The Memoir of Thomas Jefferson (AmazonClassics Edition)

by Thomas Jefferson

That the question was not whether, by a Declaration of Independence, we should make ourselves what we are not; but whether we should declare a fact which already exists:

The clause too, reprobating the enslaving the inhabitants of Africa, was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who, on the contrary, still wished to continue it.

This testimony from Jefferson that originally the declaration of independenced was to condem slavery.

deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed;

See John Locke.

Reason, justice, and equity never had weight enough on the face of the earth, to govern the councils of men. It is interest alone which does it, and it is interest alone which can be trusted;

Where the preamble declares, that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the words “Jesus Christ,” so that it should read, “a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion;” the insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination.

Multiculturalism

Yet the day is not distant when it must bear and adopt it, or worse will follow. Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate, than that these people are to be free; nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion, have drawn indelible lines of distinction between them. It is still in our power to direct the process of emancipation and deportation, peaceably, and in such slow degree, as that the evil will wear off insensibly,

While Jefferson may have been willing to accept abolition, he was not accepting of assimilation in the vein of Douglass or du Bois or King. Nor for that matter not even Booker Washington's Atlanta Compromise. But be careful of Presentism. Despite any enlightenment he was as much a product of his time as we will be seen 200 years from now. Our offspring will say "What were they thinkng."

The repeal of the laws of entail would prevent the accumulation and perpetuation of wealth, in select families, and preserve the soil of the country from being daily more and more absorbed in mortmain. The abolition of primogeniture, and equal partition of inheritances, removed the feudal and unnatural distinctions which made one member of every family rich, and all the rest poor, substituting equal partition, the best of all Agrarian laws.

Jefferson was not first-born.

and the re-eligibility of the President for life, I quite disapproved.

Term limits was idea from the beginning.

it is not by the consolidation, or concentration of powers, but by their distribution, that good government is effected.

The appeal to the rights of man, which had been made in the United States, was taken up by France, first of the European nations. From her, the spirit has spread over those of the South. The tyrants of the North, have allied indeed against it; but it is irresistible. Their opposition will only multiply its millions of human victims; their own satellites will catch it, and the condition of man through the civilized world, will be finally and greatly ameliorated. This is a wonderful instance of great events, from small causes. So inscrutable is the arrangement of causes and consequences in this world, that a two-penny duty on tea, unjustly imposed, in a sequestered part of it, changes the condition of all its inhabitants.

The Boston Tea Party was the real "shot heard 'round the world" in Jefferson's mind.

here, I cannot leave this great and good country, without expressing my sense of its pre-eminence of character, among the nations of the earth. A more benevolent people I have never known, nor greater warmth and devotedness in their select friendships. Their kindness and accommodation to strangers, is unparalleled, and the hospitality of Paris is beyond any thing I had conceived to be practicable in a large city. Their eminence, too, in science, the communicative dispositions of their scientific men, the politeness of the general manners, the ease and vivacity of their conversation, give a charm to their society, to be found nowhere else.

France is the great second democracy.

Tuckahoe

Unrelated reference, but interesting note. Tuckahoe would be the birthplace of Frederick Douglass years later.

Declaratory Charter of our rights, and of the rights of man.

The declaration Of Independence. Is a charter of the death gets of man.