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I'd be very surprised if defenders of slavery didn't routinely use Jefferson, Washington, and company to justify slavery. I don't know offhand how to find prima

I'd be very surprised if defenders of slavery didn't routinely use Jefferson, Washington, and company to justify slavery. I don't know offhand how to find primary sources, but a quick web search turns up an interview[0] with a slavery and Jefferson scholar who says: "So that Americans come to believe in racism by reading Jefferson. And in the 1840's and 50's, these Southern racists who are defending slavery are reading Jefferson and quoting him on these issues. ... This is very damaging, horrible ideas and they are used over and over again in the 1840's and 50's by the defenders of slavery to argue in favor of continuing slavery. Jefferson justifies slavery, in fact, by arguing that blacks are inferior to whites on almost all levels." [0] https://www.pbs.org/jefferson/archives/interviews/Finkelman.htm https://www.pbs.org/jefferson/archives/interviews/Finkelman....

lsc 9y ago
The constitution of the CSA[1] would look pretty familiar to anyone who has read Jefferson's work; I suspect that if both were written by private entities under current copyright laws, the CSA would be found to have infringed on the document it was abridging. I mean, this is just snark, but it's certainly an example of the words of Thomas Jefferson being used to defend slavery. This is the biggest problem with an originalist interpretation of the Constitution, and one could argue that the fact that the constitution was so vague as to what, exactly, constitutes a man or a citizen was actually a progressive thing, because if we had frozen what a voting citizen was in 1787, we'd explicitly only have given the right to vote to property owning white males, something that (I hope) almost all of us would disagree with. Because so many important things were not strictly defined, we sort of have a built in bias towards loose constructionism. [1]http://www.libs.uga.edu/hargrett/selections/confed/trans.html http://www.libs.uga.edu/hargrett/selections/confed/trans.htm...
- lsc 9y ago
  Quite some time after edits have closed, I noticed a rather glaring factual error. Jefferson didn't author the constitution. I mean, he was inarguably a big influence, but my snark above is about how similar the constitution of the CSA was to the constitution of the USA, and that Jefferson was one of the primary authors of the constitution of the USA, therefore his words were used to justify slavery. But I made a factual error, swapping Jefferson and Madison. Oops.

lsc 9y ago

The constitution of the CSA[1] would look pretty familiar to anyone who has read Jefferson's work; I suspect that if both were written by private entities under current copyright laws, the CSA would be found to have infringed on the document it was abridging. I mean, this is just snark, but it's certainly an example of the words of Thomas Jefferson being used to defend slavery. This is the biggest problem with an originalist interpretation of the Constitution, and one could argue that the fact that the constitution was so vague as to what, exactly, constitutes a man or a citizen was actually a progressive thing, because if we had frozen what a voting citizen was in 1787, we'd explicitly only have given the right to vote to property owning white males, something that (I hope) almost all of us would disagree with. Because so many important things were not strictly defined, we sort of have a built in bias towards loose constructionism. [1]http://www.libs.uga.edu/hargrett/selections/confed/trans.html http://www.libs.uga.edu/hargrett/selections/confed/trans.htm...

lsc 9y ago
Quite some time after edits have closed, I noticed a rather glaring factual error. Jefferson didn't author the constitution. I mean, he was inarguably a big influence, but my snark above is about how similar the constitution of the CSA was to the constitution of the USA, and that Jefferson was one of the primary authors of the constitution of the USA, therefore his words were used to justify slavery. But I made a factual error, swapping Jefferson and Madison. Oops.