By Paul Bremmer
Thomas Jefferson is the latest American icon to come under attack from the left, with two CNN anchors suggesting this week that the country may someday want to “rethink” the third president’s legacy and possibly take down the Jefferson Memorial because Jefferson owned slaves.
But that would be foolish and shortsighted, says a rising new author who has studied the American Founding Fathers extensively.
“There is a cohort of individuals who are trying to co-opt the current controversy over the Confederate flag in order to pursue their own ends, namely the de-legitimization of Thomas Jefferson and other Founders,” said Joshua Charles, a scholar, columnist and public speaker.
“But nothing could be more absurd than this. The Confederate flag was propagated in order to assert and defend the racial subjugation of blacks. Thomas Jefferson was not a perfect man, and yes, in many ways he was a hypocrite because of the fact that he owned slaves. But there is a not a single sentence in his vast troves of writings written in defense of slavery.”
Charles spent five years combing through thousands of pages of obscure and long-forgotten writings by the Founding Fathers. The result is his new book “Liberty’s Secrets: The Lost Wisdom of America’s Founders,” set to be released June 30.
As evidence that Jefferson was no defender of slavery, Charles pointed specifically to the “Cornerstone” speech given by Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy.
“He not only disavowed America’s founders, but Thomas Jefferson specifically: he denied in unequivocal terms the ideas of the man who had written, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,’” Charles revealed.
Jefferson and Stephens were two very different men, according to Charles.
“Thomas Jefferson, while deeply flawed, nonetheless played a pivotal role in bringing about the greatest revolution in world history in defense of the dignity of every human being,” Charles noted. “Alexander Stephens, on the other hand, went to his grave believing blacks were not only inferior, but should be enslaved. He took up arms in defense of a form of government which he himself argued was based on this ‘great philosophical, moral truth’: that the black man was, and would always be, inferior to the white man.
“Which is why any attempts at moral equivocation between those who raised a flag in support of the Confederate system, and those who raised the flag of the United States which, while deeply flawed, was nonetheless based on entirely different ideals, is intellectually absurd and morally bankrupt. Only in a world where people think in 140 characters could such a notion be taken seriously,” he said.
All the brouhaha over Jefferson has come in response to the fatal shooting of nine black people at a Charleston, South Carolina, church by a white man who took a picture with a Confederate flag.
See the report:
Many people have subsequently argued the Confederate flag should be purged from the United States because it’s a symbol of the country’s racist past. But many have gone further, suggesting public statues of Southern or Confederate figures should be taken down as well.
Then, this week, CNN anchor Ashleigh Banfield implied the country should think about taking down the Jefferson Memorial as well because Jefferson owned slaves. Her fellow anchor Don Lemon wasn’t so sure, saying Jefferson represented “the entire United States, not just the South.”
But he conceded, “There may come a day when we want to rethink Jefferson.”
But far from being a defender of slavery, Jefferson actually wanted to abolish it, Charles revealed.
“Jefferson frequently expressed hopes for total emancipation of the slaves, and on a number of occasions worked legislatively to accomplish this goal, to no avail,” Charles writes in “Liberty’s Secrets.”
In the book, Charles excerpts a letter Jefferson wrote to Edward Coles, a young slave owner who was considering selling his slaves because he was disgusted with the practice. Jefferson wrote, “The love of justice and the love of country plead equally the cause of these people, and it is a moral reproach to us that they should have pleaded it so long in vain.”
However, Jefferson urged Coles to keep his slaves. The wise old founder knew outright emancipation was difficult to do legally at the time, so the only way Coles could get rid of his slaves would be to sell them to another master. But another master might not treat the slaves as well as did Coles, who was benevolent. Therefore, Jefferson thought it best that Coles hold onto his slaves until the practice could be abolished completely. And he believed it would be the next generation that finished the job.
According to Charles, this was emblematic of the moral complexities involving slavery in the founding period. He implores Americans to understand the context surrounding Jefferson and other founders who owned slaves but wished to eventually abolish slavery. Charles breaks it down like this:
“The choice with which many of the Founders felt they were faced was either (1) the existence of the United States with slavery, but with an eventual opportunity to totally abolish it; or (2) the existence of numerous tightly packed “countries” on the same continent, with no chance for abolishing slavery, and the likelihood of perpetual war between them, as had happened in Europe. As with all human attempts to see into the future, they were able to do so only imperfectly. But given their apparent choices, the decisions they made become not justifiable so much as understandable. Among a series of very bad options, they chose what they felt was the lesser evil.”
Charles claimed the founders never sought to fix all of the world’s problems in 1776.
“The Founders knew that their own time was deeply flawed, and that to a certain extent some of them were wrapped up in those flaws,” he said. “Whatever form of government they bequeathed to the next generation would not fix all problems, but allow the society over which it governed to progressively improve the human condition.
“Few human beings have ever attained such accomplishments. Few have ever advanced the condition of the broken world into which they were born so much as the Founders of the United States of America (despite their flaws), Thomas Jefferson included.”
See also “The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed about Thomas Jefferson.”
from PropagandaGuard https://propagandaguard.wordpress.com/2015/06/28/blasting-jefferson-destroying-memorial-called-absurd/
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