MetaFilter posts tagged with jefferson and thomasjefferson

"If I was to die, today or tomorrow, I do not think I would die satisfied till you tell me you will try and marry some good, smart man that will take care of you and the children"

the man of twists and turns — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 07:28:35 -0800

Author Jon Meacham has a new book out on Thomas Jefferson. It is reviewed in the New York Times: Cultivating Control in a Nation’s Crucible

But this book does not address its principal concern, power, until Jefferson has accrued some. When it comes to the force that he wielded as a slaveholder, Mr. Meacham finds ways to suggest that thoughts of abolition would have been premature; that it was not uncommon for white heads of households to be waited on by slaves who bore family resemblances to their masters; and that since Jefferson treated slavery as a blind spot, the book can too.

At the same time, Henry Wiencek has written a "scathing assessment of America’s third president," and the two books together have kicked off some controversy. Wiencek's article in Smithsonian, The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson

The very existence of slavery in the era of the American Revolution presents a paradox, and we have largely been content to leave it at that, since a paradox can offer a comforting state of moral suspended animation. Jefferson animates the paradox. And by looking closely at Monticello, we can see the process by which he rationalized an abomination to the point where an absolute moral reversal was reached and he made slavery fit into America’s national enterprise.

In Salon, Meacham claims "I’m not letting Thomas Jefferson off the hook"

And if someone as monumental in our memories as Jefferson can be seen as someone trying to work out real problems in real time, making compromises, settling for half a loaf when you might want a full loaf, then I think that should give us a kind of confidence and a kind of hope that we can overcome the seemingly insuperable obstacles that lead us to think of politics as contentious and frustrating.

And in Slate, Anette Gordon-Reed replies to Wiencek: Thomas Jefferson Was Not a Monster: Debunking a major new biography of our third president.

The book's tone and presentation betray a journalistic obsession with “the scoop.” Getting the scoop can be the life’s blood of journalism. It does not work so well for writing history, which is not always (or almost ever, really) about discovering things previously unknown. This sensibility leads Weincek astray in a number of ways. To begin with, it compels him to write as if he had discovered, and was writing about, things that had not been discovered and written about before. In truth, all of the important stories in this book have been told by others.

Wiencek responds in Smithsonian: The author of a new book about Thomas Jefferson makes his case and defends his scholarship

I am not surprised that Gordon-Reed disliked my book so much, given that it systematically demolishes her portrayal of Jefferson as a kindly master of black slaves. In The Hemingses of Monticello, she described with approval Jefferson's "plans for his version of a kinder, gentler slavery at Monticello with his experiments with the nail factory." Gordon-Reed cannot like the now established truth that the locus of Jefferson's "kinder, gentler slavery" was the very place where children were beaten to get them to work. At first I assumed that she simply did not know about the beatings, but when I double-checked her book's references to the nailery I discovered that she must have known: A few hundred pages away from her paean to the nail factory, she cited the very letter in which "the small ones" are described as being lashed there.

On 30 NOV, Paul Finkleman in a New York Times Op-Ed countered with :The Monster Of Monticello

Neither Mr. Meacham, who mostly ignores Jefferson’s slave ownership, nor Mr. Wiencek, who sees him as a sort of fallen angel who comes to slavery only after discovering how profitable it could be, seem willing to confront the ugly truth: the third president was a creepy, brutal hypocrite.

David Post at Volokh Conspiracy writes: Why Don’t People Get It About Jefferson and Slavery?

This is truly outrageous and pernicious and a-historical nonsense. The truth is that few people in human history did more, over the course of a lifetime, to “place the road on the road to liberty for all” — and indeed, to eliminate human slavery from the civilized world — than Jefferson.

Corey Robin at Crooked Timber asks: Thomas Jefferson: American Fasicst? and examines his letters to conclude:

Jefferson was not a liberal hypocrite, a symptom of his time. He was the avant garde of a group of American theorists who were struggling to reconcile the ideals of the Declaration with the reality of chattel slavery. His resolution of that struggle took the form of one of the most vicious doctrines of racial supremacy the world had yet seen. That is his legacy, or at least part of his legacy. He was by no means the only one to take this route, but he was one of the earliest and easily the most famous. He is the tributary of what would become an American tradition.

Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic responds to Post: Slavery Is A Love Song

This is a letter that I often turn to. It was written to Laura Spicer by her husband, who was sold away, much as Jefferson sold people away. After emancipation she repeatedly tried to rekindle their love, despite the fact that the husband had now remarried and formed another family. In this letter the husband tells us what it means to be among the refuse of history:

Coates reacts to a "predictable" defense of Jefferson

In TK, Jefferson's protege Edward Coles--knowing of Jefferson's brilliant anti-slavery writings--wrote to enlist him in the cause of ridding Virginia of slavery. Coles thought to begin this effort by manumitting his own slaves. Jefferson not only declined to help Coles, but told him he was wrong to try to free his own

Henry Wiencek writes about the 'rumpus' on his blog, while Jon Meacham was interviewed on The Daily Show on 14 NOV: aired segment and full interview.

