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 ...
Failure of punctuation doesn't magically change what you say into the truth.
Yes, Jefferson died in debt. Yours was a predictable red herring.
Jefferson’s design of government was my point of debate. Your claiming he was a liberal is still incorrect, no matter how many personal judgements you use to adorn your remarks.
Lincoln talked about, said it, but its not true. You are in some kind of cultist trance.....
It appears to me that "limited government" is often confused with "constitutional government".
The desire for constitutional government is a conservative position.
I didn’t read the article. I simply made an historically undeniable statement.
people just hate it when they get their sacred cows slaughtered.
bfl
Your argument would be true if the purpose of the Declaration of Independence was abolition of slavery. The fact that it made nary a ripple on this point when it was first produced is good evidence that it was never intended to do such a thing.
What it did do was make a very good and cognitive argument for Secession from the English Union.
Yes, Jefferson put that mischievous language in the Declaration, and I think he did so to cause exactly the sort of trouble that it eventually caused, but the founders at the time regarded it as flowery embellishment to make it seem more noble, and beyond that they gave those words no weight, certainly not in relation to the slaves who remained in bondage for another 80 years.
Yes, Lincoln focused on Jefferson's noble but unrealistic (at the time) sentiment, and completely ignored the larger and more pertinent purpose of the document. The right to leave. The right of self determination. The right given by God and Nature to remove oneself from a government not to ones liking and to create a new one that suits them.
The Declaration was about Secession, and it's flowery sentiment about equality notwithstanding, the primary principle outlined therein was a deadly contradiction to what Lincoln set out to do.
Lincoln read the Declaration of Independence the way Liberals read the US Constitution. He adhered to the pretty decoration, and completely violated the meat of it.
Don't forget that he was perfectly willing to leave them in bondage provided the South just stopped fighting and accept rule from Washington D.C.
If not for being a mewling coward cva would have no character at all.
Suffice it to say that experience has shown me that all this talk about Southern men being gentlemen is badly over-stated. And I think the reason why central_va likes that picture he posted on reply 180 is because the figure in the center posesses that which he is lacking in.
That men are equal was *NOT* the primary moral, natural law assertion of the Declaration. It's that the Colonies had a right to leave the English Union which is the primary moral, natural law assertion of the Declaration.
That people have a right to leave one form of government and create another. That people are ruled by the consent of the Governed. that "That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness." The whole document lists the abuses and justification for leaving, It doesn't devote any time at all listing why it sucks to be a slave. The Abolition of slavery was NOT it's primary purpose, and indeed that bit about "all men are created equal" was Jefferson sounding flowery and Noble and if I recall properly, they were thinking of tossing out that language, but decided to leave it in just because it sounded noble.
They certainly did not and had no intentions of applying it to slaves, and this is demonstrable by the fact that not a one of them freed their own, including Jefferson.
How many CBF’s did you burn this weekend?
An easy assumption but I think an incorrect one. Most southerners are not bottom-feeders like cva. The pity is that (much like this whole CBF flag flap) they don’t rein him in when he makes all of them look bad by association. I guess that remains their cross to bear.
In his own day Jefferson was seen as a political radical, an infidel, and a Jacobin. Yet he advocated the "palaeoconservative" interpretation of the Constitution while the conservative Federalists believed in federal supremacy and implied powers.
So, in #188 you claim Lincoln violated the Declaration, and then in #192 you erase any moral meaning from the document.
It’s like reading the secession documents.
Interesting.
Why are "palaeos" who are anti-democracy such big fans of "Jeffersonian Democracy?"
It's a little more complicated than that. The name "Republican" was adopted to hark back to Jefferson's party, and they celebrated the Northwest Ordinance, allegedly written by Jefferson.
That doesn't make Jefferson a paragon of virtue, however.
Some people simply do not get this. If the absence of government meant people would all follow sound conservative instincts, then there would be no such thing as the yetzer hara`/original sin/innate total depravity.
Some "conservatives" have a very utopian view of human nature.
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