# Think Tank > History >  NYT Op-Ed: The REAL Thomas Jefferson - Monster of Monticello

## Cowlesy

Honestly, I am not trolling.  I read this, and I was so jaw-dropped that an American newspaper would decide to print it, that I had to post it.  


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/01/op...jefferson.html


I see it as just more re-writing history to support egalitarianism now.

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## CaptainAmerica

Well, he was somewhat a jekyll/hyde . Jefferson had the idea of reservations /prison camps. It really is tragic that such a genius would eventually be corrupted by power.

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## CaptainAmerica

Well, he was somewhat a jekyll/hyde . Jefferson had the idea of reservations /prison camps. It really is tragic that such a genius would eventually be corrupted by power

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## acptulsa

He admitted that the Eighteenth Century was barbaric.  It takes a bit of vision to see the barbarism of one's own age.

But regardless of all that, the agenda here is obvious.  No one spoke more truths to power than Jefferson, no one put more succinctly the evils of a massive central government than Jefferson, so Jefferson must be discredited _personally_ (regardless of whether it's fair to judge him by modern standards) before we reintroduce the nation to his wisdom.

The tyrannical element in Washington have a wet dream about the citizens of this country being so brainwashed we tear down his memorial on the tidal basin.  What better way to deny the now-proven truth of his statement that the concentration of power in a central U.S. government would result in '...the most corrupt government in the Earth'?

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## Matt Collins

People actually read the NYT?

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## itshappening

> People actually read the NYT?


They have something like two million subscribers don't they?

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## acptulsa

> They have something like two million subscribers don't they?


Someone obviously has a lot to learn about polling...

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## LibertyEagle

Just another pinko rewriting history.  As ridiculous as his rhetoric may sound to most of us, I guarantee you that some will buy it.  

Just like all the other, this is being done to tear down the basic constructs of this country so that it that it will be that much easier to bring the country down and shuffle us into world government.

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## Occam's Banana

Yeah, there's no agenda here. Given the rising prominence of things like secession, Constitutionalism, nullification, etc., this is clearly no more than the The Powers Tha... erm, I mean, the New York Times ... keeping the public supplied with the infomation it needs to evaluate & assess the issues of the day.

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## phill4paul

> the third president was a creepy, brutal hypocrite.


Like dude, ya know, he was total creepers and stuff. 

  Who wrote this article?

Paul Finkelman, a visiting professor in legal history at Duke Law School, is a professor at Albany Law School and the author of “Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson.”

  Ah, a professor, that explains it. Public edumacation.

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## sailingaway

that title would make for a great photoshop though...

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## angelatc

> Honestly, I am not trolling.  I read this, and I was so jaw-dropped that an American newspaper would decide to print it, that I had to post it.  
> 
> 
> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/01/op...jefferson.html
> 
> 
> I see it as just more re-writing history to support egalitarianism now.


Aren't we accused of doing much the same when we point out that Lincoln was far less than perfect?

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## oyarde

I really see this as waste , all NYT readers would already be collectivists ??

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## oyarde

I liken it to adding a memo at the bottom of the Manifesto .....

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## CaptUSA

Strange what thoughts are cherry-picked 200 years after the fact.

I wonder what kinds of musings I've made on the internet that could be misinterpretted 200 years from now.

To discredit Jefferson because of slavery is like discrediting Aristotle as a sexist.  You can't place 21st century context onto 18th-19th century events.

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## Anti Federalist

> Just another pinko rewriting history.  As ridiculous as his rhetoric may sound to most of us, I guarantee you that some will buy it.  
> 
> Just like all the other, this is being done to tear down the basic constructs of this country so that it that it will be that much easier to bring the country down and shuffle us into world government.


Some?

LOL

I imagine most all of the NYT readership would probably agree in whole or in part.

And I say that without even having to read the article or the comments.

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## Anti Federalist

Oh Jesus Christ, blacks and slaves, *again*...

You know what? There was wisdom in this bumper sticker cliche':

*"If I had know there would be all this damn trouble, I'd have picked my own $#@!ing cotton".*

FFS...

Of course, in the media orgasm of recent Lincoln worship, no one points out Mr. Lincoln's racism, which was *much* more pronounced and "on the sleeve" than Jefferson's.

