Sandwiched in between the Fourth of July and an upcoming trip to Washington DC, my wife and I sat down to watch a wonderful PBS documentary on Thomas Jefferson. (Thank you Netflix!)
No other man so effectively captured the Spirit of America. His words have resonated throughout every revolution, and universally encouraged the overthrow of despotism since the 18th century.
It’s true that Jefferson was a flawed man and even a hypocrite. He proposed multiple laws to overturn slavery, and even blamed Britain for the slave trade in his first draft of the Declaration of Independence. Yet he never freed his own slaves, even upon his death. Jefferson called slavery a “toxin” that poisons the morals of everyone it touches, and it poisoned him as well.
Nevertheless, the principles that Jefferson wrote down captured so eloquently the core American values that “all men are created equal”, that our nation could not live with the discontinuity between what we believed and how we behaved. Jefferson died exactly 50 years after the Declaration was penned, on July 4, 1826, drifting in and out of consciousness, asking until midnight on the eve, “is it the fourth yet?” Only twenty five years after his death the American Civil War brought catharsis to the tension of one class of mankind living off the backs of another class. The elimination of slavery was something Jefferson dreamed of but unfortunately gave up doing anything about in the last decades of his life.
Thank God for Jefferson’s legacy, on the one hand deeply flawed and on the other hand amazingly transcendent:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
