Parry writes: "On July Fourth, the people of the United States extravagantly
celebrate the high-blown expressions on human rights that Thomas Jefferson
penned in the Declaration of Independence especially the noble phrase 'all
men are created equal.' But Jefferson really didn't believe that or much
else that he said and wrote during his lifetime. He was, in reality, a
skilled propagandist and a world-class hypocrite."
Painting detail, Thomas Jefferson by Charles Willson Peale, from life,
1791-1792. (photo: Independence National Historical Park)
Thomas Jefferson: America's Founding Sociopath
By Robert Parry, Consortium News
04 July 16
When Robert Parry's article was posted two years ago, the Thomas Jefferson
v. Alexander Hamilton debate vastly favored Jefferson, but the hit Broadway
musical "Hamilton" has brought new realism about Jefferson's ugly side.
On July Fourth, the people of the United States extravagantly celebrate the
high-blown expressions on human rights that Thomas Jefferson penned in the
Declaration of Independence especially the noble phrase "all men are created
equal." But Jefferson really didn't believe that or much else that he said
and wrote during his lifetime. He was, in reality, a skilled propagandist
and a world-class hypocrite.
Yet, rather than subject Jefferson to a rigorous examination for his
multiple hypocrisies, many Americans insist on protecting Jefferson's
reputation. From the Left, there is a desire to shield the lofty principles
contained in the Declaration. From the Right, there is value in pretending
that Jefferson's revisionist concept of the Constitution, one favoring
states' rights over the federal government was the "originalist" view of
that founding document.
So, Jefferson perhaps more than any figure in U.S. history gets a pass for
what he really was: a self-absorbed aristocrat who had one set of principles
for himself and another for everybody else.
Beyond the glaring contradiction between his "all men are created equal"
pronouncement and his racist views on African-American slaves, he also
lectured others about the need for frugality and the avoidance of debt while
he lived a life of personal extravagance and was constantly in arrears to
creditors.
Jefferson also wrote provocatively that "The tree of liberty must be
refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is
it's natural manure." That is one of Jefferson's famous quotes repeated
endlessly these days by both the right-wing Tea Party and would-be leftist
revolutionaries.
But Jefferson's bravado was more a rhetorical flourish than a principle that
he was ready to live or die by. In 1781, when he had a chance to put his own
blood where his mouth was, when a Loyalist force led by the infamous traitor
Benedict Arnold advanced on Richmond, Virginia, then-Gov. Jefferson fled for
his life on the fastest horse he could find.
Jefferson hopped on the horse and fled again when a British cavalry force
under Lt. Col. Banastre Tarleton approached Charlottesville and Monticello.
Gov. Jefferson abandoned his neighbors in Charlottesville and left his
slaves behind at Monticello to deal with the notoriously brutal Tarleton.
In other words, Jefferson may have been America's original "chicken hawk,"
talking cavalierly about other people's blood as the "manure" of liberty but
finding his own too precious to risk. Nevertheless, Jefferson later built
his political career by questioning the revolutionary commitment of
Alexander Hamilton and even George Washington, who repeatedly did risk their
lives in fighting for American liberty.
But what Jefferson's many apologists have most desperately tried to obscure
was his wretched record on race. Some pro-Jefferson scholars still talk
about his rhapsodic depictions of the natural beauty of Virginia in his
Notes on the State of Virginia, but they skirt the book's sickening racism,
including his pseudo-science of assessing physiological and mental traits of
African-Americans to prove that all men were not created equal.
A Question of Rape
For generations, these apologists also have challenged slave Sally Hemings's
late-in-life remembrance to one of her sons, Madison Hemings, describing how
Jefferson had imposed himself on her sexually in Paris after she arrived in
1787 as a teen-age slave girl attending one of his daughters.
According to Madison Hemings's account, his mother "became Mr. Jefferson's
concubine [in Paris]. And when he was called back home she was enciente
[pregnant] by him." Jefferson was insistent that Sally Hemings return with
him, but her awareness of the absence of slavery in France gave her the
leverage to insist on a transactional trade-off; she would continue to
provide sex to Jefferson in exchange for his promise of good treatment and
the freedom of her children when they turned 21, Madison Hemings said.
The traditional defense of Jefferson was to portray Sally Hemings as a
promiscuous vixen who lied about her relationship with the Great Man to
enhance her humble standing. After all, whose word would you believe, that
of the estimable Jefferson who publicly decried race mixing or a lowly
African-American slave girl?
For decades, the defenders stuck to that dismissive response despite the
curious coincidence that Hemings tended to give birth nine months after one
of Jefferson's visits to Monticello and the discovery of male Jefferson DNA
in Hemings's descendants.
Still, the Jefferson apologists raised finicky demands for conclusive proof
of the liaison, as if it were absurd to envision that a relatively young man
then in his mid-40s, a widower since his wife died in 1782, would have
initiated a sexual relationship with an African-American female, even an
attractive light-skinned mulatto like Hemings (who was the illegitimate
daughter of Jefferson's father-in-law and thus Jefferson's late wife's
half-sister)..
Though it's true that unequivocal evidence does not exist - Hemings did not
save a semen-stained blue dress so it could later be subjected to DNA
analysis - historians have increasingly come to accept the reality of
Jefferson's sexual relationship with his young slave girl who was only 14
when she moved into Jefferson's residence in Paris.
So, with this ground shifting under Jefferson's defensive lines, his
apologists retreated to a new position, that the relationship was a true
love affair. Hemings was transformed into a kind of modern-day independent
woman making her own choices about matters of the heart.
However, given her age and her status as Jefferson's property the
relationship could be more accurately described as serial rape.
But the reality may be even worse. Recent historical examinations of records
at Jefferson's Monticello plantation have provided support for
contemporaneous accounts of Jefferson having sexual relations with at least
one other slave girl beside Hemings and possibly more.
Fathering of Slaves
Some scholars, such as historian Henry Wiencek in his 2012 book, Master of
the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves, give credence to old reports
about Jefferson having a direct role in populating Monticello by fathering
his own dark-skinned lookalikes.
"In ways that no one completely understands, Monticello became populated by
a number of mixed-race people who looked astonishingly like Thomas
Jefferson," wrote Wiencek. "We know this not from what Jefferson's
detractors have claimed but from what his grandson Jeff Randolph openly
admitted. According to him, not only Sally Hemings but another Hemings woman
as well 'had children which resembled Mr. Jefferson so closely that it was
plain that they had his blood in their veins.'
"Resemblance meant kinship; there was no other explanation. Since Mr.
Jefferson's blood was Jeff's blood, Jeff knew that he was somehow kin to
these people of a parallel world. Jeff said the resemblance of one Hemings
to Thomas Jefferson was 'so close, that at some distance or in the dusk the
slave, dressed in the same way, might be mistaken for Mr. Jefferson.'"
During a dinner at Monticello, Jeff Randolph recounted a scene in which a
Thomas Jefferson lookalike was a servant tending to the table where Thomas
Jefferson was seated. Randolph recalled the reaction of one guest:
"In one instance, a gentleman dining with Mr. Jefferson, looked so startled
as he raised his eyes from the latter to the servant behind him, that his
discovery of the resemblance was perfectly obvious to all."
