The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson

SmithsonianMag.com ^ | 10-2012 | Henry Wiencek

[Renfield]

...“One cannot question the genuineness of Jefferson’s liberal dreams,” writes historian David Brion Davis. “He was one of the first statesmen in any part of the world to advocate concrete measures for restricting and eradicating Negro slavery.”

But in the 1790s, Davis continues, “the most remarkable thing about Jefferson’s stand on slavery is his immense silence.” And later, Davis finds, Jefferson’s emancipation efforts “virtually ceased.”

Somewhere in a short span of years during the 1780s and into the early 1790s, a transformation came over Jefferson.

The very existence of slavery in the era of the American Revolution presents a paradox, and we have largely been content to leave it at that, since a paradox can offer a comforting state of moral suspended animation. Jefferson animates the paradox. And by looking closely at Monticello, we can see the process by which he rationalized an abomination to the point where an absolute moral reversal was reached and he made slavery fit into America’s national enterprise....

[Ditto]

I think it a fair proposition that if short fiber cotton had never become such a powerful influence in American economics and politics, slavery would have died out in the south just as it faded for economic reasons in the north, and there would not have been such a thing as the civil war.

The Cotton Gin allowed all that followed. But if Whitney hadn't invented it, someone else would have. It was the age of invention, for good or bad.

[rockrr]

It makes them feeeeeeeel better about the fact that their ancestors started a war that cost 600,000 plus lives.

[wideminded]

I selected two statements out of a lost cause rant to question and I researched the correct information. I was actually surprised that Ellison owned as many slaves as he did, but my feelings about this situation were exactly the same as yours.

[x]

Most Freedmen farmed the same land they did as slaves, only they were now sharecroppers.

Leon F. Litwack's Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery cites numerous letters from slaveowners who found that most of their slaves had run off as the Union Army approached. Some came back. Many didn't.

This even makes its way into the fictional and very romanticized Gone With The Wind. You may remember the few slaves who stayed with Scarlett on the plantation. Most didn't -- the field slaves who aren't really "characters" in the book took off when it was safe to do so and didn't come back.

Would Miss Scarlett really have been out there working the fields if the field hands had stayed? I know it's fiction, but this is something that was so true and so familiar to people that Margaret Mitchell couldn't lie about it.

Most freed slaves had zero animosity towards the former slave owners.

How would you know? It's not like freed slaves could honestly tell the old masters how they felt. If freedmen had feelings of anger, animosity, or resentment, it would be dangerous to air them to anyone, for fear the word would get back to people who could hurt them. Those who did have animosity probably left and tried to put it all behind them.