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WEISS: Jefferson’s complicated legacy

Although U.Va. founder's legacy is complicated, overarching ideals established for our young nation should not be dismissed

Last semester, after students and faculty signed a letter asking University President Teresa Sullivan to stop pointing to Jefferson as a “moral compass” following an email she sent to students on Nov. 9, the discussion that ensued took on national proportions. The question of the value of quoting Jefferson in the wake of Trump’s election to the presidency became representative of a wider conversation about language in American discourse. Reactions to the letter broke along the same tired lines.

Conservatives denounced the student and faculty signatories as products of a “politically correct” culture that seeks to eradicate the monuments of a storied past under a heap of 21st century moral scrutiny. Liberals rose in defense of the letter and pointed to the horrors that Jefferson committed both politically and personally, complicit in the expansion of slavery and indefensible in his ownership of slaves. After a period of reflection, I think it is of paramount importance that the University community acknowledge just how morally tainted Thomas Jefferson is in light of his well-documented abuses. But I believe it is equally important that we not discard the wisdom of the man who, monstrous flaws and all, contributed most to the codification of American ideals in our system of government. Now more than ever do we need to be grounded in the clarity of his vision.

Those who wrote for The Cavalier Daily on this topic last semester adopted cogent if maximalist positions, and they each helped frame the discussion. Samantha Clarkson and Sharon Stein argued that the University can no longer afford to selectively embrace Jefferson’s legacy, and that it is better for the sake of fostering “honest conversations about our national and institutional histories” to challenge Jefferson’s legacy rather than defend it. Prof. Robert Turner claims Jefferson contributed to the cause of human freedom, was a “reluctant racist” and makes the familiar argument that he was a man of his time.

Though the idea of relativizing racism or slaveholding as people did back then is deplorably apologist, much of their analysis is correct and not mutually exclusive. The America Jefferson helped found sought to be an embodiment of Enlightenment philosophy and adhere to the natural rights social contract theory. These American principles have never been more eloquently distilled than through Jefferson’s pen, in the opening sentences of the Declaration of Independence, or in the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. The country fell short of that lofty vision for the exact reasons that Jefferson can be condemned without qualification: blatant, horrible, mean-spirited hypocrisy.

The story of Jefferson is the story of America. We are a nation, guided in large part by the moral power of this irredeemable man’s words, “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Yet we were and are hopelessly far from making that promissory note come true. It came at the cost of hypocrisy, but that philosophical lodestar empowered Americans to strive to achieve a more perfect union. It provided a renewing source of validation for every generation to expand the definition of freedom and citizenship. The story of Jefferson is that of a man who owned slaves and was instrumental in shaping the values of the world’s greatest experiment in self-government.

The story of America is of a country that owned slaves, fought a civil war to keep them, segregated the newly freed slaves into de facto oppression and control for 100 years after that, and still cannot come to understand that the Civil Rights Act did not erase 400 years of structural racism with the signing of a bill into law. But slowly, frustratingly, painstakingly we are getting better. As Martin Luther King, Jr. put it, “the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice.”

This optimistic outlook is fundamentally Jeffersonian. Jefferson helped set up the philosophical and institutional structure necessary for the grueling process of over two hundred years of reform that we can now look back on, still unsatisfied but grateful for where we are.

This cannot and does not soften the harsh fact that Thomas Jefferson practiced the very tyranny he sought to eradicate. But this should not mean that University officials have to stop referring to Jefferson. He codified the best of Enlightenment political philosophy into the moral and political cornerstone of American democracy, and we are all better off for it. If anything, his legacy and his continued presence should serve as a reminder of the complexity and difficulty that America must face if the country ever is to live out the “full meaning of its creed.” How can we ever commit ourselves to bridging the divides of the country if our solution to dealing with the troubled past is to cast it aside in disgust and not learn from its glimmers of brilliance?

Olivier Weiss is an Opinion columnist for The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at o.weiss@cavalierdaily.com.

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