In the 1850s, Jeff Randolph told a visiting author that his grandfather did
not hide the slaves who bore these close resemblances, since Sally Hemings
"was a house servant and her children were brought up house servants so that
the likeness between master and slave was blazoned to all the multitudes who
visited this political Mecca" and indeed a number of visitors did make note
of this troubling reality.
Even Jefferson admirer Jon Meacham accepted the truth of the Hemings liaison
in Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power. Meacham cited a quote from Elijah
Fletcher, a visitor from Vermont: "The story of Black Sal is no farce That
he cohabits with her and has a number of children by her is a sacred truth
and the worst of it is, he keeps the same children slaves an unnatural crime
which is very common in these parts This conduct may receive a little
palliation when we consider that such proceedings are so common that they
cease here to be disgraceful."
Meacham observed that Jefferson "was apparently able to consign his children
with Sally Hemings to a separate sphere of life in his mind even as they
grew up in his midst. It was, to say the least, an odd way to live, but
Jefferson was a creature of his culture.
"'The enjoyment of a negro or mulatto woman is spoken of as quite a common
thing: no reluctance, delicacy or shame is made about the matter,' Josiah
Quincy Jr. of Massachusetts wrote after a visit to the Carolinas. This was
daily reality at Monticello."
This "daily reality" was also a troubling concern among Jefferson's white
family though the Great Man would never confirm or deny his parentage of a
number of Monticello's slaves.
"Frigid indifference forms a useful shield for a public character against
his political enemies, but Jefferson deployed it against his own daughter
Martha, who was deeply upset by the sexual allegations against her father
and wanted a straight answer Yes or no? an answer he would not deign to
give," wrote Wiencek.
Before his death, Jefferson did free several of Sally Hemings's children or
let them run away presumably fulfilling the commitment made in Paris before
Hemings agreed to return to Monticello to remain his slave concubine.
"Jefferson went to his grave without giving his family any denial of the
Hemings charges," Wiencek wrote.
The historical record increasingly makes Jefferson out to be a serial
rapist, exploiting at least one and possibly more girls who were trapped on
his property, who indeed were his property, and thus had little choice but
to tolerate his sexual advances.
Whipping the Children
The evidence of Jefferson's sexual predations must also be viewed in the
context of his overall treatment of his slaves at Monticello. Though
Jefferson's apologists pretend that he was a kind master distressed over the
inequities of a slave system that he could somehow neither correct nor
escape, the latest evidence - much of it concealed for generations to
protect Jefferson's image - reveal him to be a cruel slave-owner who
carefully calculated the net worth that his human chattel provided him and
having boys as young as 10 whipped.
Some of Jefferson's mistreatment of his slaves derived from another of his
hypocrisies, his views about simplicity and solvency. As historian John
Chester Miller wrote in his 1977 book, The Wolf by the Ears, "To Jefferson,
the abandon with which Americans rushed into debt and squandered borrowed
money upon British 'gew-gaws' and 'trumpery' vitiated the blessings of
peace.
"From Paris an unlikely podium from which to sermonize Jefferson preached
frugality, temperance, and the simple life of the American farmer. Buy
nothing whatever on credit, he exhorted his countrymen, and buy only what
was essential. 'The maxim of buying nothing without money in our pocket to
pay for it,' he averred, 'would make of our country (Virginia) one of the
happiest upon earth.'
"As Jefferson saw it, the most pernicious aspect of the postwar
preoccupation with pleasure, luxury, and the ostentatious display of wealth
was the irremediable damage it did to 'republican virtue.'"
But Jefferson himself amassed huge debts and lived the life of a bon vivant,
spending way beyond his means. In Paris, he bought fancy clothes, collected
fine wines, and acquired expensive books, furniture and artwork. It was,
however, his slaves back at Monticello who paid the price for his excesses.
"Living in a style befitting a French nobleman, his small salary often in
arrears, and burdened by debts to British merchants which he saw no way of
paying, Jefferson was driven to financial shifts, some of which were made at
the expense of his slaves. In 1787, for example, he decided to hire out some
of his slaves a practice he had hitherto avoided because of the hardship it
wreaked upon the slaves themselves," Miller wrote.
Upon returning to the United States, Jefferson reinvented himself as a more
modestly attired republican, but his tastes for the grandiose did not abate.
He ordered elaborate renovations to Monticello, which deepened his debt and
compelled his slaves to undertake strenuous labor to implement Jefferson's
ambitious architectural designs.
Needing to squeeze more value from his slaves, Jefferson was an aggressive
master, not the gentle patrician that his apologists have long depicted.
According to historian Wiencek, Jefferson "directed his manager, Nicholas
Lewis, to extract 'extraordinary exertions' of labor from the slaves to stay
current with his debt payments. Some slaves had endured years of harsh
treatment at the hands of strangers, for to raise cash, Jefferson had also
instructed Lewis to hire out slaves. He demanded extraordinary exertions
from the elderly: 'The negroes too old to be hired, could they not make a
good profit by cultivating cotton?'"
Jefferson was callous as well toward his young slaves. Reviewing
long-neglected records at Monticello, Wiencek noted that one plantation
report to Jefferson recounted that the nail factory was doing well because
"the small ones" ages 10, 11 and 12 were being whipped by overseer, Gabriel
Lilly, "for truancy."
His plantation records also show that he viewed fertile female slaves as
exceptionally valuable because their offspring would increase his assets and
thus enable him to incur more debt. He ordered his plantation manager to
take special care of these "breeding" women.
"A child raised every 2. years is of more profit than the crop of the best
laboring man," Jefferson wrote. "[I]n this, as in all other cases,
providence has made our duties and our interests coincide perfectly."
According to Wiencek, "The enslaved people were yielding him a bonanza, a
perpetual human dividend at compound interest. Jefferson wrote, 'I allow
nothing for losses by death, but, on the contrary, shall presently take
credit four per cent. per annum, for their increase over and above keeping
up their own numbers.' His plantation was producing inexhaustible human
assets. The percentage was predictable."
To justify this profiting off slavery, Jefferson claimed that he was merely
acting in accordance with "Providence," which in Jefferson's peculiar view
of religion always happened to endorse whatever action Jefferson wanted to
take.
Twisting the Founding Narrative
Yet, while Jefferson's rationalizations for slavery were repugnant, his
twisting of the Founding Narrative may have been even more significant and
long-lasting, setting the nation on course for the Civil War, followed by a
near century of segregation and carrying forward to the present day with the
Tea Party's claims that states are "sovereign" and that actions by the
federal government to promote the general welfare are "unconstitutional."
The reason the Tea Partiers get away with presenting themselves as
"conservative constitutionalists" is that Thomas Jefferson engineered a
revisionist interpretation of the Founding document, which as written by the
Federalists and ratified by the states created a federal government that
could do almost anything that Congress and the President agreed was
necessary for the good of the country.
That was the constitutional interpretation of both the Federalists and the
Anti-Federalists, who mounted a fierce though unsuccessful campaign to
defeat the Constitution's ratification because they recognized how powerful
the Constitution's federal government was. [For details, see
Consortiumnews.com's "The Right's Made-up 'Constitution.'"]
Southern Anti-Federalists, such as Patrick Henry and George Mason, argued
that the Constitution, though it implicitly accepted slavery, would
eventually be used by the North to free the slaves. Or, as Patrick Henry
colorfully told Virginia's ratifying convention in 1788, "they'll free your
niggers!"
