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We shouldn't generally care what long dead people wanted. At least for anything but historical analysis. But you needn't leave this sub-forum to find a thread dedicated to interpreting the writings of a single long dead person.
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May 21, 2014 01:22
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Sucrose posted:The most reprehensible thing I find about Thomas Jefferson, apart from him raping that slave woman, is how his views got progressively more pro-slavery as he got older, inherited more slaves, and sank deeper into debt because of his own extravagant spending. Like, he could rail against the evils of slavery when he was young, but once he started benefiting more personally from the fruits of slave labor, suddenly it was no longer as evil. Makes me dislike him even more than I think I would had he been a diehard slavery defender his whole life. Oh, and people like to defend Jefferson by calling him "a product of his time." gently caress that. Jefferson lived in an age where abolition was more talked about than ever, and where some of his fellow Founding Fathers freed their slaves, and three of them even became involved in abolitionist societies. Jefferson really had absolutely no excuse. There's an exchange of letters between Jefferson and his former protege Edward Cole in 1814 that I find particularly illustrative. Cole had already put his money where his mouth was and freed his slaves, and set them up with some of his own land, and had written TJ basically telling him it was time to put up or shut up. In response, TJ basically claims that he's too old to really do anything about slavery, the newer generation will have to solve the problem and anyway the Haitian revolution* has shown how dangerous it can be to let them have too much freedom too quickly. *It's hard to overstate just how badly Haiti scared the poo poo out of Jefferson. He does a total 180 on his position about the French aristocracy, which in his romantic love of the French Revolution he had previously despised, to seeing those who fled Haiti as poor dispossessed refugees worthy of pity and succor.
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May 21, 2014 02:05
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Kaal posted:When he comes out swinging against gay rights, the Voting Rights Act, women's rights, etc., he certainly doesn't seem too bothered about re-defining words. SedanChair posted:It's weirdly rare, you would think that more historians would be interested in the Jefferson as Villain approach. Because I mean is there a better arch-villain in history than supergenius Thomas Jefferson? He was basically Mirror Doc Savage. P.S. Jefferson was basically the architect of the Indian Removal Act, including its precursor of establishing trade with them mainly to drive them into debt and then use that debt to pry them off of their land. OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 02:39 on May 21, 2014 |
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May 21, 2014 02:18
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Captain_Maclaine posted:*It's hard to overstate just how badly Haiti scared the poo poo out of Jefferson. He does a total 180 on his position about the French aristocracy, which in his romantic love of the French Revolution he had previously despised, to seeing those who fled Haiti as poor dispossessed refugees worthy of pity and succor. "What you readin' 'bout marse? Whoop, didn' mean ta sneak up on you like that, looks like you done messed yourself again. I get the sponge 'n bucket."
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May 21, 2014 02:20
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SedanChair posted:"What you readin' 'bout marse? Whoop, didn' mean ta sneak up on you like that, looks like you done messed yourself again. I get the sponge 'n bucket." Thanks for this tasteful post.
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May 21, 2014 03:46
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:I would like to know where I can read more on "Jefferson is lovely" instead of Kens Burnsian hero worship. Here's some good poo poo. Jefferson ran a nail factory that funded much of Monticello. He ordered children who didn't want to work in it to be whipped and sold down the river. "En terrorem" he called it, as a warning to other boys to work in the factory. Some of them were his sons.
