Was Thomas Jefferson a racist

Answer 1

Thomas Jefferson was a brilliant man, yet was complicated and ideologically contradictory. Throughout his life and time in office, he often made key decisions that did not follow what was expected of him - often times doing the exact opposite. He was a champion of the yeoman farmer and a strict constructionist of the Constitution. However, there is nothing in the Constitution about, for example, giving the president the power to purchase an entire chunk of land, the Louisiana Territory. This is an example of how Jefferson, and indispensable figure in American history would rescind his own traditional values.

The issue of race and slavery was no different: at one end we see a slaveholder, and at the other, we see a man who had an intimate relationship with one of his slaves. One question that can be raised from Jefferson's Declaration of Independence is how he could have written that all men are created equal and cannot be denied life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (property), when he himself owned slaves that were clearly thought of and treated as unequal. As was stated earlier, Jefferson was indeed a brilliant man, and he was no doubt aware of the contradiction of "all men created equal" coexisting with slavery.

In fact, an early draft of the Declaration of Independence included a paragraph devoted to slavery. It stopped just short of accusing George III of creating the slave trade. The accusation was ridiculous - immigration to the Americas first and foremost had to do with economic success. Though slavery was not extensively utilized in early colonization, indentured servants (and slaves later on) would be the factor in individual success. Again, Jefferson and the co-writers of the Declaration were aware of its fallacy, and the paragraph was removed.

However, the paragraph on slavery that was composed by Jefferson still has a lot to say about him personally. Jefferson felt the need to justify slavery in America, as though it was the malignancy that we know it was today. He felt in necessary to state slavery as something to be blamed on someone, while others thought blame shouldn't be associated with slavery - it was natural.

So was Jefferson a racist? By today's standards, just owning a slave would be indicative of racism. But is this true even in the Eighteenth Century? Remember that true abolitionist movements were not popularized until the early to mid Nineteenth Century, and Jefferson surely wouldn't have won his presidential election on a platform on abolition. This is a complicated issue stemming from a complicated person in American history.