Though the Constitution eked through to passage, the fear of Southern
plantation owners that they would lose their huge investment in human
chattel did not disappear. Indeed, their trepidation intensified as it
became clear that many leading Federalists, including the new government's
chief architect Alexander Hamilton, were ardent abolitionists. Hamilton had
grown up poor in the West Indies and witnessed first-hand the depravity of
slavery.
By contrast, Jefferson had grown up the pampered son of a major Virginia
slave-owner, but he developed his own critical view of the evils of slavery.
As a young politician, Jefferson had cautiously and unsuccessfully backed
some reforms to ameliorate the injustices. In a deleted section of his draft
of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson had denounced slavery, citing
it as one of King George III's crimes.
However, after the Revolution, Jefferson recognized that any anti-slavery
position would destroy his political viability among his fellow plantation
owners in the South. While in Paris as the U.S. representative, Jefferson
rebuffed offers to join the abolitionist Amis des Noirs because by
associating with abolitionists he would impair his ability to do "good" in
Virginia, historian John Chester Miller noted, adding:
"Jefferson's political instinct proved sound: as a member of the Amis des
Noirs he would have been a marked man in the Old Dominion."
Self-Interest Over Principle
With his personal financial and political interests aligned with the
perpetuation of slavery, Jefferson emerged as the most important leader of
the slave South, seeking to reinterpret the Constitution to blunt the
potential that the federal government might eventually outlaw slavery.
So, in the 1790s, as Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists worked to create
the new government that the Constitution had authorized, Jefferson's
counter-movement emerged to reassert states' rights as defined by the
earlier Articles of Confederation, which the Constitution had obliterated.
Jefferson skillfully reframed the Constitution's powers not by asserting an
explicit defense of slavery but by voicing resistance to a strong central
government and reasserting the primacy of the states. Though Jefferson had
played no role in drafting the Constitution or the Bill of Rights - he was
in Paris at the time - he simply interpreted the Constitution as he wished,
similar to his frequent invocation of Providence as always favoring whatever
he wanted.
Most significantly, Jefferson developed the concept of "strict
construction," insisting that the federal government could only perform
functions specifically mentioned in the text of the Constitution, such as
coining money, setting up post offices, etc. Though Jefferson's concept was
silly because the Framers understood that the young country would face
unanticipated opportunities and challenges that the government would have to
address, Jefferson built a potent political party to make his idea stick.
Jefferson's strategy was to simply ignore the Constitution's clear language,
particularly its mandate in Article I, Section 8 that Congress "provide for
the general Welfare of the United States" and its grant to Congress the
power "to make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying
into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this
Constitution in the Government of the United States."
Jefferson simply insisted that the Framers hadn't meant what the Framers had
written. Jefferson went even further and reaffirmed the concept of state
sovereignty and independence that George Washington, James Madison and other
Framers had despised and intentionally expunged when they threw out the
Articles of Confederation. The Constitution had shifted national sovereignty
away from the states to "We the People of the United States."
Despite the Constitution's explicit reference to making federal law "the
supreme law of the land," Jefferson exploited the lingering resentments over
ratification to reassert the states' supremacy over the federal government.
Often working behind the scenes even while serving as Vice President under
President John Adams Jefferson promoted each state's right to nullify
federal law and even to secede from the Union.
Aiding Jefferson's cause was the shifting allegiances of James Madison, an
early Federalist who had been tapped by Washington to be the principal
architect of the Constitution. However, like Jefferson, Madison was a major
Virginian slaveholder who recognized that both his political future and his
personal fortune were dependent on the continuation of slavery.
So, Madison sold out his earlier Federalist allies and shifted his
allegiance to his neighbor, Jefferson. Madison's break with Washington and
Hamilton gave Jefferson's revisionist take on the Constitution a patina of
legitimacy given Madison's key role as one of the Framers.
Jefferson spelled out this political reality in a 1795 letter to Madison in
which Jefferson cited what he called "the Southern interest," because, as
author Jon Meacham observed, "the South was his personal home and his
political base." It was the same for Madison. [For more on Madison's role,
see Consortiumnews.com's "The Right's Dubious Claim to Madison."]
Warring with the Federalists
In his rise to power, Jefferson waged a nasty propaganda war against the
Federalists as they struggled to form a new government and endeavored to
stay out of a renewed conflict between Great Britain and France. Jefferson
secretly funded newspaper editors who spread damaging personal rumors about
key Federalists, particularly Hamilton who as Treasury Secretary was
spearheading the new government's formation.
Jefferson's governmental actions almost always dovetailed with the interests
of slaveholders and his own personal finances. For instance, as Secretary of
State during Washington's first term, Jefferson protested the Federalists'
disinterest in pursuing compensation from Great Britain for slaves freed
during the Revolutionary War, a high priority for Jefferson and his
plantation-owning allies. Jefferson correctly perceived that Hamilton and
John Jay, two staunch opponents of slavery, had chosen not to make
compensation a high priority.
Also Jefferson's interest in siding with France against Great Britain was
partly colored by his large financial debts owed to London lenders, debts
that might be voided or postponed if the United States went to war against
Great Britain.
Then, in the latter 1790s with French agents aggressively intervening in
U.S. politics to push President John Adams into that war against Great
Britain, the Federalist-controlled Congress passed the Alien and Sedition
Acts, which Jefferson's political movement deftly exploited to rally
opposition to the overreaching Federalists.
By the election of 1800, Jefferson had merged his political base in the
slave-economy South with an anti-Federalist faction in New York to defeat
Adams for reelection. The three-fifths clause, a concession by the
Constitutional Convention to the South allowing slaves to be counted as
three-fifths of a person for the purpose of representation, proved crucial
to Jefferson's victory.
As President, Jefferson took more actions that advanced the cause of his
slaveholding constituency, largely by solidifying his "states' rights"
interpretation of the Constitution. But Jefferson and his revisionist views
faced a formidable opponent in Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall, a
fellow Virginian though one who considered slavery the likely ruin of the
South.
As historian Miller wrote: "While Jefferson could account for Hamilton a
West Indian 'adventurer' goaded by ambition, unscrupulous in attaining his
ends, and wholly devoid of state loyalties he could not understand how John
Marshall, a Virginian who, under happier circumstances, Jefferson might have
called 'cousin John,' could cast off all feeling for his 'country' (i.e.
Virginia) and go over to the 'enemy'
"As Marshall saw it, Jefferson was trying to turn the clock back to the
Articles of Confederation a regression that would totally paralyze the
federal government. 'The government of the whole will be prostrated at the
feet of the members [the states],' Marshall predicted, 'and the grand effort
of wisdom, virtue, and patriotism, which produced it, will be totally
defeated.'
"The question of slavery never bulked larger on Jefferson's horizon than
when John Marshall, from the eminence of the Supreme Court, struck down acts
of the state legislatures and aggrandized the powers of the federal
government. For slavery could not be divorced from the conflict between the
states and the general government: as the Supreme Court went, so might
slavery itself go.
"States' rights were the first line of defense of slavery against
antislavery sentiment in Congress, and Jefferson had no intention of
standing by idly while this vital perimeter was breached by a troop of
black-robed jurists."
Selling Out the Haitians
Jefferson also reversed the Federalists' support for the slave rebellion in
St. Domingue (now Haiti), which had overthrown a ruthlessly efficient French
plantation system that had literally worked the slaves to death. The
violence of that revolution on both sides shocked Jefferson and many of his
fellow slaveholders who feared that the rebellion might inspire American
blacks to rise up next.
