This year I am teaching American Literature to 11th graders. Personally, I’m not a fan of the textbook. For being an American Literature textbook, there are quite a few really famous and influential American authors that hardly get mentioned. No William Faulkner, no Flannery O’Connor, only one obscure short story from Hemingway, absolutely nothing from colonial times…you get the picture. Instead of that, there are quite a few more “historical texts” that, in my opinion, fit better in a history class: The Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution, etc.
Needless to say, I wasn’t really that keen on reading the Declaration of Independence in my class. Of course, it is hugely important—it just isn’t really a “fun read,” if you know what I mean. Nevertheless, we took last week to read and analyze it. After we went through it, I thought it would be interesting to give them a copy of Jefferson’s original draft and then have the class discuss why certain things were changed.
Now, most of the edits came down to wording. The original draft, like all rough drafts, tended to be a bit wordy and cumbersome in places. There were a few interesting changes. For example, Jefferson originally had: “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable.” That got changed to, “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” Why the change? We noted that “sacred” has more “religious” overtones. Therefore, it was very possible that some colonists who weren’t really religious and were more sympathetic to the Enlightenment wouldn’t really have taken to “sacred” because it sounded like more like a religious cause. “Self-evident” probably spread a wider net among the colonists.
The Anti-Slavery Paragraph That Got Cut Out
But the most glaring change had to do with the last grievance Jefferson leveled at King George as for a reason for independence from England. He wrote:
“He [King George] 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 & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium ofinfidelpowers, 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 people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against thelibertiesof one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against thelivesof another.”
It is pretty clear that one of the reasons Jefferson put down as a cause for declaring the colonies’ independence from England is that England was a slave-trading empire. He directly blamed King George for allowing it to continue and for promoting it. Jefferson is crystal clear that he abhorred the slave trade and saw that African slaves brought to America were men who, like Jefferson and his fellow colonists, were “created equal” and thus had those “inalienable rights” of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
I then posed the question to my classes, “Why do you think they decided to leave that entire paragraph out of the Declaration of Independence?” One student sarcastically said, “Probably because they were all racist.” But then someone else pointed out that the northern colonies were against slavery. We pulled out a map of the thirteen colonies and noted that the slave colonies were from Maryland on down, while the northern colonies were against slavery. Again, “Why do you think the Continental Congress choose to leave that paragraph out?”
A light bulb went off for a few students. “The southern colonies wouldn’t have agreed to that, and if they refused to take part in the American Revolution, the other colonies wouldn’t have a chance against England.” Basically, without the southern colonies, the American Revolution wouldn’t have even gotten off the ground, let alone won by the colonies. The northern colonies needed the southern colonies to have a unified front against the most powerful empire in the world at that time.
On top of that, at that time in 1776 there was no indication that slavery was going away anytime soon in England. William Wilberforce, for example, the great abolitionist who eventually brought about the end of the slave trade in the British Empire in 1807, was only 17 years old in 1776. It seemed fairly clear that the reason why the Continental Congress shelved abolition in the colonies 1776 is because they felt they needed to gain their independence from England first, before they could address the issue of the abolition of slavery.
Then There Is Jefferson and Sally Hemmings
But then there was the added oddity regarding Jefferson himself. Even though he clearly abhorred slavery and wanted its abolition, the fact was that he owned slaves! He was from Virginia, a slave-owning colony, and had inherited a plantation with slaves. And, on top of that, he had fathered six children with a slave woman on his plantation, Sally Hemmings.
Incidentally, Jefferson had married Martha Wayles Skelton in 1772, but she died ten years later in 1782. He never married again. Sally Hemmings had accompanied Jefferson and his daughter to France in 1787, and it was during those two years in France that they probably started their relationship. Hemmings was legally free in France. She chose to go back to the United States with Jefferson and be a slave again on the condition that their children would be free when they came of age. When Jefferson died in 1826, Sally Hemmings was given her freedom. In addition, a couple of Jefferson’s and Hemming’s grandchildren ended up fighting for the North in the Civil War.
Grim Irony: England Ended Slavery Before We Did
Then there is the historical irony that England ended up abolishing slavery before the United States did. Wilberforce, by sheer political craftiness, basically snuck a bill through Parliament that effectively ended the slave trade through legal means, without having to fight a war to do it. On top of that, when England did abolish it, they provided plantation owners in the Caribbean something like a 10-year reprieve, to where they could restructure their businesses and business models before they freed their slaves.
The result of all that is that black men in England never experienced the sort of deep-seated racism that took root in America after the Civil War. Simply put, hurray for us being willing to fight a war to end slavery, but the fall out of a failed Reconstruction ended up being another 100 years of institutional racism and Jim Crow laws in the South.
