Logically & morally, one cannot be faulted for something outside of one's choice. Slavery was OBTRUDED on the Colonies by King George III. Thomas Jefferson INHERITED slaves. It was AGAINST THE LAW TO FREE THEM. When he was 26 years old, chosen for the first time to be a member of a legislature, he submitted a bill for the EMANCIPATION of ALL slaves. As a lawyer in 1770, age 27, Jefferson defended a slave, saying: "Under the law of nature, all men are born free."
Facts:
1769: Chosen for the first time to be a member of a legislature, Thomas Jefferson made one effort in the House of Burgesses for the permission of the emancipation of slaves, but was rejected.
From Jefferson's autobiography: http://www.constitution.org/tj/jeff01.txt
"In 1769, I became a member of the legislature by the choice of the county in which I live, and so continued until it was closed by the Revolution. I made one effort in that body for the permission of the emancipation of slaves, which was rejected: and indeed, during the regal government, nothing liberal could expect success."
1770: As a lawyer, Thomas Jefferson defended a slave, saying: "Under the law of nature, all men are born free."
"Under the law of nature, all men are born free; everyone comes into the world with a right to his own person, which includes the liberty of moving and using it at his own will. This is what is called personal liberty, and is given him by the Author of nature, because necessary for his own sustenance." -- Thomas Jefferson: Legal Argument, 1770. FE 1:376
1776: He strongly condemned slavery in his version of the Declaration of Independence.
"He (King George III) has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation hither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of INFIDEL powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the LIBERTIES of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the LIVES of another."http://www.princeton.edu/~tjpapers/declaration/declaration.html
1778: The legislature passed a bill he proposed to ban further importation of slaves into Virginia.
“On Government for the Western Territory, the basic document for the growth of the United States... Jefferson's effort to abolish slavery failed by one vote.”http://history-world.org/thomas_jefferson.htm
1784: His draft of what became the Northwest Ordinance stipulated that "there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude" in any of the new states admitted to the Union from the Northwest Territory.
1806: President Jefferson requested Congress to ban all slave importation to the US.
1807: Jefferson signed a bill abolishing the slave trade: On March 3, 1807, as President of the USA, Thomas Jefferson signed a bill making slave importation illegal in the United States.
http://ilynross.blogspot.com/2012/04/principles-of-jefferson-are-definitions.html
"While Jefferson did not free all of his slaves on his death (as did Washington), a law passed in Virginia in 1806 required that the legislature pass a special bill that would attest to the exemplary behavior of each slave to be freed. If freed, THE SLAVE HAD TO LEAVE THE STATE WITHOUT HIS OR HER FAMILY.
Jefferson tried unsuccessfully to get this law changed. Further, Jefferson trained his slaves in skills that would be useful when they were free. He believed that to free them first would be irresponsible -- since they would be homeless and without family."http://www.liberty1.org/defense.htm
For clarity: The law passed in VA in 1806 allowed ONLY the SELF-SUPPORTING to be freed. The freed must leave the state within the year. If a self-supporting slave had children or parents who were not, he/she had to leave them. Jefferson did not want to separate families.
Jefferson did not want nor need slaves. He inherited them. A first-time legislator at age 26, he wanted to free all slaves. He fought all his life to free them. Jefferson was a polymath and polyglot. He passed the bar at age 22. He was an architect, a scientist, an inventor. He never patented any of his inventions.
After being away from his farm for 10 years, serving his country, he found it deranged. He became a NAILMAKER. From age 26 to 66, he served his country, and after that, he served the causes of science and education.
JEFFERSON (Thomas), A Nailmaker. "In our private pursuits it is a great advantage that every honest employment is deemed honorable. I am myself a nail-maker. On returning home after an absence of ten years, I found my farms so much deranged that I saw evidently they would be a burden to me instead of a support till I could regenerate them; and, consequently, that it was necessary for me to find some other resource in the meantime. I thought for a while of taking up the manufacture of potash, which requires but small advances of money. I concluded at length, however, to begin a manufacture of nails, which needs little or no capital, and I now employ a dozen little boys from ten to sixteen years of age, overlooking all the details of their business myself, and drawing from it a profit on which I can get along till I can put my farms into a course of yielding profit. My new trade of nail-making is to me in this country what an additional title of nobility or the ensigns of a new order are in Europe."
