Presidents Of The United States

"There was not in all the colonial legislation of America one single law which recognized the rightfulness of slavery in the abstract; that in 1774 Virginia stigmatized the slave-trade as 'wicked, cruel, and unnatural'; that in the same year Congress protested against it 'under the sacred ties of virtue, honor, and love of country'; that in 1775 the same Congress denied that God intended one man to own another as a slave; that the new Discipline of the Methodist Church, in 1784, and the Pastoral Letter of the Presbyterian Church, in 1788, denounced slavery; that abolition societies existed in slave States, and that it was hardly the interest even of the cotton-growing States, where it took a slave a day to clean a pound of cotton, to uphold the system... Jefferson, in his address to the Virginia Legislature of 1774, says that 'the abolition of domestic slavery is the greatest object of desire in these colonies, where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state'; and while he constantly remembers to remind us that the Jeffersonian prohibition of slavery in the territories was lost in 1784, he forgets to add that it was lost, not by a majority of votes — for there were sixteen in its favor to seven against it — but because the sixteen votes did not represent two thirds of the States; and he also incessantly forgets to tell us that this Jeffersonian prohibition was restored by the Congress of 1785, and erected into the famous Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which was re-enacted by the first Congress of the United States and approved by the first President."

"In 1801, President Jefferson aptly described the new settler-state's intentions for horizontal and vertical continental expansion, stating: "However our present interests may restrain us within our own limits, it is impossible not to look forward to distant times, when our rapid multiplication will expand itself beyond those limits and cover the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar form by similar laws." This vision of manifest destiny found form a few years later in the Monroe Doctrine, signaling the intention of annexing or dominating former Spanish colonial territories in the Americas and the Pacific, which would be put into practice during the rest of the century."

"Jefferson's profound antagonism to the debasing effects of tyranny inspired his greatest lines of prose. He carried to his death his hostility to authoritarian doctrines, precedents, and officials. But Jefferson was more than a catalyst for the liberal opinions rife in the society, he was the live wire that made the connection between Enlightenment philosophy and American public policy... Successful in perpetuating his pristine republican style of government for a quarter of a century, Jefferson laid the intellectual foundation for limited government and the intellectual undergirding for Americans' suspicion of governmental power, even that exercised by the people."

"Jefferson surely knew slavery was wrong, but he didn't have the courage to lead the way to emancipation. If you hate slavery and the terrible things it did to human beings, it is difficult to regard Jefferson as a great man, or a good man. He was a spendthrift, always deeply in debt. He never freed his slaves... He could not rise above convenience. To be a slave-holder meant one had to regard the African American as inferior in every way. One had to believe that the worst white man was better than the best black man. If you did not believe these things you could justify yourself to yourself. So Jefferson could condemn slavery in words, but not in deeds. Jefferson had slaves at his magnificent estate, Monticello, who were superb artisans, shoemakers, masons, carpenters, cooks. But like every bigot, he never said, after seeing a skilled African craftsman at work or enjoying the fruits of his labor, 'Maybe I'm wrong'. He already knew that. He ignored the words of his fellow revolutionary John Adams, who said that the revolution would never be complete until the slaves were free."

"As early as 1774, Thomas Jefferson asserted in "A Summary View of the Rights of British America" that "the ability to migrate wasn't just an exercise of natural rights but the source of rights.... Liberty was made possible by the right to colonize, letting freemen, when their freedom was threatened, to move on to find free land and carry the torch from one place to another." As Grandin notes, Jefferson provided settlers "a historical and moral philosophy, telling them that their movement west wasn't just a fruit of freedom but the source of freedom." By 1805, Thomas Jefferson "couldn't think of any limit to U.S. expansion." In 1824, James Monroe stated, "There is no object which as a people we can desire which we do not possess or which is not within our reach." Here we can see the tension identified by Kotef as well as Hardt and Negri-a conception of sovereignty as "an open, expansive project operating on unbounded terrain" that exists alongside a "fantasy of closure and enclosure," involving "clearly demarcated territory, sealed within a border, which is a container of the people." Here we see that for certain subjects, movement is a manifestation of liberty that should be maximized. While for others, movement is something that must be tightly managed and regulated."