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## MoneyWhereMyMouthIs2

> Aren't we accused of doing much the same when we point out that Lincoln was far less than perfect?



I was about to say the same, but in a much harsher manner.

It's not a stretch to think that Jefferson was not the wonderful person history books make him out to be.  And when we quote his philosophy, we quote the parts we admire.  He's no Lincoln...  but he was no angel, either.

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## AGRP

This is great.  When will the NYT be publishing truths about Lincoln?

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## Occam's Banana

> This is great.  When will the NYT be publishing truths about Lincoln?


And THERE is the rub. Lincoln genuinely & richly deserves the lambasting he gets from us. The New York Times, however, is being *nothing* but cynically manipulative.

Despite suggestions to the contrary, we liberty lovers tend to have no problem with induging in  "distributive justice" when it comes to heaping disapprobation upon those  who deviate from the True Path.

Not even Jefferson himself is exempt. As Exhibit A, I offer the following thread, in which Thomas Jefferson is exposed as - are you ready for this? - a neo-conservative:

http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...stitutionalism

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## Galileo Galilei

I've got Finkelmen's book on Millard Fillmore.  Not unexpected, but he does not think Fillmore was a very good president.

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## KingNothing

> Strange what thoughts are cherry-picked 200 years after the fact.
> 
> I wonder what kinds of musings I've made on the internet that could be misinterpretted 200 years from now.
> 
> To discredit Jefferson because of slavery is like discrediting Aristotle as a sexist.  You can't place 21st century context onto 18th-19th century events.



Even if the quotes on Jefferson with respect to slavery and racism are in context, it doesn't matter.  No one is arguing their merits.  We just want Liberty, and his predictions on how it could be lost as a federal government grows deserve to be respected, in spite of any abhorrent beliefs he may or may not have adopted.

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## erowe1

I'm not gonna bother reading the article. But I hope it criticizes the Louisiana purchase.

What? That's not where they're coming from?

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## demolama

"The Monster of Monticello?"...really? Absolutely disgusting how this professor hides behind his profession as a historian and knowingly uses modern day moral judgments upon a man of the past. As a historian he should know better. Jefferson was no more racist than the majority of his contemporaries. He was a brutal master, but so were most slave owners. He slept with his slaves, but so did other masters. He believed Africans to be inferior, so did most whites. I haven't read Henry Wiencek's book, so I can not defend his work; however, Dr. Finkleman's Op-Ed wasn't about it either. This Op-Ed isn't a critique of one historian's work, but a hatchet job to make Dr. Finkleman seem like he is the moral superior over those who dare defend Jefferson as a man of his time.

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## FrankRep

*Thomas Jefferson and Slavery*


Monticello.org


*Thomas Jefferson was a consistent opponent of slavery his whole life.  Calling it a moral depravity and a hideous blot, he believed that slavery presented the greatest threat to the survival of the new American nation.*  Jefferson also thought that slavery was contrary to the laws of nature, which decreed that everyone had a right to personal liberty.  These views were radical in a world where unfree labor was the norm.

At the time of the American Revolution, Jefferson was actively involved in legislation that he hoped would result in slaverys abolition.  In 1778, he drafted a Virginia law that prohibited the importation of enslaved Africans.  In 1784, he proposed an ordinance that would ban slavery in the Northwest territories.  But Jefferson always maintained that the decision to emancipate slaves would have to be part of a democratic process; abolition would be stymied until slaveowners consented to free their human property together in a large-scale act of emancipation.  To Jefferson, it was anti-democratic and contrary to the principles of the American Revolution for the federal government to enact abolition or for only a few planters to free their slaves.

Although Jefferson continued to advocate for abolition, the reality was that slavery was only becoming more entrenched.  The slave population in Virginia skyrocketed from 292,627 in 1790 to 469,757 in 1830.  Jefferson had assumed that the abolition of the slave trade would weaken slavery and hasten its end.  Instead, slavery only became more widespread and profitable.  To try to erode Virginians support for slavery, he discouraged the cultivation of crops heavily dependent on slave labortobaccoand encouraged the introduction of crops that needed little or no slave laborwheat, sugar maples, short-grained rice, olive trees, and wine grapes.  But by the 1800s, Virginias most valuable commodity and export was neither crops nor land, but slaves.

