Jefferson's personal failings do not diminish at all the great ideas, work and actions he did. Americans have benefited enormously from them.
Similarly, Einstein's contributions to physics are not diminished by his bad treatment of his wife.
http://www.openculture.com/2013/12/albert-einstein-imposes-o...
(I'm ignoring the moral difference here between being a jerk and literally owning slaves, which is also huge.)
It's much easier to argue that Jefferson held himself as, and is seen today as a moral leader; to the extent that you see Jefferson as a moral leader, owning slaves really does diminish his authority in that area, in ways that having moral failings of the same magnitude would not diminish a person's contributions, say, to science. (Jefferson did make some contributions in that area, too, but compared to Einstein, or to Jefferson's contributions elsewhere, they were minor.)
I personally think one can be a terrible person and a great scientist; Can one be a horrible person and a great moral leader? My gut says that you can't, that your own moral failings compromise your greatness as a moral leader in ways that your own moral failings can not compromise your greatness as a scientist. though I can see valid counter-arguments in both cases.
For that matter, I'm not sure that scientific failings can compromise your greatness as a scientist. I think scientific contributions are interesting and important in part because we have this framework for dealing with scientific ideas that can take good and provable ideas from a source that spews a lot of (probably) false and unscientific ideas. I'm thinking here of Tesla, who unquestionably was a great scientist and who's work we use every day, but who also had a lot of ideas that didn't pan out, and many that one could argue were... crazy.
I think our framework for dealing with moral and ethical contributions is dramatically weaker. We do have such a framework for legal contributions, but even that is a lot weaker than what we have for scientific contributions.
Do you think the Lewis & Clark expedition was valueless because Jefferson owned slaves?
Do you think the Louisiana Purchase is of no consequence because Jefferson owned slaves?
Given his accomplishments and contributions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson
Don't conflate the man with the idea. The idea has changed world history for the better, a LOT better.
For example, I believe that a healthy diet is desirable. But I often fail at eating a healthy diet. In no way does that invalidate the idea or my belief in it.
"So that Americans come to believe in racism by reading Jefferson. And in the 1840's and 50's, these Southern racists who are defending slavery are reading Jefferson and quoting him on these issues.
...
This is very damaging, horrible ideas and they are used over and over again in the 1840's and 50's by the defenders of slavery to argue in favor of continuing slavery. Jefferson justifies slavery, in fact, by arguing that blacks are inferior to whites on almost all levels."
[0] https://www.pbs.org/jefferson/archives/interviews/Finkelman....
I mean, this is just snark, but it's certainly an example of the words of Thomas Jefferson being used to defend slavery.
This is the biggest problem with an originalist interpretation of the Constitution, and one could argue that the fact that the constitution was so vague as to what, exactly, constitutes a man or a citizen was actually a progressive thing, because if we had frozen what a voting citizen was in 1787, we'd explicitly only have given the right to vote to property owning white males, something that (I hope) almost all of us would disagree with. Because so many important things were not strictly defined, we sort of have a built in bias towards loose constructionism.
[1]http://www.libs.uga.edu/hargrett/selections/confed/trans.htm...
Oops.
It wasn't like everyone wanted to get rid of slavery, and ornery Jefferson blocked it. The fact that a terrible war had to be fought over it should be good evidence for that.
Some progress is better than no progress. It was called a "compromise", after all. The Constitution contained both the justification for emancipation, and the legal framework to enact it. The seeds were there, it was only a matter of time. The South saw that inevitability and seceded to try and avoid it.
If you have a theory about how it could have happened otherwise, I'd be interested to hear it.
Seriously. Jefferson wasn't a delegate at the constitutional convention. He was in France.
There is experimental data here; France, from 1315 has prohibited slavery in mainland France, and moreover any slave setting foot on the soil of mainland France would be instantly freed, at least in the eyes of French law, from then on, and at the time, France was an absolute monarchy. The UK eliminated slavery in 1833, long before the US did, and they don't have a proper constitution to this day.