Alexander Hamilton, who despised slavery from his experience growing up in
the West Indies, assisted the black slave leader, the self-taught and
relatively moderate Toussaint L'Ouverture, in drafting a constitution, and
the Adams administration sold weapons to the former slaves.
After taking over the White House, however, President Jefferson reversed
those Federalist policies. He conspired secretly with the new French
dictator Napoleon Bonaparte on a French plan to retake St. Domingue with an
expeditionary force that would re-enslave the blacks. Jefferson only learned
later that Napoleon had a second phase of the plan, to move to New Orleans
and build a new French colonial empire in the heart of North America.
Napoleon's army succeeded in capturing L'Ouverture, who was taken to France
and killed, but L'Ouverture's more radical followers annihilated the French
army and declared their independence as a new republic, Haiti.
The Haitians' bloody victory had important consequences for the United
States as well. Stopped from moving on to New Orleans, Napoleon decided to
sell the Louisiana Territories to Jefferson, who thus stood to benefit from
the Haitian freedom fighters whom Jefferson had sold out. Still fearing the
spread of black revolution, Jefferson also organized a blockade of Haiti,
which helped drive the war-torn country into a spiral of violence and
poverty that it has never escaped.
However, Jefferson also faced a constitutional quandary, since he had
espoused the ludicrous notion of "strict construction" and there was no
specific constitutional language authorizing the purchase of new lands. The
solution for Jefferson, the consummate hypocrite, was simply to violate his
own principle and proceed with the Louisiana Purchase.
This vast new territory also opened up huge opportunities for Southern
slaveholders, especially because the Constitution had called for the end of
slave importation in 1808, meaning that the value of the domestic slave
trade skyrocketed. That was especially important for established slave
states like Virginia where the soil for farming was depleted.
Breeding slaves became a big business for the Commonwealth and enhanced
Jefferson's personal net worth, underscoring his notations about valuing
female "breeder" slaves even above the strongest males.
Inviting the Civil War
But the danger to the nation was that spreading slavery to the Louisiana
Territories and admitting a large number of slave states would worsen
tensions between North and South.
As Miller wrote, "Jefferson might have averted the struggle between the
North and South, free and slave labor, for primacy in the national domain
the immediate, and probably the only truly irrepressible, cause of the Civil
War. Instead, Jefferson raised no objections to the continued existence of
slavery in the Louisiana Purchase.
"Had he the temerity to propose that Louisiana be excluded from the domestic
slave trade he would have encountered a solid bloc of hostile votes from
south of the Mason-Dixon line. Jefferson was fond of saying that he never
tilted against windmills, especially those that seemed certain to unhorse
him. Jefferson neither took nor advocated any action that would weaken
slavery among the tobacco and cotton producers in the United States."
Indeed, keeping the new territories and states open to slavery became a
major goal of Jefferson as President and after he left office.
Miller wrote, "In the case of the federal government, he could easily
imagine circumstances perhaps they had already been produced by John
Marshall which justified [the South's] secession: among them was the
emergence of a central government so powerful that it could trample
willfully upon the rights of the states and destroy any institution,
including slavery, which it judged to be immoral, improper, or inimical to
the national welfare as defined by Washington, D.C.
"Confronted by such a concentration of power, Jefferson believed that the
South would have no real option but to go its own way."
Miller continued, "As the spokesman of a section whose influence was
dwindling steadily in the national counsels and which was threatened with
the 'tyranny' of a consolidated government dominated by a section hostile to
the institutions and interests of the South, Jefferson not only took the
side of slavery, he demanded that the right of slavery to expand at will
everywhere in the national domain be acknowledged by the Northern majority."
In the last major political fight of his life, Jefferson battled Northern
efforts to block the spread of slavery into Missouri. "With the alarm bell
sounding in his ears, Jefferson buckled on the armor of Hector and took up
the shield of states' rights," wrote Miller. "Jefferson, in short, assumed
the accoutrements of an ardent and an uncompromising champion of Southern
rights. Possessed by this martial spirit, Jefferson now asserted that
Congress had no power over slavery in the territories.
"Now he was willing to accord Congress power only to protect slavery in the
territories and he converted the doctrine of states' rights into a
protective shield for slavery against interference by a hostile federal
government. He was no longer concerned primarily with civil liberties or
with the equalization of the ownership of property but in insuring that
slave-owners were protected in the full plentitude of their property rights.
"The Missouri dispute seemed to mark the strange death of Jeffersonian
liberalism."
Rationalizing Slavery
Jefferson's fight to extend slavery into Missouri also influenced his last
notable personal achievement, the founding of the University of Virginia. He
saw the establishment of a first-rate educational institution in
Charlottesville, Virginia, as an important antidote to elite Northern
schools influencing the Southern aristocracy with ideas that could undermine
what Jefferson dubbed "Missourism," or the right of all states carved from
the Louisiana Territories to practice slavery.
Jefferson complained that Southern men, who traveled North for their college
education, were infused with "opinions and principles in discord with those
of their own country," by which he meant the South, Miller wrote, adding:
"Particularly if they attended Harvard University, they returned home imbued
with 'anti-Missourism,' dazzled by the vision of 'a single and splendid
government of an aristocracy, founded on banking institutions and moneyed
corporations' and utterly indifferent to or even contemptuous of the
old-fashioned Southern patriots who still manned the defenses of freedom,
equality, and democracy", revealing again how words in Jefferson's twisted
world had lost all rational meaning. Slavery became "freedom, equality, and
democracy."
The Missouri Compromise of 1820 that barred slavery in new states north of
the 36-degree-30 parallel "made the creation of such a center of learning
imperative" to Jefferson, wrote Miller, thus driving his determination to
make the University of Virginia a Southern school that would rival the great
colleges of the North and would train young Southern minds to resist federal
"consolidationism."
Even the Jefferson-admiring Meacham noted the influence of the Missouri
dispute in Jefferson's zeal to launch his university in Charlottesville.
"The Missouri question made Jefferson even more eager to get on with the
building of the University of Virginia for he believed the rising generation
of leaders should be trained at home, in climes hospitable to his view of
the world, rather than sent north," Meacham wrote.
In short, Jefferson had melded the twin concepts of slavery and states'
rights into a seamless ideology. As Miller concluded, "Jefferson began his
career as a Virginian; he became an American; and in his old age he was in
the process of becoming a Southern nationalist."
When he died on July 4, 1826, a half century after the Declaration of
Independence was first read to the American people, Jefferson had set the
nation on course for the Civil War.
However, even to this day, Jefferson's vision of "victimhood" for white
Southerners seeing themselves as persecuted by Northern power - yet blinded
to the racist cruelty that they inflict on blacks - remains a powerful
motivation for white anger, now spreading beyond the South.
Today, we see Jefferson's racist legacy in the nearly deranged hatred
directed at the first African-American president and in the unbridled fury
unleashed against the federal government that Barack Obama heads.
As unpleasant as it may be for Americans who prefer especially on July
Fourth to ponder the pleasant image of Jefferson as the aristocratic
republican with a taste for fine art and a fondness for free-thinking, it is
well past time to look at the Declaration's author as the person he really
was, America's founding sociopath.
________________________________________
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories
for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest
book, America's Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from
Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). You also can order Robert Parry's trilogy on
the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for
only $34. The trilogy includes America's Stolen Narrative. For details on
this offer, click here.
