Free Republic
Browse · Search
General/Chat
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson
SmithsonianMag.com ^ | 10-2012 | Henry Wiencek

Posted on 09/22/2012 6:47:35 AM PDT by Renfield

click here to read article


Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-20 ... 41-6061-8081-100101-104 next last
To: Verginius Rufus

Very true and more exact, I was just keeping it simple. IF we wanted to take this further, where did the British Colonies get those slaves? Black slave catchers in Africa. So, blacks started slavery and then became the hunters of other blacks and sold them into slavery. Great continent that Africa; not any better today, either.


61 posted on 09/22/2012 10:06:56 AM PDT by CodeToad (Be Prepared...They Are.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 52 | View Replies]

To: NKP_Vet
Yours has to be the single most bogus argument I have ever heard.

So, in a state like Mississippi in 1860, the enslaved population numbered 436,631, or 55 percent of the state's total of 791,305

It is numbskull IDIOTS like you that believe that the South had any relevance or validity. How can you freaking secede when 55% of your population does not even get a vote?

The South then had ZERO moral rights to complain about anyone invading them. After all, they could not even truthfully say they represented the majority of their population.

If the blacks had been allowed to vote in any of the Southern states, not ONE of them would have seceded.

The only one influenced by propaganda (and possibly moonshine and inbreeding and a faulty education) is you.

ALL mankind was created equal. ALL of mankind has been freed from sin by Jesus and NO ONE can own another man.

And for the record, before you even ask the idiotic question, I am not Black nor am married or related to one. I do however have a brain and believe in our Lord.

Whatever one thinks of Lincoln (and there are cogent arguments to be made both ways), to justify the South and Slavery is so out of the bounds that I am surprised you are not walking around with cape on your head

62 posted on 09/22/2012 10:35:03 AM PDT by SoftwareEngineer
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 53 | View Replies]

To: Renfield; Travis McGee; Pelham; nathanbedford
You're a good poster but frankly who had slaves and who didn't is probably the last thing I think about when I wake up.

In fact I could care less and who owned them and who didn't

Who owned slaves is 99.9% of the time not a reflection of their views but rather whether they needed them or not...all the way until our little war here.

Slavery became a political issue with which to gain votes and inflame the base on both sides until the issue (expansion of to be precise) broke up the parties into 4 oddly enough and one fella managed to pull together around 39.8% of the vote and we know the rest

The thing to learn about slavery besides learning to resist that irresistible urge to preen self righteously over ones position over it today is that we are once again embarked on an eerily similar path with much the same ingredients tossed in the soup

and I for one think we will go to war once again to divide this country because the issues are too strongly felt to compromise or because that compromise would kill us.

Slavery to me is just a footnote of the human condition.

Applying fancy self aggrandizing moral posturing on it now far removed from when it mattered is a silly indulgence and makes about as much sense as Arab Springs and Peace with Honour.

Folks here who smear Jefferson are fools playing the enemy's game for them.

Am I the only freeper on this forum who feels like White Christian America is under a full throttle attack from our culture today and this administration in particular?

if so...then why in the hell would I care about an institution practiced forever and in which those brought here actually lived longer than where they came from and had more food and shelter and at least temporarily adopted some semblance of family structure both during and after said institution and other Christian and civilizing mores..why on earth do we fret over who brought them here or owned them 200 years ago...to make excuses for how too many of them behave today I suppose.

the issue has always been how to get so many of them up to speed with the rest of us?

you tell me...how has that turned out.. those here who have experience like I do in tropical African culture know this has not worked but declined markedly..whitelandia freepers have fantasies they formed from the Cosby show

why on earth worry about all that crap instead of focusing on the utter dissolution of their culture they once had here is simply an incredible indulgence of misplaced guilt

63 posted on 09/22/2012 10:36:09 AM PDT by wardaddy (this is a perfect window for Netanyahu to bomb Iran..I hereby give my go ahead..thanks Muzzie idiots)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Pharmboy; Renfield

Thomas Jefferson was a complex man, and like Washington played an indispensible role in creating the US as it is today. I think he both helped and hurt himself when he had all his personal papers burned.

