>You lost me there so far as Jefferson is concerned, Jim. The Lord of
>Monticello got a good working over here on the list a year ago, when I
>proposed that the Jefferson Memorial be bulldozed as an utterly
>ill-conceived monument to one of the greatest hypocrites of history. I was
>accused at that time of being a 20th century provincial -- or words to that
>effect -- for imposing contemporary views of racial relations on the 18th
>century. I do not accept that criticism. Jefferson's own troubled
>reflections about the vengeance that a "just God" could visit on slaveholder
>(I can't recall his exact words) surely suggests that, at some level,
>Jefferson himself realized he was full of it.
Carl Remick condemns Jefferson, hold the front page. (he always spoke so well of you)
When the United States freed itself from British Rule that change set in train the social revolution that made liberalism, socialism and the abolition of slavery possible.
It is a want of historical imagination on your part to imagine that American independence was some incidental of history. Without it, France would still be an absolute monarchy, the slaveocracy would rule on behalf of Britain in the US, and the abolition movement in England would never have been born.
More to the point, in his political life, he pushed America towards the democratic standpoint from which the abolition of slavery became a possibility. He represented not the estate-owning classes, but the small homesteads of the Virginia Uplands, religious non-conformists who resented the plantation owners. His agrarian democracy is an amplification of that social position. If he was flawed, then the truth is that the times were flawed, and he failed to transcend them. -- Jim heartfield