You have to consider the mental state of people at that time and compare Jefferson to all the people on earth at that time. We humans were not big thinkers at that time. In fact illiteracy was pervasive.
Comprehensive Democracy/Republics was a radical idea. There were other types of Republics before us, but not as comprehensive as ours. And racism, sexism and elitism and caste systems were the norm.
Jefferson saw much more than almost anyone else at the time. Great minds are all trapped in their period. Plato defended slavery. Nietzsche as many in the 1800's was a terrible sexist, yet there was not one smarter.
People do not consider the mental states of people in their time periods very well. Imagine women did not get the vote until 1919 and we did not end segregation until 1964.
How nuts is that by todays standards?
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| >>Yet who would dispute that Jefferson was a liberal in his age?<<
Jefferson was really a horrible racist:
smithsonianmag.com
Excerpt:
..What Jefferson set out clearly for the first time was that he was making a 4 percent profit every year on the birth of black children. The enslaved 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.
In another communication from the early 1790s, Jefferson takes the 4 percent formula further and quite bluntly advances the notion that slavery presented an investment strategy for the future. He writes that an acquaintance who had suffered financial reverses “should have been invested in negroes.” He advises that if the friend’s family had any cash left, “every farthing of it [should be] laid out in land and negroes, which besides a present support bring a silent profit of from 5. to 10. per cent in this country by the increase in their value.”
The irony is that Jefferson sent his 4 percent formula to George Washington, who freed his slaves, precisely because slavery had made human beings into money, like “Cattle in the market,” and this disgusted him. Yet Jefferson was right, prescient, about the investment value of slaves. A startling statistic emerged in the 1970s, when economists taking a hardheaded look at slavery found that on the eve of the Civil War, enslaved black people, in the aggregate, formed the second most valuable capital asset in the United States. David Brion Davis sums up their findings: “In 1860, the value of Southern slaves was about three times the amount invested in manufacturing or railroads nationwide.” The only asset more valuable than the black people was the land itself. The formula Jefferson had stumbled upon became the engine not only of Monticello but of the entire slaveholding South and the Northern industries, shippers, banks, insurers and investors who weighed risk against returns and bet on slavery. The words Jefferson used—“their increase”—became magic words...
Sorry to ruin your fairy tale.. |
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