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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MulhollandDrive who wrote (12841)	11/4/1998 5:27:00 PM
From: dougjn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 67261

No, BP, I'm not trashing Jefferson for playing around with Sally Hemmings. I'm confronting the RR with the discomfort of seeing another of their icons, this time a founding father and a southern gentleman if ever there was one, fail to live up to the RR's exacting moral standards. Much as it may shock you, I'm not especially bothered by Jefferson's liason with Sally Hemmings. She WAS very young, but standards about age were different in those days. Sally did after all boast about her relationship with Jefferson to her children and friends later in her life. Given her other life choices, being taken to the bed of the famous and revered Thomas Jefferson probably wasn't such a bad lot for her. He did at least free her (and his) children, at his death. A might late, I'd say. I am much more troubled by Jefferson's being simultaneously a slaveholder and the author of the Declaration, founded as it was on the enlightenment rights of man, than I am by his liason, apparently loving, with a young black slave. It was owning her and continuing to own her that was so wrong; much more so than bedding her. (Of course forceable (as opposed to notional, statutory) rape would have been something else entirely. Jefferson's basic sin was one which the entire South, and especially its plantation owning aristocracy, was guilty of for some 75 years after the Revolution was completed. At the conclusion of the Revolution the North began to quickly undo the continued hypocracy of legal slavery in a nation founded on the inalienable rights of man. The enormous wealth which slavery conferred upon the plantation owning elite of the South (first through tobacco, rice and sugar plantations, and then through king cotton) made it enormously difficult for the South to come to terms with the moral bankruptcy of its continued peculiar institution. It was, however, as you in another context praise, a society that had its eyes firmly on its pocketbook. Doug