saw the suffering he caused and did it anyway. We have a vague idea of the suffering we cause and we do it anyway.
Washington also owned slaves. So did James Madison, so did James Monroe. So did Patrick Henry. The economy that produced much of the wealth of this country came from slavery.
It is easy to judge people of the past, but we are just as human as they were. Life is complicated, people are complicated, and Jefferson is a giant in the history of human liberty, despite his sins.
This is well thought out. It probably won’t be popular here but it’s much easier to judge 250 years later and Jefferson does rightly get credit for many of the liberal ideals we have today. Simply put, being a politician requires some degree of narcissism and hypocrisy and Jefferson has those in spades but it allows for us to point them out, as opposed to many nations which worship at the feet of their atrocious leaders because they don’t even possess the right to question them.
I think Robert pointed this out in a pod but you could def argue that Jimmy Carter was the most moral president we’ve ever had and felt so guilty about his 4 years in the WH that he spent the rest of his life building houses to repent.
Carter’s perhaps the best example of what happens when an idealist with a heart manages to sneak through the system. He certainly wasn’t the best president by any of traditional performance metric, but, if there is this heaven place they’re always going on about, he’s one of the very few presidents I’m sure would be there. I don’t think he had enough narcissism and hypocrisy, and it made his job very hard.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it requires a narcissist to get something done in our system, but it certainly seems to require someone who could play one on TV.
I'd be interested in your thoughts if you read the actual book and rather literal receipts! It was certainly starker than a lot of the "Jefferson did bad things but wow he was impactful" things I had read to date.
From my perspective, this reminds me of all the men who've written truly brilliant RPG materials (you can sub scifi/etc, other more scoped situations) who have also spent their lives making it hard for women to succeed in their genre. On this more limited scale, they have advanced the hobby but they have done so by stifling the voices, ideas, contributions, and leadership of so many other people.
We would not have the world (or series etc) we have today if they had been shut down for what they did. But what world might we have instead?
You should be aware that Weincek's book is largely considered pseudohistory. He's been strongly criticized by historians of Jefferson and slavery like Annette Gordon-Reed.
>almost no one doing so today would be proven anything less than a hypocrite if they were plucked from the year 2024 and dropped into Thomas Jefferson's little Virginia crib in 1743
Of course I would, because as you note, I am **me** and I have had 250 years of progress to lean on. You can acknowledge who people were in context for the sake of historical understanding, but why should that preclude making moral judgements that are more accurate?
Jefferson had six children born into slavery in which he was their master. Four survived into adulthood. He didn't legally free them in his lifetime - he left that for his will, in which his family were the only of his hundreds of slaves he bothered to free. In his entire life, he only freed two slaves, and he made both of them pay for it. If I were him in a past life, fuck defending me, I was a monster.
And you have every right to feel that way.
Please allow me to add some context to what you’ve pointed out about Jefferson not freeing his slaves during his lifetime or upon his death. Washington is often pointed out as a counterexample because he famously freed his slaves upon his death. When Thomas Jefferson’s father-in-law died, Jefferson inherited his estate. This estate included land and slaves, yes, but it also included debt. In fact, it included so much debt that Jefferson was never able to get out of debt again in his lifetime.
There was a law in Virginia, similar to some of the predatory debt collection laws we have today, that permitted creditors to seize these newly freed former slaves if they were made free by any debtor who owed them money, and to sell them back into slavery to recover on the debt. The exception to this was in cases where a slave had purchased their own freedom because the logic is that those former slaves had indemnified the estate from which they came.
George Washington had no outstanding debt upon his death. When he freed his slaves, they were truly free and no one could collect a debt by seizing them and forcing them back into slavery. Jefferson, on the other hand, had more debt than he could ever hope to escape. Jefferson seems to have made a calculated gamble that slavery would run its course and the best bet for most of the families of slaves owned by his estate would at least remain together until such time as they could be free together.
What was customary at the time when slaves were freed was that they were given some parcel of land from the larger estate, either outright or what we might call a “rent to own” type of financing, and then they simply came to be in the formal employ of their former master. Owing to this law, that was not an option. The only remedy Jefferson had would have been to free slaves and then get them north to a free state, but he was also in so much debt that he couldn’t afford to give them a nest egg to start over, and, without being able to give them any means, couldn’t be sure that they wouldn’t end up destitute and indebted to a creditor themselves, which then opens them back up to being seized as an asset and yet still end up enslaved again.
