Thomas Jefferson statue to be removed from New York City Council chamber https://t.co/vzM2CROMot pic.twitter.com/jzHjjOVWYd
— Reuters (@Reuters) October 20, 2021
Thomas Jefferson despised big cities and the people who lived in them. And if my education (in NYC) was correct, he had a special animus for New York City, which he considered a hive of anti-revolutionary sentiments among the filthy cosmopolitan money-grubbers who controlled its politics.
New Yorkers didn’t think much of Mr. Jefferson’s style, either:
… The New York City Public Design Commission voted unanimously on Monday to dismantle the 7-foot (2.13-meter) bronze likeness of Jefferson, which has watched over proceedings in the most populous U.S. city since 1915.
During the meeting, the commission also put aside making a decision on a proposal to lend the 187-year-old statue to the New-York Historical Society, leaving open the question of where it will ultimately reside. It is a plaster model of a statue still on display in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda.
“Jefferson embodied some of the most shameful parts of our country’s long and nuanced history,” Councilperson Adrienne Adams, co-chair of the council’s Black, Latino and Asian Caucus, told the commission. “It is time for the city to turn the page and move forward.”
Jefferson’s place in U.S. history is complex.
Having written that “all men are created equal” as the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, he also enslaved more than 600 people and fathered at least six children with Sally Hemings, a woman he enslaved…
It’s not even an original! Let those who revere Jefferson go admire him at the Capitol, where he belonged. Or at his mansion, where so many enslaved people (and Jefferson’s daughters) propped up his luxury and his vanity.
A city putting a Jefferson statue in a museum does not rewrite history. Jefferson hated cities anyway.
— Whey Standard (@Whey_standard) October 19, 2021
Reading Gordon Wood's book on the Jefferson/Adams letter it seems Jefferson took the extra step of becoming the 1820s version of your aunt sucked into Facebook conspiracies. Adams tries to steer him away from accusing the North of a power grab for opposing slavery in Missouri.
— Anti-Malarkey (@jpj1421) October 19, 2021
Not an unfair way to put it.
Like many slaveholders, the Haitian Revolution broke Jefferson. His nightmare had irrupted into being in the very bosom of slaveownia. If anything, he’s apt to have felt the terror more than most given his trembling knowledge of slavery’s injustice. https://t.co/QdkJoTIP3E
— Peter Wolf (@peterawolf) October 20, 2021
Old Man Shadow
Jefferson was a hero of mine as a child. Then I found out he wasn’t a mythical figure, but a man and a hypocrite. Then I discovered he was also a rapist.
We can do better. We can honor the idea that every man and woman is equal and strive for that.
And a part of that is ending the national myth surrounding our founding fathers.
Jerzy Russian
I am not sure I understand how moving a statue is a radical rewriting of history, but I am not an historian or anything like that.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Jerzy Russian: Yes, it’s not like a lack of statues in public places is going to erase Jefferson’s importance in American history. I think it’s better we see the Found Fathers with their flaws, so people get that ordinary people can do good and great things when they put their minds to it.
I always though the best summary of Jefferson was the play 1776 were Jefferson was castigating King George III in the Declaration of Independence on allowing the slave trade and the other Southern representatives were “WTF? You own slaves yourself Jefferson”.
smith
I think reevaluating Jefferson at this time is extremely fitting, not only because of his hypocrisy regarding human equality, but also because we’re now facing the fact that the structural advantage Jefferson and others built into our system of government to favor rural over urban interests is an existential threat the very democracy they wanted to establish.
oatler
thedailybeast.com/rudy-giuliani-drains-final-dregs-of-dignity-with-abraham-lincoln-filter-attack-vid…
Roger Moore
@Jerzy Russian:
The most generous interpretation is that removing the statue isn’t by itself a massive rewrite of history but is part of a more general pattern, which I think has some truth to it. I don’t think it’s as massive a rewrite as people claim, but it is part of a large-scale and overdue reevaluation of the role of slavery in our society. People who don’t want to reevaluate slavery are angry about it and try to present even the tiniest step as rewriting history.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@smith: I think the bigger hilarious irony was the Electoral Collage was meant to stop of the kind of demagogue burn the world down for the luz asshole that it ended up enabling with Trump.