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May 21, 2014 04:08
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Rand alPaul posted:Here's some good poo poo. While TJ was pretty awful in a lot of ways, Master of the Mountain and its author came in for some well deserved flak from the Jefferson scholars out there. Not due to the facts in question, but to the motives and substance read into them. Read The Hemmingses Of Monticello by Annette Gordon Reed or anything by Peter Onuf for a better and more well rounded (but still appropriately critical) perspective on Jefferson, slavery, natonalism, and the Early Republic. Do not read Dumas Malone. That said, Wiencek's OTHER book, on George Washington and slavery, An Imperfect God is better researched, written, and more thoughtful and thorough than his book on Jefferson cited in the Smithsonian article. Also, I'd recommend Kaminski's A Neccessary Evil? for an overview of slavery's role at the Constitutional Convention, though it does border on being a little too apologetic at times. That said, when it comes to the framers and the founding generation, while slavery is a central force and idea which must be reckoned with, it's not all there is to the picture of how American politicians and political thinkers in the Early Republic and earlier tackled difficult questions about the role, extent, and powers of the government and its constituent elements. Max Edling's amazing A Revolution In Favor of Government, for example, really beings a lot to bear on more theoretic-political science questions than on slavery and is well worth a read. BrotherAdso fucked around with this message at 04:24 on May 21, 2014 |
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May 21, 2014 04:15
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I wouldn't consider Jefferson particularly evil for his time. A lot of the founding fathers owned slaves and people who owned slaves were big on loving them. He's not some special case. it's more that his other qualities were quite remarkable and the slave poo poo really is in sharp contrast to that. I don't excuse him, but I think it's important to remember the men and institutions that founded the country for what they were. The earnest set out to create a progressive, effective government, and succeeded. But they built it around their worldview and practical realities, which are pretty different from us.
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May 21, 2014 04:16
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BrotherAdso posted:While TJ was pretty awful in a lot of ways, Master of the Mountain and its author came in for some well deserved flak from the Jefferson scholars out there. Not due to the facts in question, but to the motives and substance read into them. Ah, I did not know that. Haven't been in a history department in almost four years now 
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May 21, 2014 04:25
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Last Buffalo posted:I wouldn't consider Jefferson particularly evil for his time. A lot of the founding fathers owned slaves and people who owned slaves were big on loving them. He's not some special case. it's more that his other qualities were quite remarkable and the slave poo poo really is in sharp contrast to that. Yes, the slaveowning founding fathers, and all slave owners were some of the wickedest men who ever lived. That must have been your point, right?
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May 21, 2014 04:30
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BUSH 2112 posted:Like I always do in threads like this, I would highly suggest watching the documentary series The Living Dead by Adam Curtis. Here's the first episode. The second episode is crazy too, but it's really the first ("On the Desperate Edge of Now", about the psychological component of Nazism and WWII) and the third episode ("The Attic", about Margaret Thatcher) that illustrate the kind of power that people can gain from exploiting the past. Watermelon City fucked around with this message at 05:06 on May 21, 2014 |
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May 21, 2014 05:04
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Ur-fascism is useless for understanding it.
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May 21, 2014 05:19
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Last Buffalo posted:I wouldn't consider Jefferson particularly evil for his time. A lot of the founding fathers owned slaves and people who owned slaves were big on loving them. He's not some special case. it's more that his other qualities were quite remarkable and the slave poo poo really is in sharp contrast to that. I addressed this upthread. Yes, many of the other founding fathers owned slaves. But some of them freed those slaves. I don't give George Washington a lot of slack, he owned slaves his entire life, but he at least did slightly better than Jefferson by freeing them upon his death, and not selling or buying any more slaves after the 1770s. Jefferson couldn't even do that, wouldn't even free them after he would no longer derive any benefit from them. Oh, and of other founding fathers, Franklin and John Jay freed their slaves (during their lifetimes), Hamilton never owned slaves, and those three were active in anti-slavery societies. Jefferson probably lived during a Southern political climate that was more open to the idea of abolition than at any other time before the civil war, and he continued to own slaves, treat them brutally, and even, as has been mentioned upthread, tried to dissuade men of his exact same region and social class from from freeing their own slaves. There's no real excuse for him. Yes, Jefferson does and should get a lot of credit for the separation of church and state stuff, but he was an awful person.
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May 21, 2014 05:26
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SedanChair posted:Yes, the slaveowning founding fathers, and all slave owners were some of the wickedest men who ever lived. That must have been your point, right? American chattel slavery is certainly one of the most wicked institutions that ever lived. But the people who participated in it were not mustache twirling villains. In fact, a lot of them saw themselves as good people, and some of them even did important, good things. Jefferson and his class were blind to a whole section of the country they created, and chronically abused them en mass. However, they fought for a number of progressive values and certainly were important for creating some of the more important parts of America. This doesn't absolve them of the bad things they did, but I wouldn't call Jefferson one of the most wicked men who ever lived. If you want to talk about the founding fathers, you have to take them as a whole. They weren't supermen, but they weren't Hitler either. Granted, most of the books ever written about the founding fathers focus only on the good stuff. However, you're not going to understand their world, or the present one they had a hand in making, if you write them off as evil and bad. They're America's heritage, for better or worse.