T. Jefferson to M. de Meunier. Ford ed., vii, 14. (M., 1795.)
Related article: DNA Evidence has Exonerated Jefferson
Videos:
Debating Slavery Clause in the Declaration of Independence: Second Continental Congress
"The right to be free comes from nature." - Thomas Jefferson
"About this time, Jefferson was elected to the Virginia assembly, the House of Burgesses. The first bill written and submitted to the legislature, was a bill giving the right to slave owners to give freedom to slaves. Unlike Georgia and the Carolinas, where giving a slave freedom was as simple as submitting a document to the local government, slaveowners were not allowed to give freedom to slaves. Jefferson also submitted a bill to abolish the African slave trade. Neither bill passed, mainly because the system was not set up to allow liberal reforms. At the time, Jefferson was among the largest slaveowners in the assembly. He would resubmit these bills later."
ReplyDeletehttp://www.freeinfosociety.com/article.php?id=271
"Mr. Jefferson, ... who was, is, and perhaps will continue to be, the most distinguished politician of our history... conceived the idea of taking that occasion to prevent slavery ever going into the Northwestern Territory." - Abraham Lincoln
ReplyDeletehttp://books.google.com/books?id=XufSf2ffzKsC&pg=PT365&lpg=PT365&dq=Abraham+Lincoln+called+Jefferson+%22the+most+distinguished+politician+in+our+history&source=bl&ots=yFfUK0vG_-&sig=yTXPi1SUj9O_2pmakmWyLDOIUM0&hl=en#v=onepage&q=Abraham%20Lincoln%20called%20Jefferson%20%22the%20most%20distinguished%20politician%20in%20our%20history&f=false
"Thomas Jefferson acted as attorney pro bono in two Virginia legal suits for freedom by enslaved mulatto children, both of which he lost. In Samuel Howell v. Wade Netherland, April 1770, Jefferson unsuccessfully argued that not only had Howell's grandmother been a white woman but "under the law of nature, all men are born free." Samuel Howell lost his case in the 1770 session of the General Court and ran away shortly after the verdict. The trial was included in this book of select cases illustrating important points of law."
ReplyDeletehttp://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/jeffrep.html
Removing the slavery clause in the Declaration of Independence when SC decided it would scuttle the Resolution of Independence if the slavery clause was not removed was not a compromise. It showed that in a hierarchy of values, the highest value comes first. King George III obtruded slavery on the colonies. Jefferson's first bill as a legislator, age 26, is the "permission of the emancipation of slaves", and he also filed a bill to end the slave trade. Freeing the colonies from British rule was a higher prority. Failing to do so meant that slavery would continue - slavery of blacks as well as whites.
ReplyDelete"The ground of liberty is to be gained by inches, [and] we must be contented to secure what we can get from time to time and eternally press forward for what is yet to get. It takes time to persuade men to do even what is for their own good.... Half a loaf is better than no bread. If we cannot secure all our rights, let us secure what we can." - Thomas Jefferson
http://jeffersonianclub.blogspot.com/2012/12/at-age-26-jefferson-submitted.html
http://www.tjheritage.org/imagefiles/jeffersonandslavery.pdf
ReplyDeleteThe truth is what corresponds to reality. In perceiving reality, the honest employ the Law of Identity. Those with integrity employ logic: non-contradictory identification within the FULL CONTEXT of one's knowledge.
ReplyDeleteThose who hurl slave owner at Jefferson are evil. They drop all contexts in order to destroy his accomplishments.
http://jeffersonianclub.blogspot.com/2012/12/at-age-26-jefferson-submitted.html
Jefferson's version of the Declaration of Independence:
ReplyDelete“We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable;
That all men are created equal & independent,
That from that equal creation
They derive rights inherent & inalienable,
Among which are the preservation of
Life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness…”
http://www.princeton.edu/~tjpapers/declaration/declaration.html
From: Malconius Saleem Caeser: Haji 1789 January 26. (to Edward Bancroft). "As far as I can judge from the experiments which have been made, to give liberty to, or rather, to abandon persons whose habits have been formed in slavery is like abandoning children. Many quakers in Virginia seated their slaves on their lands as tenants. They were distant from me, and therefore I cannot be particular in the details, because I never had very particular information. I cannot say whether they were to pay a rent in money, or a share of the produce: but I remember that the landlord was obliged to plan their crops for them, to direct all their operations during every season and according to the weather, but, what is more afflicting, he was obliged to watch them daily and almost constantly to make them work, and even to whip them. A man's moral sense must be unusually strong, if slavery does not make him a thief. He who is permitted by law to have no property of his own, can with difficulty conceive that property is founded in anything but force. These slaves chose to steal from their neighbors rather than work. They became public nuisances, and in most instance were reduced to slavery again.... Notwithstanding the discouraging result of these experiments, I am decided on my final return to America to try this one. I shall endeavor to import as many Germans as I have grown slaves. I will settle them and my slaves, on farms of 50. acres each, intermingled, and place all on the footing of the Metayers of Europe. Their children shall be brought up, as others are, in habits of property and foresight, and I have no doubt but that they will be good citizens. Some of their fathers will be so: others I suppose will need government...."
