On Thomas Jefferson
When I was a kid, about 8 years old, living in American military housing near an air force base in Munich, Germany, I had a record. It wasn’t music, it was a record that told a story.
The two sides of the record told different stories, although these stories were related to each other. The first side told the story of George Washington, a great man whom I certainly admired. But the second side was my favorite, that was the story of Thomas Jefferson. Even as a child I was more apt to be entranced by intelligence than virtue.
Jefferson was undoubtedly brilliant, a genius, something that becomes easy to forget when thinking about his moral failings.
I wanted to end that last sentence with the phrase — from our perspective — but that would invite the suspicion that I thought the perspectives were just a matter of looking at things in different ways and that ours was not necessarily the correct one.
It is easy to relativize morality, as is discussed in the following article
which observes
.. I don’t give a shit about any moral failing the future might decide I had that I do not consider a failing. If the future decides that it is right to have sex with squirrels because it unlocks their latent psychic powers I’d tell the future to go to hell and that I didn’t care about its opinion.
And just like I do not think the morality of the future is better than my conception of morality I do not think the things the past thought was moral that I find abhorrent can be excused with they didn’t know any better — it was abhorrent and that is the way it is for just about everyone living today (obvious fascist throwbacks notwithstanding).
This is different than thinking that if I were born and raised in that past time that I would be any better than any of the other people then. I probably wouldn’t be. But I am better than them now, by virtue of having been born in a time that understands the wrongness of chattel slavery.
People often make that mistake of saying from our perspective about slavery and its beneficiaries such as Mr. Jefferson, opening up not just the interpretation in the text that slavery and racism could be right depending on how you look at it, and other small leniencies to excuse moral failings of the past.
To the credit of Jefferson — he never equivocated in this way, and he was a brilliant man.
He was definitely too brilliant a man for any “didn’t know any better,” I could argue his friendship with Thomas Paine and a thousand other points to the dilution of this essay’s focus, but it’s a waste of energy to prove the obvious — he did know better, he just didn’t care.
I feel a deep connection to Jefferson — not in spite of his moral failings but because of them. I feel a deep connection to the source of his failings.
The Moral Failings of Literary Creativity
When one is especially gifted from an early age with certain literary skills, with the skills of easy narrative, of using rhetorical tricks to win a point, it can become easy to forgo truth for other benefits.
Just as the physically strong may abuse that strength to gratify their desires, the mentally strong may craft arguments to get what they want while hiding what that is behind words.
And for various reasons Thomas Jefferson did not want to free his slaves, in the famous case of Sally Hemings because of his carnal relations with her, in most other cases most probably because of monetary considerations — which I totally get!
I too hate doing the right thing if it isn’t to my financial advantage!
And when I don’t like to do something and I know it is wrong not to do it, well then I might deploy my mind to crafting arguments why it should not be done, in perhaps this way (and perhaps only this way) I am very Jeffersonian.
And thus Thomas Jefferson, most of whose slaves were sold after his death to pay off the debts of his estate (other than his children with Hemings who were freed or allowed to escape without pursuit, or Hemings herself who was allowed to do as she would by his daughter Martha, while still remaining legally a slave) , argued that freeing slaves would cause unruliness between the black and white populations.
Samuel Johnson said Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, a saying Jefferson must have been familiar with. I wonder if he chuckled making his arguments.
But Not So Fast, Moralist
Washington freed all his slaves when he died in his 1799 will, this is generally lauded as an example of his great virtue, although it might seem somewhat less a great virtue than a minimal one to modern eyes. That said a Virginia law sometimes known as the 1806 removal act
required formerly enslaved people to leave the commonwealth within twelve months of being granted their freedom The freeing of slaves dropped quite a lot after this.
Jefferson wrote “The laws do not permit us to turn [our slaves] loose,” n 1814. And so when he set five men free in 1826, Jefferson petitioned the Virginia legislature for a special exemption from the law. Jefferson died in 1829.
The members of the Hemmings family who were freed were also granted special dispensations to stay in Virginia, but many of them moved to Ohio, years later with the fugitive slave act remaining became even more problematic, as being free and black was more and more a combination legally frowned upon.
This also makes me think of my particular character, which I might be willing to do the right thing, even at expense to myself, but not if it were to require such a great amount of work and dealing with bureaucracy as seemed to have become the case when Jefferson was about to die. Writers and creatives may be many things, but are seldom thought hard working outside their specific discipline.
Another special case of do I think I would have been better, and the answer is probably not. I would probably have been a scumbag too. But a genius.
This article was written by IG Agents 18 and 13.
A nice book on Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson (affiliate link)
Note: By Agent 86, a version of this article was submitted with significant edits after the publication. These edits were gathered into the section at the end entitled “But Not So Fast, Moralist”
