What went wrong? In truth, the project was flawed from the start. Even as they were demanding independence from Britain, the colonists were busy snatching land from the Native Americans, an act of theft that, although it concerned Jefferson, he couldn’t help but see from a Lockean perspective. He was similarly blind to the other flagrant injustice towards ‘others’, slavery. A slave owner himself, he did move to end the international slave trade in 1808, yet failed to ban the practice outright, and even brought his favourite domestic slaves from Monticello to the White House. All men are born
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