"Some of my finest hours have been spent on my back veranda, smoking hemp and observing as far as my eye can see."

"Tyranny is defined as that which is legal for the government but illegal for the citizenry."

"How development of nations keeps the reality a little behind the wish and the will. That is, the people live under a rule made by others. Each generation is governed, necessarily, by a former generation. Jefferson's great idea: Let it be governed by its own ideas."

"The first consideration in immigration is the welfare of the receiving nation. In a new government based on principles unfamiliar to the rest of the world and resting on the sentiments of the people themselves, the influx of a large number of new immigrants unaccustomed to the government of a free society could be detrimental to that society. Immigration, therefore, must be approached carefully and cautiously."

"If you want something you have never had, you must be willing to do something you have never done."

"Widespread poverty and concentrated wealth cannot long endure side by side in a democracy"

"Almost every other American statesman might be described in a parenthesis. A few broad strokes of the brush would paint the portraits of all the early Presidents with this exception, and a few more strokes would answer for any member of their many cabinets; but Jefferson could be painted only touch by touch, with a fine pencil, and the perfection of the likeness depended upon the shifting and uncertain flicker of its semi-transparent shadows."

"Your character in history may easily be foreseen. Your administration will be quoted by philosophers as a model of profound wisdom; by politicians, as weak, superficial, and shortsighted. Mine, like Pope's woman, will have no character at all."

"The vision that impels feminists to action was the vision of the Grandmothers' society, the society that was captured in the words of the sixteenth-century explorer Peter Martyr nearly five hundred years ago. It is the same vision repeated over and over by radical thinkers of Europe and America, from François Villon to John Locke, from William Shakespeare to Thomas Jefferson, from Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, from Benito Juarez to Martin Luther King, from Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Judy Grahn, from Harriet Tubman to Audre Lorde, from Emma Goldman to Bella Abzug, from Malinalli to Cherrie Moraga, and from Iyatiku to me. That vision as Martyr told it is of a country where there are "no soldiers, no gendarmes or police, no nobles, kings, regents, prefects, or judges, no prisons, no lawsuits... All are equal and free.""

"Racism is still a major issue because it is a habit. It is a devastating disease. But it took us 370 years to get to this place and 200 years to establish racism. It won't be obliterated by the passing of a law or the charismatic presence of a Malcolm X or Martin Luther King It will be a tedious process and a long one. We will have to have people with strong and big hearts working for a few generations to obliterate the ugliness of it. There's something little spoken of. In the early 1800's, Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to a friend saying that we should send the slaves home to Africa. Why? Because, he said, it will take us five generations for them to forgive us."

"The thoroughness with which Jefferson exorcised the influence of his opponents still astounds. He removed a whole cohort of young Federalists from civil and military offices; he eliminated domestic taxes; he substantially reduced the national debt; he shrank the size of the bureaucracy despite the growth in population and territory; he hastened the conveyance of national land to ordinary farmers; and he replaced Federalist formality with a nonchalance in matters of etiquette that quite amazed foreign dignitaries."

"I don't know that Jefferson could have survived as a farmer then in that society without having an ability to work his farm with...slavery. It seems abominable to us looking back, but was a way of life then. And I think the saving grace of Jefferson's philosophy is that the things for which he stood and which he expressed so vividly and so clearly and emotionally, were what later permitted our country to escape from slavery itself."

"All the Founding Fathers hated Democracy — Thomas Jefferson was a partial exception, but only partial."

"Jefferson, apparently very early in life, found most of this distinctive Christian superstructure unbelievable, save for the assurance of life after death. In the middle years of his life he affirmed the Semitic cosmology without the Christian superstructure, although not without some sense of loneliness in a society so assertively Christian. He was persuaded, in part by the strictures of orthodox critics, that his form of religious rationalism did not qualify as Christian, and thus he did not so profess. In times of stress and anxiety he sought inspiration and consolation not in Christian sources but in Stoic and Epicurean moral philosophers. Then, in a period stretching from the early 1790s until the time he became president, he discovered a minimalist, unitarian version of Christianity, most of whose tenets he could affirm. He remained a reasonably consistent advocate of such a unitarianism until he died."

