Tuesday, September 09, 2008
Negro President
Garry Wills: Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Power. Houghton Mifflin (November 1, 2003)
If one greatly admires Thomas Jefferson, one might as well learn about the "bad" Jefferson from another admirer, Garry Wills.
The bad Jefferson here isn't the Virginian gentleman owning & selling & having sex with slaves. Reprehensible & selfish as those were, they were TJ's private hypocrasies for the most part, they didn't change the course of the new nation.
This book is about the 3/5ths Clause of the Constitution, how a slave - nonvoting "property" - equalling 3/5ths of a white man by census skewed the Electoral College, the House of Representives, & American politics & policies toward the slave states until the Civil War removed it. It's about Jefferson being elected president in 1800 with electoral votes supplied by the clause, by the power of the 3/5ths of a human "negro," using it, abusing it, promoting the interests of the slave states & Virginia's slave traders, seeking to extend slavery through the Louisiana Purchase, & becoming the reactionary he claimed to despise, suppressing free speech & calling political dissent "treason." Slavery enslaved Jefferson. His much-desired "Agrarian Republic" was a vision of slave owners with human chattel working their farms, men who wouldn't get their own hands dirty & instead built a mansion culture of Walter Scott fantasy chivalry, ridiculous mannerisms, & bad poetry. Wills examines Jefferson & his successors mostly through the actions of his dogged opponents: Timothy Pickering, John Quincy Adams, & others. He shows how Jefferson led to creeps like John Calhoun, & bizarre alliances with northerners. It's a dry book, unfocused in ways, not a whole lot of action.
Learning about Lincoln as a skilled politician ultimately enhances Lincoln, because one feels Lincoln's moral agenda weighing upon him even when he's admitting he'd save the Union rather than free the slaves. Lincoln believes with all his heart & mind that slavery is an abomination, & although he knows he may be required to preserve it, he will do nothing to nurture it. Thomas Jefferson was an old man before he lost any sleep over his personal responsibility for the evil that threatened to destroy the nation he was so instrumental in creating, when he finally heard the "fire bell in the night" that awakened him & filled him terror. How different America might have been had he heard & heeded that bell while he was president, applying his great intellect & imagination to undermining the perverted power & practices of his own class & allies.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
If one greatly admires Thomas Jefferson, one might as well learn about the "bad" Jefferson from another admirer, Garry Wills.
The bad Jefferson here isn't the Virginian gentleman owning & selling & having sex with slaves. Reprehensible & selfish as those were, they were TJ's private hypocrasies for the most part, they didn't change the course of the new nation.
This book is about the 3/5ths Clause of the Constitution, how a slave - nonvoting "property" - equalling 3/5ths of a white man by census skewed the Electoral College, the House of Representives, & American politics & policies toward the slave states until the Civil War removed it. It's about Jefferson being elected president in 1800 with electoral votes supplied by the clause, by the power of the 3/5ths of a human "negro," using it, abusing it, promoting the interests of the slave states & Virginia's slave traders, seeking to extend slavery through the Louisiana Purchase, & becoming the reactionary he claimed to despise, suppressing free speech & calling political dissent "treason." Slavery enslaved Jefferson. His much-desired "Agrarian Republic" was a vision of slave owners with human chattel working their farms, men who wouldn't get their own hands dirty & instead built a mansion culture of Walter Scott fantasy chivalry, ridiculous mannerisms, & bad poetry. Wills examines Jefferson & his successors mostly through the actions of his dogged opponents: Timothy Pickering, John Quincy Adams, & others. He shows how Jefferson led to creeps like John Calhoun, & bizarre alliances with northerners. It's a dry book, unfocused in ways, not a whole lot of action.
Learning about Lincoln as a skilled politician ultimately enhances Lincoln, because one feels Lincoln's moral agenda weighing upon him even when he's admitting he'd save the Union rather than free the slaves. Lincoln believes with all his heart & mind that slavery is an abomination, & although he knows he may be required to preserve it, he will do nothing to nurture it. Thomas Jefferson was an old man before he lost any sleep over his personal responsibility for the evil that threatened to destroy the nation he was so instrumental in creating, when he finally heard the "fire bell in the night" that awakened him & filled him terror. How different America might have been had he heard & heeded that bell while he was president, applying his great intellect & imagination to undermining the perverted power & practices of his own class & allies.
Labels: what I'm reading