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May 21, 2014 05:33
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Sucrose posted:
I wouldn't say he's a good person, I just don't think you need to write off his work because of it. Calling someone who was born and raised in a slaveholding society and kept holding slaves an awful person doesn't mean much. It's a calming black and white way to look at history, but it doesn't help you understand anything better and doesn't help otherwise. Founding myths are dumb, i guess 
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May 21, 2014 05:41
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Last Buffalo posted:I wouldn't say he's a good person, I just don't think you need to write off his work because of it. It's not like society at the time were lockstep behind slavery, it was one of the defining issues on what to do about it for the entire antebellum period of American history. Sucrose posted:I addressed this upthread. Yes, many of the other founding fathers owned slaves. But some of them freed those slaves. I don't give George Washington a lot of slack, he owned slaves his entire life, but he at least did slightly better than Jefferson by freeing them upon his death, and not selling or buying any more slaves after the 1770s. Jefferson couldn't even do that, wouldn't even free them after he would no longer derive any benefit from them. Oh, and of other founding fathers, Franklin and John Jay freed their slaves (during their lifetimes), Hamilton never owned slaves, and those three were active in anti-slavery societies. Jefferson probably lived during a Southern political climate that was more open to the idea of abolition than at any other time before the civil war, and he continued to own slaves, treat them brutally, and even, as has been mentioned upthread, tried to dissuade men of his exact same region and social class from from freeing their own slaves. There's no real excuse for him. Besides, if everyone had just listened to Hamilton from the get go it probably would have saved America a good hundred plus years of clumsily pawing towards our modern system.
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May 21, 2014 05:54
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Sucrose posted:There's no real excuse for him. Is Aspergers an excuse?
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May 21, 2014 05:59
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Last Buffalo posted:American chattel slavery is certainly one of the most wicked institutions that ever lived. But the people who participated in it were not mustache twirling villains. In fact, a lot of them saw themselves as good people, and some of them even did important, good things. Jefferson and his class were blind to a whole section of the country they created, and chronically abused them en mass. However, they fought for a number of progressive values and certainly were important for creating some of the more important parts of America. This doesn't absolve them of the bad things they did, but I wouldn't call Jefferson one of the most wicked men who ever lived. Even Hitler built the Autobahn. Plenty of Nazis saw themselves as good people. Godwin has his place, but I don't see why it's ridiculous on its face to say that chattel slavery ranks with the Holocaust and its proponents were personally the height of evil.
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May 21, 2014 06:03
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SedanChair posted:Even Hitler built the Autobahn. Plenty of Nazis saw themselves as good people. Godwin has his place, but I don't see why it's ridiculous on its face to say that chattel slavery ranks with the Holocaust and its proponents were personally the height of evil. Not even that, Jefferson being the architect of Indian Removal pretty much ranks him as up there one of the grand villains in the scheme of North American history. Or put another way, guess what was one of the inspirations for Generalplan Ost? 
Berke Negri fucked around with this message at 06:17 on May 21, 2014 |
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May 21, 2014 06:13
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How would you teach a class on Jefferson and the slave-owning founding fathers? I think ignoring the issue of slavery would be criminal, but so would saying they're as bad as Hitler. Dude wrote good stuff, did some good things, also was a lovely dude to lots of people. The world is complex.
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May 21, 2014 06:30
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Last Buffalo posted:Dude wrote good stuff, did some good things, also was a lovely dude to lots of people. The world is complex. Yeah, you're sure diving into the complexity there 
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May 21, 2014 06:38
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Ok, by how would you prefer the biography of Jefferson read? He was a vile manic, a saint, a monster? What would you describe him as? The sad fact is that America was built by slavery and genocide for a long time. We're still not great about treating people as they should be treated, but thing have changed, even improved over the past 400 years, and if you want to account for why, you have to include Jefferson in that to a degree. Not that you shouldn't bring up the stuff he did that held us back.