One of his henchmen was James Madison, who was involved in Jefferson’s nasty “anonymous” propaganda campaigns against political opponents. Madison also later served as POTUS, and wound up embracing important things that he had earlier rejected (so-called states’ rights, national bank), but it would have been better for the US had he been more qualified for the job in the first place.

Of Adams, I’ll reprise — his one indispensible contribution to US history was to be the stooge who had to follow George Washington into the Presidency. It’s good that someone who was widely disliked in his own time wound up in that role, which was an impossible one. Big shoes to fill.


64 posted on 09/22/2012 10:40:59 AM PDT by SunkenCiv (https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 43 | View Replies]

To: SoftwareEngineer

“I see many parallels today with Abortion. 50% of our populace supports abortion, mostly for selfish reasons (career, not the “right time” etc). When abortion is finally banned (as it will be) some historians will wonder if people back in the “savage 20th century” knew that abortion was wrong.”

Unfortunately I suspect euthanasia will become common in the United States long before abortion is outlawed. The appetite of government will have to be curtailed some way. No doubt the progressives will rationalize euthanasia for the elderly as “compassionate” and conserving society’s resources for future generation. Euthanasia gives the government a financial windfall by eliminating social security and medicare costs as well as harvesting the assets of the deceased through high inheritance taxes.

The plan seems to be pushing the retirement age to 70 and then setting an age cutoff of 75 for most life extending medical procedures. No more heart valve replacements, hip replacements, much less transplants for those over age 75. Quality of life will be miserable for those over age 75 and government councilors will strongly encourage the elderly to end their suffering quickly with a simple pill.

To the government, a citizen only has value if he/she is producing. Once productivity is gone, the individual has no value. Not unlike the relationship between the slaveholder and the slave.


65 posted on 09/22/2012 10:50:24 AM PDT by Soul of the South
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 19 | View Replies]

To: Albion Wilde

It happened in 2008, and in 2004... weird coincidence. :’)


66 posted on 09/22/2012 10:53:14 AM PDT by SunkenCiv (https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 51 | View Replies]

To: SoftwareEngineer; Albion Wilde; SeaHawkFan; Future Snake Eater

Thanks!


67 posted on 09/22/2012 10:54:50 AM PDT by SunkenCiv (https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 62 | View Replies]

To: SoftwareEngineer

Since you like to throw insults around let me say you are a prime example of the brain washing that has been going on for the last some 160 years. Lincoln was a murdering pychopathic, two-bit railroad lawyer that was doing the bidding of the industrial Northern bosses he worked for.

“Americans celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, but H.L. Mencken correctly evaluated the speech, “It is poetry not logic; beauty, not sense.” Lincoln said that the soldiers sacrificed their lives “to the cause of self-determination — government of the people, by the people, for the people should not perish from the earth.” Mencken says: “It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of people to govern themselves.”

http://www.americancivilwarforum.com/the-gettysburg-address-2021514.html

What Lincoln REALLY thought about blacks.

“I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in anyway the social and political equality of the white and black races – that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied everything.”

Abraham Lincoln
(1809-1865) 16th US President
Source:

Fourth Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Charleston, Illinois, September 18, 1858
(The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume III, pp. 145-146.)


68 posted on 09/22/2012 10:59:21 AM PDT by NKP_Vet
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 62 | View Replies]

To: SoftwareEngineer; NKP_Vet; Ohioan
How can you freaking secede when 55% of your population does not even get a vote?

Good question huh?

then what about all those Yankee women then pray tell..51% of northern population...did they vote??

You are aware that as late as 1840s that all white males did not vote anyhow and that initially only those who had property deeds registered locally could vote?

feel free to bash owning people as property, from our lofty but decayed perch we can preen with impunity but the who got to vote in 1860 argument is irrelevant

btw...just look at yourself...shouting how noble you are over tropical africans here but resorting to basically every personal invective specifically designed to slur that person's ethinicity and origin and class known... to hurl at your opponent here...do you even notice that?