The Complexity of History
What are we to do with all that? I know in recent years there has been growing animosity for men like Jefferson and George Washington because, despite their roles as being Founding Fathers, they had owned slaves. Back in the riots of the summer of 2020, many statues of Jefferson, Washington, and even Abraham Lincoln were defaced or demolished. I even lost an internet friend over this issue. He insisted that Jefferson and other Founding Fathers were horrible men because they didn’t immediately abolish slavery the moment our nation was formed…their statues should be torn down. I pointed out the historical realities of the times and the complexities of history, and for that, he accused me of being “pro-slavery,” which is obviously ridiculous.
Earlier this year, I got involved in a very heated exchange on the Alumni page of one of my graduate schools. The issue was over the British historian Nigel Biggar who argued that history is messy, and that despite the many obvious sins of the British Empire, it still was a tremendous force for good throughout the world. I did a book review of his book and concluded he was right. The reaction to that by some on the Alumni page wasn’t, let’s just say, too kind. Apparently, I’m “an oppressor.”
But the reality is that history really is complex and messy. Yes, as Jefferson clearly saw, slavery was an abomination. But at the same time, that institution had been going on in the colonies for over 150 years, and therefore dismantling it wasn’t an easy task. And sure, I guess you could say he was a hypocrite, but then ask yourself if you are against sweatshops in China. I’m guessing you are. Now look in your closet to see if you own any Nike shoes…or anything made in China! You hate the institution in China that produced much of your stuff, but you buy it anyway. Does that make you a hypocrite? Or does it just mean that you, a single, solitary person, have no power to snap your fingers and do away with sweatshops, and when you go to the store, you’re not thinking of that—dang it, a package of socks at this low price? I need socks! That’s a good price!
The point of this is simply this: History is really, really messy. If you deny it, you’re in danger of being a small-minded and hostile ideologue. When it comes to men like the Founding Fathers, and Jefferson in particular, they were great men who did great things…but they were still human beings with shortcomings and flaws, just like me and you. It’s okay to praise them for what they accomplished. It’s okay to acknowledge their very human flaws and shortcomings. But we shouldn’t let ourselves get caught up in ideologically-driven and broad-brushed condemnations of people living in very different circumstances who were in the middle of wrestling with horrible issues that we no longer have to wrestle with, precisely because they were the ones who got the ball rolling to eventually rectify those horrible issues.
That’s something I learned about Thomas Jefferson and United States History from my own American Literature class having to cover something that should be in a US History textbook.
In my next post, I think I’m going to talk about Alex O’Connor. Do you know who that is?
Hey Joel, interesting article. I wasn’t aware that the first draft of the consitution had a paragraph on slavery. Is it worth it to point out that Jefferson seemingly began his relationship with Sally Hemmings when they were together in Paris and she was 14 years old, and that she was 17 years old when she had her first child with Jefferson?
You may also know: according to wikipedia Jefferson’s father-in-law was also Hemming’s father – meaning that Jefferson’s father-in-law had a child with one of his slaves, kept that child as his slave, and passed his child/slave on as chattel to his daughter, her sister, as her property. She was the third straight generation of women in her family to have a child with a free(white)-man, and she was 3/4 European descent.
Hey Joel, I know you don’t normally like politics, but are you going to talk about Charlie Kirk and the reactions to his death?
Well, I’ve always liked discussing politics, but these days I’m backing off. The Kirk thing is too toxic at the moment. I’ll just say I never followed him that much; probably agreed with him on a lot of things and probably didn’t see eye to eye on some other things. I also know a lot of “progressives” a lot of Christian friends who have developed an utter hatred of Trump also hated Kirk just as much–a lot of “Nazi” and “Fascist” accusations. That saddens me. That kind of rhetoric has been blared continually for the past ten years, and I believe the outright assassinations and assassination attempts over the past year is a direct consequence of that kind of stuff. One can disagree with Trump or Kirk on issues, that’s fine. But the “Nazi” rhetoric has always been over the line. And the applauding or excusing of Kirk’s assassination is heartbreakingly sad and shocking.
He was called a “right wing extremist.” Why? Definitely a Christian and a conservative, but “right wing extremist”? A lot of things that progressives now say is evidence of “right wing extremism” are things like a person didn’t continually wear a mask during Covid, or a person thinks there are two genders, or a person who is against abortion. I think that’s crazy.
In fact, I’ve come to realize that the labels of “right wing extremism” and “Christian nationalist,” and “Fascist” that progressives throw around are almost always a way to attack just run-of-the-mill Evangelical Christian Conservatives. I’m no longer an Evangelical. I became Orthodox almost 20 years ago. I disagree vehemently with the likes of Christian Fundies like Ken Ham on a lot of things, but this demonization of Evangelicalism really upsets me. Of course, there have been bad things and bad actors within Evangelicalism, but most Evangelical Christians I know are wonderful, godly people.
Unfortunately, whether it’s acknowledged or not, the ‘average’ religious individual who is probably harmless is a cover for the extremists among whichever faith they adhere to.