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May 21, 2014 06:48
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Last Buffalo posted:How would you teach a class on Jefferson and the slave-owning founding fathers? I think ignoring the issue of slavery would be criminal, but so would saying they're as bad as Hitler. I would say that the largest issue with this, and with a lot of other historical monsters, is that in a certain analysis you can probably say that literally every human being save a few enlightened boddhisattva types (and perhaps even they) before some time in the 20th century was a horrible monster, no exceptions - they were complicit even if they weren't directly involved. I don't think this is a useful perspective for considering historical matters. For one thing it tends to imply that we're somehow much more virtuous in this present day, which may be true in aggregate through slow accretion (chattel slavery exists only in some limited areas; homosexual rights are on the rise; women's rights are recognized far more widely than they were outside of a few cultures pre-20th century) but does not mean we are at the End of History, with only the upward-treading path ahead of us. For another, and this is totally a higher-order curriculum goal, I don't think that orienting any sort of educational activity towards inducing disgust and horror is a good idea, outside of very narrow situations such as denazification or whatever. This does not mean you support the awful things they did, but you have to actually look at them and their context - which can explain, if not excuse, various evil acts. (To be clear by "explain" I mean "describe and consider the economic, cultural, etc. factors that led to A Horrible Thing," not "justify.") Last Buffalo posted:Ok, by how would you prefer the biography of Jefferson read? He was a vile manic, a saint, a monster? What would you describe him as? Nessus fucked around with this message at 07:08 on May 21, 2014 |
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May 21, 2014 07:02
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asdf32 posted:We shouldn't generally care what long dead people wanted. At least for anything but historical analysis. I didn't know we had a thread about Reagan.
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May 21, 2014 08:54
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Last Buffalo posted:How would you teach a class on Jefferson and the slave-owning founding fathers? I think ignoring the issue of slavery would be criminal, but so would saying they're as bad as Hitler. Having taught a class on the early republic and other courses about democratic principles in modern politics and relating the Framers and the Constitution to modern civil society, I can address this. I am not a university professor and teach high school, but it's at a very high level - higher than any I taught at when I was a teaching assistant or community college adjunct. You have a series of scaffolded goals to teach such a difficult course. The first is a basic understanding of the chronology, material circumstances, and key decisions of the period to give students a series of rich reference points in common and a broad (if not always deep) context of events from about 1754 - 1824. For example, if I were focusing on Jefferson, we'd need to look at everything from his birth circumstance, the timing of is participation in the events of the revolution, his specific struggles with debt, the chronology of his travels to France and runs for President, and so on. The second is an investigation of the social, ideological, and economic systems which prevailed as broad networks structuring the lives and consciousness of the people who lived at the time. This allows students to analyze the motives and beliefs of historical actors and individuals in several ways: as elements of larger systems of ideologies, as individual functions of the position and needs/desires of those actors, and as original or innovative thought. For example, if I were focusing on Jefferson, we'd need to look at (among other things) the educational system at William and Mary, the economic problems and functions of the plantation agriculture of the late 18th century, the social expectations and norms of planter aristocracts in the South in the late 18th century, the philosophical ideas in the 'republic of letters,' and prevailing and changing practices and ideas about race and slavery and how they changed over the period. The third is an analytic blending of the first two to reach conclusions about the nature of historical decisions and actors. Applying the knowledge of social, ideological, and economic systems to knowledge of specific events, decisions, and circumstances yields a richer picture than any of the above. This leads to the fourth, which is creating rich and complex moral and historical frameworks and judgements about the people and period. This is for historians much more than jurists, though. We can't (and shouldn't) expect jurists to also be professional historians with broad, deep, sophisticated understanding of the Early Republic (and Reconstruction, too, etc). This is why a framer-centric or framing-period-centric method of interpreting the Constitution will almost always fail or be problematic as hell. At most, a few of the "big ideas" from the Early Republic about legal and social equality, balances of power between government institutions, and so on should be strong elements in Constitutional interpretation. BrotherAdso fucked around with this message at 12:49 on May 21, 2014 |
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May 21, 2014 12:10
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Last Buffalo posted:Ok, by how would you prefer the biography of Jefferson read? He was a vile manic, a saint, a monster? What would you describe him as? You're really invested in saying "things aren't perfect but they're getting better" for some reason. What the hell does that have to do with Jefferson or the rest of the founders? Are you trying to say they get credit for this gradual improvement somehow? In any case, I think your main problem is that you feel like it's necessary to put Hitler in some special category of inhuman evil. Like Jefferson, he was just a man, a product of his time, a part of a larger structure, etc. But he was an evil poo poo personally, and maybe Jefferson was moreso than Hitler, because he enslaved his own kids.
