Posted on 12/02/2012 2:05:32 PM PST by nickcarraway
THOMAS JEFFERSON is in the news again, nearly 200 years after his death alongside a high-profile biography by the journalist Jon Meacham comes a damning portrait of the third president by the independent scholar Henry Wiencek.
We are endlessly fascinated with Jefferson, in part because we seem unable to reconcile the rhetoric of liberty in his writing with the reality of his slave owning and his lifetime support for slavery. Time and again, we play down the latter in favor of the former, or write off the paradox as somehow indicative of his complex depths.
Neither Mr. Meacham, who mostly ignores Jeffersons slave ownership, nor Mr. Wiencek, who sees him as a sort of fallen angel who comes to slavery only after discovering how profitable it could be, seem willing to confront the ugly truth: the third president was a creepy, brutal hypocrite.
Contrary to Mr. Wienceks depiction, Jefferson was always deeply committed to slavery, and even more deeply hostile to the welfare of blacks, slave or free. His proslavery views were shaped not only by money and status but also by his deeply racist views, which he tried to justify through pseudoscience.
There is, it is true, a compelling paradox about Jefferson: when he wrote the Declaration of Independence, announcing the self-evident truth that all men are created equal, he owned some 175 slaves. Too often, scholars and readers use those facts as a crutch, to write off Jeffersons inconvenient views as products of the time and the complexities of the human condition.
But while many of his contemporaries, including George Washington, freed their slaves during and after the revolution inspired, perhaps, by the words of the Declaration Jefferson did not. Over the subsequent 50 years, a period of extraordinary public service, Jefferson remained the master
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Huh? He who?
I would agree, this arm-chair quarterback routine doesn’t work well.
Bottom line....if you wanted to own 500 acres...then you had to farm it. And one mere man, or two mere men, or even four mere men...would never have been enough to run a 500-acre or a 1000-acre farm. So where do you get manpower? There’s only one answer to that. For those in NY or Penn...if you ran a nice tidy 100-acre farm...great for you....you got by with your cousin or nephew helping, and you could manage with two adult men and simply a corn scheme.
By the 1783 treaty, we owned the land to the Mississipi River. Brits occupied Detroit and other forts because of our treaty violations. Among them were the state’s refusal under the Confederation to allow Brit merchants to sue for payment of pre-war debt.
Though the Jay/Gardoqui treaty almost torpedoed Union under the Constitution, it was never ratified.
Odd, what did the US Senate ratify on June 24, 1795 and in 1805 what did Pres. Jefferson refuse to renew?
Also right after the 1783 Treaty, the British maintained their outpost, traded guns with the Indians and in turn used the Indians to hamper the US. Any action of US defense was retaliation, not violation which the British constantly came under.
You have your Jay treaties mixed up BTW, Washington was not President during that Jay treaty.
I never said GW was Prez when Jay/Gardoqui was negotiated.
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