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Painting detail, Thomas Jefferson by Charles Willson Peale, from life,
1791-1792. (photo: Independence National Historical Park)
https://consortiumnews.com/2016/07/04/thomas-jefferson-americas-founding-soc
iopath-2/https://consortiumnews.com/2016/07/04/thomas-jefferson-americas-fou
nding-sociopath-2/
Thomas Jefferson: America's Founding Sociopath
By Robert Parry, Consortium News
04 July 16
When Robert Parry's article was posted two years ago, the Thomas Jefferson
v. Alexander Hamilton debate vastly favored Jefferson, but the hit Broadway
musical "Hamilton" has brought new realism about Jefferson's ugly side.
n July Fourth, the people of the United States extravagantly celebrate the
high-blown expressions on human rights that Thomas Jefferson penned in the
Declaration of Independence especially the noble phrase "all men are created
equal." But Jefferson really didn't believe that or much else that he said
and wrote during his lifetime. He was, in reality, a skilled propagandist
and a world-class hypocrite.
Yet, rather than subject Jefferson to a rigorous examination for his
multiple hypocrisies, many Americans insist on protecting Jefferson's
reputation. From the Left, there is a desire to shield the lofty principles
contained in the Declaration. From the Right, there is value in pretending
that Jefferson's revisionist concept of the Constitution, one favoring
states' rights over the federal government was the "originalist" view of
that founding document.
So, Jefferson perhaps more than any figure in U.S. history gets a pass for
what he really was: a self-absorbed aristocrat who had one set of principles
for himself and another for everybody else.
Beyond the glaring contradiction between his "all men are created equal"
pronouncement and his racist views on African-American slaves, he also
lectured others about the need for frugality and the avoidance of debt while
he lived a life of personal extravagance and was constantly in arrears to
creditors.
Jefferson also wrote provocatively that "The tree of liberty must be
refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is
it's natural manure." That is one of Jefferson's famous quotes repeated
endlessly these days by both the right-wing Tea Party and would-be leftist
revolutionaries.
But Jefferson's bravado was more a rhetorical flourish than a principle that
he was ready to live or die by. In 1781, when he had a chance to put his own
blood where his mouth was, when a Loyalist force led by the infamous traitor
Benedict Arnold advanced on Richmond, Virginia, then-Gov. Jefferson fled for
his life on the fastest horse he could find.
Jefferson hopped on the horse and fled again when a British cavalry force
under Lt. Col. Banastre Tarleton approached Charlottesville and Monticello.
Gov. Jefferson abandoned his neighbors in Charlottesville and left his
slaves behind at Monticello to deal with the notoriously brutal Tarleton.
In other words, Jefferson may have been America's original "chicken hawk,"
talking cavalierly about other people's blood as the "manure" of liberty but
finding his own too precious to risk. Nevertheless, Jefferson later built
his political career by questioning the revolutionary commitment of
Alexander Hamilton and even George Washington, who repeatedly did risk their
lives in fighting for American liberty.
But what Jefferson's many apologists have most desperately tried to obscure
was his wretched record on race. Some pro-Jefferson scholars still talk
about his rhapsodic depictions of the natural beauty of Virginia in his
Notes on the State of Virginia, but they skirt the book's sickening racism,
including his pseudo-science of assessing physiological and mental traits of
African-Americans to prove that all men were not created equal.
A Question of Rape
For generations, these apologists also have challenged slave Sally Hemings's
late-in-life remembrance to one of her sons, Madison Hemings, describing how
Jefferson had imposed himself on her sexually in Paris after she arrived in
1787 as a teen-age slave girl attending one of his daughters.
According to Madison Hemings's account, his mother "became Mr. Jefferson's
concubine [in Paris]. And when he was called back home she was enciente
[pregnant] by him." Jefferson was insistent that Sally Hemings return with
him, but her awareness of the absence of slavery in France gave her the
leverage to insist on a transactional trade-off; she would continue to
provide sex to Jefferson in exchange for his promise of good treatment and
the freedom of her children when they turned 21, Madison Hemings said.
The traditional defense of Jefferson was to portray Sally Hemings as a
promiscuous vixen who lied about her relationship with the Great Man to
enhance her humble standing. After all, whose word would you believe, that
of the estimable Jefferson who publicly decried race mixing or a lowly
African-American slave girl?
For decades, the defenders stuck to that dismissive response despite the
curious coincidence that Hemings tended to give birth nine months after one
of Jefferson's visits to Monticello and the discovery of male Jefferson DNA
in Hemings's descendants.
Still, the Jefferson apologists raised finicky demands for conclusive proof
of the liaison, as if it were absurd to envision that a relatively young man
then in his mid-40s, a widower since his wife died in 1782, would have
initiated a sexual relationship with an African-American female, even an
attractive light-skinned mulatto like Hemings (who was the illegitimate
daughter of Jefferson's father-in-law and thus Jefferson's late wife's
half-sister)..
Though it's true that unequivocal evidence does not exist - Hemings did not
save a semen-stained blue dress so it could later be subjected to DNA
analysis - historians have increasingly come to accept the reality of
Jefferson's sexual relationship with his young slave girl who was only 14
when she moved into Jefferson's residence in Paris.
So, with this ground shifting under Jefferson's defensive lines, his
apologists retreated to a new position, that the relationship was a true
love affair. Hemings was transformed into a kind of modern-day independent
woman making her own choices about matters of the heart.
However, given her age and her status as Jefferson's property the
relationship could be more accurately described as serial rape.
But the reality may be even worse. Recent historical examinations of records
at Jefferson's Monticello plantation have provided support for
contemporaneous accounts of Jefferson having sexual relations with at least
one other slave girl beside Hemings and possibly more.
Fathering of Slaves
Some scholars, such as historian Henry Wiencek in his 2012 book, Master of
the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves, give credence to old reports
about Jefferson having a direct role in populating Monticello by fathering
his own dark-skinned lookalikes.
"In ways that no one completely understands, Monticello became populated by
a number of mixed-race people who looked astonishingly like Thomas
Jefferson," wrote Wiencek. "We know this not from what Jefferson's
detractors have claimed but from what his grandson Jeff Randolph openly
admitted. According to him, not only Sally Hemings but another Hemings woman
as well 'had children which resembled Mr. Jefferson so closely that it was
plain that they had his blood in their veins.'
"Resemblance meant kinship; there was no other explanation. Since Mr.
Jefferson's blood was Jeff's blood, Jeff knew that he was somehow kin to
these people of a parallel world. Jeff said the resemblance of one Hemings
to Thomas Jefferson was 'so close, that at some distance or in the dusk the
slave, dressed in the same way, might be mistaken for Mr. Jefferson.'"
During a dinner at Monticello, Jeff Randolph recounted a scene in which a
Thomas Jefferson lookalike was a servant tending to the table where Thomas
Jefferson was seated. Randolph recalled the reaction of one guest:
"In one instance, a gentleman dining with Mr. Jefferson, looked so startled
as he raised his eyes from the latter to the servant behind him, that his
discovery of the resemblance was perfectly obvious to all."
In the 1850s, Jeff Randolph told a visiting author that his grandfather did
not hide the slaves who bore these close resemblances, since Sally Hemings
"was a house servant and her children were brought up house servants so that
the likeness between master and slave was blazoned to all the multitudes who
visited this political Mecca" and indeed a number of visitors did make note
of this troubling reality.