"Never did a man achieve more fame for what he did not do."

"The natural equal rights of men. If Washington or Jefferson or Madison should utter upon his native soil today the opinions he entertained and expressed upon this question, he would be denounced as a fanatical abolitionist. To declare the right of all men to liberty is sectional, because slavery is afraid of liberty and strikes the mouth that speaks the word. To preach slavery is not sectional — no: because freedom respects itself and believes in itself enough to give an enemy fair play. Thus Boston asked Senator Toombs to come and say what he could for slavery. I think Boston did a good thing, but I think Senator Toombs is not a wise man, for he went. He went all the way from Georgia to show Massachusetts how slavery looks, and to let it learn what it has to say. When will Georgia ask Wendell Phillips or Charles Sumner to come down and show her how liberty looks and speaks?"

"With the sure sagacity of a leader of men, Washington at once selected, for the highest and most responsible stations, the three chief Americans who represented the three forces in the nation which alone could command success in the institution of the government. Hamilton was the head, Jefferson was the heart, and John Jay was the conscience. Washington's just and serene ascendancy was the lambent flame in which these beneficent powers were fused, and nothing less than that ascendancy could have ridden the whirlwind and directed the storm that burst around him."

""Mr. Jefferson displays a mild, easy and obliging temper," commented the duc de La Rochefoucald-Liancourt, "though he is somewhat cold and reserved. His conversation is the most agreeable kind." Jefferson was open and approachable, yet he maintained an impregnable core of inner feeling that has frustrated his biographers. He had an insatiable curiosity about all aspects of life. His fondness for structure and order can be seen in the meticulous records he maintained on plant life and weather conditions at Monticello. Despite his many years in politics, he never acquired two attributes usually considered essential to success in that profession: a thick skin and a gift for oratory. He was acutely sensitive to public criticism and, although captivating in small groups, delivered notoriously unmoving speeches before large crowds. He tended to mumble softly out of earshot of much of his audience."

"You profess to believe "that, of one blood, God made all nations of men to dwell on the face of all the earth," and hath commanded all men, everywhere to love one another; yet you notoriously hate, (and glory in your hatred), all men whose skins are not colored like your own. You declare, before the world, and are understood by the world to declare, that you "hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; and that, among these are, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;" and yet, you hold securely, in a bondage which, according to your own Thomas Jefferson, "is worse than ages of that which your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose," a seventh part of the inhabitants of your country."

"[On Jefferson's relationships with Sally Hemings and the likelihood of his DNA providing evidence of their living descendants.] I would not characterize it as an affair, or suggest that the relationship can be understood in modern terms. On Jefferson's isolated mountaintop, sex took place as part of a hierarchy that everyone involved understood. Jefferson, and those of his class, did not share our current understanding of sexual morality. Sally Hemings was his servant, and had little power. She was dependent economically, though this does not mean her feelings were irrelevant. But it does mean that he had extraordinary power, and she very little, and so, as his concubine, she had probably replicated her mother's relationship with Jefferson's father-in-law; for she was, in fact, Jefferson's late wife's half-sister, and I have described the Hemings family as a parallel, subordinate family to the all-white Jeffersons. ... Technically, there were other Jeffersons with matching DNA characteristics, but the white Jefferson descendents who established the family denial in the mid-nineteenth century cast responsibility for paternity on two Jefferson nephews (children of Jefferson’s sister) whose DNA was not a match. So, as far as can be reconstructed, there are no Jeffersons other than the president who had the degree of physical access to Sally Hemings that he did."

"The story of black Sal is no farce—That he cohabits with her and has a number of children by her is a sacred truth—and the worst of it is he keeps the same children slaves—an unnatural crime which is very common in these parts."

"Jefferson himself considered the people he enslaved in the coldest economic terms, saying he calculated that a “woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man of the farm. What she produces is an addition to capital, while his labors disappear in mere consumption.""

"Upstanding citizens openly used drugs to feel nice, to alter their consciousness. Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, was a long-term, avid drug user. He particularly appreciated the opium-based drugs for their mind-altering as well as medicinal effects."

