The 'nuanced' history of Thomas Jefferson
When New York City officials voted unanimously last week to remove the larger-than-life statue of Thomas Jefferson that has stood in City Hall's council chamber since the 1910s, council member Adrienne Adams rationalized the move on the grounds that the nation's third president "embodied some of the most shameful parts of our country's long and nuanced history."
That was a reference, of course, to Jefferson's record as a slaveholder, which is not only a stain on his reputation today but has been one for more than two centuries. Indeed, Jefferson's ownership of enslaved people was a decided blot on his image during his own lifetime. Published attacks on him for his relationship with Sally Hemings, with whom he is believed to have fathered six children, date back at least as far as 1796 ; some, printed under a pseudonym, were written by Alexander Hamilton, a fellow Founding Father.
In other words, there is nothing remotely new about deploring Jefferson's personal involvement in the buying, selling, and exploiting of African human beings. But there is also, to use Councilor Adams's term, nothing "nuanced" about the way she and her colleagues represent Jefferson — denouncing him as a degenerate whose complicity in the slave system of his native Virginia was the most important fact of his life, one that overshadows everything else about his astonishing career and renders him worthy only of disgrace.
 Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholdere. He was also, paradoxically, an eloquent and influential opponent of slavery. |
Consider how that statue of Jefferson ended up in New York's city hall in the first place. It was commissioned in 1833 by Uriah P. Levy, an American naval hero who was the first Jewish commodore in the United States Navy. Levy was repeatedly targeted by antisemites who resented him for his religion, and the American guarantee of freedom of worship was one he deeply cherished. He donated the statue specifically to commemorate Jefferson's advocacy of religious freedom in the armed forces.
"Jefferson, for all of his blindness concerning the evils of slavery, championed religious liberty in Virginia and in the nation as a whole," writes Jonathan D. Sarna, the noted Brandeis historian.
"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others," he wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia in 1781. "But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god." And he specifically championed the rights of Jews. He expressed pride that the University of Virginia, whose founding he considered one of his supreme achievements, both accepted Jews and "set the example of ceasing to violate the rights of conscience by any injunctions on the different sects respecting their religion."
Even as he denied his enslaved people their liberty, Jefferson espoused high-minded views concerning religious liberty as well as the "inalienable rights" that he detailed in the Declaration of Independence. Mr. Levy, like many Jews, honored him for that.
When the statue, by French sculptor Pierre-Jean David d'Angers, first arrived in New York, Levy charged an admission fee to view it, then spent the proceeds to feed the poor. So the statue that council member Adams sees as reflecting "the most shameful" elements of American history in fact had nothing to do with them. Jefferson was honored for his legendary defense of religious freedom, and the statue was used to raise money for the needy. Wouldn't a "nuanced" approach of the issue include those details?
Reasonable people can agree that Jefferson's role in slavery was a terrible moral failing, even his worst moral failing. But Jefferson was anything but a smug and complacent advocate of slavery. On the contrary: Despite his own interests and unclean hands, he was, at times, among the most eloquent and influential opponents of slavery in 18th-century America.
As a delegate to the Confederation Congress in the 1780s, Jefferson worked to prohibit the introduction of slavery into any new American lands — a prohibition that was enshrined in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which established the Great Lakes region as the newly independent nation's first organized territory. As president 20 years later, he signed legislation forbidding "the importation of slaves into any port or place within the jurisdiction of the United States," thereby ending US participation in the Atlantic slave trade. In so doing, he lived up to his own words a few months earlier, when, in his sixth Annual Message to Congress (what we today call the State of the Union message) he promised to "withdraw the citizens of the United States from all further participation in those violations of human rights which have been so long continued on the unoffending inhabitants of Africa, and which the morality, the reputation, and the best of our country have long been eager to proscribe."
In an essay published Friday, the noted American historian (and liberal Democratic loyalist) Sean Wilentz characterized Jefferson as a "man of contradictions." On the one hand, his Notes on the State of Virginia, the only full-length book Jefferson published, "indeed contains hair-raising comments about black people, closer than not to the common view among his fellow white Virginians." At the same time, wrote Wilentz, Jefferson's book "also contains an indictment of racial slavery as an offense to heaven — an uncommon view in Virginia, especially among slaveholders."
It was in that book that Jefferson described slavery as "the most unremitting despotism," one bound to bring down divine wrath on the United States. "Indeed," Jefferson wrote, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever." Coming from a slaveholding Virginian, those words "are worth Diamonds," wrote the fervently antislavery John Adams of Massachusetts. "They will have more effect than Volumes written by mere Philosophers."
