"Washington stipulated in his will that his slaves should be freed after Martha's death, and it was done. Manumission was legal in the South. Jefferson never did anything comparable......."
You are showing an abysmal ignorance of Thomas Jefferson.
"He has waged cruel war upon human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his [veto] for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce."
reformed-theology.org
"Given the prevalence of slavery and its widespread acceptance throughout history, the fact that our American ancestors are singled out for condemnation is disturbing, but, unfortunately, not surprising. And this troublesome trend becomes more irksome when one considers that the general acceptance of an institution with roots thousands of years in the past, practiced by nearly every race of man, was torn asunder in the historical blink of an eye by the ancestors of those who are now asked by the ruling elite to "apologize" for slavery. As Fogel and Engerman write, "It is amazing how rapidly, by historical standards, the institution of slavery gave way before the abolitionist onslaught, once the ideological campaign gained momentum...." In fact, the debate was raging among many of America's Founding Fathers before public opinion was sufficiently mobilized to produce the first official act banishing slavery in the New World — the 1777 prohibition contained in the Vermont Constitution.
Thomas Jefferson is often singled out for scorn by the politically correct historical revisionist crowd because of the apparent dichotomy between his public rhetoric and his personal actions. Jefferson was a slaveholder by inheritance, and he was prohibited by Virginia law from freeing them, a law he sought to overturn with his first act in the Virginia legislature. Though Monticello was deeply in debt at the time of Jefferson's death, in his will he arranged for the freedom of a number of his slaves, and as Captain Edmund Bacon, overseer at Monticello from 1806-22, noted after Jefferson's death, "I think he would have freed all of them if his affairs had not been so much involved that he could not do it."
Jefferson's actions throughout his life demonstrated an abhorrence of slavery, an institution which, he wrote, "is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other." When Jefferson was asked to pen Virginia's constitution, his first proposals included a clause stipulating that all people born on Virginia soil would be born free.
Jefferson also wrote the Ordinance of 1784, a preliminary draft of the Northwest Ordinance, which would govern the land between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River. Jefferson included in his bill a clause that would have prohibited slavery in these new territories after 1800. When this measure was blocked in Congress by just one vote, Jefferson lamented, "The voice of a single individual ... would have prevented this abominable crime from spreading itself over the new country. Thus we see the fate of millions unborn hanging on the tongue of one man, and Heaven was silent in that awful moment!" Jefferson, certain that God's wrath would not be forever stilled, said: "We must await with patience the workings of an overruling Providence, and hope that He is preparing the deliverance of these, our suffering brethren. When the measure of their tears shall be full, when their groans shall have involved heaven itself in darkness, doubtless a God of justice will awaken to their distress, and by diffusing light and liberality among their oppressors, or, at length, by His exterminating thunder, manifest His attention to the things of this world....
"Jefferson's magnum opus, the Declaration of Independence, was amended to strike a ringing condemnation of King George's promotion of the slave trade: "He has waged cruel war upon human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his [veto] for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce."
At a time when history was firmly on the side of the slave trade, Jefferson was not alone in his beliefs. Many of America's most renowned statesmen were vocal in their opposition to slavery. While Britain did not prohibit its commerce in slaves until 1807, the United States laid the groundwork for such a prohibition nearly 20 years earlier at its Constitutional Convention, by including a clause that would allow Congress to prohibit the importation of slaves beginning in 1808. In that year, Congress so acted, and the importation of slaves into the United States was banned." |