"True," replied M. de —, "he considers a free press as the paladium of liberty. I went today an hour before his time of dining, and was received in his cabinet while he was finishing a letter; I took up one of your public journals which lay upon his table, and was astonished and shocked to find its columns filled with the lowest abuse, and vilest of calumnies of the President. I threw it down with indignation, exclaiming, why do you not have the fellow hung who dares to write these abominable lies! He smiled at my warmth, and replied, 'hang the guardian of public morals? no, sir; rather would I protect the spirit of freedom which dictates even that abuse. Put that paper into your pocket, my good friend, and when you hear any one doubt the reality of American liberty, show them that paper, and tell them where you found it; you cannot have a better proof of its existence. Sir, the country where public men are amenable to public opinion; where not only their official measures, but their private morals, are open to the scrutiny and animadversion of every citizen, is more secure from despotism and corruption, than it could be rendered by the wisest code of laws, or best formed constitution. Party spirit may sometimes blacken, and its erroneous opinions may sometimes injure; but, in general, it will prove the best guardian of a pure and wise administration; it will detect and expose vice and corruption, check the encroachments of power, and resist oppression; sir, it is an abler protector of the people's rights, than arms or laws.' 'But is it not shocking that virtuous characters should be defamed?' 'Let their actions refute such libels. Believe me, virtue is not long darkened by the clouds of calumny. In its course, it will shine forth like the sun at noon-day, and with its brightness disperse the fogs and vapours which obscured its rising light. When a man assumes a public trust, he should consider himself as public property, and justly liable to the inspection and vigilance of public opinion; and the more sensibly he is made to feel his dependence, the less danger will there be of his abuse of power — The abuse of power, that rock on which good governments, and the people's rights, have been so often wrecked.' 'Such doctrines would never be recognised in the old world,' I observed. 'Our example,' he replied, 'may enforce these doctrines, which your philosophers have so long preached in vain; example, you know, far outweighs precept.'"

"I have long believed, that it was only by preserving the identity of the Republican party as embodied and characterized by the principles introduced by Mr. Jefferson that the original rights of the states and the people could be maintained as contemplated by the Constitution."

"I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."

"Directly or indirectly American classicism traces its ancestry to Jefferson, who may truly be called the father of our national architecture."

"Among the many legacies left by Thomas Jefferson, democracy may be the most lasting. Author of the Declaration of Independence, champion of the Bill of Rights, and a founder of the Democratic-Republican party, Jefferson has passed on to the American people his abiding faith in the ability of citizens to govern themselves. Of the assumptions that make American politics possible, none is more fundamental. Yet it must be said that the legacy left by this high-minded and idealistic philosopher, who was also a hard-headed and pragmatic politician—this egalitarian owner of slaves—is by no means simple. At the very least, as Charles Wiltse suggested almost half a century ago, Jefferson has left Americans with a divided conception of democracy. On the one hand, in advocating equality and popular sovereignty, he paved the way for a tradition of social democracy that extends from Albert Gallatin to Andrew Jackson to FDR and the progressive reformers of the twentieth century. On the other hand, as a believer in liberty and limited government, he can be seen as the source of a tradition of democratic individualism that runs from John Taylor to John C. Calhoun to contemporary conservatives who champion personal rights and advocate restrictions on the role of the state. "This double emphasis in Jefferson's thought," concludes Wiltse, "has left American democracy a dual tradition.""

"All honor to Jefferson to the man, who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a mere revolutionary an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all time, and so to embalm it there to-day and in all coming days it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression."

"Jefferson was exalted as the patron saint of all good things. The range of causes for which his name was invoked is staggering: democracy and partisanship, states' rights and nationalism, slavery and abolitionism, egalitarianism and racism, imperialism and isolationism, populism and laissez-faire capitalism, the planned and the decentralized society. In the nineteenth century, so long as rural values continued to prevail in America despite the relentless march of industrialization, Jefferson continued to be identified with the agrarian tradition; in the twentieth, when the center of American life and values became the city, his connection with that ideal was all but forgotten, and instead he came to be regarded as the champion of the "have-nots" against the "haves," of the "common man" (or the "forgotten man" or the "little fellow") against aristocrats and plutocrats... The real Jefferson...was lost in the shuffle. So, too, was the America he wanted his country to become; and in a nation of crime-ridden cities and poisoned air, of credit cards and gigantic corporations, of welfare rolls and massive bureaucracies, corruption and alienation, that loss is the more poignant. He and his followers set out to deflect the course of History, and History ended up devouring them and turning even their memory to its own purposes. History has a way of doing that."

