Thomas Jefferson, The Paradox Essay, Research Paper

Thomas Jefferson, The Paradox At the time when Thomas Jefferson helped with the Declaration of Independence, stating that”all men are created equal,” he hypocritically owned slaves. How can all people be equal if some arefree and others are slaves? Slavery, along with the racial discrimination that followed, would turn outto be the fundamental equal protection dilemma for the United States of America. It seems hard toexplain how a slaveowner like Thomas Jefferson could declare that “all men are created equal” andso sincerely express similar beliefs in drafting the first crucial U.S. documents. Nor is it obvious howa group of men in Philadelphia, many of whom were slaveowners themselves, could proclaimantislavery principles while endorsing a document that would permit slavery to continue in theSouthern states. This is the force behind any assertion that these men could not have meant whatthey said. Surely, the Constitution secured no rights for blacks that whites must respect. This idealeads me directly to the notion that the Founders were motivated not by noble ideals but by foul self-interest instead. I believe the idea that American Founders like Thomas Jefferson were self-interested isimpossible to deny. After all, Jefferson owned a couple of hundred slaves (3) and did not free them.Yet the case of Jefferson is revealing. Far from rationalizing plantation life by adopting the usualSouthern arguments about the happy slave, Jefferson the Virginian fiercely denounced slavery asbeing flatly inconsistent with justice. Jefferson recognized that blacks were not slaves “by nature,”only by convention. Although he agreed with the ignorant scientific view of his time, and suspectedthat blacks were inferior to whites in capacity, Jefferson expressed his wish that blackaccomplishment prove him wrong. Moreover, Jefferson strongly denied that possible blackintellectual inferiority justified white enslavement: “Whatever be their talents, it is no measure of theirrights” (1). Consequently, the only rationale for Jefferson not freeing his slaves is expediency.”Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in another” (1). The dilemma of Jefferson and the American Founders may be summarized as follows: Theyfully recognized that a democratic society depends not just on wisdom, but also on consent.Consequently, there is no justification whatever for ruling another human being without his consent.Blacks are human beings, and they are in possession of natural rights. Slavery is therefore againstnatural right and should be prohibited. But how? Here Jefferson and the Founders faced twoprofound obstacles. The first was that virtually all of them recognized the degraded condition ofblacks in America. Whatever the cause of this condition, the Framers recognized that it posed aformidable hurdle to granting to blacks the rights of citizenship. By contrast with monarchy andaristocracy, which only require subjects to obey, self-government requires citizens who have themoral and civilization capacity to be rulers (4). Jefferson also recognized the existence of intense and widespread white prejudices againstblacks that seemed to prevent the two peoples from living together peacefully on the same soil. While Jefferson agonized over the problem, Madison proposed a strange but bold scheme forsolving the nation’s multiracial dilemma of the time. The government, he suggested, might take theland it had acquired from the Indians, sell it to the new European immigrants, and use the money tosend blacks back to Africa (1,2). The concept of relocating blacks in Africa was later endorsed inprinciple by Lincoln and retained its appeal among many whites and some blacks until the Civil War.

It is clear to me from my research that to better understand the problem U.S. founders had indealing with slavery, one must examine constitutional history. When the U.S. Constitution waswritten in 1787, two basic questions were left unresolved: what would be the relative power of thefederal government versus the states, and what would the new nation do about slavery? As far asgovernmental power is concerned, the Constitution simply lists a series of powers granted to thefederal government, such as the power to coin money or regulate interstate commerce, and thenstates that Congress has the power to do everything that is “necessary and proper” to carry out thosepowers. As for slavery, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention worked out a compromise.The new Constitution recognized the institution of slavery but allowed only three-fifths of the slaves tobe counted when deciding how many representatives to the House of Representatives each statewould be apportioned every 10 years after the census. To people reading the Constitution centurieslater, this appears to be a very strange compromise; while these slaves would obviously not beallowed to vote, they would partially count when it came time to apportion the relative votes to thestates. The practical result of this was to give more voting power to voters in the South in relation tovoters in the North (1). The Constitution specifically stated that the new national government could not stop theimportation of slaves into the United States until 1808 and that this provision could not be changedby amendment. Under the Constitution, slave owners could have their slaves returned to them if theslaves escaped. The second Congress passed fugitive slave laws to enforce this provision, and theSupreme Court upheld these laws as authorized by Article IV of the Constitution. The Constitution does not use the word “slave.” Throughout the document slaves are called”persons held to service or labor.” It is important to remember that when the Constitution waswritten in 1787 there were such “persons” in every state. In the first few decades after theConstitutional Convention, the northern states used a variety of methods, such as judicialinterpretation of new state constitutions, to eliminate slavery inside their borders. Gradually, thecountry became divided by the issue of slavery into a free North and a slave South (1). But in conclusion, men like Thomas Jefferson could not have possibly found it in their ownself-interest to move for slavery’s immediate abolishment. Here again, we see how Jefferson and hiscolleagues acted with themselves in mind. Aside, from the personal losses that he would face,Jefferson clearly realized that to outlaw slavery from the beginning would have trampled tradition,ruined economies, and divided the would-be states in a fever of controversy. Surely not every statewould join the proposed union if it was going to be broken into an impoverished and depressedentity that could no longer economize labor in the fashion that it had been used to for so long. Withthis realization, one can not help but further realize the hypocrisy and lack of sincerity with which theDeclaration of Independence and the original U.S. Constitution were written. Although we still havea considerably long “way-to-go,” I am content to see that many of the original tenants of thesedocuments are finally being lived upto in action– even if not always genuinely in thought and infeeling. Bibliography 1. Byrd, Robert C., The Senate – 1789-1989: Chapter 5 The Era of Good Feelings: 1817-1824,U.S. History, 1990. 2. Carroll, J., The end of the dream., Vol. 204, New Republic, 24 Jun 1991, pp. 22. 3. Cliff, Michelle, History as fiction, fiction as history., Vol. 20, Ploughshares, 1 Sep 1994, pp.196. 4. Hackney, Sheldon, Who owns history?, Vol. 16, Humanities, 1 Jan 1995, pp. 6.