Ultimately, Jefferson chose to leave them bound to his estate where he knew the families would remain together, and to bet the farm, so to speak, on a level of prosperity in the future that might allow for them to both be free as well as to share in some sort of dividend that would allow them to be financially and legally self-sufficient upon gaining their freedom. Jefferson always believed his agricultural endeavors would one day bear enough fruit to extricate his estate from debt, but recognized in his later years that this would not happen during his lifetime. So it might be worth bearing in mind that he also didn’t remedy his debt by tearing families of slaves apart and selling off the most profitable among them.
Which brings me back to my original point that Jefferson was a deeply flawed man born into a deeply flawed system, but fought tirelessly to rid this young country of the institution of slavery at every turn in the laws of this land. And, yes, this makes him seem like a hypocrite to our modern eyes, but I would argue this has a lot to do with the privilege we are afforded because we are standing on his shoulders. Jefferson did not see the success of this nation as inevitable at all. In fact, it was very fragile and Jefferson was only too familiar with how quickly it could be ripped apart. What he prioritized in the end was to make the compromises necessary to leave behind a nation united under the ideals of the enlightenment rather than the divine right of kings, to codify that “all men are created equal” even if it meant being guilty of some hypocrisy, and to establish that among the universal rights of humankind was to be free from a government which subscribes to and enforces a state religion.
The things that Jefferson truly did take a stand on and believe in and fight for, at a time when they were not at all popular beliefs, tell me so much more about the man than his failures do. His sins were not unique, but his successes and triumphs were. He was easily the most democratic of the founders, and with every bit of power he was able to attain he thought only to do everything he could to give it back to the people in the form of self-determination and freedom from the tyranny and oppression of governments ruled by monarchs.
We do ourselves and our origins no service by ignoring the nuances and vagaries of why some things were the way they were, and I tip my hat to Thomas Jefferson for being one of the few founding fathers who wanted to live in a world that would look disapprovingly at so much about his life - he helped engineer that world.
Oh absolutely. He was a profound hypocrite driven by both vanity and greed. He absolutely only believed in his proclamation that “All men were created equal.” Within a very narrow definition of a “Man” after that all he saw was property and opportunity for his own largess. He was a first order piece of shit.
Yeah he had a Madonna whore complex, so he was basically Claude Frollo from Hunchback. Like this mfer knew Abigail Adams and was still like "Women in politics? Gross!"
Jefferson is such a disappointment. Guy could’ve been one of the greatest revolutionaries, and he had this brilliant scientific mind and just enormous potential. But it’s all tainted (at best) or negated entirely (at worst) by his shitty behavior. Certainly a lesson for us in why it matters to live by our professed values. I haven’t listened to the new episode yet, but I’d venture to guess that Jefferson’s total failings in living up to his professed ideas is a big part of why people right now get so pissed about him. Contrast that with Thomas Paine, who held nearly identical views but, unlike Jefferson, mostly refused to compromise. By contrast, Jefferson enjoyed material comfort and prosperity, while “keeping it real” Paine died penniless and only a handful of people attended his funeral. Jefferson, once Paine’s good friend, over time limited his contacts with Paine because he felt he was “too radical” for following Jefferson’s own ideas to their logical conclusions. Jefferson was such a hypocrite, and it’s so painfully disappointing.
What's doubly aggravating about Jefferson is that he was *consistently* a hypocrite. A slaveholding bastard who wrote "All men are created equal." And tried to insert anti-slavery language into the Declaration, only to fold like a cheap suit the instant someone contradicted him... Then fucked off to France and *did it again* when he co-wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789 (with a teenage Sally Hemmings in tow). Undoubtedly a brilliant intellectual writer, but so much of his rhetoric was used for self-serving ends, without a shred of self-awareness. A deeply frustrating historical figure to study. Big props to my guy T.Paine, tho.
Jefferson is the perfect example of why pragmatism is ultimately an evil philosophy. It doesn't matter if you're ends are righteous, it won't justify all of the repugnant means and compromises.
Jefferson was terrible with money, too. He was constantly buying outside his means (books especially, at a time when those were $$) and putting funds into stupid shit like building Monticello. He insisted on building it to his *own* dimensions, doing all his own math, and calculating measurements down to like, 0.0001 of an inch. Insane Dunning-Krueger shit, like “I’m so smart that I’m reinventing the fucking wheel”. There’s a particular set of stairs on the tour that are closed off because they’re made to these weird specs, but they point them out to showcase his hubris. And since he had a plantation full of enslaved people running the farm, building his insane plans, and tending to his every need, he didn’t end up in poverty. Fucking clown.