Even Jefferson admirer Jon Meacham accepted the truth of the Hemings liaison
in Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power. Meacham cited a quote from Elijah
Fletcher, a visitor from Vermont: "The story of Black Sal is no farce That
he cohabits with her and has a number of children by her is a sacred truth
and the worst of it is, he keeps the same children slaves an unnatural crime
which is very common in these parts This conduct may receive a little
palliation when we consider that such proceedings are so common that they
cease here to be disgraceful."
Meacham observed that Jefferson "was apparently able to consign his children
with Sally Hemings to a separate sphere of life in his mind even as they
grew up in his midst. It was, to say the least, an odd way to live, but
Jefferson was a creature of his culture.
"'The enjoyment of a negro or mulatto woman is spoken of as quite a common
thing: no reluctance, delicacy or shame is made about the matter,' Josiah
Quincy Jr. of Massachusetts wrote after a visit to the Carolinas. This was
daily reality at Monticello."
This "daily reality" was also a troubling concern among Jefferson's white
family though the Great Man would never confirm or deny his parentage of a
number of Monticello's slaves.
"Frigid indifference forms a useful shield for a public character against
his political enemies, but Jefferson deployed it against his own daughter
Martha, who was deeply upset by the sexual allegations against her father
and wanted a straight answer Yes or no? an answer he would not deign to
give," wrote Wiencek.
Before his death, Jefferson did free several of Sally Hemings's children or
let them run away presumably fulfilling the commitment made in Paris before
Hemings agreed to return to Monticello to remain his slave concubine.
"Jefferson went to his grave without giving his family any denial of the
Hemings charges," Wiencek wrote.
The historical record increasingly makes Jefferson out to be a serial
rapist, exploiting at least one and possibly more girls who were trapped on
his property, who indeed were his property, and thus had little choice but
to tolerate his sexual advances.
Whipping the Children
The evidence of Jefferson's sexual predations must also be viewed in the
context of his overall treatment of his slaves at Monticello. Though
Jefferson's apologists pretend that he was a kind master distressed over the
inequities of a slave system that he could somehow neither correct nor
escape, the latest evidence - much of it concealed for generations to
protect Jefferson's image - reveal him to be a cruel slave-owner who
carefully calculated the net worth that his human chattel provided him and
having boys as young as 10 whipped.
Some of Jefferson's mistreatment of his slaves derived from another of his
hypocrisies, his views about simplicity and solvency. As historian John
Chester Miller wrote in his 1977 book, The Wolf by the Ears, "To Jefferson,
the abandon with which Americans rushed into debt and squandered borrowed
money upon British 'gew-gaws' and 'trumpery' vitiated the blessings of
peace.
"From Paris an unlikely podium from which to sermonize Jefferson preached
frugality, temperance, and the simple life of the American farmer. Buy
nothing whatever on credit, he exhorted his countrymen, and buy only what
was essential. 'The maxim of buying nothing without money in our pocket to
pay for it,' he averred, 'would make of our country (Virginia) one of the
happiest upon earth.'
"As Jefferson saw it, the most pernicious aspect of the postwar
preoccupation with pleasure, luxury, and the ostentatious display of wealth
was the irremediable damage it did to 'republican virtue.'"
But Jefferson himself amassed huge debts and lived the life of a bon vivant,
spending way beyond his means. In Paris, he bought fancy clothes, collected
fine wines, and acquired expensive books, furniture and artwork. It was,
however, his slaves back at Monticello who paid the price for his excesses.
"Living in a style befitting a French nobleman, his small salary often in
arrears, and burdened by debts to British merchants which he saw no way of
paying, Jefferson was driven to financial shifts, some of which were made at
the expense of his slaves. In 1787, for example, he decided to hire out some
of his slaves a practice he had hitherto avoided because of the hardship it
wreaked upon the slaves themselves," Miller wrote.
Upon returning to the United States, Jefferson reinvented himself as a more
modestly attired republican, but his tastes for the grandiose did not abate.
He ordered elaborate renovations to Monticello, which deepened his debt and
compelled his slaves to undertake strenuous labor to implement Jefferson's
ambitious architectural designs.
Needing to squeeze more value from his slaves, Jefferson was an aggressive
master, not the gentle patrician that his apologists have long depicted.
According to historian Wiencek, Jefferson "directed his manager, Nicholas
Lewis, to extract 'extraordinary exertions' of labor from the slaves to stay
current with his debt payments. Some slaves had endured years of harsh
treatment at the hands of strangers, for to raise cash, Jefferson had also
instructed Lewis to hire out slaves. He demanded extraordinary exertions
from the elderly: 'The negroes too old to be hired, could they not make a
good profit by cultivating cotton?'"
Jefferson was callous as well toward his young slaves. Reviewing
long-neglected records at Monticello, Wiencek noted that one plantation
report to Jefferson recounted that the nail factory was doing well because
"the small ones" ages 10, 11 and 12 were being whipped by overseer, Gabriel
Lilly, "for truancy."
His plantation records also show that he viewed fertile female slaves as
exceptionally valuable because their offspring would increase his assets and
thus enable him to incur more debt. He ordered his plantation manager to
take special care of these "breeding" women.
"A child raised every 2. years is of more profit than the crop of the best
laboring man," Jefferson wrote. "[I]n this, as in all other cases,
providence has made our duties and our interests coincide perfectly."
According to Wiencek, "The enslaved people were yielding him a bonanza, a
perpetual human dividend at compound interest. Jefferson wrote, 'I allow
nothing for losses by death, but, on the contrary, shall presently take
credit four per cent. per annum, for their increase over and above keeping
up their own numbers.' His plantation was producing inexhaustible human
assets. The percentage was predictable."
To justify this profiting off slavery, Jefferson claimed that he was merely
acting in accordance with "Providence," which in Jefferson's peculiar view
of religion always happened to endorse whatever action Jefferson wanted to
take.
Twisting the Founding Narrative
Yet, while Jefferson's rationalizations for slavery were repugnant, his
twisting of the Founding Narrative may have been even more significant and
long-lasting, setting the nation on course for the Civil War, followed by a
near century of segregation and carrying forward to the present day with the
Tea Party's claims that states are "sovereign" and that actions by the
federal government to promote the general welfare are "unconstitutional."
The reason the Tea Partiers get away with presenting themselves as
"conservative constitutionalists" is that Thomas Jefferson engineered a
revisionist interpretation of the Founding document, which as written by the
Federalists and ratified by the states created a federal government that
could do almost anything that Congress and the President agreed was
necessary for the good of the country.
That was the constitutional interpretation of both the Federalists and the
Anti-Federalists, who mounted a fierce though unsuccessful campaign to
defeat the Constitution's ratification because they recognized how powerful
the Constitution's federal government was. [For details, see
Consortiumnews.com's "The Right's Made-up 'Constitution.'"]
Southern Anti-Federalists, such as Patrick Henry and George Mason, argued
that the Constitution, though it implicitly accepted slavery, would
eventually be used by the North to free the slaves. Or, as Patrick Henry
colorfully told Virginia's ratifying convention in 1788, "they'll free your
niggers!"
