legacy of thomas jefferson

Forum: Thomas Jefferson

TIME contacted a number of scholars about Thomas Jefferson and his legacy. A sampling of their views





Posted Sunday, June 27, 2004
Jan Lewis, Professor of History, Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey
His complete, uncompromising, and abiding commitment to the principle of human equality [is what I admire most about Jefferson]. This idea remains as radical today as it was when Jefferson first gave expression to it over two centuries ago. The idea of equality was in the air at the time, but Jefferson, a magnificent stylist, was able to bring it to life by expressing it clearly, simply, eloquently. And he connected equality to other ideas that remain equally compelling: liberty, self-government, freedom of religion.

[The most problematic thing about him was] his lifelong ownership of slaves and his inability to extricate either himself or his nation from the institution of slavery. Early in his life, Jefferson opposed slavery, writing, famously, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just." But as he aged, his optimism waned, and he came to fear emancipation even more than God's wrath. Committed to equality in principle, Jefferson's practice was compromised by his racism, which is so distasteful, so repugnant to us today, that I cannot read out loud to my students the passages in the Notes on the State of Virginia in which he described what he perceived as the physical badges of black inferiority. This is the contrast in Jefferson, and his legacy: Words about human equality and freedom that are as fresh today as the day he wrote them, and words about racial inferiority that are so jarring that we can't read them today without feeling a profound sense of shame.

The ideals of equality, freedom, and freedom of religion are indispensible, now more than ever. It would be instructive, for example, for both those who authorized the torture at Abu Ghraib and those who fight crusades and jihads and do unspeakable things in the name of God to read Jefferson's observations about the futility of torture, the utter ineffectiveness of coercion. "What has been the effect of coercion?" he asked. "To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth."

The standards by which we judge Jefferson are the ones he bequeathed us. We judge him harshly because he kept men and women in slavery, knowing that it was wrong — but it was Jefferson who told us that all people are equal, and that everyone is entitled to liberty and to human happiness. Don't expect history to offer us simple lessons or perfect heroes.

To his white family, Jefferson was both loving and manipulative. He gave them love to last a lifetime, and he left them impoverished. To his black family, he was remote but not unkind. He never acknowledged his black children, but he gave them their freedom, which is the greatest legacy that anyone born a slave ever wished for.

Clarence E. Walker, Professor of History and Cultural Studies, University of Calif., Davis
The most impressive thing about Jefferson was the Declaration of Independence, that is, its language. The language of the Declaration and the Constitution provided the intellectual framework for black people to stake a claim on American citizenship.

I do not see anything contradictory in his belief in freedom and being a slave holder. Blacks for Jefferson and others of his class were not civilized. Jefferson thought that black people were physically unattractive and mentally inferior to whites, as he makes clear in his Notes on the State of Virginia. This belief did not prevent Jefferson from having an affair with a women designated black by the American law of hypodescent. Sally Hemings passed the somatic test for Jefferson because she was a quadroon who looked like an octoroon. Jefferson perceived her as white and the children she bore him passed as white. Jefferson was a classic phenotypical American racist. He liked black people who did not look black. Like many white men he was attracted to a black woman whose phenotype was indeterminate. How else can we explain the popularity among young white men of the actress Halle Berry today? Berry satisfies for contemporary white men the same attraction repulsion sexual calculus that Hemings provided for Jefferson and his peers. Jefferson's racial hang ups tell us a great deal about race and sex in America today.

Roger Wilkins, professor of history at George Mason University and author of Jefferson's Pillow: The Founding Fathers and the Dilemma of Black Patriotism
Jefferson had an extraordinary capacity to seize the zeitgeist of the Revolution and to turn it into political poetry. In coupling that luminous talent to his profound belief in American freedom, Jefferson made an enormous contribution to our commitment to freedom and to our determination to retain it and to expand it (far beyond anything Jefferson ever dreamed of or would have deemed appropriate) in ways that have made us a more decent and more generous nation. This struggle continues as does Jefferson's contribution to it.

Jefferson's second great achievement was to understand that public education was essential if our republic was to thrive and then to labor to give us an excellent example of what he had in mind by founding the University of Virginia.

This man is problematic because his profound racism extinguished any impulse to act forcefully against slavery that his sure knowledge that it was a great evil (which he understood to hurt whites as well as blacks) might have generated in him. His life provides a powerful reminder to avoid absolutes whether in judging human beings (alive or dead), the origins of our nation or issues and people in our contemporary politics.

Peter Onuf, a professor of history at the University of Virginia, has written and edited numerous books on Jefferson and the early republic
Jefferson was the leading inventor of what it means to be an American. It was a leap of faith. He imagined a past for America and simultaneously projected an American future. He was constantly looking backward and forward and connecting generations — more so than any other Founder.

