Posted on 07/05/2015 3:24:11 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
GETTYSBURG, Pa. — “Lincoln hated Thomas Jefferson.” That is not exactly what we expect to hear about the president who spoke of “malice toward none,” referring to the president who wrote that “all men are created equal.”
Presidents have never been immune from criticism by other presidents. But Jefferson and Lincoln? These two stare down at us from Mount Rushmore as heroic, stainless and serene, and any suggestion of disharmony seems somehow a criticism of America itself. Still, Lincoln seems not to have gotten that message.
“Mr. Lincoln hated Thomas Jefferson as a man,” wrote William Henry Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner of 14 years — and “as a politician.” Especially after Lincoln read Theodore F. Dwight’s sensational, slash-all biography of Jefferson in 1839, Herndon believed “Mr. Lincoln never liked Jefferson’s moral character after that reading.”
True enough, Thomas Jefferson had not been easy to love, even in his own time. No one denied that Jefferson was a brilliant writer, a wide reader and a cultured talker. But his contemporaries also found him “a man of sublimated and paradoxical imagination” and “one of the most artful, intriguing, industrious and double-faced politicians in all America.”
Lincoln, who was born less than a month before Jefferson left the presidency in 1809, had his own reasons for loathing Jefferson “as a man.” Lincoln was well aware of Jefferson’s “repulsive” liaison with his slave, Sally Hemings, while “continually puling about liberty, equality and the degrading curse of slavery.” But he was just as disenchanted with Jefferson’s economic policies.
Jefferson believed that the only real wealth was land and that the only true occupation of virtuous and independent citizens in a republic was farming. “Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people,” Jefferson wrote.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Done!
What central_va said. :)
“The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society. And yet they are denied and evaded with no small show of success...All honor to Jefferson — to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document an abstract truth, applicable to all men at all times, and so to embalm it there, that today, and in all coming days, it should be a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.” — Abraham Lincoln, 1859
If the above is Lincoln’s real and total view of Jefferson then Lincoln must have respected Jefferson greatly. However, in 1859 Lincoln was considering how he would attack Jefferson’s South if elected president. Lincoln likely wanted to “capture” Jefferson and use Jefferson’s reputation to brand 1859 Southerners as “rebels” opposed to everything for which Mr. Jefferson stood.
Lincoln was a cold, calculating politician. Even today it is hard to know how much of what Lincoln said is to be believed, and how much should be discounted. All we know for sure is the 600,000 dead.
He was probably correct in that faith during his life, but might have changed his mind had he lived to see the rise of government schools.
A William Jennings Bryant supporter I see here. I prefer McKinley myself.
I added one too many t’s.
How would Lincoln know in 1859 that not only would he be elected president in 1860 but that the South would start a war in 1861? Lincoln was perceptive but he wasn't psychic.
Lincoln likely wanted to “capture” Jefferson and use Jefferson’s reputation to brand 1859 Southerners as “rebels” opposed to everything for which Mr. Jefferson stood.
Lincoln was responding to an invitation from the Massachusetts Republican Party to a dinner honoring Jefferson. He didn't initiate the discussion.
Lincoln was a cold, calculating politician. Even today it is hard to know how much of what Lincoln said is to be believed, and how much should be discounted. All we know for sure is the 600,000 dead.
And that the Confederate supporters will go to any length to blame it all on Lincoln.
Good point.
Hamilton was a Federalist political ancestor of today's God-forsaken Republican "leadership." So was Henry Clay and his despicable Whigs, including Lincoln. So was Lincoln, Thaddeus Stevens, Senator Sumner and other early "Republican" embarrassments. I have been a Republican through much of my adult life. I reflect the views of none of them. Jefferson and Jackson are far more consistent with today's GOP base.
Jefferson:
- drafted the Declaration of Independence
- banned the import of slaves (by following the legal process)
- conducted the Louisiana Purchase
- took the fight to the muslims
Lincoln:
- issued the Emancipation Proclamation (rule by decree - ala Obama)
- Threw opposing politicians in prison (mayors, congressmen, commissioners, a circuit court chief justice, city councilmen, etc)
- confiscated weapons in door-to-door seizures
- destroyed the 10th Amendment and States Rights
- shut down newspapers and imprisoned journalists who disagreed with him
Obama hasn’t even done some of these things (yet). Lincoln wasn’t killed because Booth was crazy — he was killed because people were PISSED.
Full disclosure: I voted for Thomas Jefferson (as a write-in in 2012).
Not being especially an admirer of either, I nonetheless enjoyed the author’s enthusiasm.
But Jefferson became a fan of mechanical invention. As Sec of State he was chiefly responsible for the granting of them (a duty he - as with all duties- quickly lost interest in performing).
Source, please. Why do I distrust the NYT?
They are all dead now so we can’t really question them about it .... typical liberal exercise in intellectual masturbation!
Your post 99- outstanding.
The Jefferson who supported the Jacobins, hated religion, and was always broke?
After the revolutionaries died, there were no remaining Founding Fathers, much less as late as 1900. Not even in the 1850s when the GOP was formed as a zombie from the corpse of the Whigs. Indeed, which Founding Father EVER expressed himself favorably even as to the Whigs? Hamilton had been safely dead for decades as had been Washington. John Adams had reconciled with Jefferson by 7/4/1826 the day on which both died.
Who on Earth calls Hamilton a conservative?
He was the driving force behind a centralized federal government over subservient states. Hamilton and Washington are the very architects of DC and our modern system.
I’ll go with Jefferson over Dishonest Abe any day of the week.
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