I’m not saying that Thomas Jefferson was right about everything, but he was the guy who put that stuff about The Creator in the Declaration of Independence.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
Speaking of Jefferson, he’s been in the news lately for other reasons:
Jefferson and Slavery
Well, yes, and he slept with whomever he wanted to.
Good grief what a nightmare. How can the same man who wrote the declaration and the constitution could be so racist and brutal. There is no defense of it. American History magazine has an article about his owning, buying and selling 600 slaves called “Jefferson’s Choice”.
The best explanation I’ve come across is by historian Edmund Morgan in “American Slavery, American Freedom”. Morgan makes the case that it was precisely their status as slaveowners, and their intimate knowledge of how brutally degrading it was to be a slave, as well as their even more intimate knowledge of how morally corrupting it was to be a slave owner, that led Jefferson and his peers to be so insistent about the importance of their own freedom from tyranny.
(Adam Hochschild makes a similar argument in “Bury The Chains” about the English abolition movement. Why was England the center of the movement to abolish the Atlantic slave trade? Perhaps because—due to the British Navy’s impressment practices—British citizens (particularly those who lived in or near seagoing ports) tended to have direct personal experience of having someone they knew randomly and without advance notice abducted and “disappeared” by men on ships. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressment )
Thanks for that link there are some amazing quotes there!
I used to be a big Jefferson fan since I had the idea that he helped to democratize the country more than the other guys. Jackson was sort of in the same boat. Now I’m more slanted towards the Adams or even Henry Clay. Hamilton is even starting to look better.
Also George Washington who, in addition to relinquishing power of his own accord, freed his own slaves in his will (the only one of the slave-owning founders to do so). (See Henry Wiencek’s, “An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves and the Creation of America.)
In my mind, Hamilton only looks bad because of his own ego, and his contempt for democracy. He was the first technocrat. But the difference between today’s technocrat and Hamilton is that Hamilton was probably the least corrupt public figure in such a high place of American government and that he genuinely cared about what was best for the people rather than his own ideology. Booman likes to say that every treasury secretary has always been some douchebag big banker type, and he’s right…except for Hamilton.
See, there’s your prejudice. I never said all our treasury secretaries were douchebags. I just said that they came from the world of high finance. Which makes sense.
Well, Jefferson saw Hamilton and his friends as douchebag big banker types. Which some of them were, but the weird thing is that Hamilton was also Big Government. Understanding that really helps to explode a lot of right-wing myths about the capitalist economy.
Capitalism is not something that spontaneously happens when the government gets out of the way. There was no Big Government in the US in the 1780s, and there was also no capitalism, because there was no capital. Just a huge mound of bad debts. That was actually one of the main reasons for the Constitution–it was generally perceived that a stronger central government was needed to boost the economy.
And one of the most important measures of the first congress was the funding act, which amounted to a huge stimulus package. It really isn’t too much to say that the funding act created the initial pool of capital that the capitalist economy was built on. And that was Hamilton.