Why does Jefferson continue to hold sway in the public imagination? For one, he is an eloquent wordsmith. He says things that inspire us. In his first Inaugural Address, he projects a brilliant future that's very flattering: a series of generations fulfilling their destiny. In the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, he lays out the ideals that constitute our ideals, the ideals of the American people. It is also a charter for national independence — the legacy of a band of brothers who united to fight for a common cause.

The conventional way to look at Jefferson is to look at individual rights and his classical literal legacy. The Declaration of Independence was clearly concerned with rights and liberties. But it is also concerned with geopolitics, national self-determination, an emphasis on the community. It tracks directly to modern conceptions of America.

The latter is of contemporary interest because of the extension of American power overseas. Self government of the people was absolutely central to Jefferson's thinking. However, the imperial imposition of self-government, as is happening in Iraq, is an absolute oxymoron. Jefferson was an expansionist, but he wouldn't see [expansion] as a projection of imposing rule. It would be a natural progression — the result of the tremendous power that is potentially mobilized by overthrowing the old regime.

Today we take the United States for granted. But Jefferson believed the republican experiment was very fragile. That's why he believed that the only just war is a war to defend your own principles of self-government. When you mobilize the kind of forces you need to launch an offensive war, you encroach on civil liberties. That's true of every major war America has been involved in. Jefferson's first Inaugural Address refers to the U.S. as the strongest nation on earth. He had faith that if there were another great war, Americans would rise up as one in defense of the nation, as they had done during the revolution. He couldn't possibly comprehend the idea of a large army like we have today.

Susan Dunn is a professor of humanities at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass. Her new book, Jefferson's Second Revolution: The Election Crisis of 1800 and the Triumph of Republicanism, will be published by Houghton Mifflin in September.
What captivates me about Jefferson and his great contributions to American democracy is his belief in ideas. He believed in the free circulation of ideas and was against people having ownership of ideas. Even when he goes off the deep end with his ideas, he's willing to discuss them. For example, he believed the Constitution should be reworked every 19 years — once a generation — so that the ideas in it stayed fresh. That freaked Madison out, but it showed his openness to change, whereas today we are loath to change the Constitution.

Jefferson believed in the transparency of government. He was the only one of the Founding Fathers who thought that the Constitutional Convention of 1787 should have been open to the public. He believed that ideas should circulate, not be discussed in secrecy.

Some of Jefferson's ideas should resonate today more than they do — for example, the separation of church and state, which is constantly being chipped away at. Jefferson would say he was a deist or a rationalist. He had contempt for supernatural beliefs. He definitely didn't believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ. He thought that was an elaboration of ancient Greek myths. In fact, I think people would be surprised at how anti-religion all of the Founding Fathers except Adams were.

Jefferson believed in the Bill of Rights much more so than the Constitution. The Constitution was only an organization of institutions. The Bill of Rights gave citizens protections against intrusive government power, and he saw them as sacred. That was stated very clearly: "Government shall not…." Jefferson would have been appalled at the ways in which those individual rights are being infringed upon today.

Jefferson would [also] be very upset about the gigantically high tuitions, and surely would be against charter schools and voucher systems, which drain money from public schools. He believed the purpose of a good education was to teach good citizenship, which in turn would lead to good self-government.

Jefferson was the first to say that a president could be both a party leader and a national leader. The election of 1800 was the first with a party system. And it was the first time that power was transferred to the opposite party. [But it was also] a crisis election because Jefferson and Burr tied. It was settled as the Constitution stipulates, by the House of Representatives. And they had to wait until February 1801, when the new Congress met. Bush vs. Gore, on the other hand, was decided by the Supreme Court. Since Jefferson was opposed to the Supreme Court taking on more power than was outlined in the Constitution, I think he would have said the Bush election was a coup d'état by the Court.

Dr. Judith Jackson Fossett, Associate Professor, Department of English Program in American Studies & Ethnicity and Director, African-American Studies, University of Southern California
Thomas Jefferson as private citizen and public intellectual embodied a wide spectrum of contradictions in his opinions and behavior. He drafted the Declaration of Independence, served as an foreign Ambassador, was elected President of the United States, founded a major university among many other luminous achievements even as he inherited, owned, bought and sold slaves, wrote and spoke in contradictory ways about the "problem" of slavery, solutions to it, and the irrefutable inferiority of blacks, was constantly in debt, likely maintained a decades-long concubinage with his slave Sally Hemings, fathered several illegitimate children with her who consequently became his property, and ultimately failed in his promise to free the vast majority of his slaves.

