Reason vs Slavery. Slavery won round 1

[BaalChatzaf]

If America was the product of reason (which it was, in part) why was it cursed with slavery from 1787 to 1865, and that curse purged by a war which cost 620,000 lives. Jefferson knew slavery was wrong. Most of the Founders also knew there was no reasonable defense of this peculiar institution, yet it remained and was embedded by law in the Constitution of 1787. Every State was required to recognize slaves as property whether they permitted slavery or not and to return any "property" that escaped its owner.

The sin and disgrace of slavery was a stain, a blotch, a defect. Jefferson noted that his Deist God was Just and eventually Justice would prevail. He knew it in his bones, but he did not free a single slave while he lived.

Here is what Jefferson said in 1785:

THOMAS JEFFERSON, a denunciation of slavery, 1785

The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it…The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances … if a slave can have a country in this world, it must be any other in preference to that in which he is to be born to live and labor for another … or entail his own miserable condition on the endless generations proceeding from him … Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.

Words from the man who wrote:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

How much life and liberty did Jefferson's slaves have?

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Selene]

Ba'al:

Great men can be very complex, very inconsistent, very strong and very weak.

He was a human being.

Adam

[sbeaulieu]

Last week, I watched a presentation on the History Channel about Jefferson.

While caught up as a slave owner (quite an extensive list that was willed to him), my guess is that his intent was to put forth language that would eventually evaporate slavery. That is, make the place better than you found it. Shame it took 16 Presidents to get it right.

~ Shane

[9thdoctor]

If America was the product of reason (which it was, in part) why was it cursed with slavery

Do you want to play a contrafactual history game? Strictly for the sake of argument (it’s unprovable), if the founders hadn’t compromised, they wouldn’t have won the revolution. Then imagine if the revolution came later, in response to Wilberforce’s crusade against slavery. Then the colonies become independent, with slavery much more deeply entrenched institutionally. Forget it, it happened the way it happened.

The founders never voted to start having slavery. They already had it and had to deal with it. A deal with the devil, more or less.