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 ...
McKinley promised and delivered on the wider industrialization of the US with jobs for every willing worker and on "the full dinner pail." Show me today's politician with those principles of McKinley and his deep Christian Faith back when Methodists were REALLY Wesleyan Methodists. That would be sharing as well the extraordinary faith commitment of William Jennings Bryan AND, if possible, his allergy to the corrupt "interests," and I am ready to listen and sign up.
Well, with all this NYT RATaganda, trashing and repudiation of TJ, maybe the RATs are preparing to jettison him as mascot. Who will replace him...Monica’s boyfriend?
The queer, moslem, communist, and dog-eater in chief?
Excellent post! Well done.
It isn’t hard to blame the late unpleasantness between the states on Dishonest Abe. Some blame may be assessed against incompetent Confederates like Jeff Davis and those who allowed Dishonest Abe to turn a war to impose tariffs on the Southland and to enthrone the “big business interests” into a war to free SOME slaves outside his jurisdiction but not those in Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland and Missouri, much less those of his sister-in-law or of Grant’s wife.
Hear! Hear! Great post!
Turns out the process isn’t nearly as simple or outrageous as you portray it. In many if not most states the “real” owners have a considerable period to pay the back taxes and get clear title back.
You forgot ordered the arrest of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
But a great post never-the-less!
What better way to know a person than to read their letters? Jefferson made copies and they probably number over a thousand. I’ve read many of them and am impressed by the man.
If not for anything else, he hated the mainstream media, even then.
On the other side of my family, I had a great-grandfather who was 17 months old when James Madison died. One of his granddaughters, who lived with him when she was a child, lived until 2000.
>> Thomas Jefferson was a complicated but dynamic human being <<
Absolutely correct. Spot on!
Let’s consider some of his actions/positions:
1. Supported slavery and never freed his own slaves, except for the Hemmings clan.
2. Wrote the Declaration of Independence, the very words of which were totally in contradiction to slavery.
3. Rejected the divinity of Jesus.
4. Thought manufacturing and banking basically were tools of the Devil.
5. Believed true wealth derived only from agriculture.
6. Opposed federal construction of roads and canals.
7. Supported free trade, as long as it benefited the southern planter and farmer.
8. Approved of some of the bloodiest excesses of the French Revolution.
9. Schemed and played really dirty against Pres. George Washington, while simultaneously serving as Washington’s Secretary of State.
10. Consummated the Louisiana Purchase, even though in his heart of hearts he thought it was unconstitutional.
The critical point is, TJ was not only a man of great accomplishment but also a man of immense contradictions — meaning that it’s genuinely a fools errand to try classifying him in today’s terms as a conservative, libertarian, progressive or whatever.
Guelzo is a great historian but this essay is much too short to be useful.
Lincoln grew up in a Democrat family and environment but chose to become a Henry Clay Whig politically. Lincoln never met Jefferson but he knew men from Virginia who had known him. Jefferson, like all the Founders, saw slavery as evil, but refused to take any action to end it. Jefferson’s Democrat party came to embrace slavery, and, of course, it was Democrats who tried to destroy the Union in 1861.
The fact that Jefferson’s Monticello plantation was full of miscegenation with slaves was well known during Jefferson’s lifetime.
Jefferson’s limited federal government ideas were badly flawed and left the US undefended from invasion and unprepared for the Industrial Revolution. The Whig-Republican pro-business, pro-growth ideas would be supported by almost all of us today.
Number nine is my #1 LOL
The things he did to sabotage and undermine George Washington were contemptible.
That’s why it’s called REAL Estate. All other chattels are transitory.
“Jefferson wasn’t a libertarian, he wasn’t for gay marriage and abortion, and drug use, polygamy, and porn, and prostitution.”
Lol! Nice! Awesome dig!
Why are you shilling for The Owners?
It's quite clear what was done. Denying it doesn't change the fact.
"All honor to Jefferson--to the man, who in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and sagacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so embalm it there that today and in all coming days it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression."
