A Founding Contradiction

[frogmarch]

I just listened to the iHeartRadio podcast "A Founding Contradiction" about Thomas Jefferson, focusing on his view of slavery.

I was surprised to learn that Sally Hemings was Jefferson's wife's half-sister, both having the same white father, and also surprised to learn that in Virginia at the time, the age of consent was 10, later 12. Sally Hemings was 14 when she became Jefferson's mistress, so apparently that was fine, and anyway, it was common for white slaveholders to take slaves as mistresses.

Fascinating, but parts of it made me cringe.

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/7-hidden-brain-28457178/episode/a-founding-contradiction-98785357/?cmp=android_share&sc=android_social_share&pr=false&fbclid=IwAR1hz1XFhkVD-sbfuFORRsPRmj8Afx8jzbzH3iTTAGT0KFbHNQHXyySVnmA

[Haggard Celine]

1. I had read before that Jefferson and Hemings had a relationship of sorts.

I read that he loved her and that they would have been a normal couple if it had been legally and socially permissible at the time. Of course, there was nothing preventing Jefferson from giving Ms. Hemings her freedom, but he didn't do that. Still, however, I think there was some nuance there. Sometimes I wonder what we take for granted today that those in the future will see as abhorrent. We still have slavery today, we just call it human trafficking, and we should do a lot more to stop it.

[frogmarch]

2. Yes, everything you said

is true, according to what I heard on the podcast.

Lots of nuances regarding his not giving Sally Hemings her freedom. Their children were freed, and society accepted her as freed as well, but legally she was always a slave.

I hope the future is better, making the present viewed as abhorrent.

[Dale in Laurel MD]

7. Another nuance:

When Sally Hemings went to Paris with Jefferson while he was ambassador there, all she needed to do was walk out the front door of the embassy into the street, and she would have been free under French law.

But she never did....

[Haggard Celine]

8. I don't know if I could understand loving someone that much.

Of course, her family was all back in America, so she probably cared about seeing them. But there was something more than the typical master/slave relationship, I think. I wish we had more records about them.

[MineralMan]

3. Anyone who can rationalize owning slaves can rationalize anything.

That's my opinion about that.

[misanthrope]

5. The thing I don't see discussed

is how slavery harms the psyches of all involved. I think people strangle a portion of their own humanity -- certainly their potential for greater enlightenment -- when they rationalize the tolerance of slavery. It's not only bad for the captive, but the captor loses something, too.

[MineralMan]

6. You're right. That never comes up.

If you enslave someone, that means that someone could enslave you. Maybe the person you enslaved is black, for example. Maybe in a place where black people are the majority, you become the slave.

In order to believe you can own someone and extract forced labor from them, you have to give up your own humanity, really.

I have always found our history of enslavement of others to be inexplicable. Simple logic argues against such a thing.

[Wounded Bear]

10. It's why slave cultures are so regressive and reactionary...

fear of the uprising, of the slave revolt. Any resistance at all must be ruthlessly snuffed out, as brutally as can be administered.

[wishstar]

4. Sally was 3/4 white ancestry due to her white father and her mom's white father

I believe I read that Betty Hemings father was a white sea captain. Betty, Sally and Sally's siblings had very close and intimate personal relationships with Jefferson's wife and daughters.

[frogmarch]

9. Jefferson quote:

"I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as a civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors."

-Excerpted from a letter to Samuel Kercheval, July 12, 1816.

Inscription at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial, DC
https://www.nps.gov/thje/learn/photosmultimedia/quotations.htm#:~:text=%22I%20am%20not%20an%20advocate,progress%20of%20the%20human%20mind.