—should their name be erased from your family tree?
Should Jefferson City and Jefferson County change their names because Thomas Jefferson owned slaves?
Should towns named for the Five Civilized Tribes or their leaders change their names because the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek (Muscogee), Chickasaw, and Seminole tribes sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War?
We began thinking of these questions a few days ago when we saw a Kansas City Star comment suggesting a fountain and a parkway named for J. C. Nichols be renamed because he was a racist whose real estate developments defined Kansas City’s history of racism that lingers in the minds of many citizens today, and upon hearing of a petition circulated by a University of Missouri student to remove a statue of slaveholder Thomas Jefferson from Francis Quadrangle (where the columns are in Columbia) and after seeing a news account that protestors in North Portland, Oregon had pulled down a statue of Jefferson at a high school named for him.
New to the discussion is that military bases should no longer be named for Confederate officers such as Braxton Bragg, John Bell Hood, Henry Benning Robert E. Lee, and others.
These are troubling issues and troubling questions in troubling times. Today, let’s consider Thomas Jefferson. The military bases will wait for a later posting.
Correcting the historical narrative is better than trying to erase it, for we learn nothing from erased history and we can learn everything from placing history’s people and events in context. Hasty action in emotional days might rob those in the future of needed guidance in shaping their eras.
University of Missouri Curators correctly decided to leave the Jefferson statue on Francis Quadrangle although the petitions had more than two-thousand signatures. University System President Mun Choi said, “We learn from history. We contextualize historical figures with complex legacies. We don’t remove history.”
To remove the statue of Jefferson because he owned slaves would also remove the statue of someone who was the main author of the Declaration of Independence, the creator of the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, the founder of the University of Virginia (three things he wanted on his original tombstone that also is at the University of Missouri-Columbia), and the president whose administration added most of the land west of the Mississippi River that made us a nation stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Dr. Choi and the curators had it right.
Here’s a more intimate dimension to this issue:
Several years ago when I was a guest lecturer at Kent State University, I met a sharp, earnest African-American student, Shannon Lanier, and this then-girlfriend (now his wife, Chandra, and mother of their three children). He told me he was the sixth-great grandson of Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings, whom some identify as the half-sister of Jefferson’s wife. Martha Jefferson died at the age of 33 in 1782. Shannon already had co-authored a book about Jefferson’s black descendants. DNA studies indicate Tom and Sally had six children, four of them surviving to adulthood. Many white Jefferson descendants accept the Hemings descendants as part of the Jefferson heritage.
I wonder how those African-American Jefferson descendants would feel if they knew a proposal had been made at the University of Missouri to remove a statue of their most famous ancestor. Would the removal place them in the position of being branded as products of some kind of unforgivable Original Sin? Is their existence the result of some kind of unforgiveable disobedience of widely-accepted contemporary codes against sexual relations between different races (a code often ignored in plantation America, including here in Missouri)?
The censuring of Jefferson as a slave-owner could be seen as a disparagement of hundreds of his descendants, a continuation of the idea that any child born out of wedlock—let alone also born of an interracial relationship—should bear a mark of historic illegitimacy.
And what difference does it make in the long run? The importance of a life is not how it begins but how it is lived. That is why a rush to judgment in emotionally-charged times can be perilous.
As Shannon put it on CBS This Morning, on February 14, 2019, “Sometimes, I’m proud of his accomplishments and sometimes I hate him for not doing more…We can’t necessarily judge history with contemporary eyes but we can learn from history and the mistakes that our past leaders have made.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTC_UFAhrvA)
The PBS Newshour ran an extended piece that featured other descendants of Sally and Tom commenting on a Monticello exhibit about Sally. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Gm3HtijrMQ)
The New York Times ran a Farah Stockman’s story on June 16, 2018 (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/16/us/jefferson-sally-hemings-descendants.html) about the feelings of Hemings descendants about the exhibit. One of those descendants, former employee of the National Archives in Washington, D. C., Julius “Calvin” Jefferson, took pride in his slave ancestors: “They were there at the beginning of the country. When you are of African descent, you are told that we had nothing to do with that. I’ve realized that members of my family had a lot to do with that. The contributions that the slave community did at this one plantation afforded Thomas Jefferson the leisure to be the genius that he became.”
Additionally, how, if we are to follow the wishes of those advocating removing monuments of racists and slave-holders, should we treat the thirty-nine men who signed the United States Constitution in 1787? Or the 56 who signed the Declaration of Independence? Some of them were slave-holders yet they gave us the Declaration that declared we were a nation on equal standing with other nations and asserted the immortal line we are fond of quoting today despite the times in which it originated—All men are created equal—and then produced a Constitution that, with its Bill of Rights, defines our country as the republic that it is.