What may now seem problematic about Jefferson's views — say, on the one hand, drafting the Declaration and, on the other, failing to free his slaves either before or at his death — should not be misinterpreted as simply anomalous to him. His legacy cannot be merely credited to his own brand of eccentricity. As a personal exemplar of his generation, he comes into sharpest relief against the political, ideological and cultural background of chattel slavery. It is only within the broadest context of the society which evolves out of this system of servitude that the full measure of him — man of letters, prominent member of Virginia elite and builder of enduring state institutions, son of the Enlightenment, at times prosperous master of Monticello, at other times desperate spendthrift on the verge of bankruptcy, reckless slaveowner — can be taken. As a true son of the Enlightenment, he used his enormous and dazzling rhetoric abilities to craft the emblematic statement that characterizes the human spirit of the modern world: "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Not even a decade later, he would also pen his ideas on race, the reigning views on those of African descent throughout the Americas: "Whether the black of the negro resides in the reticular membrane between the skin and scarf-skin, or in the scarf-skin itself; whether it proceeds from the colour of the blood, the colour of the bile, or from that of some other secretion, the difference is fixed in nature, and is as real as if its eat and cause were better known to us." Indeed Jefferson is most disturbed by differences in skin color, what he calls the "immovable veil of black." Just as the famous words of the Declaration would be heard all over the world, so too would the racism of human difference, their legacy obvious especially in 19th century debates about the abolition of slavery and the construction of legal racial segregation.

He, along with his elite generation, imagines "freedom" and "liberty" against the backdrop of various forms of bondage in the New World: indigenous genocide, indentured servitude and, most compelling, chattel slavery. He also imagines "freedom" and "liberty" from within a white gentry and elite whose family lives were cushioned by the invisible labors of nameless slaves. Just consider his incredible anecdote, recounting his earliest childhood memory, of being carried as an infant on a pillow by a slave from his father's house.

Jefferson absolutely remains an icon today, but in complicated ways. From the nickel to his home Monticello, from the University of Virginia to representations of his relationship with Sally Hemings, his life yields a prismatic effect, allowing us to discern fully the society and culture built upon the foundation of chattel slavery in all its contradictions and peculiarities. Having just visited Monticello again in the last few months, I am reminded of slavery's intricate but invisible tentacles upholding and fostering Jefferson's life particularly and in representations of early and antebellum America generally. His "little mountain" would not have been built or maintained without slave labor, and especially the prodigious skills and imagination of trusted and beloved slaves who toiled to execute Jefferson's quirky architectural innovations even while Jefferson would be absent from Monticello for months or even years at a time. As he gazed out of his bedroom/study/laboratory, he decided that he did not want his picturesque views disturbed by the requisite slave quarters and work buildings. But his likely relationship with Sally Hemings would have also taken place in that same series of rooms. Jefferson was both completely dependent upon the system of slavery, but also simultaneously able to disavow it.

With regard to his relationship with Hemings and the centuries of controversy that continue to generate interest, fascination, denial and scandal, we make a grave error in our contemporary assessments of Jefferson to simply label him "hypocrite". From 1789 until 1860, the President of the United States was more likely to be both Chief Executive and owner of slaves than not (with father John Adams and son Quincy Adams as notable exceptions).

As master, he held full dominion over his dependents of wife and children, his slaves and his white employees. He remained free and entitled as the owner of chattel to do with his property — of which Hemings was part — what he chose, short of murder. Also, I think it is vital to remember that Hemings was Jefferson's deceased wife Martha's half-sister, daughter of Jefferson's father-in-law and a slave woman. Although no images of Sally Hemings remain, the contemporary lore spoke of the resemblance between white and mulatto sisters.

I often wonder if the failure of Jefferson to free his slaves at his death is one of the most troubling aspects of his life. How, in contemporary terms, do we make sense of that (especially in light of recent scholarship on George Washington that assiduously documents how the first President affirmatively chose to free his property)? Jefferson, in his personal finances, seems very much a man of our times: he was a profligate spender, constantly in debt, yet still buying more. Slavery as an economic system created a source of capital in the figure of the slave that might be analogous to a modern certificate of deposit with a fluctuating interest rate, a kind of long-life annuity. Ownership of slaves was a primary investment and a potentially lucrative financial risk. There remained a strong, flexible market for slaves. Ownership of slaves was like a financial trump card; their potential sale always possible in times of economic uncertainty and financial shortfalls. Was the heavily indebted state of his estate at his death in fact one of these times of uncertainty? Seeing Jefferson's life in wider focus, with the backdrop of slavery in full and crisp view helps us to understand the nature of the man and, most importantly, the times in which he lived. Finally, doing the work of bringing slavery into focus with regards to Jefferson raises a range of moral and ethical questions about our contemporary judgments of him. Acknowledging slavery should not let Jefferson off the hook of history's judgments, simply because his actions exemplify his time.