ReplyDeleteThe Virginia Debate: Why Slavery Was Not Abolished in Virginia
ReplyDeletehttp://www.virginiaplaces.org/population/slaveabolish.html
http://www.tjheritage.org/imagefiles/jeffersonandslavery.pdf
http://www.stratalum.org/july22/slavelaw.htm
In 1806, VA mandated that freed slaves leave the state within a year. States surrounding VA passed laws forbidding freed slaves from VA to cross their borders.
http://books.google.com/books?id=R2-yNS6PqBcC&pg=PA104&lpg=PA104&dq=In+1806,+the+Virginia+General+Assembly+amended+the+manumission&source=bl&ots=DMhIdFpfj9&sig=puz8Py27b6-s9SqAFm-G5_sJwro&hl=en&sa=X&ei=xrCGUcOdMLO20AH3r4H4BA&ved=0CDgQ6AEwATgK#v=onepage&q=In%201806%2C%20the%20Virginia%20General%20Assembly%20amended%20the%20manumission&f=false
Jefferson’s “original Rough draught” of the Declaration of Independence | The Papers of Thomas...
ReplyDeletehttp://jeffersonpapers.princeton.edu/selected-documents/jefferson%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%9Coriginal-rough-draught%E2%80%9D-declaration-independence-0
Jefferson's denunciation of slavery was removed from the Declaration of Independence when SC decided it would scuttle the Resolution of Independence if the slavery clause was not removed.
ReplyDelete"He (King George III) has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation hither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of INFIDEL powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the LIBERTIES of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the LIVES of another."
http://jeffersonianclub.blogspot.com/2012/12/at-age-26-jefferson-submitted.html
Jefferson's original passage on slavery is here:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.blackpast.org/?q=primary/declaration-independence-and-debate-over-slavery
"That is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles -- right and wrong -- throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time, and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, 'You work and toil and earn bread, and I'll eat it.' No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle." - Abe Lincoln
ReplyDelete--October 15, 1858 Debate at Alton
Jefferson in Lincoln's words - Peoria Speech, October 16, 1854
ReplyDeletehttp://www.nps.gov/liho/historyculture/peoriaspeech.htm
In 1784 - Northwest Ordinance -
ReplyDeletehttp://books.google.com/books?id=ScDUHgBCis8C&pg=PT382&lpg=PT382&dq=draft+of+what+became+the+Northwest+Ordinance+stipulated+that+%22there+shall+be+neither+slavery+nor+involuntary+servitude%22+in+any+of+the+new+states+admitted+to+the+Union+from+the+Northwest+Territory&source=bl&ots=helWJZ5ebm&sig=PBLWvahdDveYxxrIIAsafccNgk4&hl=en&sa=X&ei=WWoVUpiYLq3B4AOanIAw&ved=0CGwQ6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q=draft%20of%20what%20became%20the%20Northwest%20Ordinance%20stipulated%20that%20%22there%20shall%20be%20neither%20slavery%20nor%20involuntary%20servitude%22%20in%20any%20of%20the%20new%20states%20admitted%20to%20the%20Union%20from%20the%20Northwest%20Territory&f=false
After the year 1800 there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of them. - Lost by one vote -
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Ordinance_of_1784
In an April 22 letter to John Holmes, Thomas Jefferson wrote that the division of the country created by the Compromise Line would eventually lead to the destruction of the Union:[8]
ReplyDelete...but this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. it is hushed indeed for the moment. but this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence. A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missouri_Compromise
Lincoln contrasted his support for the Declaration with opposing statements made by the Southern politician John C. Calhoun and Senator John Pettit of Indiana, who called the Declaration "a self-evident lie." Lincoln said that Chief Justice Roger Taney (in his Dred Scott decision) and Stephen Douglas were opposing Thomas Jefferson's self-evident truth, dehumanizing blacks and preparing the public mind to think of them as only property. Lincoln thought slavery had to be treated as a wrong, and kept from growing. As Lincoln said:
ReplyDeleteThat is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, "You work and toil and earn bread, and I'll eat it." No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.[30]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln%E2%80%93Douglas_debates
