National Review Online
Thursday, October 21, 2021
After more than a century, the New York City Council
is removing a statue of Thomas Jefferson from its chamber. The decision, which
was made by the New York City Public Design Commission, was unanimous.
It was wrong, too.
Justifying the move, Councilperson Adrienne Adams
proposed that Jefferson had to go because he “embodied some of the most
shameful parts of our country’s long and nuanced history.” But, ironically
enough, it is precisely “nuanced history” that is missing from this analysis.
Like many people, Jefferson could, indeed, be hypocritical and
self-contradictory. Like many people from his region, he did, indeed, own
slaves (and, unlike George Washington, he did not free them upon his death).
And, like many people of his generation, he possessed some unpleasant private
views. But it is not for any of that that we celebrate him. We celebrate him
because he authored the Declaration of Independence — a magisterial
document, which, both at home and abroad, has served as a beacon of hope and
liberty throughout that “long” history to which Adrienne Adams refers.
This matters, for, as Princeton’s Sean Wilentz told the
commission in a letter, the statue in question “specifically honors Jefferson
for” his role in penning the Declaration, which Wilentz describes as “his
greatest contribution to America, indeed, to humankind.” Jefferson deserves to
be honored for that contribution, which has served, in the words of Abraham
Lincoln, as “an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times,” as “the
definitions and axioms of free society,” and as “a rebuke and a stumbling-block
to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.” It is no
accident that 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. Taken in full, his is indeed a “nuanced” legacy,
and yet there is no getting past the fact that among the achievements of his
long public career were the elimination of the transatlantic slave trade to the
United States; the creation of a free Midwest, which flowed from his proposal
in 1784 to ban slavery in all the territories west of the Appalachians; and the
provision of the moral ammunition that a later generation would use to stamp
out slavery on the theory that “all men are created equal.”
To paraphrase John Adams, a free republic will be one of
ideas, not of men. In this case, though, it is extremely difficult to separate
them. Thomas Jefferson has stood at the New York City Council since 1915 not as
a memorial to the Democratic-Republican party, or to Virginia, or to his
two-term presidency, but as a tribute to the remarkable, world-changing ideas
that he laid out in July of 1776. Those who have orchestrated his unceremonious
removal ought to be careful, lest, in a fit of Jacobin pique, they tear down
his self-evident truths into the bargain.
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