Though the Constitution eked through to passage, the fear of Southern
plantation owners that they would lose their huge investment in human
chattel did not disappear. Indeed, their trepidation intensified as it
became clear that many leading Federalists, including the new government's
chief architect Alexander Hamilton, were ardent abolitionists. Hamilton had
grown up poor in the West Indies and witnessed first-hand the depravity of
slavery.
By contrast, Jefferson had grown up the pampered son of a major Virginia
slave-owner, but he developed his own critical view of the evils of slavery.
As a young politician, Jefferson had cautiously and unsuccessfully backed
some reforms to ameliorate the injustices. In a deleted section of his draft
of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson had denounced slavery, citing
it as one of King George III's crimes.
However, after the Revolution, Jefferson recognized that any anti-slavery
position would destroy his political viability among his fellow plantation
owners in the South. While in Paris as the U.S. representative, Jefferson
rebuffed offers to join the abolitionist Amis des Noirs because by
associating with abolitionists he would impair his ability to do "good" in
Virginia, historian John Chester Miller noted, adding:
"Jefferson's political instinct proved sound: as a member of the Amis des
Noirs he would have been a marked man in the Old Dominion."
Self-Interest Over Principle
With his personal financial and political interests aligned with the
perpetuation of slavery, Jefferson emerged as the most important leader of
the slave South, seeking to reinterpret the Constitution to blunt the
potential that the federal government might eventually outlaw slavery.
So, in the 1790s, as Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists worked to create
the new government that the Constitution had authorized, Jefferson's
counter-movement emerged to reassert states' rights as defined by the
earlier Articles of Confederation, which the Constitution had obliterated.
Jefferson skillfully reframed the Constitution's powers not by asserting an
explicit defense of slavery but by voicing resistance to a strong central
government and reasserting the primacy of the states. Though Jefferson had
played no role in drafting the Constitution or the Bill of Rights - he was
in Paris at the time - he simply interpreted the Constitution as he wished,
similar to his frequent invocation of Providence as always favoring whatever
he wanted.
Most significantly, Jefferson developed the concept of "strict
construction," insisting that the federal government could only perform
functions specifically mentioned in the text of the Constitution, such as
coining money, setting up post offices, etc. Though Jefferson's concept was
silly because the Framers understood that the young country would face
unanticipated opportunities and challenges that the government would have to
address, Jefferson built a potent political party to make his idea stick.
Jefferson's strategy was to simply ignore the Constitution's clear language,
particularly its mandate in Article I, Section 8 that Congress "provide for
the general Welfare of the United States" and its grant to Congress the
power "to make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying
into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this
Constitution in the Government of the United States."
Jefferson simply insisted that the Framers hadn't meant what the Framers had
written. Jefferson went even further and reaffirmed the concept of state
sovereignty and independence that George Washington, James Madison and other
Framers had despised and intentionally expunged when they threw out the
Articles of Confederation. The Constitution had shifted national sovereignty
away from the states to "We the People of the United States."
Despite the Constitution's explicit reference to making federal law "the
supreme law of the land," Jefferson exploited the lingering resentments over
ratification to reassert the states' supremacy over the federal government.
Often working behind the scenes even while serving as Vice President under
President John Adams Jefferson promoted each state's right to nullify
federal law and even to secede from the Union.
Aiding Jefferson's cause was the shifting allegiances of James Madison, an
early Federalist who had been tapped by Washington to be the principal
architect of the Constitution. However, like Jefferson, Madison was a major
Virginian slaveholder who recognized that both his political future and his
personal fortune were dependent on the continuation of slavery.
So, Madison sold out his earlier Federalist allies and shifted his
allegiance to his neighbor, Jefferson. Madison's break with Washington and
Hamilton gave Jefferson's revisionist take on the Constitution a patina of
legitimacy given Madison's key role as one of the Framers.
Jefferson spelled out this political reality in a 1795 letter to Madison in
which Jefferson cited what he called "the Southern interest," because, as
author Jon Meacham observed, "the South was his personal home and his
political base." It was the same for Madison. [For more on Madison's role,
see Consortiumnews.com's "The Right's Dubious Claim to Madison."]
Warring with the Federalists
In his rise to power, Jefferson waged a nasty propaganda war against the
Federalists as they struggled to form a new government and endeavored to
stay out of a renewed conflict between Great Britain and France. Jefferson
secretly funded newspaper editors who spread damaging personal rumors about
key Federalists, particularly Hamilton who as Treasury Secretary was
spearheading the new government's formation.
Jefferson's governmental actions almost always dovetailed with the interests
of slaveholders and his own personal finances. For instance, as Secretary of
State during Washington's first term, Jefferson protested the Federalists'
disinterest in pursuing compensation from Great Britain for slaves freed
during the Revolutionary War, a high priority for Jefferson and his
plantation-owning allies. Jefferson correctly perceived that Hamilton and
John Jay, two staunch opponents of slavery, had chosen not to make
compensation a high priority.
Also Jefferson's interest in siding with France against Great Britain was
partly colored by his large financial debts owed to London lenders, debts
that might be voided or postponed if the United States went to war against
Great Britain.
Then, in the latter 1790s with French agents aggressively intervening in
U.S. politics to push President John Adams into that war against Great
Britain, the Federalist-controlled Congress passed the Alien and Sedition
Acts, which Jefferson's political movement deftly exploited to rally
opposition to the overreaching Federalists.
By the election of 1800, Jefferson had merged his political base in the
slave-economy South with an anti-Federalist faction in New York to defeat
Adams for reelection. The three-fifths clause, a concession by the
Constitutional Convention to the South allowing slaves to be counted as
three-fifths of a person for the purpose of representation, proved crucial
to Jefferson's victory.
As President, Jefferson took more actions that advanced the cause of his
slaveholding constituency, largely by solidifying his "states' rights"
interpretation of the Constitution. But Jefferson and his revisionist views
faced a formidable opponent in Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall, a
fellow Virginian though one who considered slavery the likely ruin of the
South.
As historian Miller wrote: "While Jefferson could account for Hamilton a
West Indian 'adventurer' goaded by ambition, unscrupulous in attaining his
ends, and wholly devoid of state loyalties he could not understand how John
Marshall, a Virginian who, under happier circumstances, Jefferson might have
called 'cousin John,' could cast off all feeling for his 'country' (i.e.
Virginia) and go over to the 'enemy'
"As Marshall saw it, Jefferson was trying to turn the clock back to the
Articles of Confederation a regression that would totally paralyze the
federal government. 'The government of the whole will be prostrated at the
feet of the members [the states],' Marshall predicted, 'and the grand effort
of wisdom, virtue, and patriotism, which produced it, will be totally
defeated.'
"The question of slavery never bulked larger on Jefferson's horizon than
when John Marshall, from the eminence of the Supreme Court, struck down acts
of the state legislatures and aggrandized the powers of the federal
government. For slavery could not be divorced from the conflict between the
states and the general government: as the Supreme Court went, so might
slavery itself go.
"States' rights were the first line of defense of slavery against
antislavery sentiment in Congress, and Jefferson had no intention of
standing by idly while this vital perimeter was breached by a troop of
black-robed jurists."
Selling Out the Haitians
Jefferson also reversed the Federalists' support for the slave rebellion in
St. Domingue (now Haiti), which had overthrown a ruthlessly efficient French
plantation system that had literally worked the slaves to death. The
violence of that revolution on both sides shocked Jefferson and many of his
fellow slaveholders who feared that the rebellion might inspire American
blacks to rise up next.
