Jefferson Views

Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia show him to be a different person than what other sources have told me he is. In history classes (not just this year) and books about history, people have talked about how no one was really what they seemed. This year in history class we read about him and got a more realistic picture of him. However, apart from history class, everything and everyone seems to portray him as some great hero- writer of the Declaration of Independence and purchaser of Louisiana. I'd read that he might have supposedly fathered a child by a slave. Looking at his descendents and the general record of him, everyone or almost everyone seems to think of him as an almost perfect being who absolutely supported equality. That picture of his descendents shows white and black people, equal.

To me, that's a little silly. Most of the founding fathers and people of their generation and around it said that they were against slavery, yet did little about it. It wasn't just blacks they were prejudiced against. Indians, women, immigrants, foreigners, Northeners, Southeners, nobody liked each other. So what we read wasn't really surprising. Thomas Jefferson thought the same things, generally, as the rest of the people around him. So it is a little disturbing to see it written so clearly his thoughts on others, but it isn't unexpected.

For the Declaration of Independence, he (and the others who wrote it) weren't trying to cover every situation. They weren't trying to draft a carefully scripted record of who deserves what, for why, and the circumstances of being equal and who should be equal. They weren't trying to write the fine script. They needed a provoking, defiant speech against the British. That's all. They had to be as general as possible so that as many people as possible would help fight against the British. They couldn't outright condemn people who were different (except the British, obviously), for they needed all the fighters, black and white, they could get. They couldn't condemn racism, or slavery, or else the wealthy plantation owners would withold their aid. They couldn't do anything in fact, except state that everyone's equal and ignore the fact that no, they didn't really mean that. Jefferson wasn't racist. Even reading Notes I didn't feel that he was. He felt superior, certainly, but he reasoned through the fact. (Even if his reasoning was incredibly flawed. He based intelligence on musical ability? Well, then, I'm certainly not intelligent, then!) He didn't hate blacks.

My conclusions from all this are two: that people's real personality gets filtered out through the ages, and that Thomas Jefferson was more ordinary than anyone thinks. He was not the true advocate of absolute equality, but he wasn't a horrible person, either. You have to take him in context of his times. And whether he meant to or not, he did lead to a better America.