It's a Puzzlement

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....

--Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence (original wording)

The fathers of this republic waged a seven years war for political liberty. Thomas Jefferson taught me that my bondage was, in its essence, worse than ages of that which your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose.

--Frederick Douglass, address in Baltimore, 17 Nov. 1864

I am a first-generation American. Both of my parents were immigrants*, though they came to the US at different times and in very different circumstances. I don't know if it's because my mother found herself in small town America up against anti-immigrant sentiment, or if it was just because my mom believes in throwing herself whole-heartedly into everything she does, but she was always extremely patriotic (she even crocheted an American flag that I believe still hangs in the Ohio Governor's office) and taught me to be, too. I grew up waving the US flag, singing patriotic songs, and basically believing that the Founding Fathers were paragons of virtue and excellence. George Washington never told a lie. Ben Franklin was a genius inventor. Thomas Jefferson believed that all people were equal.

Or did he?

His original version of the Declaration includes a long paragraph about the evils of slavery, calling it "this execrable commerce" and "this assemblage of horrors," but the paragraph was removed by Congress. Our reading from last week, Ronald Takaki's A Different Mirror, says "as a member of the Virginia legislature, he supported an effort for the emancipation of slaves. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, he recommended the gradual abolition of slavery, and in a letter to a friend written in 1788, he wrote: 'You know that nobody wishes more ardently to see an abolition not only of the [African slave] trade but of the condition of slavery."

And yet he himself kept over 200 slaves until his death. He was of the opinion that blacks were inferior to whites. He was dismissive of the accomplishments of Phillis Wheatley and Benjamin Banneker. He quite possibly fathered children by his slave Sally Hemmings (who also happened to be his wife's half-sister).

How could there be such a vast difference between what Jefferson wrote in the Declaration and how he lived his life?

It's a puzzlement.



ADDENDUM: I want to make it clear that I don't think Jefferson's personal views diminish the incredible power of his words. I think he is, after all, only human.

I recently read at the Racialicious blog a post titled "Civil Rights, but Just for Me," in which the author talks about how Ghandi argued that Indians (that is, people from India) should have more rights than Africans because, well, because they're not like *those people*. The author concludes with this paragraph, which I think sums up my feelings really well:

I think, this is also true: it does not matter what Gandhi thought of black people or what Martin Luther King thought of gay people. For all the deification, they are both just men, fallible men–men of a different time and place (Mohandas Gandhi was born in the 19th century, for goodness sake.), men who were just as influenced by the biases of their day as any of us are, men like those who wrote “all men are created equal” and yet owned men, women and children as property. Do we even know whether MLK would have approved of a woman (his daughter or no) as head of the SCLC? His views and treatment of women were not exactly enlightened. That Gandhi did not believe in the inherent equality of all brown people; that King may not have approved of gay marriage–I couldn’t care less.

ADDENDUM #2, FRIDAY MORNING: Um, ok. Re-reading the first addendum, I see that saying "I couldn't care less" makes it sound like I think that it's ok Jefferson kept slaves, etc. In fact, I *don't* think it's ok. What I *do* think is that his words -- his ideas -- are more powerful than his actions were.

He was a flawed human being, as we all are, but we should always strive to uphold his astonishingly crazy and revolutionary idea that "all men are created equal" everyday of our lives.

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*It's actually more complicated than that, as life usually is. My dad was born in the US, but his parents (both naturalized US Citizens) took the family back to the Old Country to settle some family business, then returned to the US when my dad was 7 years old (his younger brother was born in Europe). My dad spoke no English and was faced with the same pressure to assimilate that other Eastern European immigrants in the 1920's faced. So, even though he was born a US Citizen, both by blood and by birth, he was still an immigrant. My mom came to the US from Germany in 1968 and was naturalized in the early 70's. I was born here.

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