Six Disturbing Facts About Thomas Jefferson’s Personal Life
For my readers: Can you judge the past with today’s eyes?
One of America’s founding fathers and the 3rd US President, Thomas Jefferson, is a name most schoolchildren are familiar with. He was one of the five authors of the Declaration of Independence, and the line “all men are born equal” was penned by his hand. At the time, slavery was rampant, and the Aristotelian notions of the inequality of birth and nature were still ubiquitous in academia.
Therefore, Jefferson’s support of such a line of thinking was remarkably prescient. However, Jefferson wasn’t a saint by any means. His pristine image portrayed in most American history textbooks is manufactured to an extent.
1. He owned hundreds of slaves.
Despite his authorship of the famous line of equality, Jefferson was actually a raging hypocrite in this respect. He owned around two hundred slaves when he penned the line, though he would free some later. However, he didn’t release all of them. In fact, he had hundreds of slaves at his plantation in Monticello.
While Jefferson made some attempts at treating his slaves better, he had abandoned all his previous hatred of the institution. Unsurprisingly, the economic benefits he derived from…