Jeffersons belief in the necessity of ending slavery never changed.  From the mid-1770s until his death, he advocated the same plan of gradual emancipation. First, the transatlantic slave trade would be abolished.  Second, slaveowners would improve slaverys most violent features, by bettering (Jefferson used the term ameliorating) living conditions and moderating physical punishment.  Third, all born into slavery after a certain date would be declared free, followed by total abolition.  Like others of his day, he supported the removal of newly freed slaves from the United States. The unintended effect of Jeffersons plan was that his goal of improving slavery as a step towards ending it was used as an argument for its perpetuation.  Pro-slavery advocates after Jeffersons death argued that if slavery could be improved, abolition was unnecessary.

Jeffersons belief in the necessity of abolition was intertwined with his racial beliefs.  He thought that white Americans and enslaved blacks constituted two separate nations who could not live together peacefully in the same country.  Jeffersons belief that blacks were racially inferior and as incapable as children, coupled with slaves presumed resentment of their former owners, made their removal from the United States an integral part of Jeffersons emancipation scheme.  Influenced by the Haitian Revolution and an aborted rebellion in Virginia in 1800, Jefferson believed that American slaves deportationwhether to Africa or the West Indieswas an essential consequence of emancipation.

Jefferson wrote that slavery was like holding a wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.  He thought that his cherished federal union, the worlds first democratic experiment, would be destroyed by slavery.  To emancipate slaves on American soil, Jefferson thought, would result in a large-scale race war that would be as brutal and deadly as the slave revolt in Haiti in 1791.  But he also believed that to keep slaves in bondage, with part of America in favor of abolition and part of America in favor of perpetuating slavery, could only result in a civil war that would destroy the union.  Jeffersons latter prediction was correct: in 1861, the contest over slavery sparked a bloody civil war and the creation of two nationsUnion and Confederacyin the place of one.

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## Philhelm

> He admitted that the Eighteenth Century was barbaric.  It takes a bit of vision to see the barbarism of one's own age.
> 
> But regardless of all that, the agenda here is obvious.  No one spoke more truths to power than Jefferson, no one put more succinctly the evils of a massive central government than Jefferson, so Jefferson must be discredited _personally_ (regardless of whether it's fair to judge him by modern standards) before we reintroduce the nation to his wisdom.
> 
> The tyrannical element in Washington have a wet dream about the citizens of this country being so brainwashed we tear down his memorial on the tidal basin.  What better way to deny the now-proven truth of his statement that the concentration of power in a central U.S. government would result in '...the most corrupt government in the Earth'?


I agree with every sentence.

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## Cutlerzzz

> Some?
> 
> LOL
> 
> I imagine most all of the NYT readership would probably agree in whole or in part.
> 
> And I say that without even having to read the article or the comments.


I doubt most of them know enough to agree or disagree. They'll probably just take it as fact.

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## Galileo Galilei

If Thomas Jefferson was so bad, why did so many blacks decide to select the last name 'Jefferson'?

And that goes for other Founders, like 'Washington', 'Madison', 'Monroe', 'Jackson', 'Clay', 'Lee', 'Henry', and 'Harrison' who owned slaves.

There were millions of black people who decided they wanted these last names when they became free, and their many millions of their descendants are here to prove it.  There is a reason for that.  They knew these men stood for a better life for all Americans and hope for the future.

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## Griffith

> *Thomas Jefferson and Slavery*
> 
> 
> Monticello.org
> 
> 
> *Thomas Jefferson was a consistent opponent of slavery his whole life.  Calling it a moral depravity and a hideous blot, he believed that slavery presented the greatest threat to the survival of the new American nation.*  Jefferson also thought that slavery was contrary to the laws of nature, which decreed that everyone had a right to personal liberty.  These views were radical in a world where unfree labor was the norm.
> 
> At the time of the American Revolution, Jefferson was actively involved in legislation that he hoped would result in slaverys abolition.  In 1778, he drafted a Virginia law that prohibited the importation of enslaved Africans.  In 1784, he proposed an ordinance that would ban slavery in the Northwest territories.  But Jefferson always maintained that the decision to emancipate slaves would have to be part of a democratic process; abolition would be stymied until slaveowners consented to free their human property together in a large-scale act of emancipation.  To Jefferson, it was anti-democratic and contrary to the principles of the American Revolution for the federal government to enact abolition or for only a few planters to free their slaves.
> ...


Sounds exactly the opposite of the NYT article.

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## Chester Copperpot

if anybody wants the author's contact info here it is: email, phone, etc.

http://law.duke.edu/fac/finkelman/

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## carclinic

> Oh Jesus Christ, blacks and slaves, *again*...
> 
> You know what? There was wisdom in this bumper sticker cliche':
> 
> *"If I had know there would be all this damn trouble, I'd have picked my own $#@!ing cotton".*
> 
> FFS...
> 
> Of course, in the media orgasm of recent Lincoln worship, no one points out Mr. Lincoln's racism, which was *much* more pronounced and "on the sleeve" than Jefferson's.


If America never had slavery, it's amazing how much better this country would be.

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## acptulsa

Seems to be the Official Revisionist Propaganda Move of the moment.  Just now on _This Week_ Stephanopoulos picked up on someone else's theme of, 'Which dead president would you like to interview and why?'  His picks?  Interview Lincoln and Truman about how important and noble it was that they kill hundreds of thousands, and interview Jefferson about what a hypocrite he was for writing the Declaration and yet 'unapologetically' owning slaves.

Wonder if we can parlay this stupidity into a greater attention to his words?  Can we make this backfire in their ugly faces?

If you think of a way, or just want to say why you'd rather interview Coolidge (like about how ending Wilson's socialism kicked off the Roaring Twenties, perhaps), tweet #GStephanopoulos.

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## LibertyIn08

> People actually read the NYT?


I know this might be shocking to you and your bubble but: yes, quite a few people to do. More importantly, the Times' reach is international.

It is better to be cognizant of what the media is producing, and know how to respond in kind, than to be willfully ignorant.

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## acptulsa

> I know this might be shocking to you and your bubble but: yes, quite a few people to do. More importantly, the Times' reach is international.
> 
> It is better to be cognizant of what the media is producing, and know how to respond in kind, than to be willfully ignorant.


You don't understand.  Collins thinks we don't count if we are converted to libertarianism from a former life as a Democrat.  We only count if we come to libertarian thought from a former life as a neocon.  So, it really doesn't matter to him what the 'opposition' is up to.  He manages to find a sillier thing to do than underestimate them--he ignores them completely.

It enables him to keep his Fox Newspeak perfect.  If he listens to any other voice, he might pick up and repeat something that a Fox viewer would find offensive...

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## NorfolkPCSolutions

Well, poop - this is one of those rare moments where I'm glad that the overwhelming majority of Americans are borderline illiterate and possess precisely zero interest in the news.  On the flip side, just think of all those kids in all those schools that will read about, hear about, and be forced to write about, this article in K-12 history classrooms...

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## Philhelm

Thomas Jefferson, I have never prayed to you before.  I have no tongue for it.  No one, not even you, will remember if we were good men or bad.  Why we fought, or why we died.  All that matters is that few stood against many.  That's what's important! Liberty pleases you, Thomas Jefferson... so grant me one request.  Grant me revenge!  And if you do not listen, then to HELL with you!

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## Cowlesy

We make all these movies about how amazing Abraham Lincoln was, and have to listen to the talking heads discuss Doris Kearns-Goodwin's books on him.  Then we have zero films about Jefferson (probably a good thing), and have the media portray what a horrible person he was.

It's less about the masses reading the article (they won't), but rather the TV pundits who take the article and broadcast it out to the TV-watching masses.

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## Brian4Liberty

> He admitted that the Eighteenth Century was barbaric.  It takes a bit of vision to see the barbarism of one's own age.
> 
> But regardless of all that, the agenda here is obvious.  No one spoke more truths to power than Jefferson, no one put more succinctly the evils of a massive central government than Jefferson, so Jefferson must be discredited _personally_ (regardless of whether it's fair to judge him by modern standards) before we reintroduce the nation to his wisdom.
> 
> The tyrannical element in Washington have a wet dream about the citizens of this country being so brainwashed we tear down his memorial on the tidal basin.  What better way to deny the now-proven truth of his statement that the concentration of power in a central U.S. government would result in '...the most corrupt government in the Earth'?


Agree.

To these propagandists, the ends justify the means. They want an all powerful central government, that caters to the demands of those with the most influence. There are no true principals, just (supposedly enlightened) self-interest. Thus, they worship Father Abraham, who represents the use of force to maintain and consolidate central power, and demonize Jefferson, who represents individual liberty and warns of the corruption of power.

Their argument is in favor of the "benevolent" Dictator, albeit one that does their bidding. Power is their drug, and those who try to rain on their parade will be demonized. Slavery is just a convenient subterfuge, an emotional hot button for the masses. In other circumstances, the manipulators would argue for slavery, if it were expedient in the pursuit of power.

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## pochy1776

> People actually read the NYT?


Despite the politic and social bull$#@!, they have a stellar food review.

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## Brian4Liberty

Not to demonize Lincoln by the actions of those who have used his name, but a historical fact that the NYT probably leaves out is the use of Lincoln's name by American Communists. For instance, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade:




> The Abraham Lincoln Brigade (in fact, a Battalion—see the etymological note below) was made up of volunteers from all walks of American life, and from all classes. Many of the people who volunteered for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade were official members of the Communist Party USA or affiliated with other socialist or anarchist organizations,...
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln_Brigade

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## Brian4Liberty

Who better to describe the long association of communists and socialists with Lincoln than the International Socialist? And more pertinent to the OP of this thread, the role of New York newspapers in shaping public opinion.




> Unless, of course, we bother to examine the tattered copies of the *American outlet for Marxs revolutionary preachments* during the period when Lincoln was preparing to leave the political wilderness and make his march to the presidency. That journal, the *New York Tribune*, was the most consistently influential of nineteenth-century American newspapers. Indeed, this was the newspaper that engineered the unexpected and in many ways counterintuitive delivery of the Republican nomination for president, in that most critical year of 1860, to an Illinoisan who just two years earlier had lost the competition for a home-state U.S. Senate seat...
> ...
> Lincolns involvement was not just with Greeley but with his sub-editors and writers, so much so that the first Republican president appointed one of Greeleys most radical lieutenantsthe Fourier- and Proudhon-inspired socialist and longtime editor of Marxs European correspondence, Charles Danaas his assistant secretary of war.
> ...
> Long before 1848, German radicals had begun to arrive in Illinois, where they quickly entered into the legal and political circles in which Lincoln traveled. One of them, Gustav Korner, was a student revolutionary at the University of Munich who had been imprisoned by German authorities...
> ...
> Within a decade, Korner would pass the Illinois bar, win election to the legislature and be appointed to the state Supreme Court. Korner and Lincoln formed an alliance that would become so close that the student revolutionary from Frankfurt would eventually be one of seven personal delegates-at-large named by Lincoln to serve at the critical Republican State Convention in May 1860, which propelled the Springfield lawyer into that years presidential race. Through Korner, Lincoln met and befriended many of the German radicals who, after the failure of the 1848 revolution, fled to Illinois and neighboring Wisconsin. Along with Korner on Lincolns list of personal delegates-at-large to the 1860 convention was Friedrich Karl Franz Hecker, a lawyer from Mannheim who had served as a liberal legislator in the lower chamber of the Baden State Assembly before leading an April 1848 uprising in the regionan uprising cheered on by the newspaper Marx briefly edited during that turbulent period, Neue Rheinische ZeitungOrgan der Demokratie.
> ...
> The failure of the 1848 revolts, and the brutal crackdowns that followed, led many leading European radicals to take refuge in the United States, and *Lincolns circle of supporters would eventually include some of Karl Marxs closest associates* and intellectual sparring partners, including Joseph Weydemeyer and August Willich. 
> ...

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## trey4sports

Truth be told, there has never really been a libertarian America. No real golden age. Hopefully we will be able to bring one about though.

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## Galileo Galilei

> Truth be told, there has never really been a libertarian America. No real golden age. Hopefully we will be able to bring one about though.


From 1788 until 1912, the average federal spending per year was only about 2% of GDP.  Most people in the US had no contact whatsoever with the federal government, even indirectly, except as to maintain basic order in society.  That's why people by the millions poured into the land and the USA gained nicknames like the Era of Good Feelings, Jacksonian Democracy, and the Gay '90s.

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## LibertyEagle

> Truth be told, there has never really been a libertarian America. No real golden age. Hopefully we will be able to bring one about though.


Pretty damn close, there was.




