Systemic Racism in America's Founding Part II - The Role of Thomas Jefferson By The Otter Patriot

DISCLAIMER: SLAVERY AND RACISM ARE WRONG…PERIOD…END OF STORY.

NOTHING STATED HEREIN SHOULD BE MISCONSTRUED OTHERWISE.

In Part I, I explored the importance of perspective in regard to this sensitive issue (as well as so many others). To repeat, one cannot judge history through the lens of the modern world. The residents of 18th Century America lacked access to our modern values. They lived in a “pre-modern” world that is lost us and, as such, we need to remember that racial integration is a mid-20th century ideal that few of our founder’s generation would have been able to comprehend. Imposing our racial agenda on them may be politically correct, but it is historically irresponsible.

Recent news is filled with stories of mobs of “protesters” marching in the streets, burning businesses, and defacing and tearing down statues for “racial justice”. So far most of the statues have been Confederate Generals and the like, but also among the monuments being damaged or destroyed is the Shaw Memorial, a monument honoring the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the first all-black volunteer regiment of the Union Army in the Civil War. Sgt. William Harvey Carney, a soldier in the regiment carried the American flag throughout the battle, never dropping it despite being shot 7 times. He was the first black American to win the Congressional Medal of Honor for action. A monument to Mathias Baldwin, an early abolitionist who fought against slavery for 30 years, fought for black voting rights and funded schools for black children, was also defaced with such hateful words as “Colonizer” and “Murderer”.

This is an act of ignorance, not protest. It is deplorable and sets back the cause of civil rights. It is chaos without thought. It is anarchy without reason. More than anything it is an act that speaks of a failed education system that has discarded the importance of history and truth in favor of virtue signaling and false flags.

Also, among the many acts of vandalism and destruction is the recent toppling of a statue of Thomas Jefferson that stood at Jefferson High School in Portland, Oregon. Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence and the third President of these United States of America wrote the words “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among those are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” These words have been an inspiration to generations of Americans and to hopeful immigrants and refugees who came to this country with a dream of Freedom for themselves and their families and to escape racism and tyranny. They inspired such great people as Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., Ronald Reagan and many others. The words of the Declaration of Independence have oft been repeated by Supreme Court Justices in ruling on civil rights cases.

The statue that was torn down had the words “Slave Owner” spray painted on it. Like George Washington, the subject of Part I, Jefferson was a slave owner and, like Washington, his views on slavery changed as he grew older and wiser and he eventually became an abolitionist. When writing the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson listed many grievances against the King of England and Parliament and, in fact, mentioned slavery in his first draft. He wrote a condemnation of the king’s support for the African slave trade, stating that it was a violation of the “most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.” Unfortunately, this language was eliminated from the declaration’s final text, because South Carolina and Georgia wished to continue the African slave trade.

Thomas Jefferson did own slaves for his entire adult life, however, he also was a consistent opponent of slavery publicly. He called it a “moral depravity” and a “hideous blot”. He believed that slavery presented the greatest threat to the survival of the new American nation and he also believed that this new federal union, the first democratic experiment in history, would be destroyed by the fight over it. He once wrote that slavery was like holding “a wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go”. Jefferson believed that the laws of nature decreed everyone a right to personal liberty and that slavery was contrary to those laws of nature. These views were radical in the world of the 18th century where slavery was the norm.

Jefferson had assumed that the move toward abolition would grow and become a reality. In the late 1700’s to early 1800’s, however, slavery numbers increased greatly in Virginia. As such, he tried to discourage such labor-intensive crops as tobacco in favor of crops that required less labor like wheat, rice, grapes and sugar maples. He knew, however, that only through legislation could the evil of slavery be rid of the nation forever.

Jefferson’s strength of resolve in the belief that slavery must end never changed and, until his death, he continued to advocate for gradual emancipation. At the time of the American Revolution, Jefferson was quite active in drafting legislation that aimed to abolish slavery. His multi-point plan was to first abolish the slave trade itself. In 1779, he pushed legislation in Virginia to ban the importation of slaves; the bill did not pass. In 1784, he worked on the federal level toward the same ends in all lands westward of the original 13 states; it failed to pass by one vote. “Thus we see the fate of millions unborn hanging on the tongue of one man, & heaven was silent in that awful moment! but it is to be hoped it will not always be silent & that the friends to the rights of human nature will in the end prevail”, he wrote in a letter to a friend about the pain of that narrow loss. Second, he pushed for slaveowners to improve slavery’s most heinous features, by improving living conditions and moderating physical punishment. Third, he advocated that all persons born into slavery after a certain date would be declared free, followed by total abolition. Unfortunately, Jefferson’s plan had unintended effects in that his goal of “improving” slavery as a step towards ending it was used as an argument for its perpetuation. Pro-slavery advocates after Jefferson’s death argued that if slavery could be “improved,” abolition was unnecessary.

Jefferson always believed that the decision to emancipate slaves would have to be part of a democratic process. He knew that abolition could not come to fruition until slave owners agreed to free their slaves together in a large-scale act of emancipation. To Jefferson, the abolition of human property enacted by the Federal Government, was anti-democratic and contrary to the principles of the American Revolution. Congress did finally ban the importation of slaves in 1808, in large part due to continued efforts by Thomas Jefferson.

The narrative that systemic racism is integral in America’s founding is a dangerous lie. No one denies that the sin of slavery was present in America’s founding and a part of the founder’s history. To state that it is the basis of America’s founding, however, is in the words of Frederick Douglas “a slander upon [the framers] memory”. It is easy to judge slaveholders from the revolutionary era like Jefferson and Washington through a lens of racism, but it is also lazy. To do so is to ignore the incredible foundation that they laid for the abolition of slavery. They were born and lived in an era with vastly different views and morality than the world of today, but in setting their sights on the just laws of nature, they set into motion the most precipitous leap toward LIBERTY and EQUALITY the world has ever known.

As monuments to the Giants of our Founding and the Leaders of Civil Rights fall to the whims of today’s “Armies of Idiocracy”, so does the history that belongs to them. And with the death of that history, so to must the lessons of it pass into obscurity. Be forewarned, however, for lost histories unlearned will once again rise from their forgotten tombs to haunt the very people who wished to forget them forever. This is the nature of the human condition. Perhaps it would be a wise course to rethink ERASING history and return to TEACHING history, so that we never again repeat the evils of mankind.