Let Facts be submitted to a candid world

Rhaomi — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 09:22:00 -0800

The Declaration of Independence is perhaps the most masterfully written state paper of Western civilization. As Moses Coit Tyler noted almost a century ago, no assessment of it can be complete without taking into account its extraordinary merits as a work of political prose style. Although many scholars have recognized those merits, there are surprisingly few sustained studies of the stylistic artistry of the Declaration. This essay seeks to illuminate that artistry by probing the discourse microscopically -- at the level of the sentence, phrase, word, and syllable. The University of Wisconsin's Dr. Stephen E. Lucas meticulously analyzes the elegant language of the 235-year-old charter in a distillation of this comprehensive study. More on the Declaration: full transcript and ultra-high-resolution scan, a transcript and scan of Jefferson's annotated rough draft, the little-known royal rebuttal, a thorough history of the parchment itself, a peek at the archival process, a reading of the document by the people of NPR and by a group of prominent actors, H. L. Mencken's "American" translation, Slate's Twitter summaries, and a look at the fates of the 56 signers.

Time Wastes Too Fast

gingerbeer — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 19:46:23 -0800

Maira Kalman does it again, with a beautifully illustrated blog post about her visit to Mr. Jefferson's Monticello. Previously and previously, but she may be best known for the famous New Yorkistan New Yorker cover.

Thomas Jefferson's Library On Exhibit

Rykey — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 16:42:07 -0800

WWJD (Which Words Jefferson Digested) Some Flash

The Jefferson Bible

nax — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 13:36:08 -0800

Thomas Jefferson so wanted to fix what he thought was wrong with religion that he rewrote the Bible. He went through and cut out the parts that he liked most and pasted it to a fifth volume. He cut out Miracles. He cut out the Christmas story. He cut out most of the Easter story. Resurrection is gone. Wikipedia. previously

A Big Cheese for a Big Cheese

jonp72 — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 13:39:52 -0800

The Mammoth Cheese of Cheshire was the most unusual gift ever given to a President of the United States. In the aftermath of the "Revolution of 1800", the eccentric Baptist preacher John Leland decided to celebrate the presidency of Thomas Jefferson by convincing the predominantly Baptist farmers of Cheshire, Massachusetts to create a giant 1,235-pound block of cheese as a monument to small-"r" republicanism and religious freedom. The cheese eventually reached Thomas Jefferson on New Years Day in 1802, the same day that Jefferson wrote his famous letter to the Danbury Baptists about the wall of separation between church and state. The Federalist Party, which opposed Jefferson's funding of scientific research during the Lewis & Clark expedition, ridiculed the cheese as a "mammoth," a reference to the recent exhumation of a mammoth by the painter and naturalist, Charles Willson Peale. The derision of the Federalists backfired, however, as the delivery of the cheese coincided with a huge "mammoth craze" that popularized the word "mammoth" as an adjective describing anything enormous, including a mammoth loaf of bread gifted to Jefferson in 1804. An experimental dairy station in Perth, Ontario eventually made a bigger mammoth cheese, but Jefferson's mammoth cheese has inspired a novel, a children's book, a monument protected by funds from the Department of Homeland Security, and a subplot on The West Wing. Last but not least, check out this research paper, which places the Mammoth Cheese of Cheshire in the context of Jeffersonian participatory democracy.

Over God

condour75 — Tue, 14 Oct 2003 18:38:01 -0800

Founding fathers quotations about religion. Sick of hearing fundie pundies say "the US was founded on a vision of Christianity"? Let TJ and the crew speak for themselves.

Sneering at President John Adams as "querulous, Bald, blind, crippled, Toothless Adams"

mediareport — Wed, 03 Jul 2002 12:23:57 -0800

Sneering at President John Adams as "querulous, Bald, blind, crippled, Toothless Adams" got Ben Franklin's grandson arrested under the Sedition Act of 1798. Federalists like Adams and Alexander Hamilton used the Sedition Act to muzzle highly aggressive elements of the press. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison fought back -- and won. Understanding this early power grab by the U.S. executive branch helps put recent events into historical context. The struggle itself has been part of the United States of America since the beginning, and anyone working to fight Cheney and Ashcroft's unconstitutional assault happens to be in pretty good company. Happy Fourth of July.