Adams prophesied accurately. Jefferson's words most certainly did have a powerful effect in toppling slavery and, later, in achieving civil rights for black Americans. Not the words in his book about Virginia, but those in the Declaration of Independence — the founding document of American liberty and one of the most important defenses of human rights and freedom in that "long and nuanced" history to which Adrienne Adams referred.
In his original draft of the Declaration, Jefferson included a clause passionately condemning African slavery and was chagrined when the Continental Congress, which required unanimity, struck it from the final version. Nevertheless, what remained — especially the ringing opening lines that set the stage for all that followed — packed a fierce moral punch. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his unforgettable "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963, appealed to the authority of Jefferson's words in the Declaration, regarding them not as evidence of hypocrisy but as a solemn promise to which America should be held:
We've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the "unalienable Rights" of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."
But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation....
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."
A century before MLK, another champion of black liberty — Abraham Lincoln — likewise invoked Jefferson's formula, appealing to the transcendent truth of the Declaration's words in defense of the war to preserve the union and abolish slavery. The United States, Lincoln told the audience that gathered to dedicate the Gettysburg battlefield as a national cemetery, was the world's first republic to be "conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."
A decade earlier, inveighing against slavery on Independence Day in 1852, Frederick Douglass famously asked : "What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?" It was a "sham," he answered, "empty and heartless . . . revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy." After all, he demanded, "Are the great principles . . . embodied in that Declaration of Independence extended to us?" In 1852, the answer was obviously no. But Douglass's argument was not that Jefferson, the Declaration, and the Fourth of July should be thrown out with history's trash. It was that the "great principles" for which they stood should be extended to all Americans.
Jefferson, for all his moral failings, authored the document that gave the foes of slavery and, later, Jim Crow, one of their most potent weapons in the fight for freedom and civil rights. As for the defenders of slavery, they rejected that document. As Rich Lowry points out in National Review:
It is no accident that [in 1861] the most pernicious expositor of the pro-slavery cause, Alexander Stephens, loathed Thomas Jefferson and was keen to cast the Confederacy as having been founded upon "exactly the opposite idea" to those "entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution."
Or, to put it another way: What was remarkable about Jefferson was not what he had in common with his contemporaries around the world, but what he did not.
I have proposed a two-part test for determining when it is right to remove from a public place of honor a statue or monument to some historical person: (1) Was that person honored for unworthy or indecent behavior? (2) Is that person known today primarily for unworthy or indecent behavior? When the answer to both is no, the statue or monument should stay.
By that test, as I wrote last year, "every memorial that glorifies leaders and generals of the Confederacy should be hauled away. The cause for which they struggled was the vilest cause in American history: the perpetuation of African slavery. They were extolled because they went to war in defense of human bondage. Monuments to such men should have no place in our public square."
But that's a far cry from retroactively dishonoring someone whose life was largely admirable, if imperfect. Even great people can have lamentable flaws, especially when viewed in retrospect. Rarely is it wise or fair to let the flaw nullify the greatness, and never is it "nuanced."
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30 years of hating Clarence Thomas
This weekend marked the 30th anniversary of the accession of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. The judge from Pinpoint, Ga., is now the 16th-longest serving high court justice in history , and another three years will move him into the Top 10. Thomas is now 73, so it isn't inconceivable that he could eventually surpass William O. Douglas, whose tenure on the court — 36½ years — remains the all-time record.
I've admired Thomas from the first time I heard him speak, which was on July 1, 1991 — the day President George H. W. Bush announced that he was nominating Thomas to replace the retiring Justice Thurgood Marshall. After the president made his announcement, Thomas spoke a few graceful, grateful words:
As a child I could not dare dream that I would ever see the Supreme Court, not to mention be nominated to it. Indeed, my most vivid childhood memory of a Supreme Court was the "Impeach Earl Warren" signs which lined Highway 17 near Savannah. I didn't quite understand who this Earl Warren fellow was, but I knew he was in some kind of trouble.
I thank all of those who have helped me along the way and who helped me to this point and this moment in my life, especially my grandparents, my mother, and the nuns, all of whom were adamant that I grow up to make something of myself. I also thank my wonderful wife and my wonderful son.
In my view, only in America could this have been possible. I look forward to the confirmation process and an opportunity to be of service once again to my country and to be an example to those who are where I was and to show them that, indeed, there is hope.
It was unusual — and, to my mind, deeply moving — to hear a nominee to one of the highest positions in American life make a point of thanking "the nuns" who had so profoundly shaped his view of himself and the world. Years later, in his memoir My Grandfather's Son , Thomas wrote about St. Benedict the Moor Grammar School and about the Franciscan sisters, mostly Irish immigrants, who taught, inspired, and disciplined him and the other children in his classes. "The sisters . . . taught us that God made all men equal, that blacks were inherently equal to whites, and that segregation was morally wrong." For promoting that view, Thomas wrote, white bigots tarred the sisters with an ugly racial slur.
