Tearing Down Thomas Jefferson Over Slavery Is Moral Idiocy By Dan McLaughlin
Actually, Thomas Jefferson did a lot of good, even on slavery.
Y ou can always count on woke progressives to live up to the worst caricatures of their ideas. Democrats on the New York City Council have now removed a statue of the founder of the Democratic Party, Thomas Jefferson, from the City Council chamber in New York City Hall. The statue has been in City Hall since 1834 (eight years after Jefferson’s death), when it was erected to celebrate his advocacy of religious liberty. It is a sign of how proud Democrats are of their decision that they tried to block the press from witnessing the removal.
This is madness, and it vindicates many on the right — prominently including Donald Trump — who argued that the campaigns against Confederate statues were dangerous precisely because the people pushing for the removals were certain to move next against the Founding Fathers. When Trump made that argument in 2017, he was met with sneers. In a piece titled “Statues of Washington, Jefferson Aren’t ‘Next,’ But It’s Complicated, Historians Say,” Dartunorro Clark of NBC News wrote:
Historians who spoke to NBC News said such fears are slightly misplaced and that Trump is championing a murky interpretation of history. . . . “The president can raise the slippery slope, but it’s a false slippery slope,” said Kevin Levin, a Boston-based historian who specializes in American Civil War history.
I’ll tell you where it stops. Somewhere! Any time someone asks, where does it stop, the answer’s always . . . somewhere. You might let your kid have Twizzlers, but not inject black tar heroin. You don’t just go, “Well, after the Twizzlers, where does it stop?”
Actually, you do ask that, and this is why. Whatever Trump understood about history, he understood the madness of mobs better than Kevin Levin or John Oliver did.
Without rehashing here the whole debate over Confederate icons — which has been going on for years now and has been vigorously debated on this website, sometimes by me — the strongest argument for removing some or all Confederate statutes and monuments is that the Confederate cause was not just flawed in the way that many great Americans are flawed; it was actively wrong, and the people who supported it made the country worse, or at any rate tried to, and thus should never have been memorialized in the first place.
The underlying assumption of this argument is that it is possible to reasonably and rationally distinguish some historical figures from others: We can honor those who did good things as well as bad ones, while dishonoring those who are best known for bad causes. By contrast, a major argument against tearing down statues and monuments in general is that we end up not just disfiguring public places and concealing our own history but also feeding the iconoclasm of mobs who by nature do not reason, and never know when and how to stop. Few things draw people to Trumpism more than a sense that one is dealing with people who can never be reasoned with, only opposed at every turn.
For those of us who still care to reason, however, the City Council’s move is not just an anti-intellectual assault on historical memory; it is also moral idiocy. Jefferson should not be canonized, but building statues is not about sainthood. There is much to dislike in his personality and his long and eventful career, including his service in New York City as our first secretary of state. He was hypocritical, devious, and too easily enamored of radical fads. He lived his whole life off of the labor of slaves and did not take even George Washington’s belated steps to emancipate slaves in his will. For that, he must answer to his Maker. But he was also a monumental contributor to early America — and specifically to many of the things that almost anyone would see as this country’s virtues. There are good reasons why Jefferson has a memorial in the capital and his face on Mount Rushmore, the nickel, and the two-dollar bill, is the namesake of the capital of Missouri and many other American towns and streets, and was until the past few years embraced by the Democratic Party as its founding inspiration.
It is a particular sign of the bullheaded ignorance of the City Council that its case against Jefferson is based entirely on his personal ownership of slaves and his personal sexual relationship with one of them, Sally Hemings, rather than anything Jefferson did as a public man. Americans of past generations who built statues were under no illusion that they were honoring saints; they were memorializing great accomplishments in the public sphere. Unlike his namesake Jefferson Davis, we do not have statues to Jefferson because of his vices, but because of the good he did for his nation.
