By Dan McLaughlin
Tuesday, November 23, 2021
You can always count on woke progressives to live up
to the worst caricatures of their ideas. Democrats on the New York City Council
have now removed a statue of the founder of the Democratic Party,
Thomas Jefferson, from the City Council chamber in New York City Hall. The
statue has been in City Hall since 1834 (eight years after Jefferson’s death),
when it was erected to celebrate his advocacy of religious liberty. It is a
sign of how proud Democrats are of their decision that they tried to block the
press from witnessing the removal.
This is madness, and it vindicates many on the right —
prominently including Donald Trump — who argued that the campaigns against
Confederate statues were dangerous precisely because the people pushing for the
removals were certain to move next against the Founding Fathers. When Trump
made that argument in 2017, he was met with sneers. In a piece titled “Statues
of Washington, Jefferson Aren’t ‘Next,’ But It’s Complicated, Historians
Say,” Dartunorro Clark of NBC News wrote:
Historians who spoke to NBC News
said such fears are slightly misplaced and that Trump is championing a murky
interpretation of history. . . . “The president can raise the slippery slope,
but it’s a false slippery slope,” said Kevin Levin, a Boston-based historian
who specializes in American Civil War history.
I’ll tell you where it stops.
Somewhere! Any time someone asks, where does it stop, the answer’s always . . .
somewhere. You might let your kid have Twizzlers, but not inject black tar
heroin. You don’t just go, “Well, after the Twizzlers, where does it stop?”
Actually, you do ask that, and this is
why. Whatever Trump understood about history, he understood the madness of mobs
better than Kevin Levin or John Oliver did.
Without rehashing here the whole debate over Confederate
icons — which has been going on for years now and has been vigorously debated on this website,
sometimes by me — the strongest argument for removing some or
all Confederate statutes and monuments is that the Confederate cause was not
just flawed in the way that many great Americans are flawed; it was actively
wrong, and the people who supported it made the country worse, or at any rate
tried to, and thus should never have been memorialized in the first place.
The underlying assumption of this argument is that it is
possible to reasonably and rationally distinguish some historical figures from
others: We can honor those who did good things as well as bad ones, while
dishonoring those who are best known for bad causes. By contrast, a major
argument against tearing down statues and monuments in general is that we end
up not just disfiguring public places and concealing our own history but also
feeding the iconoclasm of mobs who by nature do not reason, and never know when
and how to stop. Few things draw people to Trumpism more than a sense that one
is dealing with people who can never be reasoned with, only opposed at every
turn.
For those of us who still care to reason, however, the
City Council’s move is not just an anti-intellectual assault on historical
memory; it is also moral idiocy. Jefferson should not be canonized, but
building statues is not about sainthood. There is much to dislike in his
personality and his long and eventful career, including his service in New York
City as our first secretary of state. He was hypocritical, devious, and too
easily enamored of radical fads. He lived his whole life off of the labor of
slaves and did not take even George Washington’s belated steps to emancipate
slaves in his will. For that, he must answer to his Maker. But he was also a
monumental contributor to early America — and specifically to many of the
things that almost anyone would see as this country’s virtues. There are good
reasons why Jefferson has a memorial in the capital and his face on Mount
Rushmore, the nickel, and the two-dollar bill, is the namesake of the capital
of Missouri and many other American towns and streets, and was until the past
few years embraced by the Democratic Party as its founding inspiration.
It is a particular sign of the bullheaded ignorance of
the City Council that its case against Jefferson is based entirely on
his personal ownership of slaves and his personal sexual relationship with one
of them, Sally Hemings, rather than anything Jefferson did as a public man.
Americans of past generations who built statues were under no illusion that
they were honoring saints; they were memorializing great accomplishments in the
public sphere. Unlike his namesake Jefferson Davis, we do not have statues to
Jefferson because of his vices, but because of the good he did for his nation.