ReplyDeleteIn 1784, this fifth Article in Thomas Jefferson's Northwest Ordinance lost by one vote: "After the year 1800 there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of [the new States]." The 1787 Northwest Ordinance outlawed slavery in the new territories. The Missouri Compromise, passed in 1820, prohibited slavery in the former Louisiana Territory north of the parallel 36°30′ north except within the boundaries of the proposed state of Missouri.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, sponsored by Douglas, in effect repealed the Missouri Compromise by lifting the ban against slavery in territories north of the 36°30′ latitude. In place of the ban, Douglas offered popular sovereignty, the doctrine that the actual settlers in the territories and not Congress should decide the fate of slavery in their midst.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=577329008991006&set=a.564011160322791.1073741832.100373710019874&type=1&theater
Jefferson's denunciation of slavery was removed from the Declaration of Independence when SC decided it would scuttle the Resolution of Independence if the slavery clause was not removed.
ReplyDeleteJefferson's original passage on slavery is here:
http://www.blackpast.org/?q=primary/declaration-independence-and-debate-over-slavery
"Africans started slavery - how it REALLY happened"
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=IKjuu1ZOF-o
For clarity: The law passed in VA in 1806 allowed ONLY the SELF-SUPPORTING to be freed. The freed must leave the state within the year. If a self-supporting slave had children or parents who were not, he/she had to leave them. Jefferson did not want to separate families.
ReplyDeleteIn 1806, VA mandated that freed slaves leave the state within a year. States surrounding VA passed laws forbidding freed slaves from VA to cross their borders.
http://books.google.com/books?id=R2-yNS6PqBcC&pg=PA104&lpg=PA104&dq=In+1806,+the+Virginia+General+Assembly+amended+the+manumission&source=bl&ots=DMhIdFpfj9&sig=puz8Py27b6-s9SqAFm-G5_sJwro&hl=en&sa=X&ei=xrCGUcOdMLO20AH3r4H4BA&ved=0CDgQ6AEwATgK#v=onepage&q=In%201806%2C%20the%20Virginia%20General%20Assembly%20amended%20the%20manumission&f=false
A Declaration of[1] the Representatives of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, in General Congress assembled.
ReplyDeleteWhen in the course of human events it becomes necessary for a people to advance from that subordination in which they have hitherto remained, & to assume among the powers of the earth the equal & independent station to which the laws of nature & of nature’s god entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the change.
We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable;[2] that all men are created equal & independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights[3] inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these ends, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government shall become destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, & to institute new government, laying it’s foundation on such principles & organising it’s powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety & happiness. prudence indeed will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light & transient causes: and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. but when a long train of abuses & usurpations, begun at a distinguished period, & pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to subject[4] them to arbitrary power[5] it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government & to provide new guards for their future security. such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; & such is now the necessity which constrains them to expunge their former systems of government. the history of his present majesty, is a history of unremitting injuries and usurpations, among which no one fact stands single or solitary to contradict the uniform tenor of the rest, all of which have in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. to prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world, for the truth of which we pledge a faith yet unsullied by falsehood.
he has refused his assent to laws the most wholesome and necessary for the public good:
ReplyDeletehe has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate & pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has neglected utterly to attend to them.
