Newsgroup: rec.arts.tv.soaps.cbs
Re: GL/ I Love Reva /
Past Life Storyline

Owning slaves while presiding over a country founded on a Declaration of Independence screams hypocritical behavior of the worst order, and can hardly be chalked up to a deficit of the times, or otherwise moderated.
[ 7 out of first 10 presidents owned slaves ]

[ "Nine of the 1st 12 pres. fr. 1789-1845 owned slaves" ]

[ US Pres. Lists and Records ]

  A strong case can be made that Jefferson was a complete hypocrite, and that the _prevailing_ "attitude" of the times, which he apparently shared, was that blacks were not merely "inferior" to whites, but actually less than human; sub-human.


Jefferson on slaves:

"As Jefferson explains in his Autobiography: 'Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people [African-American slaves] are to be free.  Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government.  Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.  It is still in our power to direct the process of emancipation and deportation peaceably and in such slow degree as that the evil will wear off insensibly, and their place be pari passu filled up by free white laborers.'"

"...as I have detailed in SLAVERY AND THE FOUNDERS: RACE AND LIBERTY IN THE AGE OF JEFFERSON, Jefferson actively discouraged others from freeing their slaves. By the time of his death Jefferson was more an opponent of abolition than an opponent of slavery. This was largely a function of his own deep seated hatred and fear of blacks, but it was also a function of his need to have slaves to support his life-style. In the 1780s and 1790s, while professing to some that he disliked slavery, Jefferson sold off about 80 slaves to pay his debts. When he needed another case of Bordeaux, another shipment of books, more paintings from France, or any of the many other luxuries he could not live without, Jefferson simply sent someone's son or daughter, someone's wife or husband, off to the slave market.

Paul Finkelman
John F. Seiberling Professor of Constitutional Law
University of Akron School of Law
150 University Avenue
Akron, OH 44325-2901
Phone: 330-972-6384
Fax: 330-258-2343
E-mail: pfinkel@uakron.edu

"In addition to arguing that slavery was central to the nation's founding, he also asserts that it created a "tension between the professed ideals of America, as stated in the Declaration of Independence, and the reality of early national America" (p. ix). No one reflected that tension better than Thomas Jefferson.

In spite of the ideals that he expressed in the Declaration, Jefferson was a slaveholder--simply a slaveholder--with general slaveholder values. Rhetorically, Finkelman notes, Jefferson hated slavery, but that hatred was based on several factors which demonstrated Jefferson's inability to transcend class and race or to honor the principles of his Declaration. He hated slavery because he despised blacks; they were, Jefferson believed, of a different order from whites. "Race, more than their status as slaves, doomed blacks to permanent inequality" (p. 108).

He hated slavery because it brought Africans to the nation and made them permanent residents. He hated slavery because of its impact on whites, not because of what it did to blacks

Above all, for one who affirmed independence to be the ultimate political and social value and one who celebrated the yeoman farmer for his independence, Jefferson hated slavery because it made him dependent on his slaves; dedicating his life to independence, he lived a life of dependency. Finkelman argues that Jefferson could not continue his "extravagant life-style" without slaves (p. 107). The natural rights of slaves had to be subordinated to his grand style of living, his unrestrained spending habits and his compulsively acquisitive character. He contends that historians have misconstrued one of Jefferson's more famous quotes about slavery: "[W]e have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other." The quote, Finkelman argues, did not reflect fears of a slave revolt. The self-preservation to which Jefferson alluded went to his way of life, premised as it was on slavery. The "wolf" he was holding was probably "the wolf of gluttony and greed" (p. 150).

The Declaration and Constitution had powerful antislavery potential and, given his status in the new nation's history, Jefferson could have energized that potential. Finkelman contends that the test for Jefferson's views on slavery should not be whether he was better "than the worst of his generation but whether he was the leader of the best," not whether he embodied the values of southern planters, but whether he transcended his economic and sectional interests. In both cases, Finkelman concludes that "Jefferson fails the test" (p. 105).

Indeed, he argues, Jefferson was behind his time. He sold slaves and broke up families to preserve his high-living style and to pay his debts; after a shopping spree in France, he sold eighty-five slaves (p. 150). Morally, Finkelman implies, he was also a laggard. For all the debate about Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemings, his half-sister-in-law, scholars have missed a more critical issue than whether Hemings bore him children: "for most of his adult life, Jefferson enslaved a generation of people--Sally Hemings and her siblings--who were his in-laws." This causes Finkelman to wonder whether it mattered "[f]or the sake of character...whether Jefferson enslaved his own children or merely his blood relatives and his wife's blood relatives" (p. 142).

"Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of colour in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immovable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race? Add to these, flowing hair, a more elegant symmetry of form, their own judgment in favour of the whites, declared by their preference of them, as uniformly as is the preference of the Oranootan for the black women over those of his own species.

The circumstance of Superior beauty, is thought worthy attention in the propagation of our horses, dogs, and other domestic animals; why not in that of man? Besides those of colour, figure, and hair, there are other physical distinctions proving a difference of race. They have less hair on the face and body. They secrete less by the kidneys, and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odour. This greater degree of transpiration renders them more tolerant of heat, and less so of cold than the whites.