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May 21, 2014 14:03
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SedanChair posted:Like Jefferson, he was just a man, a product of his time, a part of a larger structure, etc. But he was an evil poo poo personally, and maybe Jefferson was moreso than Hitler, because he enslaved his own kids. Way to blow your load early, dude.
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May 21, 2014 15:11
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Captain_Maclaine posted:Way to blow your load early, dude. The point that it doesn't make sense to put Hitler into some completely different category from other historical figures who committed or were complicit in various atrocities is completely valid, though.
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May 21, 2014 18:05
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Not really. All slave owners who had children with their slaves and didn't free them are not equal to someone who intentionally killed some 20 millim people with the intention of killing some 20 millim more. Sorry, but I find a fundamental difference in the values of the individual as well as the consequences of the actions. Going off what I've read, Jefferson had a lovely worldview where blacks, even his kids, were not seen as people to him and, though he treated them with a certain paternal duty, they were seen as property. However, he did not want to kill them, or work them to death, and clearly had some conflicting thoughts on how to deal with the institution of slavery. Hitler, however, had no deep conflicts that we know about when it came to murdering millions. There's a difference, and if you ignore that then you're going to get a dumb reading of history.
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May 21, 2014 19:40
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Last Buffalo posted:Not really. All slave owners who had children with their slaves and didn't free them are not equal to someone who intentionally killed some 20 millim people with the intention of killing some 20 millim more. Sorry, but I find a fundamental difference in the values of the individual as well as the consequences of the actions. Going off what I've read, Jefferson had a lovely worldview where blacks, even his kids, were not seen as people to him and, though he treated them with a certain paternal duty, they were seen as property. However, he did not want to kill them, or work them to death, and clearly had some conflicting thoughts on how to deal with the institution of slavery. Hitler, however, had no deep conflicts that we know about when it came to murdering millions. If we're going off of numbers, millions may have died on the middle passage. And does anguish and inner conflict really count for anything? If you end up committing monstrous acts but make like you felt lovely about it, you're just a hypocritical monster instead of a consistent one. But you're not a very deep thinker. I see your brain running into your high school history lessons over and over again.
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May 21, 2014 19:57
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Nonsensical Hitler equivalencies is probably the stupidest direction that this thread could have taken. Thanks for that SedanChair.
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May 21, 2014 20:03
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Kaal posted:Nonsensical Hitler equivalencies is probably the stupidest direction that this thread could have taken. Thanks for that SedanChair. Take your internet debate preconceptions and stick 'em somewhere, because we're talking about a group of men who engineered the rape of multiple continents and the people therein. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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May 21, 2014 20:11
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SedanChair posted:If we're going off of numbers, millions may have died on the middle passage. And does anguish and inner conflict really count for anything? If you end up committing monstrous acts but make like you felt lovely about it, you're just a hypocritical monster instead of a consistent one. Deep thinking = "everyone is as bad as hitler"?
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May 21, 2014 21:20
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Install Windows posted:Ur-fascism is useless for understanding it.
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May 21, 2014 21:20
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Watermelon City posted:I disagree, obviously. Every one of Eco's 14 features of Ur-Fascism is a canny description of the political movements coalescing around Founding Fathers worship. No they aren't, furthermore Eco himself cautioned against assuming everything vaguely similar should be called it. The point of the essay was not "literally everything in history was one step from being ur-fascist".