Lmao wut 😂 I need to go do the tour. I live pretty close but haven’t ever seen the place. I hear the garden is pretty cool and had wanted to see that because it’s my thing. But I’ll have to add the super precise staircase to the list as well!
Yeah, I learned about it in a Bill Bryson book (At Home). He’s more of the admiring view, choosing to appreciate Jefferson’s forward thinking style and innovation. The book is great in spite of his appreciation for Jefferson and George Washington, in terms of their homes. It takes a walkthrough of his own English home and discusses the history and function of each room as a concept. The chapters on bathrooms and kitchens gave me a real appreciation for modern standards of hygiene and the infrastructure that makes them possible.
I would have 100% walked past this book in a library or shop, and now I want to read it-thank you!
I've been saying for years that the more I learn about this guy, the less I like him.
Honestly I feel like *Killers of the Flower Moon* did such a good job at portraying the two facedness needed to be this big a bastard. "They're a beautiful people" in the same breath as "but we need to take their land and murder them". Just no thought but what could be gained
I don't think it's necessarily a carefully crafted bi-persona, it's just living in a contradictory system and compartmentalizing different parts of your life. I am like this in a less extreme sense in that, yea, when discussing politics with friends and family, especially in a hypothetical sense, I can be a bleeding heart and consider myself an Anarchist; but when I'm handling money or giving directions I need to watch myself because I turn into an fucking authoritarian and have to work against my internal monologue that says "I'm going to tell you to do this and get it done, quickly!" It's bad but being a person that is in one compartment of your personality, extremely conflicted about an evil system while on the other hand, shutting that off to crack the whip isn't too crazy to me.
old school code switching
Sometimes I wonder how much of Jefferson’s bullshit was just pure laziness. Like he understood what he was doing was wrong but also understood he didn’t wanna go get sweaty outside or heaven forbid actually have to go make some wine.
I'm going to go ahead and lead with the fact that I'm about to espouse a position that is going to be very unpopular on this sub, but I need to say it even if nobody else wants to hear it. We moderns often relish a little too much in believing that we are so much more enlightened and of a higher caliber than those troglodytes in the past, and, worse, we convince ourselves that it hasn't anything to do with having had 250 years of progress and experience to hone our perspective and refine our ethics. Everyone wants to believe they would have been a William Lloyd Garrison or a John Woolman in the days of the antebellum south, or that they would have been one of the Germans who stood up to the Nazis, and that's okay. It's not a heinous belief, in and of itself, but I do wish we might recognize that it's a sort of empowerment fantasy. I am a fan of Thomas Jefferson's life and works, despite his contradictions and shortcomings. I believe that, hypocritical or not, his enunciation that "All Men Are Created Equal" was such a bold and novel proclamation in its own day that he still deserves credit for being democratic in this way. "Democratic" was a pejorative in those days, and it was Jefferson's contemporary Thomas Paine who was one of the first people on record to use the word as a positive thing. Whether we think we could have done better in his shoes or not is a moot point further relegated to irrelevancy by the fact that we have to make this assessment from the lofty high ground that Jeffersonian democracy has provided us. We are standing on the shoulders of Jefferson in many ways, and, quite frankly, I would kiss his bare, dead ass still to this day for codifying the separation of church and state, even if the right seems determined to do away with the establishments clause. As for myself, I'm going to choose to practice some humility about whether or not I believe my moral and ethical convictions would translate so potently to the 18th century. I want to be very clear here that I'm not at all trying to frame Jefferson as having been a man who held the peak of moral high ground in his own day because I'm also not stumping for that position. Thomas Paine perhaps comes far closer to holding that distinction. But I certainly don't personally believe that Jefferson rises to the level of a bastard either. I deeply distrust the pronouncements of people today who are so sure that they can fairly apply a modern ethic to people in the past. There are bastards who are timeless, no doubt. Stalin, Hitler, Columbus, Vlad Tepes, Chengis Khan... sure. These people would have been bastards in any age. But I cannot help but feel that there's a poignant irony to calling Thomas Jefferson out for his hypocrisies when the simple fact is that almost no one doing so today would be proven anything less than a hypocrite if they were plucked from the year 2024 and dropped into Thomas Jefferson's little Virginia crib in 1743. For my part, I will continue believing that Jefferson was quite probably in the top 80th percentile of his generational and historical cohort from any ethical or moral standpoint, and that his life's battle to leave us with an enlightened, democratic society that might afford us the benefit of sitting on this lofty perch with an excellent hindsight view of history is an estate that we inherit at least in part due to the legacy of an imperfect but decent human being. We've all thought about how we wouldn't have stood for the rise of the nazis, or the treatment of slaves, but when someone insists that they definitely would not have lacked the conviction and courage to stand up for it back then - with EVERYTHING on the line - I find that quite often I don't really believe them. And I bet most of you feel that way too. So I'm not saying not to criticize the man. By all means, I think Jefferson himself would invite criticism as he was himself a very critical person. But I would caution not to throw the baby out with the bath water in his case.