Jeffro
I read Alan Taylor’s Thomas Jefferson’s Education about a month ago – highly recommended btw – and it was really eye-opening in many ways. I knew he was anti-religion but whew, he was REALLY anti-religion. He was always conniving against someone, and was nearly always broke (and died well in debt).
One of his plans for ending slavery would have involved taking enslaved toddlers away from their parents, having them do menial work for a decade, then shipping them off to Africa before they could have children of their own. He had the numbers all worked out and everything. Sick.
The book was really enlightening in any number of other directions too. I had no idea that at one point, William & Mary was down to 6 students, or that Williamsburg was considered a decrepit backwater in Jefferson’s time. The stories of college-kid-hooliganism, though, would blow anyone’s mind. Today’s “rowdy” frat parties don’t even come close.
Mike in NC
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Correct. Hopefully nobody anywhere will ever put up a statue of the most vulgar New Yorker that ever lived.
Jeffro
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: yeah, the assumption was that electors would be these noble folks who would vote for the best man when it came down to it, right? Country over party? LOL
Sasha
IMHO, Jefferson deserves celebration for his role as a Founding Father, philosopher and inventor, and advocate for the separation of church and state … along with the acknowledgement that he was a morally compromised slave-owner. (And at least he had the decency, unlike the Confederates, to feel conflicted and ashamed about it.)
Jefferson legacy is “… and a slaveholder”, unlike Confederate “heroes” whose legacy is “Only a slaveholder”.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Mike in NC: Picture a 50ft statue of The Donald at the Texas border, covered in gold, facing south and scowling, silent and eternally demanding Mexico pay for The Wall. At it’s feet McConnell lies bound and gagged, while at the statues base of the statue, made in common clay, a horde MAGA thank Trump with tears in their eyes…
Joe Falco
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
“Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Dee Lurker
americanyawp.com/reader/the-early-republic/thomas-jefferson-notes-on-the-state-of-virginia-1788/
Lest anyone forget his psuedo-scientific quackery about race. The number on purveyor of disinformation about US history is not social or corporate media but our school system. The founders were flawed men, white men, who developed a form of government built for white men. It has perpetuated the rule of white male values and narratives since its inception. Hagiography is not history but propaganda. How are we to progress if we continue to wax nostalgic over the saintly perfections of our founders?
However, our ridiculous exceptionalist narratives will be defended to the death because perpetuating the lies upholds the power structure to the benefit of the few.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Sasha: All that is true, my problem stems from the fact that he took 14 year old slave to Paris to be his oldest daughter’s companion (his daughter also happened to be Sally Hemming’s niece most likely, it’s thought that Jefferson’s wife Martha and Sally were half-sisters). While there he started a sexual relationship with a teenage girl, that he owned. Consent doesn’t even have a place in the conversation, he owned her, she had no rights according to the state of Virginia. He then fathered a child on her(six children eventually, 4 lived to adulthood). Side note, not that it matters, but he was about 44 when he started a sexual relationship with a minor child he owned. Which, yes makes him a rapist.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Dee Lurker: Thank you. Power structures meant to favor white men, especially land-owning, wealthy white men.
zhena gogolia
“What’d I miss?”
Tony Gerace
I don’t think that this will ever happen — but maybe “we” shouldn’t erect public statues of historical figures. A statue is iconography that communicates, without words, that this person is to be admired. Every person is a product of his or her culture, and the interpretation of that culture changes over time. Jefferson (like Churchill, for example), was part of a culture that did not consider non-whites to be fully human. Ideally, a person like Jefferson (or Churchill, or any other flawed figure from the past or present), would be studied by historians — the good as well as the bad — but would not be venerated with statues. But humans like their public spectacles.
Suzanne
I like the Jefferson statue at the NMAAHC…. surrounded by bricks, each one bearing the name of one of his slaves.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
Side note- Jefferson did not free some of his and Sally Hemmings children, specifically his 2 sons, until his death, four of his grandsons with Sally Hemmings served in the Union Army during the Civil War in a little bit of irony…
topclimber
@Dee Lurker: Well, he did revere yeoman farmers, so it makes sense he had to plow the fields now and then with whatever company was at hand.
