Gun Control & RKBA

Paul Finkelman, author of Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson, said that he couldn’t judge how colleges should deal with Jefferson statues, but he said that the history is clear.

“I don't think you go around honouring people for behaviour that was truly awful, and Jefferson’s relationship with slavery and race was truly awful, even from his own times,” Finkelman said. “This is not looking back from now,” he stressed.

Finkelman, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Program on Democracy, Citizenship and Constitutionalism and the Ariel F. Sallows visiting professor of human rights law at the University of Saskatchewan College of Law, compared Jefferson with George Washington.

“George Washington ceased using white overseers to manage his plantations before he became president” and gave the positions to slaves “as a prelude to emancipating them in his will”, Finkelman said. Jefferson never took such a step. “Washington famously said that he did not take men to the market like cattle, but Jefferson sold nearly 100 slaves in the 1790s,” Finkelman said.

Neither Mr. Meacham, who mostly ignores Jefferson’s slave ownership, nor Mr. Wiencek, who sees him as a sort of fallen angel who comes to slavery only after discovering how profitable it could be, seem willing to confront the ugly truth: the third president was a creepy, brutal hypocrite.

Contrary to Mr. Wiencek’s depiction, Jefferson was always deeply committed to slavery, and even more deeply hostile to the welfare of blacks, slave or free. His proslavery views were shaped not only by money and status but also by his deeply racist views, which he tried to justify through pseudoscience.

There is, it is true, a compelling paradox about Jefferson: when he wrote the Declaration of Independence, announcing the “self-evident” truth that all men are “created equal,” he owned some 175 slaves. Too often, scholars and readers use those facts as a crutch, to write off Jefferson’s inconvenient views as products of the time and the complexities of the human condition.
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But while many of his contemporaries, including George Washington, freed their slaves during and after the revolution — inspired, perhaps, by the words of the Declaration — Jefferson did not. Over the subsequent 50 years, a period of extraordinary public service, Jefferson remained the master of Monticello, and a buyer and seller of human beings.