[Thomas] Jefferson, [Paul] Finkelman tells us [link added], was not a “particularly kind” slave-master; he sometimes “punished slaves by selling them away from their families and friends, a retaliation that was incomprehensibly cruel even at the time.” And he believed that ”blacks’ ability to reason was ‘much inferior’ to whites’ and that they were “in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.” So what? Really – so what? If you want to think that he was a bad guy — or even a really bad guy, with truly grievous personal faults — you’re free to do so. But to claim that that has something to do with Jefferson’s historical legacy is truly preposterous.That is an incredibly stupid thing for Post to write. I don't know from "immoral"; for one thing I tend not to think the word "immoral" is particularly useful in most, if any, contexts (I'll save that discussion for another time), and for another I've read so many stupid and bigoted paragraphs by so many that this one does not jump out. "Inane" seems to me a more fitting adjective, though perhaps that does not carry the full freight of what is wrong here.
Brad DeLong -- an economics professor at U. Cal. Berkeley -- compares Post's statement to Aunt Sally in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:
HUCK FINN: "It warn't the grounding -- that didn't keep us back but a little. We blowed out a cylinder-head."I think that's apt. It undercuts "immorality" by Post, though, because there's no intent to be evil; he's just dumb.
AUNT SALLY: "Good gracious! anybody hurt?"
HUCK FINN: "No'm. Killed a nigger."
AUNT SALLY: "Well, it's lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.
What Post intends, in fact, is to defend Jefferson the man by defending his words that "all men are created equal." From his post at The Volokh Conspiracy it is plain that Post believes the legacy of the abolition of slavery to a large extent Jefferson's, and he quotes Abraham Lincoln at length praising Jefferson. That's a bizarre ad hominem argument -- it's bizarre because not only whether Lincoln liked Jefferson or not is irrelevant to what Jefferson actually did but the whole premise of Post's assertions that Jefferson should be judged by his thoughts is undercut by trying to support him ad hominem. But such a nice understanding may be beyond Professor Post.
The thing is, the merits of the man as such may be distinct from the merits of the idea that all people are and should be equal before the law. If that is so, then Post's babblings to defend Jefferson the man are silly from the get-go. His point -- if that was it -- would have been made simply by saying that Jefferson's actions as a human being are no more relevant to the idea of equality than those of any other slave owning rich Virginia landowner in the late 1700's early 1800's. Jefferson may have been a bum but the idea of equality is still brilliant.
That, however, is not really Post's purpose. He's incensed that Paul Finkleman (the only historian among the lot in this post, but maybe I'm getting a bit ad hominem myself here) has the tenacity to point out what a bum Jefferson was in a New York Times op ed. Finkelman agrees there is a "paradox about Jefferson" given his advocacy of equality while owning slaves and defending slavery.
Finkelman, who has written several books on the subject and can rightly be called an expert, points out that Jefferson ultimately opposed manumission of slaves and emancipation; that while George Washington freed his slaves Jefferson did not; "he punished slaves by selling them away from their families and friends"; "he advocated harsh, almost barbaric, punishments for slaves and free blacks, ... proposed legislation to make emancipated blacks 'outlaws' ... [and] proposed expelling from Virginia the children of white women and black men"; "he blocked consideration of a law that might have eventually ended slavery in [Virginia]"; he allowed slavery to spread and continue in the Louisiana Territory after it was purchased; "he told his neighbor Edward Coles not to emancipate his own slaves, because free blacks were 'pests in society' who were 'as incapable as children of taking care of themselves.'" According to Finkelman, "Jefferson ... believed blacks lacked basic human emotions" and Jefferson wrote "[t]heir griefs are transient," their love lacks "a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation," and he had "never seen an elementary trait of painting or sculpture [or poetry among blacks]" and "in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous." He "speculated that blackness might come 'from the color of the blood' and concluded that blacks were 'inferior to the whites in the endowments of body and mind.'"
Jefferson may have advocated freedom for all as a younger man. He changed.
And it's so odd that Post premises his defense of Jefferson on Lincoln, for Lincoln was a keen supporter of the continuation of the Missouri Compromise (a compromise that limited the spread of slavery and the retrenchment from which, via the Kansas-Nebraska Act, led to the formation of the Republican Party, as I've discussed before), while Jefferson aggressively opposed the Missouri Compromise, thought slavery should spread, and, according to Finkelman, "believed that by opposing the spread of slavery in the West, the children of the revolution were about to 'perpetrate' an 'act of suicide on themselves, and of treason against the hopes of the world.'"
To see if, perchance, Post might have scholarly work remotely similar to Finkelman (turns out he doesn't), I went to Amazon (for books, found 2), the journal web site SSRN (since he's a law professor), and LEXIS-NEXIS (which has extensive law articles). His expertise, such as it is, is in internet law and intellectual property, and only one of these related to Jefferson (of the 33 law journal articles I found on SSRN and 29 on LEXIS-NEXIS (which has most of the SSRN articles)). So I thought I'd see what he says there; maybe that article has Jefferson gold.
In that article (found at 49 Drake L. Rev. 407), amazingly, Post actually advocates making decisions "without reason" (at 410), he calls the internet a "language," says it seems he has "lost his mind," and states, "Thomas Jefferson will serve as the 'lunatic' from whom I will seek some guidance." (Id. at 412) He is turning to Jefferson for guidance on linguistics. (Id. at 417-23.) That is, he is actually then purporting to use Jefferson as a current preeminent scholar on linguistics. (Id.) Jefferson lived from the mid 1700's to early 1800's. Linguistics did not even really begin until then, and substantially developed since then. And not a single authoritative source I have ever seen considers Jefferson to be a leading light on linguistics, even then.
It is hard for me to describe how inane Post's one published Jefferson article is. Immoral? No. Frivolously stupid and ignorant? Yes. Maybe Post has got something else -- he refers to an apparently unpublished article in his Volokh Conspiray post which I've read and understand why it is apparently not published.
I am going to go with Finkelman, though, who uses, you know, facts. Jefferson as a man: complex, inconsistent, and often a bum. That's fundamentally different than the idea of equality. The idea of equality predated Jefferson by far, but it was the brilliance of the ratifiers of Virginia Constitution and the Declaration of Independence to begin to make it law.
There's a second part to this post I'll follow with tomorrow night.
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