On the specific issue of slavery, as our editorial noted, Jefferson did quite a lot of good, and not only because of the pivotal role played by his “all men are created equal” rhetoric in inspiring later generations. He was a lifelong opponent of the transatlantic slave trade, perhaps the nation’s most vocal, consistent, and ultimately successful opponent. In 1776, Jefferson tried to get a denunciation of the trade into the Declaration of Independence. In 1778, as governor of Virginia, he signed into law a state ban on importing slaves (a bill he may or may not have authored). The Constitution forbade the federal government from banning the slave trade before 1808; as president, Jefferson called on Congress in his 1806 State of the Union message to ban it at the first moment allowed by the Constitution and “withdraw the citizens of the United States from all further participation in those violations of human rights, which have been so long continued on the unoffending Inhabitants of Africa, & which the morality, the reputation, & the best interests of our country have long been eager to proscribe.” He signed that ban into law in 1807. True, the ban on the external slave trade was in the financial interests of Jefferson and other Virginia planters, who could sell their slaves internally to the Deep South — as with so many things, the issue had its trade-offs and moral complexities — but the fight against the transatlantic slave trade was the central battlefield of the abolitionist movement during Jefferson’s political career, he was on the right side of it, and he succeeded in ending America’s involvement in it.
Jefferson’s record on the domestic expansion of slavery was mixed but also had genuine and enduring positive influences. In 1784, Jefferson proposed to the Continental Congress a ban on slavery in all the territory west of the Appalachians after 1800. His bill, the Territorial Governance Act, failed by one vote, but Jefferson’s language was included in the final, narrower Northwest Ordinance passed in 1787, which banned slavery west of the Appalachians and north of the Ohio River. The Northwest Ordinance helped create the free states of the Midwest that proved decisive in the long-term free–slave state balance. Moreover, the language Jefferson used in 1784 was reused by Congress in 1865 for the 13th Amendment. Thus, Jefferson is, literally, the author of our constitutional ban on slavery.
Jefferson always maintained that slavery was an evil, even when he was in the mood to excuse it as one that could not practically be done away with easily. In 1820, during the controversy that led to the Missouri Compromise, he wrote, “We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.” In 1785, in his Notes on the State of Virginia, he took a harder look at the pervasive corrupting influence of slavery on the master class (a prophetic sentiment in light of the decay in the quality of statesmen produced by Virginia in the generations that followed Jefferson):
There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it. . . . This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do. . . . The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.
With what execration should the statesman be loaded, who permitting one half the citizens thus to trample on the rights of the other, transforms those into despots, and these into enemies, destroys the morals of the one part, and the amor patriae of the other. For if a slave can have a country in this world, it must be any other in preference to that in which he is born to live and labour for another: in which he must lock up the faculties of his nature, contribute as far as depends on his individual endeavours to the evanishment of the human race, or entail his own miserable condition on the endless generations proceeding from him. With the morals of the people, their industry also is destroyed. For in a warm climate, no man will labour for himself who can make another labour for him. This is so true, that of the proprietors of slaves a very small proportion indeed are ever seen to labour.
And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.
Jefferson gradually lost the moral courage to do more about slavery in the nation, in his home state, or in his own household. But he continued, into his old age, to encourage others to keep alive the anti-slavery cause. In 1814, he wrote to Edward Coles, urging him to carry on anti-slavery in Virginia into the next generation: “The love of justice & the love of country plead equally the cause of these people, and it is a mortal reproach to us that they should have pleaded it so long in vain.” Coles ended up moving to Illinois instead, where he played a crucial role as governor in beating back an effort in 1824 to introduce legal slavery. In 1826, receiving a letter asking for him to make a public statement against slavery, Jefferson demurred, but in a response written just six weeks before his death, he added: “My sentiments have been 40. years before the public . . . altho I shall not live to see them consummated, they will not die with me. But living or dying they will ever be in my most fervent prayers.”
There of course is more to the Jefferson record on slavery and race; there is more even in some of these letters. He shared many of the racist assumptions of his time. His treatment of Haiti during his presidency, when it was struggling to throw off French slavery, was deplorable. The Louisiana Purchase, while a great boon to the nation, also did a lot to extend the institution of slavery westward. But that, like so much else in Thomas Jefferson’s career, is why he is worthy of study and critique rather than expungement from memory.
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