Two interesting and diverse biographies on Thomas Jefferson came out this year. They show him to be a man of many passions, some noble and others quite evil.
"Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power" by Jon Meacham explores the Founding Father's contribution to forming popular government in America. It discusses his wheeling and dealing and powers of statesmanship in his fight to keep control in the hands of we the people. His philosophy of governing endures and continues to shape our country.
Jefferson, after all, famously penned some of the most beautiful words ever written in the Declaration of Independence. He definitively stated, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
And then there's that other side of Jefferson we occasionally hear about, but we like to ignore. Henry Wiencek addresses this in "Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves." He explores the depths to which Jefferson sank to keep his beloved Monticello afloat.
I recently read an article based on the book in the October issue of Smithsonian Magazine. It can be summed up in one sentence, "Show me the money."
In one passage, the author quotes a note in which Jefferson authorized whippings to force young boys to work in the nail factory. According to Wiencek, this document was deliberately deleted from the 1953 "Farm Book," which contains documents often used as a reference to how Monticello was operated. The legacy must be protected, I suppose.
It's horrifying when you realize this man made the decisions that separated parents from children for profit and kept his own relatives, some of whom were his children, in slavery.
Yes, one could argue that Jefferson was simply a product of his time, and there is some merit to that. However, many people of that time abhorred slavery and fought against it.
George Washington at least freed his slaves in his will. According to Wiencek, Washington worked hard to gather enough money to finance their emancipation.
However, Jefferson wouldn't take that step even when the money was handed to him. A friend from the Revolutionary War left him a fortune specifically so that Jefferson could afford to release his slaves and equip them to start a life on their own, but Jefferson refused the money.
There was a time when he talked about the end of slavery. In the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, he even denounced it as "execrable commerce," but he ultimately surrendered to the god of greed. Wiencek wrote that one Virginia abolitionist said of Jefferson, "Never did a man achieve more fame for what he did not do."
Of course, neither of these two books can possibly tell us all there is to know about Jefferson. Statesman, ambassador, farmer, plantation owner, experimenter, slave owner. Which was the real Jefferson? He was all of them, and he was flesh and blood and, like all of us, capable of good and evil, occasionally both at the same time. How do we reconcile these two sides of him? We can't and are left to ponder the mystery of humanity.
William Shakespeare wrote, "The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred in their bones."
Let this not be the case with Jefferson.
The man who wrote "all men are created equal" apparently abandoned that belief, but thankfully others did not. It took many painful decades and generations later for civil rights to be won in the United States. I don't think anybody from the 1700s would ever have dreamed that a black man would one day be president, and yet here we are.
I am not so naive as to think that racism has disappears from our national conscience, but we've come a long way.
Let us continue to move past the shadow that slavery left on this country.