Isn't that what you think you are fighting against yet you do it yourself with little or no provocation

it's ok to call one an inbred hick who sleeps with sisters as long as ONE LOVES BLACK PEOPLE...where did you learn such logic?

at engineering school?

which one...I want to be sure to have my boys avoid it

69 posted on 09/22/2012 11:11:13 AM PDT by wardaddy (this is a perfect window for Netanyahu to bomb Iran..I hereby give my go ahead..thanks Muzzie idiots)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 62 | View Replies]

To: Ditto
My friend, the invention of the cotton gin did just the opposite of what you claim. Before the gin, the only cotton that could be profitably grown was the long fiber or 'low-land' variety. It was not a major crop because it was very geographically limited.

With the gin, the short fiber or 'upland' variety could be profitably grown spreading cotton production all the way from Georgia to Texas and as far north as Missouri and Tennessee. It infinitely increased the demand for slaves to plow, plant, how and pick cotton and the price of slaves sky rocked to the point that in 1860, slaves were the most valuable property in the nation -- more valuable than all the railroads and factories in the notion combined.

Excellent post. Without the cotton gin history would have been very different. Slavery wouldn't have been as firmly rooted. Slaveowners wouldn't have been quite so well-off and confident about their institution. Slavery might not have appeared so essential and beneficial to so many people.

You can see some of the same kind of wishful thinking in Jefferson's own assumptions. He came to believe that spreading slavery territorially would make it easier to abolish the institution. Or at least he said that. But of course it didn't work that way.

70 posted on 09/22/2012 11:11:27 AM PDT by x
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 44 | View Replies]

To: Albion Wilde
My first thought as well. Rake up the racial animus real good just before the election = Alinsky.

exactly...and sure not the first thing I think about when i wake up...even at 54 i still think about something else first thing...just like always ..since the late 1960s..lol

why freepers fall for this stuff...

71 posted on 09/22/2012 11:13:26 AM PDT by wardaddy (this is a perfect window for Netanyahu to bomb Iran..I hereby give my go ahead..thanks Muzzie idiots)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 51 | View Replies]

To: Ohioan; rockrr; Ditto
Jefferson was far more of a friend to American non-whites than Thad Stevens or those now running the Smithsonian.

Uh, no. Not unless you'd like to live under that kind of "paternalistic care" yourself and would be willing to give up whatever rights you have in exchange for security.

What we refer to, today, as "slavery," was a complex system, which in America, at least, was managed under Christian concepts, where those in charge assumed clear responsibilities for the welfare of those dependent upon them, whether free family members or those held in service. With emancipation, not only the duties were abolished for the "slaves." They were abolished for the "Masters." And, to this day, nothing as compassionate has ever really been substituted. (And the Welfare State, created by the Federal Bureaucracy, is really a terrible impediment, not a boon, to actual social progress.)

You recognize the similarities, but cover the old order with enough schmaltz to make it seem more benign and palatable than it actually was. What you think of as institutions that produce "actual social progress" are more intrusive, more brutal, and worse than anything we have today. I repeat, if that kind of antebellum paternalism was so good, give up your rights and live under it yourself.

72 posted on 09/22/2012 11:21:07 AM PDT by x
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 58 | View Replies]

To: NKP_Vet
Slavery existed all over the northern states also, especially New York.

All slaves were freed in the state of New York by 1827.

The biggest slave owner in the state of SC was a black man.

There were black slave owners in South Carolina, but the largest black slave owner, William Ellison, did not own more slaves the largest white slave owners.

73 posted on 09/22/2012 11:39:29 AM PDT by wideminded
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 35 | View Replies]

To: x
The difference between the paternalism of feudal type societies & the modern Welfare State, do not go so much to the question of greater or lesser personal independence of action--for most of the population, there is very limited true independence, unless one has at least some property. The real difference is between local, extended family type paternalism, and the cold regulated check lists of a remote bureaucracy.

The reason that I keep recommending the Booker T. Washington address, is that it humanizes the interaction. I suspect that there are very, very few, today, who ever went weeping to a cemetery to mourn the passing of the person in charge of a local Welfare Office.

