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
Vulgar New Yorkers Open Thread: Tough Tiddy, TomPost + Comments (54)