The fact that we were one of the last developed countries to eliminate slavery shows that our constitution did not hurry the day that slavery would be eliminated.
I personally wonder how necessary a constitution is for a functional republic; it is supposed to protect the rights of the minority, but I'm not sure the historical evidence comes out in that direction.
To more directly address the question, I honestly don't know. My first instinct is to exclude the south. Of course, that excludes most of the founders. But think of what an industrial powerhouse we would have had to become to survive, without the agricultural money. Would we have made it without them and the agricultural money, which mattered a lot more back then? would they have joined us in a more peaceful sort of way? Would we have ended up conquering them anyhow, and perhaps subjugating them in a way that ended up being better than what happened during our timeline, the appeasement in the name of unification? I don't know.
So yes, the fact that he owned slaves diminishes the admiration he might deserve for coming up with that line. It does not eliminate it
If we find that a piece of writing that means one thing to us meant a different thing at the time, does that change our understanding of that writing?
Truth is independent of belief.
> If we find that ...
Many ideas transcend their times. It's what makes them great ideas.
An idea like "all men are created equal" occurred in a time when there were deeply embedded notions of class, nobility, slavery, etc. That it failed to instantly transform the world is not a flaw in the idea. It takes some time.
I often fail to live up to my own ideals. It's a failing of me, not a failing of the ideals.
Men can come up with ideas that are better than themselves. It seems you believe that this is not possible.
You seem very certain of my beliefs, especially considering that you are responding to a post wherein I asked two questions and made no statements.
Sure, questions have implications, and imply something as to the worldview of the person asking, but you seem to have a very certain, very black and white view of the world, which I think can only be described as incorrect because of it's very black-and-whiteness. Perhaps incorrect is the wrong term. I believe that human behavior can not be understood in black and white terms just because nothing any of us does is entirely good or bad, entirely self-consistent or hypocritical. You cannot understand ethics, history, or human behavior with an approach that can not see and deal with these subtle shades of gray.
>An idea like "all men are created equal" occurred in a time when there were deeply embedded notions of class, nobility, slavery, etc. That it failed to instantly transform the world is not a flaw in the idea. It takes some time.
That idea did transform the world in pretty short order; Locke, the man who is most commonly credited with laying out that idea for the founders, (though he certainly wasn't the first to express the idea) was a 17th century man who fought in the English civil war. Considering how quickly after the American revolutionary war that other popular wars started popping off, you could say that the American revolution was one of the causes of those other revolutions, and in a real way, it could have been said to have been the decisive blow against the idea that men with titles are superior to men with money. This idea that maybe we should have less respect for inherited privilege swept the western world in just a few hundred years, with the definition of 'man' in Jefferson's writing about the idea being slowly expanded. The early 19th century was characterized by the aftermath of the french revolution, which I argue includes the wars of German nationalism and expansion during the late 19th and early 20th centuries[1]. I make a distinction between the revolutions before and after the English civil war; the revolutions before that were largely struggles between the king and other men with titles, while after that, the war was about men with titles against men with money. (There's a third phase hinging on the French revolution where it's between those with money and those without[2].)
Now, in favor of the "all of this is just expanding the definition of "man" narrative, while I feel that the view that people with titles should have more rights as very similar to the view that people of a certain race should have more rights, generally speaking those fights, from a historical perspective, have been fought at very different times. Yes, yes, the ACW was fought at a time where the average northerner feared the growing power of the southern planter, and the southern planters are seen by northerners both at the time and now as respecting titles or birth more than money, the south did have official, legal distinctions between the rights of people of different races, while as far as I know, the distinctions between people of title and people without were unofficial and not codified into law, so I would argue that the war was more about race than about the fight between inherited titles and money, though you could make a lot about the white northerner's motivations and their fear of men of title if you wanted to make the counter argument.