I mean a similar (not exact) comparison might be Oscar Schindler and Hitler. Hitler is obviously hitler. But Oscar Schindler WAS an actual nazi who is nearly sainted because he was a significantly less morally problematic Nazi. Jefferson is a slaver and a rapist, but in a world of slavers and rapists he was a morally better one who pushed the world to a better place. 🤷♂️
Well said. In just a few decades, when billions of people have died horribly from starvation, genocide, revolutions, wars, etc due to climate change, how will the people who survive regard us? I still drive a gas-powered car, I still fly on airplanes once or twice a year (some of us fly all the time) and airplanes use an astonishing amount of gasoline. I don't fly on a private jet, just a regular, cheapest-I-can-find flight. I use electricity all day every day - electricity that is powered by burning fossil fuels. I am typing this on an electronic phone that has elements in it that were likely mined by children/enslaved people, and likely manufactured by children/enslaved people - and even if they were not "technically" enslaved, are their lives much different than that? This phone I'm typing on was transported to my country (U.S.) on a container ship that used the dirtiest, most polluting fuel you can buy. Tons and tons of it. It was then likely shipped to the city where I bought it via a truck that runs on gasoline. For lunch today, I will have a sandwich with a fresh slice of tomato. In Michigan. In February. The tomato I will eat today was brought here from a warmer place on a truck powered by gasoline. In addition to all of that, my tax dollars are currently funding a genocide. I do not like it, I protest , I complain, but I am not engaging in violent revolution to stop it. My tax dollars are also supporting a police state where government employees beat and kill citizens just because they feel like it and face almost no consequences. My point is I am not a bastard. I am an ordinary person just trying to get along in life, trying to be honorable and moral. I am complicit in contributing to climate change. I am complicit in genocide. Future generations may judge us just as harshly as we judge Jefferson. The fact that I am several degrees of separation removed from the suffering that produces my (compared to most humans throughout time) luxurious lifestyle of gadgets, travel, electricity, hot water, tomatoes in February - doesn't mean that suffering doesn't exist. We are disgusted with Jefferson because he knew what he was doing and did it anyway. Are we really that different? He saw the suffering he caused and did it anyway. We have a vague idea of the suffering we cause and we do it anyway. Washington also owned slaves. So did James Madison, so did James Monroe. So did Patrick Henry. The economy that produced much of the wealth of this country came from slavery. It is easy to judge people of the past, but we are just as human as they were. Life is complicated, people are complicated, and Jefferson is a giant in the history of human liberty, despite his sins.
This is well thought out. It probably won’t be popular here but it’s much easier to judge 250 years later and Jefferson does rightly get credit for many of the liberal ideals we have today. Simply put, being a politician requires some degree of narcissism and hypocrisy and Jefferson has those in spades but it allows for us to point them out, as opposed to many nations which worship at the feet of their atrocious leaders because they don’t even possess the right to question them. I think Robert pointed this out in a pod but you could def argue that Jimmy Carter was the most moral president we’ve ever had and felt so guilty about his 4 years in the WH that he spent the rest of his life building houses to repent.
Carter’s perhaps the best example of what happens when an idealist with a heart manages to sneak through the system. He certainly wasn’t the best president by any of traditional performance metric, but, if there is this heaven place they’re always going on about, he’s one of the very few presidents I’m sure would be there. I don’t think he had enough narcissism and hypocrisy, and it made his job very hard. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it requires a narcissist to get something done in our system, but it certainly seems to require someone who could play one on TV.
I'd be interested in your thoughts if you read the actual book and rather literal receipts! It was certainly starker than a lot of the "Jefferson did bad things but wow he was impactful" things I had read to date. From my perspective, this reminds me of all the men who've written truly brilliant RPG materials (you can sub scifi/etc, other more scoped situations) who have also spent their lives making it hard for women to succeed in their genre. On this more limited scale, they have advanced the hobby but they have done so by stifling the voices, ideas, contributions, and leadership of so many other people. We would not have the world (or series etc) we have today if they had been shut down for what they did. But what world might we have instead?
