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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

Whether he had slaves or not made no difference to American history. I've never read about anyone justifying holding slaves because Jefferson did.

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.

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The fact that Jefferson owned slaves made an enormous difference to American history. Slavery is the original sin of our republic, and Jefferson was --- though not the worst of them --- among the cohort who helped ensure that sin was baked into our first Constitution.

There wouldn't have been a Constitution without that compromise. The Constitution did, however, lay the groundwork for the eventual elimination of slavery (which is why the South seceded). With no Constitution, slavery might have persisted for much longer.

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.

No, Jefferson was just one of the ornery people who blocked it. It's odd to try to rationalize support for the institution of slavery as striking a blow for emancipation.

> It's odd to try to rationalize

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.

Going from no Constitution to a Constitution that enshrined the institution of slavery simply isn't progress.

I understand your sentiment. It certainly would have been better to go all the way at the time.

How did Jefferson do that while not actually being there?

Seriously. Jefferson wasn't a delegate at the constitutional convention. He was in France.

Jefferson was a key influencer on the Constitution and one of the reasons (though not the most important) that it didn't included graduated emancipation --- an idea Jefferson supported in theory but believed in practice would, without a program to immediately deport all the slaves back to Africa, lead to a race war in which whites would exterminate blacks.

>With no Constitution, slavery might have persisted for much longer.

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.

You mean empirical data right ?

Empirical is more correct, though I was trying to make an allusion to "The great republic experiment."

If you were a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, what would you have done?

I still think you are responding to a comment two levels up from mine. I entered the thread saying that as a "moral leader" owning slaves reflected badly on Jefferson[1] - Certainly, the fact that slavery was allowed by the constitution made it less of a good document, but if you note, I didn't say that owning slaves diminished his role as an author of the constitution; I only said that owning slaves diminished his standing as a moral leader. Of course, writing a constitution that accepted and protected slavery diminishes his standing as someone who wrote an important document on the road towards progress, because even by the standards of the time, that was not particularly progressive.

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.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14698270

What? The Articles of Confederation didn't mention slavery, and Jefferson was in France for the second round.

I'd be very surprised if defenders of slavery didn't routinely use Jefferson, Washington, and company to justify slavery. I don't know offhand how to find primary sources, but a quick web search turns up an interview[0] with a slavery and Jefferson scholar who says:

"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....

The constitution of the CSA[1] would look pretty familiar to anyone who has read Jefferson's work; I suspect that if both were written by private entities under current copyright laws, the CSA would be found to have infringed on the document it was abridging.

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...

Quite some time after edits have closed, I noticed a rather glaring factual error. Jefferson didn't author the constitution. I mean, he was inarguably a big influence, but my snark above is about how similar the constitution of the CSA was to the constitution of the USA, and that Jefferson was one of the primary authors of the constitution of the USA, therefore his words were used to justify slavery. But I made a factual error, swapping Jefferson and Madison.

Oops.

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