So a man who had never fought in a battle and owned slaves thought other people's lives were cheap. Jefferson made significant contributions to both America and the world, but that doesn't mean he never got it wrong.
Jefferson and his contemporaries led a revolution against a country which abolished slavery more quickly than America did, and several of his contemporaries were literally slaveholding bigots. If they never existed slavery may have been abolished sooner, although in our alternate history Britain would be under more pressure to not abolish to keep the southern economy going.
It’s great he said some abolitionist things, but abolitionists had existed and had even successfully abolished slavery since before the birth of Christ. There are people after Jefferson and his contemporaries that actually abolished slavery from then into the present day. I’m not sure why the US founding fathers who came up with shit like the 3/5th’s compromise deserve any special credit.
I would give more credit to the white abolitionists who lived in the 1800s and the slaves themselves.
England abolished slavery after The Revolutionary War. The abolitionist movement started in the US. Black men could vote in Massachusetts in 1780.
Jefferson and others were proven right when it took a war to end slavery in the US. That's what they wanted to avoid. It's uncharitable to blame them for not fighting that war; it would have been their lives on the line. Meanwhile we're sitting in the present, benefitting from that war without the need to die in it.
The abolitionist movement predates Christ. The Qin Dynasty are the first abolitionists we have written records of. So if anything the evidence points to the abolitionist movement starting in China.
> Jefferson and his contemporaries led a revolution against a country which abolished slavery more quickly than America did, and several of his contemporaries were literally slaveholding bigots.
IMO this is unfair description of the US's fight for freedom from the tyranny of a country that was an ocean away and still meddled in literally every country's affairs.
I did not say it was trivial, nor did I belittle his very real achievements. What I was attempting to say is this quote is needlessly cavalier with people's lives, and should be taken with a grain of salt. Voices from the past are guides, not masters.
I suspect that in a world where half of the kids died of banal diseases and even a strong young person could die from smallpox, rotten tooth or tuberculosis in a few weeks or months, human lives weren't valued as highly. War was just one of many ways to die young.
