Introduction
Having finished our section in this series on the influential ministers leading up to the Founding and the Revolutionary War, we will now turn our attention to the Founders themselves, beginning with Jefferson. This, I have found, is where it all starts to come together because students of this portion of history can see the influences of the various ministers previously discussed in the writings of the men who came together to represent the various colonies in the Founding. The material is incredibly relevant even today, and I think that readers will be surprised at how much of what history textbooks teach is inaccurate, incomplete, or outright false.
We are beginning with Jefferson first because he is one of my personal favorites among the Founders and second because he is one of the two Founders about whom the most misinformation and outright lies have been spread. His life has, due to a series of unfortunate issues that we will look at briefly this week, provided those seeking to twist his image with key material needed to do so effectively. Unfortunately, his writings and that of his fellow countrymen provide a very different picture of Jefferson than these ill-intentioned slanderers intended. And yes, I mean slanderers because some of them have set out intentionally to destroy the image of this man knowing full well that the overwhelming majority of reliable primary sources do not support their lies. That is slander.
So what are the lies about Jefferson? Let’s dive right in!
Lie #1: Thomas Jefferson was not a Christian
This is commonly promulgated in public schools. Ask any public schooler if the Founders were Christians, and they’ll tell you they were all deists (using the modern definition, by the way, not the definition it had during the Revolutionary War era) or else firm atheists. The Bible and Christianity had no bearing on any of our Founding documents, according to these individuals, and the Founders did not intend to preserve Christian morals or principles within the Supreme law of the land (our Constitution). Some of the blame for this can be laid on Zinn and the 1619 Project, both of which paint an abysmal picture of the character of our Founders on multiple counts. The 1619 Project in particular seeks to paint them as a bunch of rich men who were only interested in preserving their rights–no else’s, and certainly not those of any black men and women–and were a group of horrid bigots who cared nothing for anything but their own advantage. The only thing this demonstrates is their refusal to return to the actual writings of these men for a more accurate understanding of anything related to our Founding.
I will take everyone through a more in depth discussion of Jefferson’s political and religious stances in our next article, but to debunk this claim, let us review a few key notes that Jefferson discusses and involves himself with in his autobiography.
In reference to the Boston port bill and what to do about it, Jefferson states, “The lead in the House, on these subjects, being no longer left to the old members, Mr. Henry, R.H Lee, Fr. L. Lee, three or four other members, whom I do not recollect, and myself, agreeing that we must boldly take an unequivocal stand in the line with Massachusetts, determined to meet and consult on the proper measures, in the council-chamber, for the benefit of the library in that room. We were under conviction of the necessity of arousing our people from the lethargy into which they had fallen, as to passing events; and thought that the appointment of a day of general fasting and prayer would be most likely to call up and alarm their attention. No example of such a solemnity had existed since the days of our distresses in the war of ’55, since which a new generation had grown up.” Jefferson discusses how they went about getting their resolution out and then notes that it was “for a day of fasting, humiliation [humility or humbling of one’s self before God, in this case], and prayer, to implore Heaven to avert from us the evils of civil war, to inspire us with firmness in support of our rights, and to turn the heart of the King and Parliament to moderation and justice” (Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson, excerpted from Modern Library’s The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, pgs. 8-9, emphasis mine.)
From Jefferson’s initial draft of the Declaration of Independence: “When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
“We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness” (Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson, 22).
Notice why Jefferson says that men are all created equal and with inherent, inalienable rights. Because they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights and because the Creator created them that way. Furthermore, note that he states that the new political entity would assume separate and equal station as the laws of nature and nature’s God allowed and entitled them.
These were Jefferson’s own words. He includes it in his autobiography and the version he includes was noted by Jefferson himself with what Congress removed or added. These two paragraphs, with the exception of replacing “inherent and inalienable” with “certain inalienable rights”, is all Jefferson’s own wording and statements prior to Congress’s seeing it or approving it. This from a man who is not a Christian or religious? Apparently, whoever came up with our first lie hadn’t read anything Jefferson wrote or else chose to entirely ignore it.
