Substituting someone who was president for a literal peasant in terms of culpability is peak lib
like, the whole point of the original is that the peasant doesn't fucking have the option of simply refusing to participate in the system that is oppressing them!
Jefferson enslaved 6 of his children, he's an absolute monster. The cognitive dissonance around the founding fathers is insane
right, some Founders werent too grotesque, yet they went for Jefferson. just fucking baffling.
Paine, Burr, Franklin, Laurens, most of the cool proto-socialist dudes upstairs from Jefferson et al in the radical assemblies of the Provincial Conference (who forced the signing of the declaration of Independence by voting for Pennsylvania to unilaterally declare independence.)
That said, Jefferson was probably in the upper third of founders morally simply for rising to the position of hypocrite. Most of the southern founders were absolute unrepentant monsters.
Paine is, i think, the only one who you can really say was good without asterisks
skimming his wikipedia and saying fuck yeah every three lines
Jefferson blocking imports does nothing to reduce slavery as an institution
Not when the prohibition is so comically ill-enforced that NYC is a national hub for human trafficking fifty years later. Certainly not with The Fugitive Slave Act permits an open season on Freedmen native to the states and territories.
Had this strictly been a power play to consolidate control over the human chattel marketplace, it may have undermined slavery as a trade. But it seems that Jefferson only consolidated power within his office. He did comically little to deter actual slave traffic.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_Prohibiting_Importation_of_Slaves
Federal Law passed in 1807
how tf are we supposed to interpret it then :brow:
Incrementalist nonsense. Sure he enslaved hundreds, but he was part of the movement to change it since he wrote letters about his guilt! This is essentially what they teach in schools
you say Jefferson was BAD for owning slaves but he was sad about owning them!!!!!!
He kept six hundred human beings in bondage. Raped an underage one, had six kids with her, then kept her and them as slaves. First time in a while I've been genuinely offended by a post on the internet.
under no circumstances do you "gotta hand it to" the child rapist
thomas jefferson worship is so fucking :centrist:
and he was not in fact a genius if you 'set aside' his OWNING PEOPLE as people in these discussions want you to do. he wasn't a Big Enlightenment Guy because he enforced religious freedom, the US literally had to have it or the fuckers would've immediately started murdering each other. he wanted Small Federal Government, which from a post ww2 perspective sounds okay, but Jeff wanted a federal gov that basically didn't exist. it's hard to even compliment the anti-army sentiment when that was de facto a preference for state-based militaries instead of a federally organized one.
and he was not in fact a genius
He was the Elon Musk / Jeff Bezos of his era. Just a phenomenally wealthy politician who commanded legions of blinkered wanna-bes.
I've had my q anon boomer dad try to plead with me before the forefathers absolutely wanted to do away with slavery and planned to do it and every excuse under the sun to justifywhy those dudes were totally chill and good. Anyways, that poster reminds me of him
History must have sucked so much in American schools. Propa aside you guys all five way too much of a shit about founding fathers and shit like that. Canadian history was English people fight french people and massacre natives, the English mostly came out on top, now here we are. They teach other crap but they know it's mind numbingly boring and no one is really expected to know it
You have no idea. Through 13 years of school including a couple AP courses + a few college courses, I never ONCE learned even a little bit about the history of Latin America outside of the Mexican-American War, history of sub-saharan Africa, or East or Southern Asia other than WWII and Vietnam. I had one teacher in high school that felt history was too western focused so we did spend a week or so learning about Islam. However he also made us watch a docudrama about Golda Meir so....
Imagine being a Hamilton fan AND a Jefferson fan. Like repping both Hitler and Churchill.