Perhaps too a difference of structure in the pulmonary apparatus, which a late ingenious experimentalist has discovered to be the principal regulator of animal heat, may have disabled them from extricating, in the act of inspiration, so much of that fluid from the outer air, or obliged them in expiration, to part with more of it. They seem to require less sleep. A black after hard labour through the day, will be induced by the slightest amusements to sit up till midnight, or later, though knowing he must be out with the first dawn of the morning. They are at least as brave, and more adventuresome. But this may perhaps proceed from a want of forethought, which prevents their seeing a danger till it be present..

When present, they do not go through it with more coolness or steadiness than the whites. They are more ardent after their female: but love seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation. Their griefs are transient. Those numberless afflictions, which render it doubtful whether heaven has given life to us in mercy or in wrath, are less felt, and sooner forgotten with them.

In general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection. To this must be ascribed their disposition to sleep when abstracted from their diversions, and unemployed in labour. An animal whose body is at rest, and who does not reflect, must be disposed to sleep of course. Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous. It would be unfair to follow them to Africa for this investigation."

"Some slaves were not even told they were free. Their masters, believing emancipation to be...immoral, refused to spread the word..."

"America is a land of myths - tall tales and downright lies told and retold until they seem to carry the weight of history. And they're not just any old stories, good for entertainment. They have a serious purpose, which is to persuade us not only that we live in the best of all possible worlds but that the world we live in is the only one possible.
One of the most powerful of these myths has to do with democracy. It starts with the authors and their supposed devotion to a government "of the people, by the people and for the people." The truth is that the authors were wealthy white men of property who wrote a Constitution that legally defined a Black person as three fifths of a human being and restricted the vote to men like themselves.
Having won, by force of arms, their independence from England, the authors, Slaveholders, bankers, merchants, lawyers and land barons set about the task of fashioning a state in their own image. For inspiration they turned to their older bourgeois cousins in Europe. Author Alexander Hamilton was an ardent admirer of England's House of Lords (a body of Britain's filthy rich which exists to this day) as a bulwark against the pernicious innovation" of the masses.
"All communities divide themselves into the few and the many, " this aristocrat told the Constitutional Convention. "The first are the rich and well born, the other the mass of the people. Give, therefore, to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second ... nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy."

Henry David Thoreau's "Slavery in Massachusetts" speech (July 4, 1854):

"Again it happens that the Boston Court-House is full of armed men, holding prisoner and trying a MAN, to find out if he is not really a SLAVE. Does any one think that justice or God awaits Mr. Loring's decision?

For him to sit there deciding still, when this question is already decided from eternity to eternity, and the unlettered slave himself and the multitude around have long since heard and assented to the decision, is simply to make himself ridiculous.

We may be tempted to ask from whom he received his commission, and who he is that received it; what novel statutes he obeys, and what precedents are to him of authority. Such an arbiter's very existence is an impertinence. We do not ask him to make up his mind, but to make up his pack.

I wish my countrymen to consider, that whatever the human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can ever commit the least act of injustice against the obscurest individual without having to pay the penalty for it. A government which deliberately enacts injustice, and persists in it, will at length even become the laughing-stock of the world.

Much has been said about American slavery, but I think that we do not even yet realize what slavery is. If I were seriously to propose to Congress to make mankind into sausages, I have no doubt that most of the members would smile at my proposition, and if any believed me to be in earnest, they would think that I proposed something much worse than Congress had ever done.

But if any of them will tell me that to make a man into a sausage would be much worse -- would be any worse -- than to make him into a slave -- than it was to enact the Fugitive Slave Law, I will accuse him of foolishness, of intellectual incapacity, of making a distinction without a difference. The one is just as sensible a proposition as the other."

"Here in the United States, we were founded as a nation that practiced slavery and slaves were, quite frequently, killed even though they were innocent. This country once looked the other way when significant numbers of Native Americans were dispossessed and killed to get their land or their mineral rights or because they were thought of as less than fully human and we are still paying the price today.
Even in the 20th century in America people were terrorized or killed because of their race. And even today, though we have continued to walk, sometimes to stumble, in the right direction, we still have the occasional hate crime rooted in race, religion, or sexual orientation. So terror has a long history.

The second point I want to make is, in that long history, no terrorist campaign standing on its own has ever won, and conventional military strategies that have included terrorism with it have won because of conventional military power, and terrorism has normally been a negative. I will just give you one example from my childhood.
In the Civil War, General Sherman waged a brilliant military campaign to cut through the South and go to Atlanta. It was significant and very helpful in bringing the Civil War to a close in a way to, thank God, save the Union. On the way, General Sherman practiced a relatively mild form of terrorism -- he did not kill civilians, but he burned all the farms and then he burned Atlanta, trying to break the spirit of the Confederates. It had nothing whatever to do with winning the Civil War, but it was a story that was told for a hundred years later, and prevented America from coming together as we might otherwise have done.

When I was a boy growing up in the segregated South, when we should have been thinking about how we were going to integrate the schools and give people equal opportunity, people were making excuses for unconscionable behavior by talking about what Sherman had done a hundred years ago.
So, it is important to remember that normally terrorism has backfired and never has it succeeded on its own..."

--- former President Bill Clinton,
from a speech at Georgetown, 11.7.01
("A Struggle for the Soul of the 21st Century" - full text)