You know, for all the whataboutism going on in defense of Thomas Jefferson, I’d like to point out that his contemporary, John Adams, never owned a slave. Neith

You know, for all the whataboutism going on in defense of Thomas Jefferson, I’d like to point out that his contemporary, John Adams, never owned a slave. Neither did Thomas Paine, Alexander Hamilton or Roger Sherman. People were capable of understanding that slavery was wrong, it was just an inconvenient truth for most of them(them being the wealthy land owners in America). I’m not going to go so far as to say it’s a good reason to forget about him, Jefferson was a great thinker, but the whole “product of the times” is kinda BS. People who act shitty don’t deserve forgiveness because they could get away with something immoral through the contemporary legal framework. I say this because very rarely are people lionized for being ahead of their times in important practical moral ways.