On the specific issue of slavery, as our editorial noted, Jefferson did quite a lot of good, and
not only because of the pivotal role played by his “all men are created equal”
rhetoric in inspiring later generations. He was a lifelong opponent of the
transatlantic slave trade, perhaps the nation’s most vocal, consistent, and
ultimately successful opponent. In 1776, Jefferson tried to get a denunciation
of the trade into the Declaration of Independence. In 1778, as governor of
Virginia, he signed into law a state ban on importing slaves (a bill he may or may not have
authored). The Constitution forbade the federal government from banning the
slave trade before 1808; as president, Jefferson called on Congress in his 1806
State of the Union message to ban it at the first moment allowed by the
Constitution and “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, & which the morality,
the reputation, & the best interests of our country have long been eager to
proscribe.” He signed that ban into law in 1807. True, the ban on the external
slave trade was in the financial interests of Jefferson and other Virginia
planters, who could sell their slaves internally to the Deep South — as with so
many things, the issue had its trade-offs and moral complexities — but the
fight against the transatlantic slave trade was the central
battlefield of the abolitionist movement during Jefferson’s political career,
he was on the right side of it, and he succeeded in ending America’s
involvement in it.
Jefferson’s record on the domestic expansion of slavery
was mixed but also had genuine and enduring positive influences. In 1784,
Jefferson proposed to the Continental Congress a ban on slavery in all the
territory west of the Appalachians after 1800. His bill, the Territorial
Governance Act, failed by one vote, but Jefferson’s language was included in
the final, narrower Northwest Ordinance passed in 1787, which banned slavery
west of the Appalachians and north of the Ohio River. The Northwest Ordinance
helped create the free states of the Midwest that proved decisive in the
long-term free–slave state balance. Moreover, the language Jefferson used in
1784 was reused by Congress in 1865 for the 13th Amendment. Thus, Jefferson is,
literally, the author of our constitutional ban on slavery.
Jefferson always maintained that slavery was an evil,
even when he was in the mood to excuse it as one that could not practically be
done away with easily. In 1820, during the controversy that led to the Missouri
Compromise, he wrote, “We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither
hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation
in the other.” In 1785, in his Notes on the State of Virginia, he
took a harder look at the pervasive corrupting influence of slavery on the
master class (a prophetic sentiment in light of the decay in the quality of
statesmen produced by Virginia in the generations that followed Jefferson):
There must doubtless be an unhappy
influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery
among us. 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. . . . This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his
cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do. . . . 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 of
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.
With what execration should the
statesman be loaded, who permitting one half the citizens thus to trample on
the rights of the other, transforms those into despots, and these into enemies,
destroys the morals of the one part, and the amor patriae of
the other. For if a slave can have a country in this world, it must be any
other in preference to that in which he is born to live and labour for another:
in which he must lock up the faculties of his nature, contribute as far as
depends on his individual endeavours to the evanishment of the human race, or
entail his own miserable condition on the endless generations proceeding from
him. With the morals of the people, their industry also is destroyed. For in a
warm climate, no man will labour for himself who can make another labour for
him. This is so true, that of the proprietors of slaves a very small proportion
indeed are ever seen to labour.
And can the liberties of a nation
be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in
the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they
are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when
I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever: that
considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel
of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may
become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute
which can take side with us in such a contest.
Jefferson gradually lost the moral courage to do more
about slavery in the nation, in his home state, or in his own household. But he
continued, into his old age, to encourage others to keep alive the anti-slavery
cause. In 1814, he wrote to Edward Coles, urging him to carry on
anti-slavery in Virginia into the next generation: “The love of justice &
the love of country plead equally the cause of these people, and it is a mortal
reproach to us that they should have pleaded it so long in vain.” Coles ended
up moving to Illinois instead, where he played a crucial role as governor in
beating back an effort in 1824 to introduce legal slavery. In 1826, receiving
a letter asking for him to make a public statement
against slavery, Jefferson demurred, but in a response written just six weeks before his death, he
added: “My sentiments have been 40. years before the public . . . altho I shall
not live to see them consummated, they will not die with me. But living or
dying they will ever be in my most fervent prayers.”
There of course is more to the Jefferson record on
slavery and race; there is more even in some of these letters. He shared many
of the racist assumptions of his time. His treatment of Haiti during his
presidency, when it was struggling to throw off French slavery, was deplorable.
The Louisiana Purchase, while a great boon to the nation, also did a lot to
extend the institution of slavery westward. But that, like so much else in
Thomas Jefferson’s career, is why he is worthy of study and critique rather
than expungement from memory.
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