Alexander Hamilton, who despised slavery from his experience growing up in
the West Indies, assisted the black slave leader, the self-taught and
relatively moderate Toussaint L'Ouverture, in drafting a constitution, and
the Adams administration sold weapons to the former slaves.
After taking over the White House, however, President Jefferson reversed
those Federalist policies. He conspired secretly with the new French
dictator Napoleon Bonaparte on a French plan to retake St. Domingue with an
expeditionary force that would re-enslave the blacks. Jefferson only learned
later that Napoleon had a second phase of the plan, to move to New Orleans
and build a new French colonial empire in the heart of North America.
Napoleon's army succeeded in capturing L'Ouverture, who was taken to France
and killed, but L'Ouverture's more radical followers annihilated the French
army and declared their independence as a new republic, Haiti.
The Haitians' bloody victory had important consequences for the United
States as well. Stopped from moving on to New Orleans, Napoleon decided to
sell the Louisiana Territories to Jefferson, who thus stood to benefit from
the Haitian freedom fighters whom Jefferson had sold out. Still fearing the
spread of black revolution, Jefferson also organized a blockade of Haiti,
which helped drive the war-torn country into a spiral of violence and
poverty that it has never escaped.
However, Jefferson also faced a constitutional quandary, since he had
espoused the ludicrous notion of "strict construction" and there was no
specific constitutional language authorizing the purchase of new lands. The
solution for Jefferson, the consummate hypocrite, was simply to violate his
own principle and proceed with the Louisiana Purchase.
This vast new territory also opened up huge opportunities for Southern
slaveholders, especially because the Constitution had called for the end of
slave importation in 1808, meaning that the value of the domestic slave
trade skyrocketed. That was especially important for established slave
states like Virginia where the soil for farming was depleted.
Breeding slaves became a big business for the Commonwealth and enhanced
Jefferson's personal net worth, underscoring his notations about valuing
female "breeder" slaves even above the strongest males.
Inviting the Civil War
But the danger to the nation was that spreading slavery to the Louisiana
Territories and admitting a large number of slave states would worsen
tensions between North and South.
As Miller wrote, "Jefferson might have averted the struggle between the
North and South, free and slave labor, for primacy in the national domain
the immediate, and probably the only truly irrepressible, cause of the Civil
War. Instead, Jefferson raised no objections to the continued existence of
slavery in the Louisiana Purchase.
"Had he the temerity to propose that Louisiana be excluded from the domestic
slave trade he would have encountered a solid bloc of hostile votes from
south of the Mason-Dixon line. Jefferson was fond of saying that he never
tilted against windmills, especially those that seemed certain to unhorse
him. Jefferson neither took nor advocated any action that would weaken
slavery among the tobacco and cotton producers in the United States."
Indeed, keeping the new territories and states open to slavery became a
major goal of Jefferson as President and after he left office.
Miller wrote, "In the case of the federal government, he could easily
imagine circumstances perhaps they had already been produced by John
Marshall which justified [the South's] secession: among them was the
emergence of a central government so powerful that it could trample
willfully upon the rights of the states and destroy any institution,
including slavery, which it judged to be immoral, improper, or inimical to
the national welfare as defined by Washington, D.C.
"Confronted by such a concentration of power, Jefferson believed that the
South would have no real option but to go its own way."
Miller continued, "As the spokesman of a section whose influence was
dwindling steadily in the national counsels and which was threatened with
the 'tyranny' of a consolidated government dominated by a section hostile to
the institutions and interests of the South, Jefferson not only took the
side of slavery, he demanded that the right of slavery to expand at will
everywhere in the national domain be acknowledged by the Northern majority."
In the last major political fight of his life, Jefferson battled Northern
efforts to block the spread of slavery into Missouri. "With the alarm bell
sounding in his ears, Jefferson buckled on the armor of Hector and took up
the shield of states' rights," wrote Miller. "Jefferson, in short, assumed
the accoutrements of an ardent and an uncompromising champion of Southern
rights. Possessed by this martial spirit, Jefferson now asserted that
Congress had no power over slavery in the territories.
"Now he was willing to accord Congress power only to protect slavery in the
territories and he converted the doctrine of states' rights into a
protective shield for slavery against interference by a hostile federal
government. He was no longer concerned primarily with civil liberties or
with the equalization of the ownership of property but in insuring that
slave-owners were protected in the full plentitude of their property rights.
"The Missouri dispute seemed to mark the strange death of Jeffersonian
liberalism."
Rationalizing Slavery
Jefferson's fight to extend slavery into Missouri also influenced his last
notable personal achievement, the founding of the University of Virginia. He
saw the establishment of a first-rate educational institution in
Charlottesville, Virginia, as an important antidote to elite Northern
schools influencing the Southern aristocracy with ideas that could undermine
what Jefferson dubbed "Missourism," or the right of all states carved from
the Louisiana Territories to practice slavery.
Jefferson complained that Southern men, who traveled North for their college
education, were infused with "opinions and principles in discord with those
of their own country," by which he meant the South, Miller wrote, adding:
"Particularly if they attended Harvard University, they returned home imbued
with 'anti-Missourism,' dazzled by the vision of 'a single and splendid
government of an aristocracy, founded on banking institutions and moneyed
corporations' and utterly indifferent to or even contemptuous of the
old-fashioned Southern patriots who still manned the defenses of freedom,
equality, and democracy", revealing again how words in Jefferson's twisted
world had lost all rational meaning. Slavery became "freedom, equality, and
democracy."
The Missouri Compromise of 1820 that barred slavery in new states north of
the 36-degree-30 parallel "made the creation of such a center of learning
imperative" to Jefferson, wrote Miller, thus driving his determination to
make the University of Virginia a Southern school that would rival the great
colleges of the North and would train young Southern minds to resist federal
"consolidationism."
Even the Jefferson-admiring Meacham noted the influence of the Missouri
dispute in Jefferson's zeal to launch his university in Charlottesville.
"The Missouri question made Jefferson even more eager to get on with the
building of the University of Virginia for he believed the rising generation
of leaders should be trained at home, in climes hospitable to his view of
the world, rather than sent north," Meacham wrote.
In short, Jefferson had melded the twin concepts of slavery and states'
rights into a seamless ideology. As Miller concluded, "Jefferson began his
career as a Virginian; he became an American; and in his old age he was in
the process of becoming a Southern nationalist."
When he died on July 4, 1826, a half century after the Declaration of
Independence was first read to the American people, Jefferson had set the
nation on course for the Civil War.
However, even to this day, Jefferson's vision of "victimhood" for white
Southerners seeing themselves as persecuted by Northern power - yet blinded
to the racist cruelty that they inflict on blacks - remains a powerful
motivation for white anger, now spreading beyond the South.
Today, we see Jefferson's racist legacy in the nearly deranged hatred
directed at the first African-American president and in the unbridled fury
unleashed against the federal government that Barack Obama heads.
As unpleasant as it may be for Americans who prefer especially on July
Fourth to ponder the pleasant image of Jefferson as the aristocratic
republican with a taste for fine art and a fondness for free-thinking, it is
well past time to look at the Declaration's author as the person he really
was, America's founding sociopath.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories
for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest
book, America's Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from
Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). You also can order Robert Parry's trilogy on
the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for
only $34. The trilogy includes America's Stolen Narrative. For details on
this offer, click here.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
