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Harry Binswanger (Tj '61)
I think the motivation behind the anti-Jeffersonians is very bad. They are against Jefferson because he moved the world AWAY from slavery.
A person's historical significance lies not in the ideas and practices that were common in his time but rather in what was distinctive about him, what he introduced that was new and different .Slave ownership was, unfortunately, common in the 18th century. In fact, the acceptance of slavery is the default condition of mankind: it takes the development of civilization and of certain political-ethical ideas in order to grasp the dignity of, then the inalienable rights of, other human beings.
Jefferson's distinctive role was to advance this movement toward freedom. His historical meaning was not that he, llike so many others, owned slaves but the he championed and gave inspiring expression to John Locke's revolutionary conception: the inalienable rights of the individual.
He gave voice to this radical new vision of universal freedom. That's the actual reason he is loathed by those who seek state control over everything.
As to Jefferson's own views on the enslavement of blacks, here is what he wrote in his first draft of the Declaration, as one of the charges against George III [emphasis and punctuation taken from the original]:
"he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very ppeople to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus payng off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another"
From: The Declaration of Independence by Carl L. Becker.
We should be fiercely proud of being graduates of a high school named in honor of this great champion of liberty.
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