"It may, on the whole, be truly said of him, that he was greatly eminent for the comprehensiveness and fertility of his genius, for the vast extent and rich variety of his acquirements, and particularly distinguished by the philosophic impress left on every subject which he touched. Nor was he less distinguished for an early and uniform devotion to the cause of liberty, and systematic preference of a form of Government squared in the strictest degree to the rights of man. In the social and domestic spheres, he was a model of the virtues and manners which most adorn them."

"The two major achievements of Jefferson's presidency were the Louisiana Purchase and the abolition of the slave trade."

"When Mr. Jefferson wrote that one of his associates in Washington's cabinet was "a fool and a blabber," his words, taken in their context, make exactly the same impression of calm, disinterested and objective appraisal as if he had remarked that the man had black hair and brown eyes."

"If Jefferson was wrong, America is wrong. If America is right, Jefferson was right."

"More than 20 years after CBS executives were pressured by Jefferson historians to drop plans for a mini-series on Jefferson and Hemings, the network airs Sally Hemings: An American Scandal. Though many quarreled with the portrayal of Hemings as unrealistically modern and heroic, no major historian challenged the series' premise that Hemings and Jefferson had a 38-year relationship that produced children."

"If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey it, he is obligated to do so."

"Thank Heaven, I have never hesitated to criticize Jefferson; he was infinitely below Hamilton. I think the worship of Jefferson a discredit to my country."

"Jefferson died on the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. This was on July 4, 1826. He had lived a full life of eighty-three years. He appealed to and expressed America's better self, and as a statesman believed in America and the people of America. He kept his fine ideals, his simplicity, his youthful mind, and his hopeful outlook to the very last."

"When I read Jefferson's disparagement of Wheatley, it felt like he had been disparaging the entire lineage of Black poets who would follow her, myself included, and I saw a man who had not had a clear understanding of what love is...Jefferson's conceptions of love seem to have been so distorted by his own prejudices that he was unable to recognize the endless examples of love that pervaded plantations across the country: mothers who huddled over their children and took the lash so their little ones wouldn't have to; surrogate mothers, fathers, and grandparents who took in children and raised them as their own when their biological parents were disappeared in the middle of the night; the people who loved and married and committed to one another despite the omnipresent threat that they might be separated at any moment. What is love if not this?"

"This very verse, brethren, having emanated from Mr. Jefferson, a much greater philosopher the world never afforded, has in truth injured us more, and has been as great a barrier to our emancipation as any thing that has ever been advanced against us. ... I pledge you my sacred word of honour, that Mr. Jefferson's remarks respecting us, have sunk deep into the hearts of millions of the whites, and never will be removed this side of eternity."

"Jefferson expressed the American idea: political and social pluralism; government of limited, delegated and enumerated powers; the fecundity of freedom. He expressed it not only in stirring cadences, but also in the way he lived, as statesman, scientist, architect, educator. Jeffersonianism is what free men believe. Jefferson is what a free person looks like—confident, serene, rational, disciplined, temperate, tolerant, curious. In fine, Jefferson is the Person of the Millennium."

"Jefferson's objects have not fallen out of date. They are our own objects, if we be faithful to any ideals whatever; and the question we ask ourselves is not, How would Jefferson have pursued them in his day? but How shall we pursue them in ours? It is the spirit, not the tenets of the man by which he rules us from his urn."

"Thomas Jefferson: Writings: Autobiography / Notes on the State of Virginia / Public and Private Papers / Addresses / Letters (1984, Library of America edition; see discussion of sources at . There are numerous one-volume collections; this is perhaps the best place to start."

"Lipscomb, Andrew A. and Albert Ellery Bergh, eds. The Writings Of Thomas Jefferson 19 vol. (1907) not as complete nor as accurate as Boyd edition, but covers TJ from 1801 to his death. It is out of copyright, and so is online free."

"The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not."