 Some of Clarence Thomas's liberal foes attacked him for being in an interracial marriage. |
Decades later, the prospect of a conservative, religious black jurist joining the Supreme Court triggered a lot of ugly slurs against Thomas — not from white bigots, but from black liberals.
No sooner was Thomas nominated than Harvard law professor Derrick Bell pronounced it "an insult to place a man on the court who looks black and thinks white." Chicago Sun-Times columnist Carl Rowan told a TV interviewer: "If you gave Clarence Thomas a little flour on his face, you'd think you had David Duke talking."
Much of the fury aimed at Thomas was triggered by his originalist legal views, but some of his defamers went after him for having married a white woman . "Here's a man who's going to decide crucial issues for the country and he has already said no to blacks," wrote Barbara Reynolds in her USA Today column. "He has already said if he can't paint himself white, he'll think white and marry a white woman." The Washington Post quoted similarly poisonous remarks from other black scholars, including Ronald Walters, the chairman of Howard University's political science department:
"White conservatives are [Thomas's] ideological bedfellows, and his white conservative wife is literally his bedfellow."
For anyone who thinks that the left's insistence on racializing political disagreement is a recent phenomenon, it is eye-opening to look back at the coverage of Thomas's nomination. Right from the outset, so many of those who opposed his constitutional philosophy and approach to the law insisted on reaching for demeaning racial put-downs.
All of the race-based insults and libels I've just quoted were from the very earliest days of Thomas's confirmation process. But the racial hostility from the left for the man who is only the second black justice to sit on the Supreme Court has never really let up. During MSNBC's Election Day coverage last November, the network's prominent host/commentator Joy Reid casually smeared Thomas as "Uncle Clarence" — an obvious and disgraceful allusion to "Uncle Tom," the slanderous label applied to a servile black man.
In doing so, wrote Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley, Reid joined
a long list of liberal black elites — journalists, activists, academics, politicians — attacking Justice Thomas as a sellout for having the audacity to disagree with them on racial issues generally and on affirmative action in particular. Testifying against Justice Thomas's confirmation in 1991, Rep. Major Owens likened him to Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian military officer who collaborated with the Nazis. On PBS in 1994, the political commentator Julianne Malveaux remarked: "I hope his wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter and he dies early, like many black men do, of heart disease."
The press often presents the views of black elites as representative of the views of most blacks. In fact, Justice Thomas was always more popular with average black people than the media led us to believe. Most blacks backed his nomination to the Supreme Court, both before and after Anita Hill's allegations of inappropriate sexual talk. "Polls consistently revealed that the majority of the black populace supported Thomas's nomination and that the lower the income level, the greater the support," according to the veteran grassroots activist Robert Woodson. "At the same time, Clarence Thomas's greatest antagonists were leaders of the civil rights establishment who viewed his positions as a threat to their agenda of race-based grievances."
Justice Thomas has long argued that racial preferences not only stigmatize black achievement but are far more likely to help those who were already better off rather than the black underclass in whose name these policies are advocated. When the likes of Joy Reid knock him for this view, they are acting in their own self-interest, not in the interest of most black people.
In November 1996, the liberal magazine Emerge depicted "Uncle Thomas" on its cover as a "Lawn Jockey for the Far Right ." Inside, across a two-page spread, was an image of a grinning Thomas gleefully shining the shoes of his fellow conservative justice, the late Antonin Scalia. The accompanying article quoted retired federal Judge A. Leon Higginbotham Jr., one of the first black judges named to US Court of Appeals, who described Thomas as being in the grip of "a level of racial self-hatred that is clinically observable."
Yet in the 1960s, Thomas had been a militant black nationalist who memorized the speeches of Malcolm X and was active in the Black Power movement . Were those the views he brought to the Supreme Court 30 years ago, it's safe to say he would have been treated as a hero on the left and that insulting him in racial terms would be a career-ending offense. But over time, Thomas became a conservative, so no one who attacks him has to fear being "canceled."
In elite liberal circles, Thomas is reviled, but I find him even more impressive now than I did on that summer day in 1991 when I heard him give thanks to the nuns whose teaching so profoundly shaped his heart and mind. Thirty years later, Thomas is firmly established as one of the most influential conservatives in the history of American jurisprudence. As long as he remains on the court, the bitter barbs and casual smears from the left are likely to continue. Then again, so is his impact. Not a bad tradeoff.
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Last Line
"Right ho, Jeeves."
"Very good, sir." — P. G. Wodehouse, Right Ho, Jeeves (1934)
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(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).
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