What Did Lincoln Really Think of Jefferson?

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.

Take comfort from your misguided assumptions but the recent hysteria against the Confederate battle flag will fade soon enough but it will continue to be revived by those who despise tyranny.

During campaigns against a state personal income tax on wages and salaries being imposed in Connecticut, we turned instinctively to the coiled rattlesnake flag against a bright yellow background and the legend Don't Tread on Me! which had been a battle flag of our colonial era Revolutionary War predecessors. The leftists hate that flag too.

Likewise, whenever tyranny is threatened, the Confederate Battle Flag will be brought out for renewed service.

On July 4, 1915, just 100 years ago this past weekend, the Confederate Veterans of America CVA and the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) held their very first joint national encampment and held it at Gettysburg. The old men of both armies re-enacted Pickett's disastrous charge (without live ammo). The Union vets broke from the tradition of the actual battle and ran down the hill to meet the reb vets. When they came together, they embraced one another in tears. They are all our honored national ancestors, representing the 600,000 dead and the incredible number who had been wounded. They understood that as you apparently do not.

If you don't understand that, you are beyond help and you exemplify what is ugly in the current administration of race baiters in Washington who are trying to stampede Americans out of every worthwhile aspect of their heritage.

Our government schools dominated by the ultra-leftist National Misedumakashun Association may favor your revisionist mythology but actual conservatives will not and we will keep our heritage alive by properly educating our children.

You have an excessively rose-colored view of race relations in Latin America. Latin American countries have had less of a history of de jure racial segregation but have a greater degree of de facto segregation and hierarchy to this day. Almost all of the people in Rio de Janeiro slums are black or brown, all most all those in the high rise penthouses are European (there’s also a geographic divide with the more European affluent south of Brazil vs. the more Indian/Black and impoverished north). Similarly, most of the business elite and professionals of Mexico look like Spaniards, the peasants and unskilled workers are Indios or Mestizos. They did have the Indio-looking Benito Juarez, since then most of their El Presidentes have looked more like Vincente Fox.

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