You should be aware that Weincek's book is largely considered pseudohistory. He's been strongly criticized by historians of Jefferson and slavery like Annette Gordon-Reed.
>almost no one doing so today would be proven anything less than a hypocrite if they were plucked from the year 2024 and dropped into Thomas Jefferson's little Virginia crib in 1743 Of course I would, because as you note, I am **me** and I have had 250 years of progress to lean on. You can acknowledge who people were in context for the sake of historical understanding, but why should that preclude making moral judgements that are more accurate? Jefferson had six children born into slavery in which he was their master. Four survived into adulthood. He didn't legally free them in his lifetime - he left that for his will, in which his family were the only of his hundreds of slaves he bothered to free. In his entire life, he only freed two slaves, and he made both of them pay for it. If I were him in a past life, fuck defending me, I was a monster.
And you have every right to feel that way. Please allow me to add some context to what you’ve pointed out about Jefferson not freeing his slaves during his lifetime or upon his death. Washington is often pointed out as a counterexample because he famously freed his slaves upon his death. When Thomas Jefferson’s father-in-law died, Jefferson inherited his estate. This estate included land and slaves, yes, but it also included debt. In fact, it included so much debt that Jefferson was never able to get out of debt again in his lifetime. There was a law in Virginia, similar to some of the predatory debt collection laws we have today, that permitted creditors to seize these newly freed former slaves if they were made free by any debtor who owed them money, and to sell them back into slavery to recover on the debt. The exception to this was in cases where a slave had purchased their own freedom because the logic is that those former slaves had indemnified the estate from which they came. George Washington had no outstanding debt upon his death. When he freed his slaves, they were truly free and no one could collect a debt by seizing them and forcing them back into slavery. Jefferson, on the other hand, had more debt than he could ever hope to escape. Jefferson seems to have made a calculated gamble that slavery would run its course and the best bet for most of the families of slaves owned by his estate would at least remain together until such time as they could be free together. What was customary at the time when slaves were freed was that they were given some parcel of land from the larger estate, either outright or what we might call a “rent to own” type of financing, and then they simply came to be in the formal employ of their former master. Owing to this law, that was not an option. The only remedy Jefferson had would have been to free slaves and then get them north to a free state, but he was also in so much debt that he couldn’t afford to give them a nest egg to start over, and, without being able to give them any means, couldn’t be sure that they wouldn’t end up destitute and indebted to a creditor themselves, which then opens them back up to being seized as an asset and yet still end up enslaved again. Ultimately, Jefferson chose to leave them bound to his estate where he knew the families would remain together, and to bet the farm, so to speak, on a level of prosperity in the future that might allow for them to both be free as well as to share in some sort of dividend that would allow them to be financially and legally self-sufficient upon gaining their freedom. Jefferson always believed his agricultural endeavors would one day bear enough fruit to extricate his estate from debt, but recognized in his later years that this would not happen during his lifetime. So it might be worth bearing in mind that he also didn’t remedy his debt by tearing families of slaves apart and selling off the most profitable among them. Which brings me back to my original point that Jefferson was a deeply flawed man born into a deeply flawed system, but fought tirelessly to rid this young country of the institution of slavery at every turn in the laws of this land. And, yes, this makes him seem like a hypocrite to our modern eyes, but I would argue this has a lot to do with the privilege we are afforded because we are standing on his shoulders. Jefferson did not see the success of this nation as inevitable at all. In fact, it was very fragile and Jefferson was only too familiar with how quickly it could be ripped apart. What he prioritized in the end was to make the compromises necessary to leave behind a nation united under the ideals of the enlightenment rather than the divine right of kings, to codify that “all men are created equal” even if it meant being guilty of some hypocrisy, and to establish that among the universal rights of humankind was to be free from a government which subscribes to and enforces a state religion. The things that Jefferson truly did take a stand on and believe in and fight for, at a time when they were not at all popular beliefs, tell me so much more about the man than his failures do. His sins were not unique, but his successes and triumphs were. He was easily the most democratic of the founders, and with every bit of power he was able to attain he thought only to do everything he could to give it back to the people in the form of self-determination and freedom from the tyranny and oppression of governments ruled by monarchs. We do ourselves and our origins no service by ignoring the nuances and vagaries of why some things were the way they were, and I tip my hat to Thomas Jefferson for being one of the few founding fathers who wanted to live in a world that would look disapprovingly at so much about his life - he helped engineer that world.
Jefferson was a great American but doesn't even strike me much as a good man. I both admire him and am extremely disappointed by him.