Dee Lurker
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone:
“Among the Romans emancipation required but one effort. The slave, when made free, might mix with, without staining the blood of his master. But with us a second is necessary, unknown to history. When freed, he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture.” – Good ol’ TJ
The sheer hypocritical BALLS of the man. Property owner indeed.
Roger Moore
@Jeffro:
One of the things that people need to remember is that a lot of anti-slavery feeling was really anti-black. A key way the abolitionist movement grew in the run-up to the Civil War was to expand from people who opposed slavery on moral grounds to people who wanted to end slavery because the didn’t want to compete with slaver labor and ones who hoped to send all black people back to Africa. That was a major reason Reconstruction failed: too many people who were willing to fight slavery didn’t care what happened to the freed slaves as long as they stayed away.
Roger Moore
@Tony Gerace:
It definitely makes me sympathize with the more extreme interpretations of the Commandment against idolatry that think it bans all representational art. We obviously can’t adopt such an extreme position because of the 1st Amendment, but I can understand the desire to do away with anything that might be used as an idol.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
People are complicated. The prisons are filled with people who have done some good in their lives, too. Jefferson was a brilliant man who did a lot of good as well as the bad. One doesn’t eclipse the other. Its important to acknowledge both. Until social media and Fox news, this country has been strong, independent, and slowly moving toward equality and justice (though there have been plenty of reversals over time). Jefferson did an exceptional job of articulating that vision of the future, even as he failed personally to live up to it. I am especially grateful for the separation of church and state which was absolutly unheard of at the time. Quack theories about race, slavery, and much older men marrying (or just having sexual relationships with) women in their mid-teens were COMMON practices at the time. They were terrible practices, but they were normal. It takes exceptional people to actually SEE that they way they live their day to day normal lives has some measure of exploitation and malice in it. There are things we are doing right now we will be judged incredibly harshly in the future for.
gene108
A Jefferson statue in NYC’s council building is a real kick in the nuts to Alexander Hamilton.
Hamilton LOVED New York City. He wanted it to be the capital of the U.S.A., so it would be on par with London and Paris as the most powerful cities in the world, being both the political and financial capitals of their respective countries.
Jefferson was just a much, much better politician than Hamilton, which is why Jefferson’s party eventually triumphed over Hamilton’s.
Kay
Interesting! Not willing to defend this decadent, wealthy grifter at this time.
Gravenstone
@Jerzy Russian: The people complaining don’t want to be reminded that the “heroes” those statues represent were at best flawed, and in many cases outright despicable human beings. Because those flaws reflect upon the worshipers as well, and they don’t like that.
Sort of the “I’m in this picture, and I don’t like it.” meme brought to life.
Librarian
@gene108: I’m sure there are a few statues and paintings of Hamilton in City Hall.
Sasha
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone: Like I said, morally compromised.
That’s part of his legacy. It’s not the only or the most important part, but it’s indelible.
rikyrah
Thomas Jefferson – author of the Declaration of Independence.
And, then, I found out about Sally Hemings. Considering that I knew where the light-skindedness of my family came from, that didn’t surprise me.
But, then, I found out that Sally was the late Mrs. Jefferson’s half-sister.
Ew.
And, that she greatly resembled the late Mrs. Jefferson.
More Ew.
And, that, Sally was 15 when Jefferson began ‘visiting’ her.
And, wouldn’t free their children.
So, yeah, Jefferson ain’t shyt.
And, as a descendent of American Chattel Slavery, I say this with my whole chest.
Dee Lurker
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
I understand what you are saying. Sort of. Yes, he was a decent exemplar of enlightenment humanism, and the ideals he promoted in order to extricate the colonies from imperial rule were excellent. However, we cannot handwave the very real flaws with cultural relativism. Yes, society back then had backward notions. Society today has backward notions.
A peer of Jefferson’s (albeit in Europe) was Immanuel Kant. He was a proponent of scientific racism and sexism until the last decade of his life. The full weight of his insight regarding deontology penetrated his cultural blindness. There is nothing that prevents anyone from picking up the gospels, opening up Matthew 25, and catching its implications, religious or secular. The times they live in is not sufficient excuse for going out of one’s way to be a hypocritical rapey bastard.