Lie #2: Jefferson Was the Father of Sally Hemings’ Children
With this one, it’s a little less clear cut than the first. The DNA testing that was done was actually not conclusive. What it could prove for certain was that one of the Jefferson males alive during the years Hemmings was having children had in fact fathered at least one of Hemmings’ children. But it could not prove that it was Thomas Jefferson. In fact, as David Barton points out in his book The Jefferson Lies, “
In 1998 the journal Science released the results of a DNA investigation into whether Jefferson had fathered any children through his slave Sally Hemings, specifically her first child, Thomas, or her fifth child, Eston.1 In conjunction with its announcement, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Professor Joseph Ellis wrote an accompanying article in the journal Nature announcing that the question was now settled – that DNA testing had conclusively proved that Thomas Jefferson had indeed fathered a Hemings child, thus scientifically affirming a two-centuries-old rumor. … However, only eight weeks after the initial blockbuster DNA story was issued, it was pulled and rewritten, quietly and without fanfare, with the scientific researcher who had conducted the DNA test acknowledging that the test actually had not proven that Jefferson fathered any children with Hemings.15 It turned out that the results had been dramatically overstated: there were twenty-six Jefferson males living in the area, of whom ten might have been the father of a Hemings child, and Thomas was only one possibility. But the admission of the misportrayed DNA testing results did not make the same splash in the national headlines, for it aided no agenda. Doing justice to Jefferson’s reputation was not deemed in and of itself to be a worthy national consideration, so the retraction story was generally buried or ignored” (Barton, David, The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson, Kindle Edition, Location 1102-1108 and 1141-1151).
The ellipses here indicate a removed portion in which Barton discusses why it is that the retraction story was ignored or buried, linking it to President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial and quoting the initial article’s writer as well as several others on how the news of Jefferson’s DNA and Hemings’ children was useful to the Clinton support movement. If you want to know more about the lies told about Jefferson, Barton’s book is an excellent resource as Barton thoroughly documents all of the claims and takes the time to discuss the source material proving the claims to be false. This is just one example of the evidence he presents to show that Jefferson was not in fact the things people often said he was.
Lie #3: Jefferson Was A Racist Who Supported Slavery
This lie requires unpacking two separate claims: first, that Jefferson was a racist and second, that he supported slavery. We’ll start with the easier one to debunk, which is that he supported slavery.
First on the list of evidence that he did not is this portion from his autobiography and the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, which was removed by Congress due to offense taken by Georgia and South Carolina (but not by Virginia, interestingly enough, which we will later be examining in this section): “He [King George III] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and 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 hither. 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 and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this excrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting thos very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another” (Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson, pgs. 15-16).
Yes, Jefferson himself wrote that! He was vehemently opposed to the slave trade, believed it violated the rights of people (thus admitting that he saw them as people, not as property or animals), and that it was disgusting that the King (who claimed to be Christian) should encourage it and refuse to allow it to be ended. Jefferson was disgusted by the practice.
This is further evidenced by what he wrote while in the legislative body of his state. He writes in his autobiography, “The first establishment in Virginia which became permanent was made in 1607. I have found no mention of negroes in the colony until about 1650. The first brought here as slaves were by a Dutch ship; after which the English commenced the trade, and continued it until the revolutionary war. That suspended ipso facto, their further importation for the present, and the business of the war pressing constantly on the legislature, the subject was not acted on finally until the year ’78, when I brought in a bill to prevent their further importation. This passed without opposition, and stopped the increase of the evil by importation, leaving to future efforts its final eradication (Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson, pg 40).
