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July 4 - July 9, 2022
Nonetheless, one could argue that Jefferson himself preferred Aesopian, not descriptive history, as his fondness for the Roman writer Tacitus shows.
“Tacitus I consider as the first writer in the world without a single exception. His book is a compound of history and morality of which we have no other example.”
It constitutes, perhaps, the distinction between panegyric and history.”
Overall, history should not be Aesopian. It should neither be normative nor be based on innuendo or fiction.
prosaisms.
First, history is not a matter of construction, which implies whim not evidence, but of evidence-driven reconstruction.
Canons of rationality are applicable to historians’ research. Without such canons, historians might just as well write poetry.
Jefferson considered blacks intellectually and physically, but not morally, inferior to nonblacks.
Bringing together the two notions—that of history being a matter of construction and that of holding past figures accountable to current mores and standards—we arrive at something outlandish.
The real Jefferson must be forever inaccessible because he is accessible only through the lens of modern-day culture.
what is inaccessible cannot be held accountable to evaluation and condemnation—especially of the moral sort.
either scenario is the best we can do, then there is no reason, other than intellectual masturbation, to pursue history.
History is construction is a construction and, thus, need
be taken seriously. What, then, is the motivation to write history, when one can grab a pint of cheap scotch, a pocketful of bad cigars, and go fishin’? There is none.
In both instances, we find evidence of an agenda-driven movement. It is not that the cause of advance of human rights is a poor motive, but to sacrifice truth to do so is a colossal risk.
a realist and not a Rortian, I am inclined to believe that human rights are best advanced by adherence to truth, not fabulation—a very Jeffersonian point. Without truth, whose vision of which rights uniquely and categorically belong to humans are we to adopt? I suppose it will come down to trickery and coercion, but that is just what Jefferson fought so long and hard all of his life to eradicate from governing.
paralogism.
crapulous
by judging Jefferson by the norms of his day—which is what historians ought to be doing—is itself a cover for Burstein's own racism.
Thus, “I advance it…as a suspicion only, that the blacks…are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.”
and a scientific attitude is not consistent with racism, since racism is judgment based on prejudice and not on an unbiased examination of facts.
Scholarly work by historians is supposed to stay at the descriptive level. Epithets such as racism are value judgments, often unceremoniously ascribed
They are more passionate than whites in sex, but less tender. In the main, they are more sensual and less reflective than whites. They are equal in memory to whites, inferior in reasoning, and “dull, tasteless, and anomalous” in imagination. They are the equals of whites in moral discernment.
Ascription of intellectual and physical deficiencies notwithstanding, Jefferson considers blacks the moral equals of whites—a point missed by nearly all scholars, historian
a letter to Henri Grégoire, bishop in the Roman Catholic Church and advocate of racial equality (February 25, 1809), he adds:
Intellectual superiority, he goes on to say, grants no one any rights that the intellectually inferior do not have, otherwise Newton would have been lord over all others.
Jefferson is guilty not of racism, but of hasty and biased induction—and that is not an anachronistic claim.
has an intellectualist's, not a humanist's, approach to slavery. Yet that is merely Jefferson being Jefferson.
My second reason for rejection of the claim Jefferson was racist concerns racism itself. The difficulties with the word are three. First, it has pejorative emotive content that obscures its cognitive meaning. Second, it is an evaluative (i.e., normative) term and history is not a normative discipline. Finally, it is anachronistic.
It is not the job of a biographical historian to evaluate through passing moral judgment on a personage. It was a staple of Stoic ethical thinking, which Jefferson integrated, to avoid judgments of others that went beyond what was readily observable.
Moreover, labeling Jefferson racist would implicate others, such as Benjamin Franklin, who was a slave trader as a young man, but who founded the first school for blacks in 1758 in Philadelphia and served as president of his regional abolition society.
The difficulty is noted by law professor David Mayer, who maintains that much of revisionist history is a result of presentism—the tendency to evaluate the past by the standards of the present, to commit what I call the fallacy of historical anachronism.35 Presentism is an obstacle to historical understanding.
The essence of virtue is in doing good to others.
Intentionality, I take myself to have shown, factors importantly into right moral judgment as much as outcome.
Panaetian
“Virtue does not consist in the act we do, but in the end it is to effect. If it is to effect the happiness of him to whom it is directed, it is virtuous.”
For Jefferson, it is the key notion of moral refinement that is wanting from African blacks. They are as equipped by nature with a moral sense as are whites, but it is an unrefined, brutish sense because they are culturally retarded. That does not make blacks morally lax. It is just that their moral sense is conditioned to more primitive social conditions.
That explains his love of neology in languages,
There is still much grit in the oil.
blacks’ prejudices, blacks’ recollection of injuries, and natural differences.
Jefferson's belief that black inferiority is likely natural also explains the paternalistic manner in which he often speaks of blacks. “To give liberty to, or rather, to abandon persons whose habits have been formed in slavery,” he writes to physician Edward Bancroft (January 26, 1789), “is like abandoning children.”
Albemarle native Edward Coles (August 25, 1814), who manumitted his slaves in 1819: My opinion has ever been that, until more can be done for them, we should endeavor, with those whom fortune has thrown on our hands, to feed and clothe them well, protect them from all ill usage, require such reasonable labor only as is performed voluntarily by freemen, & be led by no repugnancies to abdicate them, and our duties to them. The laws do not permit us to turn them loose, if that were for their good: and to commute them for other property is to commit them to those whose usage of them we cannot
...more
Jefferson lived by several maxims, one of which was that everything had its right season or right time. Farming is an outstanding example. Crops needed to be planted and reaped at the right times, as each crop had its own critical period.
Reason led him astray, not moral sensibility. He reasoned that if he should pick up the wounded soldier, all other wounded soldiers would wish to be picked up, and that was impossible. Jefferson drove off, only to be hounded by his moral sense, which told him he had acted immorally. Jefferson turned back the wagon, only to find that the soldier had gone.
Jefferson lived an inordinately, almost pathologically structured life62 centered on kairos.
Jefferson famously summarizes his frustration in a letter to politician John Holmes (April 22, 1820): “The cessation of that kind of property [slavery], for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle which would not cost me a second thought, if…a general emancipation and ex-patriation could be effected, and gradually and with due sacrifices, I think it might be. We have the wolf by the ears: and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”
Jefferson knew that the time was not right (Greek, ou kairos) for the abolition of the institution of slavery, and so he resigned himself to the notion that his remaining years would be best spent pursuing something that could be seen to completion—namely, the creation of the University of Virginia.
Jefferson, who was then eighty-two years of age, excuses himself because of his years. “The abolition of the evil is not impossible; it ought never therefore to be despaired of. Every plan should be adopted, every experiment tried, which may be something towards the ultimate object.”
The present generation has the same right of self-government which the past one has exercised for itself.” Slavery was no longer his concern, but that of the next generation.
consistent with his notion that “the earth belongs in usufruct to the living,”