Yes, kudos to him for pointing towards a conception of liberty and equality ahead of his times. Minus 15 to Gryffindor for being a hypocritical rapey bastard who only applied his high ideals to his peers.
gene108
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
The view of the Founders has been brought down to earth a bit, since I was in my K-12 years, mostly in the 1980’s.
They were infallible revered figures, who were deified in their own way. Washington had the myth about chopping down the cherry tree, and never telling a lie.
I think some of this was America looking for its own cultural identity, which is independent of their European ancestry.
Now, after decades of work we are seeing a better rounded picture of them, especially with regards to their embrace of slavery. It’s a shock for many people to see previous historical figures deemed infallible to be recast as merely mortal men, with strengths and weaknesses.
CindyH
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: well said
NotMax
Somebody has to say it.
Tiddy?
Welcome to Bowdler Juice.
;)
Geminid
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: Annette Gordon Reed was author of a thoroughly researched book centered on Sally Hemings, The Hemingses of Monticello (2008). Reed takes issue with the now popular view of Sally Hemings as Thomas Jefferson’s victim. I could not do justice to Reed’s argument, but it is thoughtful and made from a strong base of knowledge of her subject.
Reed won a Pulitzer Prize for this history. Her own life is interesting. Born in 1958, Reed was the first Black child in her small Texas town’s elementary school. She went on to Dartmouth College, and is now Professor of History at Harvard and is on the Law School faculty.
Madeleine
My husband, a couple friends, and I visited Montecello years ago after spending some days attending a conference at that other Jefferson architectural landmark,UVa. We found the geography of the place interesting. J’s house and flower gardens are at the top of the hill on which it’s sited. The approach to it is lovelyas are the house and gardens, of course. Underneath the house are various shops where the enslaved worked, with passageways from one side to the other so there was no need to cross up top. Cabins for the enslaved and agricultural fields were also at lower levels.
We were all taken aback (that seems too mild), and in part because the docent guiding us seemed so completely unaware of what J’s design plainly showed. The passageway was pointed out, if I remember correctly, as good planning. I suppose it was in its peculiar way.
Being there was eye-opening and disillusioning in another way beside the ones already recognized at the time—the Declaration, Sally Hemmings. In fact that visit to both theUniversity and Montecello marked a real turn in my view of him. His whole way of life overwhelmed his part in establishing the country.
pluky
@rikyrah:
Preach!
Madeleine
My husband, a couple friends, and I visited Montecello years ago after spending some days attending a conference at that other Jefferson architectural landmark,UVa. We found the geography of the place interesting. J’s house and flower gardens are at the top of the hill on which it’s sited. The approach to it is lovelyas are the house and gardens, of course. Underneath the house are various shops where the enslaved worked, with passageways from one side to the other so there was no need to cross up top. Cabins for the enslaved and agricultural fields were also at lower levels.
We were all taken aback (that seems too mild), and in part because the docent guiding us seemed so completely unaware of what J’s design plainly showed. The passageway was pointed out, if I remember correctly, as good planning. I suppose it was in its peculiar way.
Being there was eye-opening and disillusioning in another way beside the ones already recognized at the time—the Declaration, Sally Hemmings. In fact that visit to both theUniversity and Montecello marked a real turn in my view of him. His whole way of life overwhelmed his part in establishing the country.
Roger Moore
@Dee Lurker:
This. Yes, Jefferson did a great job of writing about liberty, and yes, he was a man of his times. But if you want to talk about him as a man of his times you have to acknowledge that his times also included abolitionists. It’s not as if nobody at the time recognized that slavery was a moral evil. Even Jefferson himself recognized that slavery was a moral evil; he was just so tied into it that he was unable to give up owning slaves himself.
Part of the reason Jefferson is so polarizing is precisely because he was a hypocrite. So are almost all of us. There are things in our society that we know are wrong that we participate in anyway because it’s too hard to go against the mainstream*. Maybe we rationalize our participation, or maybe we continue to feel guilty but never take more than baby steps away from it. I think we’re right to see slavery as worse than the various bad things we do, but that’s a difference of degree, not kind.
*A good example of this for me is eating meat. I know I should become a vegetarian for a variety of good reasons, but doing it is just too hard, so I never do.