he has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people unless those people would relinquish the right of representation,[6] a right inestimable to them, & formidable to tyrants alone:[7]
he has dissolved Representative houses repeatedly & continually, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people:
he has refused[8] for a long space of time[9] to cause others to be elected, whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise, the state remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, & convulsions within:
he has endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither; & raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands:
he has suffered the administration of justice totally to cease in some of these colonies, refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers:
he has made our judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and amount of their salaries:
he has erected a multitude of new offices by a self-assumed power, & sent hither swarms of officers to harrass our people & eat out their substance:
he has kept among us in times of peace standing armies & ships of war:
he has affected to render the military, independent of & superior to the civil power:
he has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitutions and unacknoleged by our laws; giving his assent to their pretended acts of legislation, for quartering large bodies of armed troops among us;
for protecting them by a mock-trial from punishment for any murders they should commit on the inhabitants of these states;
for cutting off our trade with all parts of the world;
ReplyDeletefor imposing taxes on us without our consent;
for depriving us of the benefits of trial by jury;
for transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offences:
for taking away our charters, & altering fundamentally the forms of our governments;
for suspending our own legislatures & declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever:
he has abdicated government here, withdrawing his governors, & declaring us out of his allegiance & protection:
he has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns & destroyed the lives of our people:
he is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation & tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty & perfidy unworthy the head of a civilized nation:
he has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, & conditions of existence:
he has incited treasonable insurrections in our fellow-subjects,[10] with the allurements of forfeiture & confiscation of our property:
he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce:[11] and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.
in every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms; our repeated petitions have been answered by repeated injury. a prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a people who mean to be free. future ages will scarce believe that the hardiness of one man, adventured within the short compass of 12[12] years only, on so many acts of tyranny without a mask, over a people fostered & fixed in principles of liberty.
I just saw a photo on my newsfeed of one enjoying the freedom won by the 1776 Revolutionaries yet maligns them. Here is a movie that every honest person must ponder, must study further. http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/10882566
ReplyDeleteJefferson is the most maligned, so I have been compiling truths about him: http://jeffersonianclub.blogspot.com/
Many enjoy the freedom won by the 1776 Revolutionaries yet malign them. Here is a movie that every honest person must ponder, must study further. http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/10882566
ReplyDeleteJefferson is the most maligned, so I have been compiling truths about him: http://jeffersonianclub.blogspot.com/
Jefferson talked of the dunghill who perverted Christianity. One of them is King George III who called himself Christian.
ReplyDeleteJefferson's denunciation of slavery was removed from the Declaration of Independence when SC decided it would scuttle the Resolution of Independence if the slavery clause was not removed. Jefferson's original passage on slavery is here:
http://www.blackpast.org/?q=primary/declaration-independence-and-debate-over-slavery
Thomas Jefferson never patented any of his inventions. He suffered financially for serving his country. After being away from his farm for 10 years, serving his country, he found it deranged. This man who was a lawyer at 22, an architect, a scientist, a polymath and polyglot, became a NAILMAKER. From age 26 to 66, he served his country, and after that, he served the causes of science and education.
ReplyDeleteSince Jefferson valued freedom and knowledge above all, it was no sacrifice. But he cared about people.
"Under the law of nature all men are born free"
ReplyDeleteThomas Jefferson acted as attorney pro bono in two Virginia legal suits for freedom by enslaved mulatto children, both of which he lost. In Samuel Howell v. Wade Netherland, April 1770, Jefferson unsuccessfully argued that not only had Howell's grandmother been a white woman but "under the law of nature, all men are born free." Samuel Howell lost his case in the 1770 session of the General Court and ran away shortly after the verdict. The trial was included in this book of select cases illustrating important points of law.
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/jeffrep.html
Like many admirers of the Enlightenment, Jefferson was convinced that science and the scientific method held the keys to learning and education in the broadest sense. Jefferson promoted studies of natural history, botany, archeology, and architecture. His extensive library, the largest personal one in the United States by 1815, was a testament to his conviction that all subjects of learning fell within the purview of all learned men.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/jeffrep.html
Thomas Jefferson's denunciation of slavery in his Declaration of Independence -
ReplyDeletehttp://www.blackpast.org/?q=primary/declaration-independence-and-debate-over-slavery
Full Movie - http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/10882566
ReplyDelete"Ignorance and despotism seem made for each other." - Thomas Jefferson
ReplyDeletehttp://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-29-02-0135
From Jim Woods: "A few more corrective points related to Jefferson's debts 1) he inherited debts from deceased relatives, 2) his debts were increased by him having had cosigned on loans for friends who failed, 3) the credit crunch created by the Bank of the United States and the Panic of 1819 destroyed the finances of Jefferson and many across the country, and 4) Jefferson's plan to resolve his debts through a private lottery of his other properties was delayed by the Virginia legislature such that his plan could not be executed before his death."
ReplyDeleteDeclaration: http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration_transcript.html
ReplyDeleteThomas Jefferson-An Innocent Man
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1xJ7Ydh-XU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSJ7H3gQae8