On the broader subject, one can cite Biblical relationships; the celebration of British valor at Agincourt, or whatever illustrates the fact that Mankind has always had to struggle with the fact that everyone does not achieve at the same level, and leadership to address the resulting "problems" cannot be fairly judged without a better understanding of the "problems," than those trying to prove points are likely to have.

William Flax

74 posted on 09/22/2012 11:43:23 AM PDT by Ohioan
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 72 | View Replies]

To: wardaddy

Well said wardaddy. The whole race thing today is a bigger mess than it has ever been. Our nation and culture is being destroyed and ripped apart at the seams as a direct result of it. Whether through manipulation or this perpetual running around in circles about it. All this constant slavery rehashing is very counter productive and hypocritical as hell not to mention where it is all leading to. Just look around at Obama and what race crap has bubbled to the surface and that is just some mild examples of what is really underneath. We are heading down a very troubled road. I don’t care who had slaves, I don’t care that blacks as a race can’t seem to get their stuff together and I certainly don’t care to hold myself or family hostage to all this ‘social justice’ BS of today. That many so called conservatives seem to wallow in it is proof enough of just how far left the whole country has moved. From Affirmative action and quotas to African American studies and Black Liberation Theology all this anti-white rhetoric is not only BS but very dangerous.


75 posted on 09/22/2012 11:50:36 AM PDT by Altura Ct.
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 63 | View Replies]

To: wardaddy
Let me bump your excellent #63, for the common sense, fine historic perspective, and ability to focus on what is really important, here & now!

Cheers, wardaddy!

Bill Flax

76 posted on 09/22/2012 11:53:04 AM PDT by Ohioan
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 63 | View Replies]

To: Altura Ct.
On "social justice," see What Is Not Social & Not Just.

William Flax

77 posted on 09/22/2012 11:56:41 AM PDT by Ohioan
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 75 | View Replies]

To: SunkenCiv
Yes..."complex" is one way to describe Jefferson; there are a few others. And, to be fair, his presidency was much better than I would have predicted if I had been alive at the time.

Interesting comment about Adams.

78 posted on 09/22/2012 11:58:23 AM PDT by Pharmboy (Democrats lie because they must.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 64 | View Replies]

To: SoftwareEngineer

“”ALL mankind was created equal. ALL of mankind has been freed from sin by Jesus and NO ONE can own another man.””

One only needs to read Jefferson’s letter to John Adams to understand that Jefferson was an anti Christian bigot. Jefferson was the worst kind of heretic there is -on the same level of someone like Bill Maher

Excerpt from Jefferson’s letter to Madison...

“And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter”-Thomas Jefferson
http://www.beliefnet.com/resourcelib/docs/53/Letter_from_Thomas_Jefferson_to_John_Adams_1.html


79 posted on 09/22/2012 12:19:57 PM PDT by stfassisi ((The greatest gift God gives us is that of overcoming self"-St Francis Assisi)))
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 62 | View Replies]

To: Ohioan
I suspect for most free people in those days if you were lucky enough to have children they could support you when you got old. If you were fortunate, you bought a farm, and your family could feed itself. So you didn't need to depend either on a state bureaucracy or on the whim of some master. There was the "poor farm" in those days, for those who didn't have other means of support, but you didn't want to go there. So things weren't as bleak for free people as slaveowners liked to claim.

Now maybe some research is called for, but I'm betting if you were a single slave with no family or relatives, you might be bounced through the system from one owner to another. Maybe you wouldn't actually be turned out to starve, but the notion that your masters would be extremely benevolent when you got to old to work is something I'd question. Having children and other relatives on the plantation that you could do things for and who could do things for you would probably make a master much more likely not to sell you off.

In any case, when emancipation came, many slaves took to the road. The conditions they found when their journey ended may not have been very different from what they left, but they very definitely wanted to get out from under the personal tyranny of particular masters and live their own, more independent and self-reliant lives.

It's funny how some people who are most adamantly for liberty and against government have a soft spot when it comes to the tyranny of slavery and make the same kind of paternalistic arguments that they spurn when it comes to present-day society.

80 posted on 09/22/2012 12:23:35 PM PDT by x
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 74 | View Replies]


Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-20 ... 41-6061-8081-100101-104 next last

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
General/Chat
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson