Parry: Thomas Jefferson: America's Founding Sociopath

Thomas Jefferson: America's Founding Sociopath

By Robert Parry, Consortium News

04 July 16

    */When Robert Parry’s article was posted two years ago, the Thomas

    Jefferson v. Alexander Hamilton debate vastly favored Jefferson, but

    the hit Broadway musical “Hamilton” has brought new realism about

    Jefferson’s ugly side./*

n July Fourth, the people of the United States extravagantly celebrate 

the high-blown expressions on human rights that Thomas Jefferson penned 

in the Declaration of Independence especially the noble phrase “all men 

are created equal.” But Jefferson really didn’t believe that or much 

else that he said and wrote during his lifetime. He was, in reality, a 

skilled propagandist and a world-class hypocrite.

Yet, rather than subject Jefferson to a rigorous examination for his 

multiple hypocrisies, many Americans insist on protecting Jefferson’s 

reputation. From the Left, there is a desire to shield the lofty 

principles contained in the Declaration. From the Right, there is value 

in pretending that Jefferson’s revisionist concept of the Constitution, 

one favoring states’ rights over the federal government was the 

“originalist” view of that founding document.

So, Jefferson perhaps more than any figure in U.S. history gets a pass 

for what he really was: a self-absorbed aristocrat who had one set of 

principles for himself and another for everybody else.

Beyond the glaring contradiction between his “all men are created equal” 

pronouncement and his racist views on African-American slaves, he also 

lectured others about the need for frugality and the avoidance of debt 

while he lived a life of personal extravagance and was constantly in 

arrears to creditors.

Jefferson also wrote provocatively that “The tree of liberty must be 

refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It 

is it’s natural manure.” That is one of Jefferson’s famous quotes 

repeated endlessly these days by both the right-wing Tea Party and 

would-be leftist revolutionaries.

But Jefferson’s bravado was more a rhetorical flourish than a principle 

that he was ready to live or die by. In 1781, when he had a chance to 

put his own blood where his mouth was, when a Loyalist force led by the 

infamous traitor Benedict Arnold advanced on Richmond, Virginia, 

then-Gov. Jefferson fled for his life on the fastest horse he could find.

Jefferson hopped on the horse and fled again when a British cavalry 

force under Lt. Col. Banastre Tarleton approached Charlottesville and 

Monticello. Gov. Jefferson abandoned his neighbors in Charlottesville 

and left his slaves behind at Monticello to deal with the notoriously 

brutal Tarleton.

In other words, Jefferson may have been America’s original “chicken 

hawk,” talking cavalierly about other people’s blood as the “manure” of 

liberty but finding his own too precious to risk. Nevertheless, 

Jefferson later built his political career by questioning the 

revolutionary commitment of Alexander Hamilton and even George 

Washington, who repeatedly did risk their lives in fighting for American 

liberty.

But what Jefferson’s many apologists have most desperately tried to 

obscure was his wretched record on race. Some pro-Jefferson scholars 

still talk about his rhapsodic depictions of the natural beauty of 

Virginia in his /Notes on the State of Virginia/, but they skirt the 

book’s sickening racism, including his pseudo-science of assessing 

physiological and mental traits of African-Americans to prove that all 

men were not created equal.

*A Question of Rape*

For generations, these apologists also have challenged slave Sally 

Hemings’s late-in-life remembrance to one of her sons, Madison Hemings, 

describing how Jefferson had imposed himself on her sexually in Paris 

after she arrived in 1787 as a teen-age slave girl attending one of his 

daughters.

According to Madison Hemings’s account, his mother “became Mr. 

Jefferson’s concubine [in Paris]. And when he was called back home she 

was /enciente/ [pregnant] by him.” Jefferson was insistent that Sally 

Hemings return with him, but her awareness of the absence of slavery in 

France gave her the leverage to insist on a transactional trade-off; she 

would continue to provide sex to Jefferson in exchange for his promise 

of good treatment and the freedom of her children when they turned 21, 

Madison Hemings said.

The traditional defense of Jefferson was to portray Sally Hemings as a 

promiscuous vixen who lied about her relationship with the Great Man to 

enhance her humble standing. After all, whose word would you believe, 

that of the estimable Jefferson who publicly decried race mixing or a 

lowly African-American slave girl?

For decades, the defenders stuck to that dismissive response despite the 

curious coincidence that Hemings tended to give birth nine months after 

one of Jefferson’s visits to Monticello and the discovery of male 

Jefferson DNA in Hemings’s descendants.

Still, the Jefferson apologists raised finicky demands for conclusive 

proof of the liaison, as if it were absurd to envision that a relatively 

young man then in his mid-40s, a widower since his wife died in 1782, 

would have initiated a sexual relationship with an 

African-American female, even an attractive light-skinned mulatto like 

Hemings (who was the illegitimate daughter of Jefferson’s father-in-law 

and thus Jefferson’s late wife’s half-sister)..

Though it’s true that unequivocal evidence does not exist — Hemings did 

not save a semen-stained blue dress so it could later be subjected to 

DNA analysis — historians have increasingly come to accept the reality 

of Jefferson’s sexual relationship with his young slave girl who was 

only 14 when she moved into Jefferson’s residence in Paris.

So, with this ground shifting under Jefferson’s defensive lines, his 

apologists retreated to a new position, that the relationship was a true 

love affair. Hemings was transformed into a kind of modern-day 

independent woman making her own choices about matters of the heart.

However, given her age and her status as Jefferson’s property the 

relationship could be more accurately described as serial rape.

But the reality may be even worse. Recent historical examinations of 

records at Jefferson’s Monticello plantation have provided support for 

contemporaneous accounts of Jefferson having sexual relations with at 

least one other slave girl beside Hemings and possibly more.

*Fathering of Slaves*

Some scholars, such as historian Henry Wiencek in his 2012 book, /Master 

of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves/, give credence to old 

reports about Jefferson having a direct role in populating Monticello by 

fathering his own dark-skinned lookalikes.

“In ways that no one completely understands, Monticello became populated 

by a number of mixed-race people who looked astonishingly like Thomas 

Jefferson,” wrote Wiencek. “We know this not from what Jefferson’s 

detractors have claimed but from what his grandson Jeff Randolph openly 

admitted. According to him, not only Sally Hemings but another Hemings 

woman as well ‘had children which resembled Mr. Jefferson so closely 

that it was plain that they had his blood in their veins.’

“Resemblance meant kinship; there was no other explanation. Since Mr. 

Jefferson’s blood was Jeff’s blood, Jeff knew that he was somehow kin to 

these people of a parallel world. Jeff said the resemblance of one 

Hemings to Thomas Jefferson was ‘so close, that at some distance or in 

the dusk the slave, dressed in the same way, might be mistaken for Mr. 

Jefferson.’”

During a dinner at Monticello, Jeff Randolph recounted a scene in which 

a Thomas Jefferson lookalike was a servant tending to the table where 

Thomas Jefferson was seated. Randolph recalled the reaction of one guest:

“In one instance, a gentleman dining with Mr. Jefferson, looked so 

startled as he raised his eyes from the latter to the servant behind 

him, that his discovery of the resemblance was perfectly obvious to all.”

In the 1850s, Jeff Randolph told a visiting author that his grandfather 

did not hide the slaves who bore these close resemblances, since Sally 

Hemings “was a house servant and her children were brought up house 

servants so that the likeness between master and slave was blazoned to 

all the multitudes who visited this political Mecca” and indeed a number 

of visitors did make note of this troubling reality.

Even Jefferson admirer Jon Meacham accepted the truth of the Hemings 

liaison in /Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power./ Meacham cited a quote 

from Elijah Fletcher, a visitor from Vermont: “The story of Black Sal is 

no farce That he cohabits with her and has a number of children by her 

is a sacred truth and the worst of it is, he keeps the same children 

slaves an unnatural crime which is very common in these parts This 

conduct may receive a little palliation when we consider that such 

proceedings are so common that they cease here to be disgraceful.”

Meacham observed that Jefferson “was apparently able to consign his 

children with Sally Hemings to a separate sphere of life in his mind 

even as they grew up in his midst. It was, to say the least, an odd way 

to live, but Jefferson was a creature of his culture.

“‘The enjoyment of a negro or mulatto woman is spoken of as quite a 

common thing: no reluctance, delicacy or shame is made about the 

matter,’ Josiah Quincy Jr. of Massachusetts wrote after a visit to the 

Carolinas. This was daily reality at Monticello.”

This “daily reality” was also a troubling concern among Jefferson’s 

white family though the Great Man would never confirm or deny his 

parentage of a number of Monticello’s slaves.

“Frigid indifference forms a useful shield for a public character 

against his political enemies, but Jefferson deployed it against his own 

daughter Martha, who was deeply upset by the sexual allegations against 

her father and wanted a straight answer /Yes or no?/ an answer he would 

not deign to give,” wrote Wiencek.

Before his death, Jefferson did free several of Sally Hemings’s children 

or let them run away presumably fulfilling the commitment made in Paris 

before Hemings agreed to return to Monticello to remain his slave 

concubine. “Jefferson went to his grave without giving his family any 

denial of the Hemings charges,” Wiencek wrote.

The historical record increasingly makes Jefferson out to be a serial 

rapist, exploiting at least one and possibly more girls who were trapped 

on his property, who indeed were his property, and thus had little 

choice but to tolerate his sexual advances.

*Whipping the Children*

The evidence of Jefferson’s sexual predations must also be viewed in the 

context of his overall treatment of his slaves at Monticello. Though 

Jefferson’s apologists pretend that he was a kind master distressed over 

the inequities of a slave system that he could somehow neither correct 

nor escape, the latest evidence — much of it concealed for generations 

to protect Jefferson’s image — reveal him to be a cruel slave-owner who 

carefully calculated the net worth that his human chattel provided him 

and having boys as young as 10 whipped.

Some of Jefferson’s mistreatment of his slaves derived from another of 

his hypocrisies, his views about simplicity and solvency. As historian 

John Chester Miller wrote in his 1977 book, /The Wolf by the Ears,/ “To 

Jefferson, the abandon with which Americans rushed into debt and 

squandered borrowed money upon British ‘gew-gaws’ and ‘trumpery’ 

vitiated the blessings of peace.

“From Paris an unlikely podium from which to sermonize Jefferson 

preached frugality, temperance, and the simple life of the American 

farmer. Buy nothing whatever on credit, he exhorted his countrymen, and 

buy only what was essential. ‘The maxim of buying nothing without money 

in our pocket to pay for it,’ he averred, ‘would make of our country 

(Virginia) one of the happiest upon earth.’

“As Jefferson saw it, the most pernicious aspect of the postwar 

preoccupation with pleasure, luxury, and the ostentatious display of 

wealth was the irremediable damage it did to ‘republican virtue.’”

But Jefferson himself amassed huge debts and lived the life of a /bon 

vivant,/ spending way beyond his means. In Paris, he bought fancy 

clothes, collected fine wines, and acquired expensive books, furniture 

and artwork. It was, however, his slaves back at Monticello who paid the 

price for his excesses.

“Living in a style befitting a French nobleman, his small salary often 

in arrears, and burdened by debts to British merchants which he saw no 

way of paying, Jefferson was driven to financial shifts, some of which 

were made at the expense of his slaves. In 1787, for example, he decided 

to hire out some of his slaves a practice he had hitherto avoided 

because of the hardship it wreaked upon the slaves themselves,” Miller 

wrote.

Upon returning to the United States, Jefferson reinvented himself as a 

more modestly attired republican, but his tastes for the grandiose did 

not abate. He ordered elaborate renovations to Monticello, which 

deepened his debt and compelled his slaves to undertake strenuous labor 

to implement Jefferson’s ambitious architectural designs.

Needing to squeeze more value from his slaves, Jefferson was an 

aggressive master, not the gentle patrician that his apologists have 

long depicted.

According to historian Wiencek, Jefferson “directed his manager, 

Nicholas Lewis, to extract ‘extraordinary exertions’ of labor from the 

slaves to stay current with his debt payments. Some slaves had endured 

years of harsh treatment at the hands of strangers, for to raise cash, 

Jefferson had also instructed Lewis to hire out slaves. He demanded 

extraordinary exertions from the elderly: ‘The negroes too old to be 

hired, could they not make a good profit by cultivating cotton?’”

Jefferson was callous as well toward his young slaves. Reviewing 

long-neglected records at Monticello, Wiencek noted that one plantation 

report to Jefferson recounted that the nail factory was doing well 

because “the small ones” ages 10, 11 and 12 were being whipped by 

overseer, Gabriel Lilly, “for truancy.”

His plantation records also show that he viewed fertile female slaves as 

exceptionally valuable because their offspring would increase his assets 

and thus enable him to incur more debt. He ordered his plantation 

manager to take special care of these “breeding” women.

“A child raised every 2. years is of more profit than the crop of the 

best laboring man,” Jefferson wrote. “[I]n this, as in all other cases, 

providence has made our duties and our interests coincide perfectly.”

According to Wiencek, “The enslaved people were yielding him a bonanza, 

a perpetual human dividend at compound interest. Jefferson wrote, ‘I 

allow nothing for losses by death, but, on the contrary, shall presently 

take credit four per cent. per annum, for their increase over and above 

keeping up their own numbers.’ His plantation was producing 

inexhaustible human assets. The percentage was predictable.”

To justify this profiting off slavery, Jefferson claimed that he was 

merely acting in accordance with “Providence,” which in Jefferson’s 

peculiar view of religion always happened to endorse whatever action 

Jefferson wanted to take.

*Twisting the Founding Narrative*

Yet, while Jefferson’s rationalizations for slavery were repugnant, his 

twisting of the Founding Narrative may have been even more significant 

and long-lasting, setting the nation on course for the Civil War, 

followed by a near century of segregation and carrying forward to the 

present day with the Tea Party’s claims that states are “sovereign” and 

that actions by the federal government to promote the general welfare 

are “unconstitutional.”

The reason the Tea Partiers get away with presenting themselves as 

“conservative constitutionalists” is that Thomas Jefferson engineered a 

revisionist interpretation of the Founding document, which as written by 

the Federalists and ratified by the states created a federal government 

that could do almost anything that Congress and the President agreed was 

necessary for the good of the country.

That was the constitutional interpretation of both the Federalists and 

the Anti-Federalists, who mounted a fierce though unsuccessful campaign 

to defeat the Constitution’s ratification because they recognized how 

powerful the Constitution’s federal government was. [For details, see 

Consortiumnews.com’s “The Right’s Made-up ‘Constitution.’ 

<https://consortiumnews.com/2013/07/06/the-rights-made-up-constitution/>”]

Southern Anti-Federalists, such as Patrick Henry and George Mason, 

argued that the Constitution, though it implicitly accepted slavery, 

would eventually be used by the North to free the slaves. Or, as Patrick 

Henry colorfully told Virginia’s ratifying convention in 1788, “they’ll 

free your niggers!”

Though the Constitution eked through to passage, the fear of Southern 

plantation owners that they would lose their huge investment in human 

chattel did not disappear. Indeed, their trepidation intensified as it 

became clear that many leading Federalists, including the new 

government’s chief architect Alexander Hamilton, were ardent 

abolitionists. Hamilton had grown up poor in the West Indies and 

witnessed first-hand the depravity of slavery.

By contrast, Jefferson had grown up the pampered son of a major Virginia 

slave-owner, but he developed his own critical view of the evils of 

slavery. As a young politician, Jefferson had cautiously and 

unsuccessfully backed some reforms to ameliorate the injustices. In a 

deleted section of his draft of the Declaration of Independence, 

Jefferson had denounced slavery, citing it as one of King George III’s 

crimes.

However, after the Revolution, Jefferson recognized that any 

anti-slavery position would destroy his political viability among his 

fellow plantation owners in the South. While in Paris as the U.S. 

representative, Jefferson rebuffed offers to join the abolitionist /Amis 

des Noirs/ because by associating with abolitionists he would impair his 

ability to do “good” in Virginia, historian John Chester Miller noted, 

adding:

“Jefferson’s political instinct proved sound: as a member of the /Amis 

des Noirs/ he would have been a marked man in the Old Dominion.”

*Self-Interest Over Principle*

With his personal financial and political interests aligned with the 

perpetuation of slavery, Jefferson emerged as the most important leader 

of the slave South, seeking to reinterpret the Constitution to blunt the 

potential that the federal government might eventually outlaw slavery.

So, in the 1790s, as Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists worked to 

create the new government that the Constitution had authorized, 

Jefferson’s counter-movement emerged to reassert states’ rights as 

defined by the earlier Articles of Confederation, which the Constitution 

had obliterated.

Jefferson skillfully reframed the Constitution’s powers not by 

asserting an explicit defense of slavery but by voicing resistance to a 

strong central government and reasserting the primacy of the states. 

Though Jefferson had played no role in drafting the Constitution or the 

Bill of Rights — he was in Paris at the time — he simply interpreted the 

Constitution as he wished, similar to his frequent invocation of 

Providence as always favoring whatever he wanted.

Most significantly, Jefferson developed the concept of “strict 

construction,” insisting that the federal government could only perform 

functions specifically mentioned in the text of the Constitution, such 

as coining money, setting up post offices, etc. Though Jefferson’s 

concept was silly because the Framers understood that the young country 

would face unanticipated opportunities and challenges that the 

government would have to address, Jefferson built a potent political 

party to make his idea stick.

Jefferson’s strategy was to simply ignore the Constitution’s clear 

language, particularly its mandate in Article I, Section 8 that Congress 

“provide for the general Welfare of the United States” and its grant to 

Congress the power “to make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper 

for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers 

vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States.”

Jefferson simply insisted that the Framers hadn’t meant what the Framers 

had written. Jefferson went even further and reaffirmed the concept of 

state sovereignty and independence that George Washington, James Madison 

and other Framers had despised and intentionally expunged when they 

threw out the Articles of Confederation. The Constitution had shifted 

national sovereignty away from the states to “We the People of the 

United States.”

Despite the Constitution’s explicit reference to making federal law “the 

supreme law of the land,” Jefferson exploited the lingering resentments 

over ratification to reassert the states’ supremacy over the federal 

government. Often working behind the scenes even while serving as Vice 

President under President John Adams Jefferson promoted each state’s 

right to nullify federal law and even to secede from the Union.

Aiding Jefferson’s cause was the shifting allegiances of James Madison, 

an early Federalist who had been tapped by Washington to be the 

principal architect of the Constitution. However, like Jefferson, 

Madison was a major Virginian slaveholder who recognized that both his 

political future and his personal fortune were dependent on the 

continuation of slavery.

So, Madison sold out his earlier Federalist allies and shifted his 

allegiance to his neighbor, Jefferson. Madison’s break with Washington 

and Hamilton gave Jefferson’s revisionist take on the Constitution a 

patina of legitimacy given Madison’s key role as one of the Framers.

Jefferson spelled out this political reality in a 1795 letter to Madison 

in which Jefferson cited what he called “the Southern interest,” 

because, as author Jon Meacham observed, “the South was his personal 

home and his political base.” It was the same for Madison. [For more on 

Madison’s role, see Consortiumnews.com’s “The Right’s Dubious Claim to 

Madison 

<https://consortiumnews.com/2013/06/23/the-rights-dubious-claim-to-madison/>.”]

*Warring with the Federalists*

In his rise to power, Jefferson waged a nasty propaganda war against the 

Federalists as they struggled to form a new government and endeavored to 

stay out of a renewed conflict between Great Britain and France. 

Jefferson secretly funded newspaper editors who spread damaging personal 

rumors about key Federalists, particularly Hamilton who as Treasury 

Secretary was spearheading the new government’s formation.

Jefferson’s governmental actions almost always dovetailed with the 

interests of slaveholders and his own personal finances. For instance, 

as Secretary of State during Washington’s first term, Jefferson 

protested the Federalists’ disinterest in pursuing compensation from 

Great Britain for slaves freed during the Revolutionary War, a high 

priority for Jefferson and his plantation-owning allies. Jefferson 

correctly perceived that Hamilton and John Jay, two staunch opponents of 

slavery, had chosen not to make compensation a high priority.

Also Jefferson’s interest in siding with France against Great Britain 

was partly colored by his large financial debts owed to London lenders, 

debts that might be voided or postponed if the United States went to war 

against Great Britain.

Then, in the latter 1790s with French agents aggressively intervening in 

U.S. politics to push President John Adams into that war against Great 

Britain, the Federalist-controlled Congress passed the Alien and 

Sedition Acts, which Jefferson’s political movement deftly exploited to 

rally opposition to the overreaching Federalists.

By the election of 1800, Jefferson had merged his political base in the 

slave-economy South with an anti-Federalist faction in New York to 

defeat Adams for reelection. The three-fifths clause, a concession by 

the Constitutional Convention to the South allowing slaves to be counted 

as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of representation, proved 

crucial to Jefferson’s victory.

As President, Jefferson took more actions that advanced the cause of his 

slaveholding constituency, largely by solidifying his “states’ rights” 

interpretation of the Constitution. But Jefferson and his revisionist 

views faced a formidable opponent in Supreme Court Chief Justice John 

Marshall, a fellow Virginian though one who considered slavery the 

likely ruin of the South.

As historian Miller wrote: “While Jefferson could account for Hamilton a 

West Indian ‘adventurer’ goaded by ambition, unscrupulous in attaining 

his ends, and wholly devoid of state loyalties he could not understand 

how John Marshall, a Virginian who, under happier circumstances, 

Jefferson might have called ‘cousin John,’ could cast off all feeling 

for his ‘country’ (i.e. Virginia) and go over to the ‘enemy’

“As Marshall saw it, Jefferson was trying to turn the clock back to the 

Articles of Confederation a regression that would totally paralyze the 

federal government. ‘The government of the whole will be prostrated at 

the feet of the members [the states],’ Marshall predicted, ‘and the 

grand effort of wisdom, virtue, and patriotism, which produced it, will 

be totally defeated.’

“The question of slavery never bulked larger on Jefferson’s horizon than 

when John Marshall, from the eminence of the Supreme Court, struck down 

acts of the state legislatures and aggrandized the powers of the federal 

government. For slavery could not be divorced from the conflict between 

the states and the general government: as the Supreme Court went, so 

might slavery itself go.

“States’ rights were the first line of defense of slavery against 

antislavery sentiment in Congress, and Jefferson had no intention of 

standing by idly while this vital perimeter was breached by a troop of 

black-robed jurists.”

*Selling Out the Haitians*

Jefferson also reversed the Federalists’ support for the slave rebellion 

in St. Domingue (now Haiti), which had overthrown a ruthlessly efficient 

French plantation system that had literally worked the slaves to death. 

The violence of that revolution on both sides shocked Jefferson and many 

of his fellow slaveholders who feared that the rebellion might inspire 

American blacks to rise up next.

Alexander Hamilton, who despised slavery from his experience growing up 

in the West Indies, assisted the black slave leader, the self-taught and 

relatively moderate Toussaint L’Ouverture, in drafting a constitution, 

and the Adams administration sold weapons to the former slaves.

After taking over the White House, however, President Jefferson reversed 

those Federalist policies. He conspired secretly with the new French 

dictator Napoleon Bonaparte on a French plan to retake St. Domingue with 

an expeditionary force that would re-enslave the blacks. Jefferson only 

learned later that Napoleon had a second phase of the plan, to move to 

New Orleans and build a new French colonial empire in the heart of North 

America.

Napoleon’s army succeeded in capturing L’Ouverture, who was taken to 

France and killed, but L’Ouverture’s more radical followers annihilated 

the French army and declared their independence as a new republic, Haiti.

The Haitians’ bloody victory had important consequences for the United 

States as well. Stopped from moving on to New Orleans, Napoleon decided 

to sell the Louisiana Territories to Jefferson, who thus stood to 

benefit from the Haitian freedom fighters whom Jefferson had sold out. 

Still fearing the spread of black revolution, Jefferson also organized a 

blockade of Haiti, which helped drive the war-torn country into a spiral 

of violence and poverty that it has never escaped.

However, Jefferson also faced a constitutional quandary, since he had 

espoused the ludicrous notion of “strict construction” and there was no 

specific constitutional language authorizing the purchase of new lands. 

The solution for Jefferson, the consummate hypocrite, was simply to 

violate his own principle and proceed with the Louisiana Purchase.

This vast new territory also opened up huge opportunities for Southern 

slaveholders, especially because the Constitution had called for the end 

of slave importation in 1808, meaning that the value of the domestic 

slave trade skyrocketed. That was especially important for established 

slave states like Virginia where the soil for farming was depleted.

Breeding slaves became a big business for the Commonwealth and enhanced 

Jefferson’s personal net worth, underscoring his notations about valuing 

female “breeder” slaves even above the strongest males.

*Inviting the Civil War*

But the danger to the nation was that spreading slavery to the Louisiana 

Territories and admitting a large number of slave states would worsen 

tensions between North and South.

As Miller wrote, “Jefferson might have averted the struggle between the 

North and South, free and slave labor, for primacy in the national 

domain the immediate, and probably the only truly irrepressible, cause 

of the Civil War. Instead, Jefferson raised no objections to the 

continued existence of slavery in the Louisiana Purchase.

“Had he the temerity to propose that Louisiana be excluded from the 

domestic slave trade he would have encountered a solid bloc of hostile 

votes from south of the Mason-Dixon line. Jefferson was fond of saying 

that he never tilted against windmills, especially those that seemed 

certain to unhorse him. Jefferson neither took nor advocated any action 

that would weaken slavery among the tobacco and cotton producers in the 

United States.”

Indeed, keeping the new territories and states open to slavery became a 

major goal of Jefferson as President and after he left office.

Miller wrote, “In the case of the federal government, he could easily 

imagine circumstances perhaps they had already been produced by John 

Marshall which justified [the South’s] secession: among them was the 

emergence of a central government so powerful that it could trample 

willfully upon the rights of the states and destroy any institution, 

including slavery, which it judged to be immoral, improper, or inimical 

to the national welfare as defined by Washington, D.C.

“Confronted by such a concentration of power, Jefferson believed that 

the South would have no real option but to go its own way.”

Miller continued, “As the spokesman of a section whose influence was 

dwindling steadily in the national counsels and which was threatened 

with the ‘tyranny’ of a consolidated government dominated by a section 

hostile to the institutions and interests of the South, Jefferson not 

only took the side of slavery, he demanded that the right of slavery to 

expand at will everywhere in the national domain be acknowledged by the 

Northern majority.”

In the last major political fight of his life, Jefferson battled 

Northern efforts to block the spread of slavery into Missouri. “With the 

alarm bell sounding in his ears, Jefferson buckled on the armor of 

Hector and took up the shield of states’ rights,” wrote Miller. 

“Jefferson, in short, assumed the accoutrements of an ardent and an 

uncompromising champion of Southern rights. Possessed by this martial 

spirit, Jefferson now asserted that Congress had no power over slavery 

in the territories.

“Now he was willing to accord Congress power only to protect slavery in 

the territories and he converted the doctrine of states’ rights into a 

protective shield for slavery against interference by a hostile federal 

government. He was no longer concerned primarily with civil liberties or 

with the equalization of the ownership of property but in insuring that 

slave-owners were protected in the full plentitude of their property rights.

“The Missouri dispute seemed to mark the strange death of Jeffersonian 

liberalism.”

*Rationalizing Slavery*

Jefferson’s fight to extend slavery into Missouri also influenced his 

last notable personal achievement, the founding of the University of 

Virginia. He saw the establishment of a first-rate educational 

institution in Charlottesville, Virginia, as an important antidote to 

elite Northern schools influencing the Southern aristocracy with ideas 

that could undermine what Jefferson dubbed “Missourism,” or the right of 

all states carved from the Louisiana Territories to practice slavery.

Jefferson complained that Southern men, who traveled North for their 

college education, were infused with “opinions and principles in discord 

with those of their own country,” by which he meant the South, Miller 

wrote, adding:

“Particularly if they attended Harvard University, they returned home 

imbued with ‘anti-Missourism,’ dazzled by the vision of ‘a single and 

splendid government of an aristocracy, founded on banking institutions 

and moneyed corporations’ and utterly indifferent to or even 

contemptuous of the old-fashioned Southern patriots who still manned the 

defenses of freedom, equality, and democracy”, revealing again how words 

in Jefferson’s twisted world had lost all rational meaning. Slavery 

became “freedom, equality, and democracy.”

The Missouri Compromise of 1820 that barred slavery in new states north 

of the 36-degree-30 parallel “made the creation of such a center of 

learning imperative” to Jefferson, wrote Miller, thus driving his 

determination to make the University of Virginia a Southern school that 

would rival the great colleges of the North and would train young 

Southern minds to resist federal “consolidationism.”

Even the Jefferson-admiring Meacham noted the influence of the Missouri 

dispute in Jefferson’s zeal to launch his university in Charlottesville. 

“The Missouri question made Jefferson even more eager to get on with the 

building of the University of Virginia for he believed the rising 

generation of leaders should be trained at home, in climes hospitable to 

his view of the world, rather than sent north,” Meacham wrote.

In short, Jefferson had melded the twin concepts of slavery and states’ 

rights into a seamless ideology. As Miller concluded, “Jefferson began 

his career as a Virginian; he became an American; and in his old age he 

was in the process of becoming a Southern nationalist.”

When he died on July 4, 1826, a half century after the Declaration of 

Independence was first read to the American people, Jefferson had set 

the nation on course for the Civil War.

However, even to this day, Jefferson’s vision of “victimhood” for white 

Southerners seeing themselves as persecuted by Northern power — yet 

blinded to the racist cruelty that they inflict on blacks — remains a 

powerful motivation for white anger, now spreading beyond the South.

Today, we see Jefferson’s racist legacy in the nearly deranged hatred 

directed at the first African-American president and in the unbridled 

fury unleashed against the federal government that Barack Obama heads.

As unpleasant as it may be for Americans who prefer especially on July 

Fourth to ponder the pleasant image of Jefferson as the aristocratic 

republican with a taste for fine art and a fondness for free-thinking, 

it is well past time to look at the Declaration’s author as the person 

he really was, America’s founding sociopath.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

/Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra 

stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy 

his latest book, /America’s Stolen Narrative,/either in print here 

<https://org.salsalabs.com/o/1868/t/12126/shop/shop.jsp?storefront_KEY=1037> or 

as an e-book (from Amazon 

<http://www.amazon.com/Americas-Stolen-Narrative-Washington-ebook/dp/B009RXXOIG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1350755575&sr=8-1&keywords=americas+stolen+narrative> 

and barnesandnoble.com 

<http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/americas-stolen-narrative?keyword=americas+stolen+narrative&store=ebook&iehack=%E2%98%A0>). 

You also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its 

connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy 

includes /America’s Stolen Narrative/. For details on this offer, click 

here <https://consortiumnews.com/2015/06/15/the-bush-dynastys-back-story/>./

        Comments

        <http://readersupportednews.org/component/jcomments/feed/com_content/37828><http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/37828-thomas-jefferson-americas-founding-sociopath#>

We are concerned about a recent drift towards vitriol in the RSN Reader 

comments section. There is a fine line between moderation and 

censorship. No one likes a harsh or confrontational forum atmosphere. At 

the same time everyone wants to be able to express themselves freely. 

We'll start by encouraging good judgment. If that doesn't work we'll 

have to ramp up the moderation.

General guidelines: Avoid personal attacks on other forum members; Avoid 

remarks that are ethnically derogatory; Do not advocate violence, or any 

illegal activity.

Remember that making the world better begins with responsible action.

- The RSN Team

<http://readersupportednews.org/user-profile/userprofile/ericlane>

+29 # 

<http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/37828-thomas-jefferson-americas-founding-sociopath#comment-624439> 

ericlane 2016-07-04 15:41

Perry makes good points, with the benefit of hindsight. That same 

hindsight should also allow us to view some of the positive points of 

Jefferson's life. For example, before the Declaration of Independence, 

Jefferson drafted the Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom 

that passed the Virginia legislature in 1786. This singular event was 

the forerunner to the first clause of the First Amendment separating 

church from state and making freedom of conscience real as opposed to 

imagined. Without separation of church and state or liberty of 

conscience, I would argue that slavery would still exist today, women 

would still be property, and only propertied white men over 35 would be 

able to vote. Why? Because the state religion would have demanded 

complete obedience or banishment or death. Hindsight can't be used 

simply as a cudgel. It needs to be more nuanced. Jefferson was a 

southerner and, unlike most southerners then and today, didn't use 

religion to beat citizens into submission.

<http://readersupportednews.org/user-profile/userprofile/Farafalla>

+16 # 

<http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/37828-thomas-jefferson-americas-founding-sociopath#comment-624587> 

Farafalla 2016-07-04 22:17

But the religious window opens the door to irrational justifications for 

positions that diverge from the democratic paradigm, such as owning people.

<http://readersupportednews.org/user-profile/userprofile/newell>

+52 # 

<http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/37828-thomas-jefferson-americas-founding-sociopath#comment-624456> 

newell 2016-07-04 16:13

Hindsight is just an excuse. All humans know that rape and slavery are 

wrong--at any point in history. Whether or not they will admit it is 

another thing.

<http://readersupportednews.org/user-profile/userprofile/Ken%20Halt>

+44 # 

<http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/37828-thomas-jefferson-americas-founding-sociopath#comment-624563> 

Ken Halt 2016-07-04 20:41

In US public schools I was taught to revere TJ as an eloquent man who 

stood for freedom and equality, the fact that he championed slavery was 

not an issue. As I've learned more about him my respect has dwindled. He 

was an avowed anti-federalist and as Sec'y of State under Washington, a 

strong federalist, he employed a man in the state dept whose sole 

responsibility was to produce scurrilous pamphlets maligning GW. John 

Adams and GW came to know him as a treacherous friend, could there be 

any worse evaluation from two of the most principled founding fathers ? 

Perhaps the most damning evidence was published in the Oct 2012 issue of 

Smithsonian Magazine: TJ's revolutionary friend Thaddeus Kosciuszko 

bequeathed him $20,000 to free TJ's slaves and purchase land and farming 

equipment for them. TJ refused the gift because his financial 

calculations expected a higher yield from keeping them as slaves. TJ was 

a talented but unscrupulous man of flexible moral character, Parry's 

reevaluation is well-justified.

<http://readersupportednews.org/user-profile/userprofile/Farafalla>

+42 # 

<http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/37828-thomas-jefferson-americas-founding-sociopath#comment-624586> 

Farafalla 2016-07-04 22:14

This is more awesome than I expected. I'm glad I read it today. I knew 

bits and pieces, never the whole narrative. With "Hamilton" as a major 

Broadway hit, I wonder if we will start to see history differently. I 

sure am after reading this.

<http://readersupportednews.org/user-profile/userprofile/jdd>

+9 # 

<http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/37828-thomas-jefferson-americas-founding-sociopath#comment-624627> 

jdd 2016-07-05 05:36

Maybe, but the truth about Hamilton and Jefferson should have been 

revealed long ago, as a simple read of the "Federalist Papers" would 

make clear. Jefferson was a spokesman for the Southern slavocracy that 

feared a strong national government would intrude upon their slave 

system. Thus Hamilton, who created the American economic and 

constitutional system, was opposed by Jefferson at every turn. The great 

ideas of the Declaration were long abandoned by Jefferson who, under the 

direct tutelage of Benjamin Franklin, had been inspired by Franklin to 

author them in 1776. The issue is not merely history as the legacy of 

Jefferson, and his wretched followers such as the treasonous Aaron Burr 

and the vile Andrew Jackson, continue to plague the Democratic Party, 

where Jefferson, not the great Hamilton (FDR excepted), is looked to a 

an intellectual model.

<http://readersupportednews.org/user-profile/userprofile/Radscal>

0 # 

<http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/37828-thomas-jefferson-americas-founding-sociopath#comment-624832> 

Radscal 2016-07-05 15:30

Hamilton was not without blemish. He maneuvered the payment of the debt 

the Colonies had accumulated in the Revolutionary War such that the 

soldiers who fought the war were left unpaid, while the financial 

interests who floated loans were fully compensated with handsome profits.

Then, he pushed for the Whisky Tax which was specifically designed to 

drive small farmers into debt, resulting in their farms being foreclosed 

by those same financial interests. And many of those small farm owners 

were actual Revolutionary War veterans.

And he knew all along that this tax (which the farmers could never 

afford to pay) would be rejected, and so his goal of creating a standing 

army was made manifest by the need to suppress the "insurrection."

BTW: I find no evidence that Hamilton ever personally fought in the 

Revolution. He was as much a "chicken hawk" as was Jefferson.

Yes, he favored urban manufacture over rural plantations. But he was all 

about enriching the elite by breaking the backs of the working classes.

I highly recommend William Hogeland's excellent book, "The Whisky 

Rebellion" to get a more rounded view of Hamilton.

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/37828-thomas-jefferson-americas-founding-sociopath