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 ...
Jefferson was a brilliant and courageous patriot. Lincoln was a tyrant, which would explain his disregard for American greatness.
Posting lies & BS, and trying to pick a fight, yet again, eh, ansel?
FredZarguna wrote no such thing on this thread, nor made any such "claims", and that FACT is easily checked.
Same way I feel about FDR.
He claimed that Jefferson was a libertarian, and as a libertarian, that means full equality for homosexuals including military service and marriage benefits.
Get your facts straight, before you try to claim that Jefferson was a member of this goofy modern movement.
Did this journalist speak to President Lincoln? If so, did he use a Ouija board? Or did he do a seance to talk to President Lincoln?
Oh, shut up.
you’re badly disoriented. historically and philosophically.
Quit trying to fake history, to advance modern liberalism.
It wasn’t a “motion”. it was a poorly considered outburst.
"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
You have thrown lots of insults, without a single fact to support them. Please explain exactly how Thomas Jefferson would be a big-government liberal democrat if he were alive today. And try to use a fact or two, and not just personal attacks.
ah. the half understood quotes that have been taken out of context have arrived. right on cue.
**sigh** Here we go, again.
He's going to go off like a Roman candle, spouting all sorts of mendacities, as if Jefferson would have the slightest clue of the views of a modern-day libertarian.
Your posts about Jefferson are to be understood in their historical context.
To believe that a Founding Father would advocate in favor of homosexuality is COMPLETE nonsense.
That is what I said, Jefferson was not a libertarian.
Your post was "Nonsense", on the face of it.
It was my first reaction - but Fred posted it first.
Are you still chirping your BS?
Don’t feed the troll. He really has nothing to add to this, or any other, discussion.
And yet many leftards who claim to be Conservative are willing to vote for a candidate who is for increasing central government, just so long as there's an (R) after the name.
Fully two thirds of the people insisting now that they will never pull the lever for jeb, will next year when the CoC hands him the nomination.
I didn’t learn everything I know about Thomas Jefferson during an afternoon in the Internet. Expecting me to fix your lack of knowledge in a few easy to digest Internet links is just being lazy.
Sorry. It’s just not my job to straighten you out on Thomas Jefferson.
(Cue the standard, “aha! You can’t support your position!” response when I refuse to spend my time disabusing those that don’t wish to be disabused)
Says the guy who jumps on a thread to tell everyone that Jefferson was actually a secret libertarian, so support libertarians.
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