What if jefferson was right

Breadcrumb U. Executive Power Jefferson's performance as President justified divergent conceptions of executive power. The Private and Public Jefferson has been a great democratic icon precisely because he so eloquently articulated fundamental tensions in Americans' understanding of the people's power.

Rights, Rhetoric, and Reality Jefferson will always be celebrated for articulating the American national creed, the fundamental and universal principles of self-government that he set forth in the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson Essays Life in Brief. Life Before the Presidency. Campaigns and Elections. Domestic Affairs. Foreign Affairs. Life After the Presidency. Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. Frank Shuffelton. New York: Penguin Press, Sheldon, Garrett Ward.

The Political Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, Is It Really Part of the Law? Post, David. Carol Walker. Thomas Jefferson [electronic resource]. Other articles in Presidents. Want to support the Free Speech Center?

Donate Now. The Spirit of America. New York: Simon and Schuster, Brodie, Fawn. Thomas Jefferson. New York: Bantam Books, Bruns, Roger. New York: Chelsea House, Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault.

Recommended for you. How the Troubles Began in Northern Ireland. Alexander Hamilton's Complicated Relationship to Slavery. How did the founding fathers view equality? And how did these diverging interpretations emerge? But after the Revolution succeeded, Americans began reading that famous phrase another way. It now became a statement of individual equality that everyone and every member of a deprived group could claim for himself or herself.

With each passing generation, our notion of who that statement covers has expanded. It is that promise of equality that has always defined our constitutional creed. At different moments, the Virginia colonists had tried to limit the extent of the slave trade, but the British crown had blocked those efforts. But Virginians also knew that their slave system was reproducing itself naturally. They could eliminate the slave trade without eliminating slavery.

That was not true in the West Indies or Brazil. To make any claim of this nature would open them to charges of rank hypocrisy that were best left unstated. If the founding fathers, including Thomas Jefferson, thought slavery was morally corrupt, how did they reconcile owning slaves themselves, and how was it still built into American law? Two arguments offer the bare beginnings of an answer to this complicated question.

The first is that the desire to exploit labor was a central feature of most colonizing societies in the Americas, especially those that relied on the exportation of valuable commodities like sugar, tobacco, rice and much later cotton.