> From 1788 until 1912, the average federal spending per year was only about 2% of GDP.  Most people in the US had no contact whatsoever with the federal government, even indirectly, except as to maintain basic order in society.  That's why people by the millions poured into the land and the USA gained nicknames like the Era of Good Feelings, Jacksonian Democracy, and the Gay '90s.


+rep

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## acptulsa

Well, maybe there never was a libertarian America, though the western frontier (while it lasted) was about as close as anything this side of the Australian Outback.  Back east, of course, there were Blue Laws, Sedition Laws, These Laws and Those Laws.  But at least they were local--you could escape them without getting a passport first.

As for Jefferson, I saw him treated fairly on television today.  I was watching _Liberty's Kids_, an animated series aired by CBS and produced by Cookie Jar TV.  It's amusing to note that Cookie Jar has Canadian ties, and is becoming more Canadian all the time.  So, Jefferson now has to go to the British Empire to get an even break, because he can't get one in the U.S...

That's some painful irony right there.

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## Deborah K

All these history revisionists and their anachronisms.....geez.  I just love the way people impose modern-day mores on past eras. 

Abolition was already a topic of discussion back then, and everyone knew that eventually slavery would end, which it did around 60 years later.  People like this creep with an agenda seem to want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

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## Deborah K

> If Thomas Jefferson was so bad, why did so many blacks decide to select the last name 'Jefferson'?
> 
> And that goes for other Founders, like 'Washington', 'Madison', 'Monroe', 'Jackson', 'Clay', 'Lee', 'Henry', and *'Harrison'* who owned slaves.
> 
> There were millions of black people who decided they wanted these last names when they became free, and their many millions of their descendants are here to prove it.  There is a reason for that.  They knew these men stood for a better life for all Americans and hope for the future.



Btw, I'm a descendent of the Harrisons, on my mother's father's side.

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## RSLudlum

Kevin Gutzman posted the piece on his facebook page and said "I think this is about right".  There's a very interesting discussion going on in the comments.

https://www.facebook.com/kevin.gutzm...47301141996420

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## Galileo Galilei

> Btw, I'm a descendent of the Harrisons, on my mother's father's side.


That's cool, they had a signer of the Declaration of Independence (Benjamin Harrison), and two presidents.  And I think the family went back to the mid-1600s.

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## Deborah K

> That's cool, they had a signer of the Declaration of Independence (Benjamin Harrison), and two presidents.  And I think the family went back to the mid-1600s.


Yep.

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## Cutlerzzz

If a New York times article started out by saying "Thomas Jefferson was born December 25th, 1612, in a small city in Hawaii", does anyone think that most of the NYT readers would know it was wrong?

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## Feeding the Abscess

Jefferson had serious failings as a human being - let alone when he wielded power and expanded it immensely - and anyone arguing otherwise is engaging in hero worship.

There's zero need to even use his name when bringing forward some of his arguments. To buttress his arguments, cite Lysander Spooner, who took Jefferson's radical rhetoric, expanded it further, lived by it, and was also an abolitionist of the most extreme variety. Oh, and he had his own postal service that was so effective it led to the US government granting a monopoly to its own service.

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## jmdrake

> Aren't we accused of doing much the same when we point out that Lincoln was far less than perfect?


+rep!  Really, who cares?  I can appreciate Jefferson the statesmen without glossing over the failings of Jefferson the man.

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## jmdrake

> Jefferson had serious failings as a human being - let alone when he wielded power and expanded it immensely - and anyone arguing otherwise is engaging in hero worship.
> 
> There's zero need to even use his name when bringing forward some of his arguments. To buttress his arguments, cite Lysander Spooner, who took Jefferson's radical rhetoric, expanded it further, lived by it, and was also an abolitionist of the most extreme variety. Oh, and he had his own postal service that was so effective it led to the US government granting a monopoly to its own service.


I didn't know Spooner had his own postal service.  You learn something new every day.

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## acptulsa

> I can appreciate Jefferson the statesmen without glossing over the failings of Jefferson the man.


Know what?  I can appreciate Lincoln without glossing over his failings as well.

It's still obvious, distressing, and kind of pathetically funny that they're deliberately trashing Jefferson now.  Not hard to wonder why.




> 'If ever this vast country is brought under a single government, it will be one of the most extensive corruption.


I mean, why _wouldn't_ they try to convince everyone not to read this guy?

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