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 ...
Well you might put “conservatives” in scare quotes. Conservatives conserve the defining values of their country. The theme of American conservatism is freedom.
You have the right of it, lad. :)
was it you that denied being afflicted by hero worship, or someone else that merely sounds like you?
Ah, the opinion with nothing to back it up continues, just as it started.
C’mon... ONE fact oh wise one. Please, bless us with your voluminous knowledge.
Everyone knows Jefferson was a rogue and of questionable moral character. Blah blah blah. Thats not what we’re arguing however. Please... tell us what in Jeffersons background indicates he would be a big-government Democrat. Just one fact. We’re waiting.
Ask mommy to read the thread to you — slowly — if you can’t figure out who posted what.
thank you for doing precisely what I said you would do, precisely when I said you would do it.
was for limited government.
“That government is best, which governs least”
Thomas Jefferson
I guess us 97ers & 98ers are just very familiar with the "liberal in the classical tradition" discussion.
Some of the newer members must have missed the memo on that. Maybe if they did some reading of the older threads, they wouldn't get so bent out of shape at the reference...
well, then, “we” will have to find a way to fill the rest of your lives. I would suggest doing some actual scholarship on Thomas Jefferson.
I”ve done plenty. Too bad you aren’t interested in a factual discussion. Might have been interesting. Otherwise you’re just another guy shooting off his mouth on the internet.
Your contempt doesn’t either.
indeed. this argument breaks out every time TJ lurches into the conversation. libertarians latch onto TJ because they literally have no one else that isn’t an absolute embarrassment — ron paul, for example.
I’m still not sure why FR has become such a safe haven for so many self righteous, millenial snowflake libertarians.
“That government is best, which governs least” Thomas Jefferson
Yes, indeed.
We actually have a renowned FReeper who took a screen name relating to that particular quote [I believe], and has been doing yeoman service in the cause for many, many years. :)
Still waiting... LOL! ;-)
Lincoln was a Henry Clay man, not a Jefferson man.
One thing on which Jefferson erred was his faith in the people to educate themselves.
But he IS a democRAT. He's one of the party icons...along with Andrew Jackass.
Libertarianism is the path to larger and more intrusive government.
Broken individuals, and broken societies, who have the vote, do not vote for the conservative goals of smaller/limited government.
Sodom and Gomorrah, doesn’t vote responsibly, they vote out of personal greed and want, to give themselves more, not less, and that society of wolves and sheep, leads to a larger, more powerful government.
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