There is danger in applying a moral standard of our time to punish our ancestors for the values they held in morally different societies. To brand them for being part of an acceptable culture that would not be acceptable today runs the risk of diminishing our opportunities to learn from them. Failing to remember our past with its disgraceful as well as its noble moments is to risk an ignorance that could produce regrettable repetitions.
Thomas Jefferson, J. C. Nichols and all of those in our pasts whose flaws we recognize because of our contemporary values give us important context as we correct today’s shortcomings.
Tomorrow is more important than yesterday. But knowing about yesterday is vitally important in helping us shape that tomorrow. Ignorance of history is more dangerous than knowledge of it. Historic events and historical figures are products of their times. Placing people and events within the standards of their eras gives them a reality that we cannot ignore as we consider who we are today and who we will seem to be when we join them as history.
Our presence in these times is a history lesson for tomorrow whether we like it or not or whether those who come after like us or not.
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jon Meacham a few days ago on MSNBC discussed how he evaluates historical figures:
Was the person or the institution being memorialized ultimately devoted to the pursuit of a more perfect union or were they for ending the constitutional experiment altogether. And by that test, even the most flawed white Americans—Andrew Jackson, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, could be memorialized and understood as imperfect people who nevertheless were about defending a system that ultimately gave us the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments that ultimately gave us the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Woman Suffrage. From Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall, the story of the country has been one of all-too-gradual liberation and we should build our monuments; we should focus our collective commemorative memory around those moments.
Taken as a whole, was Jefferson’s life a quest for that “more perfect union?” Yes, it was and is the reason his statues should remain in Columbia and elsewhere, a representation of a man who—as is true of all of us—is greater than his shortcomings.
Thanks, Bob! I learned from your post today, as usual. Thanks!
Thank you for your comments. I am sure you will get grief over this. BUT, Thomas Jefferson was a key part of American history. He was also a key part of Missouri’s history. Without his gutsy decision — and very un-Jeffersonian decision — to make the Louisiana Purchase, Missouri might not be part of the U.S.
Yes. Jefferson was a slaveholder. That was morally wrong. BUT, he is not being recognized for being a slaveholder. His is being recognized for his so many other contributions to America’s history.
George Washington was a slaveholder. Are we also going to erase Washington from America’s history? Back in his day, Washington (and Benjamin Franklin) were the two most known names in America. Without Washington’s leadership, the American Revolution would probably have been lost. Even more significant is Washington’s lending his respectability and credibility to the replacement of the Articles of Confederation with the Constitution. Without his leadership with the transition from the Revolution to the ratification of the Constitution, the United States of America would likely have become a collection of regional units more like Europe than a nation stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
Thank you for having the courage to so succinctly say what you have said. Yes. We should NOT condone slavery. Duh! But, let’s not be stupid and throw out all of the history that can be taught about historical figures who may have had flaws like slaveholding in their personal lives. Jefferson and people like him MADE history with their significant contributions. Jefferson helped make America what it is today despite his flaws. I am not advocating for ignoring his flaws, but at the same time, don’t ignore his role in making us who we are.
Thank you for your comment. We are on the same page. I would point out that Jefferson was surprised by the Louisiana Purchase; he had sent our ministers to negotiate with Napoleon only for the port of New Orleans and considered the deal that was struck the most unconstitutional thing of his presidency–which is why he did not want it on his tombstone. He decided the less said, the better, and for that almost all of us west of the Mississippi are eternally grateful.
Jefferson passed laws PROHIBITING Slaves imported into the USA. He wrote bills and the Constitution giving freedom…he did not have slaves in chains…such lies. Those servants had jobs, they had cabin-houses, food and family units. He educated them…no different than having a job by today’s standards. He saved slaves from brutal slave trades…
Thank you for your contribution, Jean. I edited out the last line because I do not allow name-calling in comments. I suggest you check an article from the October, 2012 issue of Smithsonian Magazine, “The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson,” which presents a less flattering portrait of Jefferson as a slave-holder and suggests slavery at Monticello was hardly “no different than having a job by today’s standards.” https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-dark-side-of-thomas-jefferson-35976004/
I point this out because, as I hope I indicated in the post, Thomas Jefferson was a complex man, as all of us are complex individuals, and to judge someone on the basis of one quality while ignoring other values they espoused is damaging to a holistic understanding of our history and thus, damaging to our understanding of who we are and the world in which we live.