How "Hamilton" Recasts Thomas Jefferson as a Villain

The Atlantic ^ | 8-19-2015 | ALANA SEMUELS

[Citizen Zed]

The smash Broadway musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda joins the growing movement encouraging Americans to take a closer look at the Founding Father’s life and legacy.

Go to any American elementary school and ask the students to name the Founding Fathers, and it’s likely that Thomas Jefferson will come up, right alongside George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson is on the nickel. Jefferson’s face is one of the four on Mount Rushmore. Jefferson has his own monument in Washington, D.C. Jefferson got to be president.

But Jefferson’s star may be fading. Democrats are erasing his name from political dinners because of his slave-owning history. Abraham Lincoln, almost everyone’s favorite president, “hated Thomas Jefferson,” a Gettysburg College professor explained this summer. After the independent historian Henry Wiencek published a controversial book criticizing the Virginian in 2012, The New York Times called Jefferson “The Monster of Monticello.”

[Ditto]

Why?

[<1/1,000,000th%]

It’s easier to hate Jefferson for running away while Virginia governor instead of organizing the militia to repel the British during the War for Independence. Or for 8 years of boycotts that trashed the economy. Or for dragging out the 1st American-Muslim War.

Or you could love him for eliminating all internal taxes and keeping us out of war with the British.

[Resolute Conservative]

I think he was disingenuous as to his motives for the war and let northern governors and power brokers sway his decisions. He did well in his attempts to keep the country whole but I do not think he was 100% honest in the process. I do not really want to get into a diatribe about the war, there are threads every where, it is just my opinion.

[tanknetter]

Like an earlier post said, Jefferson was a mass of contradictions.

His words on freedom and liberty and opposing tyranny are words to live by. Even setting aside his ownership of slaves, it’s clear that his agrarian mindset was rooted in a desire to keep society static, limiting movement between the classes and restricting the ability of members of the lower classes to ascend into the socio-political elite.

Hamilton, on the other hand, was a huge fan and proponant of such mobility, seeing capital as the means to effect it.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

I agree. Jefferson wanted to return to the old medieval European society with rich landowners running the show.

But I think Hamilton wanted the country to be run by an educated elite where the lower classes knew their place, just like England at the end of the 18th century.

I think they would both be shocked at where we are now.