Madeleine
A comment I wrote about visiting Montecello years ago has disappeared and I don’t want to rewrite it from scratch. So,
While the top of hill home and gardens J and his family enjoyed are beautiful, the work areas of enslaved people are literally dug from the ground below, complete with passage from one side to the other. I don’t know what could be a plainer statement of J’s philosophy of life, however the Declaration might be read.
leeleeFL
@rikyrah: . Rikyrah, I am as white as can be, possibly sheer. Jefferson had much to answer for before the God he, himself admitted caused him to tremble because he was just.
Moving statues that represent flawed Founders is the least we can do. It’s a step in the direction of admitting white privilege exists and needs not to.
Darkrose
@gene108: Hamilton’s political acumen can be summed up as, “You thought the Reynolds Pamphlet was a good idea WHY?!”
That man had what was ultimately a fatal case of Smartest Guy in the Room Syndrome.
Darkrose
@rikyrah: My “favorite” fact about that man is him writing in Notes on the State of Virginia about how Black folks smelled weird and were dirty. Funny how that didn’t keep him from raping Sally Hemings, now did it?
Ruckus
@smith:
The “very democracy they wanted to establish?” The founders?
Do you mean the one that allowed the common people to have the say in their lives without the uber wealthy controlling the end result – or the one we have now? The one where one or two humans can screw up actually fixing what the last guy just about destroyed? The one where we go back and forth from complete idiocy or clean up on aisle 1-47? Cause I’m not seeing a different “democracy” than the one the founding fathers actually did form.
Ken
JEFFERSON. They are people who are being treated as property. I tell you, the rights of human nature are deeply wounded by this infamous practice.
RUTLEDGE. Then see to your own wounds, Mr. Jefferson, for you are a practitioner! Are you not?
JEFFERSON. I have already resolved to release my slaves.
Not stated in the musical: They’d be released after he died.
moonbat
Just asking, but when is the book going to be written that argues that the move for American independence didn’t begin until Great Britain began to at least nominally make good on ending the slave trade? Southern colonies saw their chances to get and stay rich by growing commodity crops with free labor as being threatened and suddenly British monarchy was the worst thing EVAH!
It’s made very clear in our founding documents that freedom and equality was meant for white male landowners. The founders’ mistake was that they filled those documents with such inspirational language about human equality that the have-nots started to get ideas above their station. Probably the biggest joke on the haves in human history.
Nutmeg again
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: But, beating and whipping little kids for not working fast enough, sunup to end of day in a nail forge? Little kids.
Calculating how much each new enslaved baby born would be worth at sale or as capital?
Selling family members, aged 9 or 10, away from parents … forever.
All of this is documented in the unexpurgated version of TJ’s Farm Book. His choices, to keep himself in luxury. spit.
See: smithsonianmag.com/history/the-dark-side-of-thomas-jefferson-35976004/
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Nutmeg again: This part is especially nauseating
Chris
@moonbat:
The Losers still has the best take on this.
“You believe that all men are created equal?”
“It’s right there in the Declaration of Independence. It’s what we fight for.”
“But that declaration was written by slave-owners and Indian-killers.”
“So they were hypocrites. So what? Doesn’t mean the sentiment isn’t noble, worth fighting for. Worth dying for.”
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Nutmeg again:
These things are horrible. They were also standard practice back then. It wasn’t just slave children who worked 12 hour days and were regularly beaten. Poor kids did too, and were also abused. There were no child labor laws. Children were considered the property of their parents to literally do with as they pleased. Women were property of their husbands. This was all normal to people born in that time. Jefferson’s behavior was not different than any other wealthy Southern man. People ARE products of their time. Some are ahead of their time, but those people are RARE exceptions. His work laid part of the foundation, not just for democracy here, but across the world. That doesn’t erase the evil he did. But the evil he did doesn’t erase his good works either.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Chris: Exactly.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Dee Lurker: His actions as a slave owner were definitely evil. I just think context matters. The closest analogy I can provide is this… if I find out someone has murdered 5 people, I’m going to judge it differently if he/she was a military sniper on a mission vs someone whose job is to carry out the death penalty vs a serial killer. The outcome is exactly the same, cold blooded executions, and is just as evil. The context is completely different.
NotMax
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
Children were a fungible commodity.
Shocking to us that not all that long after Jefferson’s time, for example, the average age of death for factory workers in Liverpool was 15. Source