To the contrary. I have been of late pointing out how the Union efforts in the Civil war were an absolute breaking of the principles outlined in the Declaration of Independence, (The right to leave a larger Union) and who was that document's primary author?
What Jefferson Wrote, Lincoln Broke.
As have the leftist trolls.
I disagree. It’s quite obvious that what Jefferson wrote, Lincoln helped fulfill for an entire race of people who had been de-personified and deprived of their most important God-given, unalienable rights.
“These communities [the Fathers of the Republic], by their representatives in old Independence Hall, said to the whole world of men: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’
“This was their majestic interpretation of the economy of the Universe. This was their lofty, and wise, and noble understanding of the justice of the Creator to his creatures.
“Yes, gentlemen, to all his creatures, to the whole great family of man. In their enlightened belief, nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows. They grasped not only the whole race of man then living, but they reached forward and seized upon the farthest posterity. They erected a beacon to guide their children, and their children’s children, and the countless myriads who should inhabit the earth in other ages.
“Wise statesmen as they were, they knew the tendency of prosperity to breed tyrants, and so they established these great self-evident truths, that when in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, or none but white men, or none but Anglo-Saxon white men, were entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, their posterity might look up again to the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began, so that truth and justice and mercy and all the humane and Christian virtues might not be extinguished from the land; so that no man would hereafter dare to limit and circumscribe the great principles on which the temple of liberty was being built.
“Now, my countrymen, if you have been taught doctrines conflicting with the great landmarks of the Declaration of Independence; if you have listened to suggestions which would take away from its grandeur and mutilate the fair symmetry of its proportions; if you have been inclined to believe that all men are not created equal in those inalienable rights enumerated by our chart of liberty, let me entreat you to come back. Return to the fountain whose waters spring close by the blood of the Revolution. Think nothing of me — take no thought for the political fate of any man whomsoever — but come back to the truths that are in the Declaration of Independence. You may do anything with me you choose, if you will but heed these sacred principles. You may not only defeat me for the Senate, but you may take me and put me to death. While pretending no indifference to earthly honors, I do claim to be actuated in this contest by something higher than an anxiety for office. I charge you to drop every paltry and insignificant thought for any man’s success. It is nothing; I am nothing; Judge Douglas is nothing. But do not destroy that immortal emblem of Humanity — the Declaration of American Independence.”
— Abraham Lincoln, speech in Lewiston, Illinois, August 17, 1858, four days before his first historic debate with Stephen A. Douglas, Printed in the Chicago Press and Tribune.
That’s right. Jefferson was an `anti-federalist’ while Lincoln was definitely not. Abe was a former Whig who wound up in the new Republican party following the Democratic victory in the Missouri Compromise and the demise of the Whigs.
We should be seeing something similar happening in the next few years.
http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h374.html
This site is a pain in the a** so here’s an excerpt.
Anti-Federalists
The Anti-Federalists opposed ratification of the Constitution and were typified by:
Ratification sentiments map
A desire to establish a weak central government (as had been created by the Articles of Confederation)
A corresponding desire for strong state governments
The support of many small farmers and small landowners
The support of debtor elements who felt that strong state legislatures were more sympathetic to them than a strong central government.
A series of articles appeared in the Poughkeepsie Country Journal from November, 1787, through January, 1788, usually titled Letters from the Federal Farmer. Although unsigned, it is generally believe that they were written by Richard Henry Lee of Virginia. This series of essays was probably the most widely known expression of anti-federalist views. The first letter ends:
The first interesting question, therefore suggested, is, how far the states can be consolidated into one entire government on free principles. In considering this question extensive objects are to be taken into view, and important changes in the forms of government to be carefully attended to in all their consequences. The happiness of the people at large must be the great object with every honest statesman, and he will direct every movement to this point. If we are so situated as a people, as not to be able to enjoy equal happiness and advantages under one government, the consolidation of the states cannot be admitted.
***Anti-Federalists were concerned that the constitution did not equally divide power among the three branches of government. They also worried about giving the federal government the power to regulate commerce.***
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.