Clearly, Jefferson had no love for the institution of slavery. But what about the fact that he owned slaves? Here, we must understand where Jefferson obtained them. So outspoken a man on the evils of slavery as we have seen him to show himself by his own words must have had reason that he had slaves, yes? It would defy reason, of which Jefferson was a fierce advocate, to declare otherwise. So what were the reasons? First, Jefferson’s own slaves were passed on to him with the estate his father handed to him. Then, when he married, he obtained more slaves through the dowry of his wife, Martha Wayles. Unfortunately, the death of his father-in-law not only deeded to him his father-in-law’s holdings but also all of the debt. The portion of her father’s debt that Martha–and Jefferson by extension–owed was considerable. Barton states that “part of Jefferson’s cash shortage was due to his lifestyle as a large landowner, but there were other factors as well. For example, his wife, Martha, inherited a sizeable debt on the death of her father John Wayles in 1773. Her portion of the debt was 3,749 pounds, or more than half-a-million dollars in today’s money.” And a further interesting note from Barton on Jefferson’s debt problem was this: “Jefferson’s economic hardship was further exacerbated by his practice, unlike other slave owners, of paying his slaves for the vegetables they raised, meat obtained while hunting and fishing, and for extra tasks performed outside of regular working hours. He even offered a revolutionary profit sharing plan for the products his enslaved artisans produced in their shops” (Barton, The Jefferson Lies, Kindle Edition). Not a man who viewed slave-holding in the traditional way, certainly.
So why didn’t Jefferson free all of his slaves? This is where we go back to Virginia. Despite their silence on Jefferson’s original paragraph lambasting the British King for his part in bringing slavery to the colonies in a whole new, unheard of way, and despite their original passage of Jefferson’s proposed bill to stop slave importation, Virginia’s laws on freeing slaves were some of the most restrictive in the fledgling nation. In summing up his section on the lies about Jefferson and slavery, Barton states, “In short, Jefferson was required to operate under numerous oppressive state laws. As he once lamented to an abolitionist friend, ‘[t]he laws do not permit us to turn them loose.’ But even though he did not have the economic resources that would allow him to free his slaves under Virginia law, Jefferson was nevertheless a local, national, and even a global voice advocating emancipation. He helped slowly turn the culture in a direction that would allow equal civil rights to eventually be secured for all Americans regardless of race” (Barton, The Jefferson Lies, Kindle Edition).
To read more on the Virginia laws at the time, see volumes 1 and 9-13 from Hening’s Statutes at Large. The sections are broken up into page numbers and sub-sections for easier reading, but for those interested in finding out more about what laws surrounded slaves, you should look to the actual headers within the sub-sections. For example, volume 10, section titled “Acts of Assembly May 1779, Chap. XXXIX to LV“, page 115 has a header stating “An act for the manumission of a certain Slave“. The section contains a legal precedent of sorts set for the emancipation of a slave in the event that he or she has rendered some substantial service to the State and then directs for the payment of 1000 pounds to the specific slave this section deals with. The sections and chapters themselves are not long, so I would highly encourage readers to go browse through them for a better understanding of what abolitionists in these sorts of states were up against. There was a mountain of legalities to get through in order to even emancipate one slave.
For our purposes here, these laws serve to show why it was that Jefferson couldn’t free all of his slaves however much he wished to. He did not have the finances required to do it, and even had he the money, it may have been seriously irresponsible since Virginia law allowed creditors to seize emancipated slaves to pay off a debt the owner who freed them owed but couldn’t pay. This meant the slaves who had been freed lived in fear of being re-enslaved for the remainder of the life of their previous owner (and the settling of any debts he owed on death). A horrible thing to live knowing, for certain, and since Jefferson passed with a sizeable debt still in his name, freeing his slaves might have done nothing but pass them along to a master who would not have treated them as humanely as Jefferson did. You can be assured few if any other masters would have paid them anything for the work they did or provided them with the sort of decent life that Jefferson strove to provide for them.
So as much as Jefferson hated slavery as an institution, his responsibilities to those under his care, which included a large number of inherited slaves, dictated that if he could not pay of his debts and legally free them, he could not free them at all and was, in fact, doing better by them to keep them on and provide housing and clothing in exchange for the labor they did as well as, rightfully so, paying them what he could for everything that went beyond the normal work any other employee might have performed for monetary gain without any provided housing or clothing. This doesn’t make the sad realities of slavery any more acceptable, naturally, but it does mean that Jefferson cared for those he had much better than most masters and fought to bring about the changes needed to free them. He did not see this hope realized in his lifetime, sadly, but while he would have been saddened at the war we had to fight over the issue, I think his writings and character reveal a man who would be proud of the way we strove to live up to those valiant words he penned in the Declaration of Independence and the equality of rights and opportunity that he wished for all men to have.
