Why polarized America can’t deal with Thomas Jefferson
Stephen H. Provost
I can understand why a D.C. committee wants to “rename, remove, or contextualize” places like the Jefferson Memorial.
It’s not the only public space named by the committee in its report, which also included the Washington Monument, as well as schools named for James Monroe, Woodrow Wilson, and Alexander Braham Bell. More than 50 parks, playgrounds, and other buildings were also identified.
So, why focus on Jefferson?
Because, for me, he represents a challenge, as I suspect he does for many other open-minded Americans — a group that, admittedly, is dwindling in number in our hyperpolarized present.
Jefferson wasn’t just our third president; he was also the most influential of our founding fathers. He was the main author of the Declaration of Independence, the founder of the University of Virginia, the architect of the Louisiana Purchase, and a champion of religious freedom who produced his own version of the Christian gospel.
They call George Washington the “father of our country,” but the title fits Jefferson far better. He’s always been something of a hero to me: someone who epitomized the Enlightenment in the truest meaning of the world. He was a champion of free thought, education, and independence.
Except when he wasn’t.
Jefferson the slaveholder
When my family and I came to Virginia, we visited Jefferson’s historic home at Monticello. The thing that stuck with me wasn’t the mansion, but the reconstructed slave quarters on “Mulberry Row” and the stories behind them.
Stories of slaves, by the hundreds, forced to live in the barest of conditions and spend virtually all their waking hours toiling for Jefferson so he could live in that mansion.
Stories of the slave woman whose children he fathered. Those four children were the only family unit ever freed by Jefferson. He did not, however, free their mother, Sally Hemings.
Was Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings consensual? How could it have been? In cases where power rests solely in the hands of one person, “consensual” is impossible. Even if Sally Hemings were alive today and could proclaim her love for Jefferson, we could never be sure that such a declaration was freely given or the product of something like Stockholm syndrome.
“Freely,” after all, was a term that never applied to slaves.
If Bill Clinton abused his power (and he did) by having a brief sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky, Jefferson more than abused his by keeping the mother of his children as a slave. But in the same way that Clinton —a popular and effective president whose actions could be self-absorbed and abusive —poses an awkward problem for Democrats, Jefferson poses one for all of America.
The Jefferson Memorial, Washington, D.C.
Jefferson the hypocrite
The problem becomes even more difficult when we realize that Jefferson drafted a Virginia law that banned the importation of enslaved Africans in 1778 and, as president, signed a similar law that covered the entire nation in 1807.
Which makes him one hell of a hypocrite.
Here’s the problem: Jefferson wasn’t just a slaveholder; he was a visionary. But on the other hand, he wasn’t just a visionary, he was a slaveholder.
He was not, like Robert E. Lee or Jefferson Davis, someone who betrayed his country to fight for slavery. Removing tributes to Confederate figures is, to me, a no-brainer. Their names belong to the annals of a self-proclaimed nation that no longer exists, not this one.
But neither is it acceptable to dismiss Jefferson the slaveholder as simply “a product of his times.” Such excuses ring as hollow as that of a soldier who rationalizes war crimes by saying, “I was just following orders.” Even more so, because Jefferson was a person of power — the one who gave the orders. He could see the conditions he was forcing slaves to live in, and he perpetuated them.
Jefferson in polarized America
Jefferson was very much a statesman and genius, and he was also an enabler of systemic racism in its basest form.
How do we reconcile those two truths?
In our current climate, we don’t. In polarized America, we aren’t encouraged to think in terms of nuance and contradiction, no matter how pervasive such traits might be in human beings. We’re taught to view things from one perspective: our own and that of others in our “tribe.”
Critics of the D.C. panel’s recommendation, for example, immediately latched onto the most extreme of its three possible actions — removal — while ignoring the other two. No one’s suggesting removing the Jefferson Memorial, and I doubt that most people on that panel want to rename it, either. What they’re probably suggesting is that we contextualize it.
And what’s wrong with that? It’s exactly what Monticello has done in highlighting both Jefferson’s achievements in the mansion itself, and his unforgivable treatment of slaves on Mulberry Row (tours of both are highlighted at the site and take about the same amount of time). That’s what contextualizing looks like. It works. It diminishes neither Jefferson’s achievements, nor his abuse.
But our polarized society, increasingly, views issues and history in absolute terms of good and evil. And in such a society, providing context becomes more and more difficult.
Even more worrisome, though, is that we view human beings through the same kind of narrow lens —as either good or evil, ally or enemy. Which is precisely the kind of thinking that paved the way for slavery in the first place.
Featured photos: Monticello mansion and Mulberry Row, by the author.