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May 21, 2014 21:24
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In an attempt to re-rail the thread, I have a related question. Modern American government and society has outright rejected a lot of what the founding fathers preferred. Probably the biggest thing that comes to mind is white supremacy. Many, if not most of the Founding Fathers were clear racists who believed in the superiority of white Christians in society. Were there any founding fathers who especially rejected not just slavery, but racism in their time? Some people, like Benjamin Franklin and the Boston types, were much more opposed to the institution of slavery as a system. However, were there many who were explicitly not what we'd characterize today as white supremacists?
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May 21, 2014 21:47
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Last Buffalo posted:Not really. All slave owners who had children with their slaves and didn't free them are not equal to someone who intentionally killed some 20 millim people with the intention of killing some 20 millim more. Sorry, but I find a fundamental difference in the values of the individual as well as the consequences of the actions. Going off what I've read, Jefferson had a lovely worldview where blacks, even his kids, were not seen as people to him and, though he treated them with a certain paternal duty, they were seen as property. However, he did not want to kill them, or work them to death, and clearly had some conflicting thoughts on how to deal with the institution of slavery. Hitler, however, had no deep conflicts that we know about when it came to murdering millions. I had Jefferson's involvement and advocacy for Indian removal in mind just as much as his opinions on slavery or behavior towards his own slaves. And America's treatment of Native Americans absolutely can, and should, be compared with other very large scale atrocities.
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May 21, 2014 21:47
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Jefferson wasn't Hitler, he also isn't a man we should form a cult of personality around. The founding fathers are useful for historical perspective (both positively and negatively) and the only reason to "follow their words" is if you want to wrap yourself in nationalism to get something you want. In order to compare him to Hitler you would have to prove he actually engineered atrocities on that scale, and they aren't there. That said, "small scale" atrocities isn't actually isn't much to talk about either. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 21:59 on May 21, 2014 |
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May 21, 2014 21:57
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Watermelon City posted:I disagree, obviously. Every one of Eco's 14 features of Ur-Fascism is a canny description of the political movements coalescing around Founding Fathers worship. D&D relies on that crappy work far too much.
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May 21, 2014 23:19
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Last Buffalo posted:In an attempt to re-rail the thread, I have a related question. Actually, Jefferson was one of the only or very few we'd consider 'racist' by modern standards. 18th century conceptions of racial difference were not yet made scientific, universal, or even deeply theological the way they would be as the antebellum slave system reached its apogee in the 1820s and 1840s, and as they would be even more with the rise of explicitly systematic, scientific racial thought in the 1880s and onwards. Jefferson, in 'Notes on Virginia,' was one of the first to try to reason out a series of inheret ways and reasons that Africans and African-Americans were inferior and therefore ought to be in some natural or pre-ordained sense in positions of servitude. Even then, the awful stuff in his Query 14 is pretty mild compared to mid- and late-19th century racial treatises, and it doesn't occupy a really central place in his discussion either. 18th century racial hierarchies were complicated by this lack of a universalizable external system of inherent racial difference and superiority. The treatment and status of mulattos, especially mulattos whose fathers were black but whose mothers were white, was a source of great consternation. Free blacks were relatively common and often seen as capable of occupying similar positions in the trades and occupations as free whites - they were given mostly the same legal privelges in many colonies. Other distinctions of property ownership, community membership (especially religious community membership), wealth, social status, lineage, and so on mattered far more than obvious racial difference in skin color. Now that's not to say they weren't racist, it's just that their racial hierarchies and ideas and their reasons for them are nothing like what we'd call today "white supremacism," and didn't really contain logic about things like the purity of the white race and miscegenation, inherent intellectual inferiority or servility of blacks, etc. If you want two or three interesting windows onto this, I would look at Melvin Ely's Israel on the Appomatox, Anthony Parents' Foul Means, and James Sidbury's Ploughshares into Swords. I'm almost done with Henry wienceck's An Imperfect God: George Washington and His Slaves, which is also pretty good, but less deeply academic in tone and style. I cannot recommend strongly enough, though, that if you have even the slightest interest in delving into the question of racial identity and slavery in the Revolution and Early Republic you start with Edmund Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom.
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May 21, 2014 23:45
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