On the topic of racism, we have a bit of a harder task. I think we have proven, in our preceding discussion, that whatever form of racist we could label Jefferson, we certainly could not say he believed that enslaved blacks were less than people! He viewed them as equally deserving of natural rights as any other people, and he said so. He wanted them freed and given those rights. This was certainly more than most at the time would have said, though most of the Founding Fathers did actually agree with his sentiment despite disagreements on how to go about emancipation.
However, one significant help in this area is a letter written from him to a freed slave, Benjamin Banneker, and the corresponding letter in which he enclosed both a personal letter and Banneker’s almanac to Marquess de Condorcet. We will take a look at an excerpt from his letter to Condorcet here because it succinctly explains Jefferson’s views and reservations regarding the blacks, whom he admitted in his writings he had observed only in the degraded state of slavery for the most part. He writes to Condorcet, “I shall be delighted to see these instances of moral eminence so multiplied as to prove that the want of talents observed in them is merely the effect of their degraded condition, and not proceeding from any difference in the structure of the parts on which intellect depends” (From Thomas Jefferson to Condorcet, 30 August 1791).
Here, Jefferson reveals both his hope that the lack of talent he has observed in those blacks he knew personally was not in fact due to any intellectual deficit but was instead related to the enslaved state they were kept in. His letter and tone reveal an excitement over reading such a well-composed piece from a freed black author and his hope that there will be many more examples like it to show that the blacks were equal to the whites. He wanted this. It was a hope of his, despite the reality that to that point he had only ever seen examples that would encourage him to believe it impossible.
In today’s terms, we might well deem that racist. But in his day, when most simply took it as fact that the enslaved blacks weren’t as smart, useful, or good as their white counterparts (let alone the whites of higher society), Jefferson’s hopes on this front were revolutionary and shocking. He has to admit that he in the small minority in other letters he wrote, particularly when writing to a minister in his acquaintance. He reassures the minister that slavery is an institution he strongly believes will be corrected in the southern colonies, though with difficulty because, unlike the North, the South had engrained it into their very legal system, making it much harder to eradicate.
For Jefferson to express this hope and to delight in an example that he hoped would be only one of many to prove the hope out, and for him to doubt the prevailing claims that the African slaves were less intelligent than whites in the first place, was surprising and displeasing to most of those in charge in the Southern colonies. In the proper context of history, I think it would be fair to say that Jefferson was far from as racist as people claim. He was conflicted about whether or not blacks had the same mental capacity as whites, yes, but he was conflicted because he hadn’t seen any evidence to the contrary, though despite lack of evidence he retained hope that it might be proven that the claim was false.
When he saw some evidence that it might very well be false, Jefferson was ecstatic and was quick to send that evidence (Banneker’s almanac from 1793) to his friend in France with an excited recommendation and a sincere wish that this would only be the first of many wonderful examples of the intelligence possessed by those in the African community when provided with the opportunities to learn that enslavement had denied them.
I think, then, it is fair to denounce claims that he was a racist on the grounds that he was trying to make up his mind with very little evidence to disprove a prevailing claim and a belief that he could not fully pass judgment on it without seeing the group of people in an un-enslaved state and with the provision of an education equal to their white counterparts.
Lie #4: Jefferson Wrote His Own Bible
I will explain this in brief here since in my next article I will discuss what Jefferson actually did in more length and, if I am able to find the full texts for these works of his, provide you as my readers with the links to go read Jefferson’s “Bibles” if you please. Yes, Bibles plural.
