Canceling Thomas Jefferson

National Review Online

Friday, August 26, 2022

 

Wait until they hear about Queen Elizabeth I.

 

The editorial board of the University of Virginia student newspaper — there is a reason “sophomoric” is a term of opprobrium — has decided that Thomas Jefferson’s name and likeness must be stripped from the university, writing: “Our physical environment—from statues to building names to Jefferson’s overwhelming presence—exalts people who held the same beliefs as the repugnant white supremacists in attendance at the ‘Unite the Right’ rally.”

 

Of course, that isn’t quite true.

 

Jefferson’s views on slavery and racial relations were, like much of the rest of Jefferson’s thinking, all over the map. “Commerce between master and slave is despotism,” he famously wrote. “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free.” And then he continued: “Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.” Jefferson was wrong about a great many things — he was not wrong about slavery’s being a “hideous blot” on the new republic. Jefferson’s tortured 18th-century romantic liberalism had many deficiencies, but it had practically nothing in common with the thinking, such as it is, of the addled nihilistic morons who fly swastika flags and march around with tiki torches. That the students of the University of Virginia have not availed themselves of the opportunity to learn about this is to their discredit rather than Jefferson’s.

 

A New Jersey school board similarly proposes to take Jefferson’s name off an elementary school. New Jersey was founded by slavers, and the state’s name is a tribute to the royalist slave trader Sir George Carteret of Jersey. New Jersey was the last northern state to abolish slavery, and Trenton is named for a slave trader. Thomas Jefferson is the least of the Garden State’s problems.

 

When the first Europeans landed in the Americas in 1492, slavery was present, and generally accepted, in practically every corner of the world: Moors and Spaniards held slaves, Englishmen and Frenchmen held slaves, Arabs and Africans traded slaves, slavery had been enshrined in Chinese law for centuries, Aztec slave traders enjoyed vast fortunes and special social privileges, the Pawnee and the Tlingit practiced slavery with all the usual brutality. Though it may be awkward to admit it at UVA, Virginia itself is named in honor of a prolific slave trader, Queen Elizabeth I of England. Slavery was a factor in Texas’s joining the Union. Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Cleopatra — none thought twice about the legitimacy of slavery. (And Genghis Khan had been a slave for a decade.) Jefferson was unusual in his clear-eyed understanding of the despotism and tyranny inherent in slavery, though he failed personally to implement that understanding in his personal life at all or adequately in his political life.

 

There are those who probably would go along with the ridiculous notion of renaming Virginia — and Columbus, and every Jefferson County in the country (there are more than two dozen of them), Baltimore, Washington . . . — but this is not restorative justice: It is only vandalism.

 

Millions of men have owned slaves over the years — one of them wrote the Declaration of Independence.

 

And that, of course, is what this really is all about. The Left’s culture-war politics has nothing to do with slavery or slave traders: You don’t hear very many American progressives complaining about the College of William and Mary or Napoleon, N.D. The target is the Founding Fathers — and, through them, the Founding itself, and its ideals.

 

The American people, like every people, has its corporate sins — and slavery is prominent among them. Penance is necessary, a fact expressed perhaps better than anyone else by Thomas Jefferson: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.” But redecorating the lawn at UVA is not going to change the fact that Thomas Jefferson — if we may be so bold as to remind the excruciatingly enlightened teenagers at UVA — founded the university. More important was his role in founding the United States, an act that did more for liberty and human flourishing than any other single political act in human history so far. Jefferson’s greatness does not erase Jefferson’s sins — but neither is that greatness erased by those sins.

 

To the kids at the Cavalier Daily: Grow up and maybe think about developing some humility and some gratitude. And if at UVA you learn to write a sentence half as good as one of Thomas Jefferson’s, then you should add that to the list of blessings that you owe, directly or indirectly, to that flawed and complicated man.