[1]One could argue that the Levée en mass was enabled by the ideas of the french revolution; that arming a wide swath of your citizens is only possible if you also give them some political rights; some argue that before this time, armies were made up of smaller portions of the population (and promotion was tightly confined to the noble classes) because otherwise the men with the guns would demand better treatment in general for the lower classes. Of course not everyone agrees with that, and even I see some problems with that worldview. My assertion that the wars of unification and then world wars 1 and 2 were related to the napoleonic wars is... far more controversial. There is a lot of support for my assertion that the wars of German unification were part of the aftermath of the napoleonic wars; All the countries in question had been involved, and most of them conquered by Napoleon; seems like that would be a big incentive to unite. They even signed the treaty ending the war in France, as a sort of middle-finger, I think, to their previous overlord. My assertion that this is related to world war one is way weaker, except perhaps in the sense that Germany expected France to invade if given half a chance
[2]Many people would argue that the three are different stages of the same issue, bringing basic human rights and political agency to an ever broader swath of humanity, and that is certainly a valid way to view it. Personally, though, I think there's a fundamental difference between the war between the king and the barons, then the war between the people with titles and those with money, and finally, the war between people with money and people without. I think that the American revolutionary war, at least on the radical edges where it wasn't just a tax protest (and it was just a tax protest for the majority, I think) was largely the middle one, while the balance between the king and the nobles quickly became a dead issue (sorry) during the French revolution, and it quickly became a fight between monied interests and the non-monied. The 20th century Russian revolution went similarly, and ended with the balance favoring money rather less than the French. I understand and sympathize with but mostly disagree with the idea that money and titles are the same thing because both are inherited. I think that "people with money should have more rights" is a very different sort of worldview from "people with titles or with a skin color should have more rights"
If he breathed life into new ideas, it is hardly surprising his own life did not 100% align with his ideals. That does not change the fact that it elevated other people who would not have been elevated had he not set pen to paper.
Progress is hard.
Hm. I always saw things the other way around; Almost none of my ideas are new or original; that's the fun thing about reading philosophy; It seems that every weird idea I've had about how the world might work has been thoroughly labeled and explored by some philosopher. Now, I get to decide which ideas I reject and accept, but I think it's pretty hard to come up with a new idea that hasn't been beaten to death, dissected, masticated, digested and regurgitated by some greek; whenever I think I have accomplished the task, I find there are Greeks that I haven't read.
>If he breathed life into new ideas, it is hardly surprising his own life did not 100% align with his ideals. That does not change the fact that it elevated other people who would not have been elevated had he not set pen to paper.
Of course, and I agree with all that, but arguing that "all men are created equal" if you use the modern sense of 'man' at least, while owning slaves borders on the ridiculous. A far cry from merely living your own life in a way that does not 100% align with your own ideas.
Most likely, Jefferson's idea of "men" would be rather more narrow than how we conceive the idea today, and that changes the meaning of "all men are created equal" to "some men are created equal, others are not really human at all" which, I'm sure you'll agree, is not nearly as admirable a thing to say.
And certainly, I'm not arguing that Jefferson didn't fight for progress; I think it's almost unquestionably clear that Jefferson did help move the world from where it was in a direction we would call progress today. And yes, progress is hard, and certainly, "A man with a title of nobility is no better than a man who is otherwise similar but who lacks a title of nobility" - which almost certainly Jefferson would have agreed with, really was progress in those days; So yes, even if our full understanding of what Jefferson was likely saying diminishes our initial admiration quite a lot from what it would be if he meant "all men are created equal" in the modern sense, he's still an admirable historical figure.
Thanks for this. This is the best thing I've picked up here in a very long time.
The idea that the Louisiana Purchase is inconsequential because of Jefferson's personal history is nowhere to be found on this thread.
"Yes, it does weaken their message and other supposed great work and actions"
"Other" would include the Louisiana Purchase.
Nobody had done that before.
With the lives and stories of the folks in the Native communities fresh in my mind, it's tough for me to view stuff like the Lewis & Clark expedition, or the Louisiana Purchase, in as positive a light. For me, yeah, America's been a nice thing. For the people who were displaced, shuttled onto the res, etc., these things all had more of a sinister consequence. And they're still living out the consequences of all those big points in American history, just on the negative side where I get the pluses.