In actuality, the Jefferson “Bible” could refer to one of two works, neither of which were Bibles. The first, which was published by Jefferson during his lifetime, was a collection of verses in English intended for the use of recently converted Indian Christians who needed some place to start on understanding the teachings of Jesus. There were actually two different versions of this work, but only the second has survived, so we do not have any way to read the initial one, though lists of verses Jefferson was considering for inclusion in these two works did survive. The book was solely devoted to Jesus’s teachings, morals, and life, and it was not intended to be a Bible, which was clear in the title Jefferson gave the work: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. No mention of its being a Bible anywhere in the title, I’m afraid. Sorry to disappoint the critics there.
I’m about to disappoint a second time… The second work that could be referred to when someone mentions the famous Jefferson “Bible” is Jefferson’s own personal collection of verses. So far as I know, this did not have a title. It was a small book in which Jefferson had pasted various verses from the Bible in multiple languages. Some of his relatives recalled later that they had seen him studying from it every night before bed. The book looks somewhat like modern day collections of verses that some Christians may make to look at as reminders of verses that provided comfort, were helpful in some way, or might have made them think. We do this all of the time in the Christian community. Jefferson just took it a step further by including a few other languages, perhaps to help keep his reading abilities of those languages fresh or simply for his own enjoyment since he was at least reading-proficient in them.
So there was no actual Jefferson Bible. Only compilations of verses from Scripture that Jefferson found meaningful and important for his audience, whether the Indians or himself for nightly studies. The second so-called Bible wasn’t even published until after his death, when it was discovered among his papers and published by a descendant or family member at some point.
Conclusion
I hope that you have found this introduction to Jefferson interesting. We began here with the major lies told about him because I do not believe readers who have been taught these things can come honestly to a study of Jefferson or his accomplishments without understanding these first. It is imperative that we start by setting the record straight according to the historical narrative presented by Jefferson’s own writings, the laws of the time, and what other individuals wrote. There is much more information to be had regarding the various lies told about Jefferson. If you prefer not to go digging through all of the primary sources or are unsure where to start on the research in the primary source records, Barton’s book The Jefferson Lies is an excellent place to begin. The book is not terribly long, but it is packed full of details, quotes from primary sources (and the footnotes to tell you the titles so you can go read the whole source yourself if you wish to find a copy online or in a library), and a discussion of the objections made to the book (since he experienced considerable opposition from non-historians who were scholars but had no expertise whatever in the subject matter, and they gained a great deal of traction that resulted in the initial publisher pulling Barton’s books from the shelves with no attempt to alert him to this or to determine the validity of the accusations). He does a beautiful job of laying out the evidence against the claims made in attack on Jefferson’s character, and I highly recommend it as a starting point.
I have also included below the resources I used here in addition to Barton’s book. All but Barton’s book and the Modern Library collection of Jefferson’s writings are online resources that you can read through without paying anything to do so. I would urge you to do this in order to settle in your mind the true record regarding this Founding Father, whom Frederick Douglass would later frequently quote and point back to as an example of what this country was really all about and the importance of equal rights for all men of all colors.
Our history books do not tell us the whole story and frequently fail to tell us even a partial truth about the story. If we want to know the truth, we will have to start going back to the primary sources, the historical context of these individuals’ lives, and the historical record prior to the muddying that modern historians have done with it in order to fit it to one agenda or another. If we do not, we cannot have a clear and defensible picture of what America was founded on or what she was intended to stand for.
In the next article, we will explore some of Jefferson’s accomplishments and who his writings reveal him to be. I think you will be surprised that there is far more to Jefferson than most of us were ever told. I know that I have been surprised and delighted at many points as I have been reading through his autobiography. While he is one of my personal heroes because of his emphasis on clarity, reason, and natural rights of all men, I have not, until recently, had in my hands a work that contained his own words about his life and countless letters he wrote during his lifetime. I have been learning so much more from these about the man behind the legend than I ever did in reading even reliable biographies regarding him. I think this will be the experience of many of my readers as well, and I hope that I can provide the beginnings of that surprise and delight at discovering that he was much different and, though still a flawed human being, a much better man than modern history frequently gives him credit for being.
Resources
Barton, D., 2016. Jefferson lies. 2nd ed. Washington, D.C.: Wnd Books. Kindle Edition.
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