Presidents Of The United States

"There is nothing that will make an Englishman shit so quick as the sight of General Washington."

"The location of Washington's home is most beautiful and commanding, but, oh, the air of dilapidation and decay that everywhere meets the eye, the tottering out-buildings, the mark of slavery o'ershadow[ing] the whole. Oh, the thought that it was here, that he whose name is the pride of this nation was the Slave Master. The humorous, little buildings surrounding, or rather in [the] rear of the great house plainly tell the tale-a Slave, Woman, the cook of the present owner, Grand Nephew of Gen. Washington, told me these buildings were the Servants' Quarters. The tomb is humble indeed. It would seem that, if the profession of reverence for the "Father of his Country" were real, that this home of Washington would be rescued from the curse of slave labor, and made to blossom in the sunshine of free labor...."

"Washington wasn't born good. Only practice and habit made him so."

"You can no more love and revere the memory of the biographical George Washington than you can an isosceles triangle or a cubic foot of interstellar space. The portrait-painters began it—Gilbert Stuart and the rest of them. They idealized all the humanity out of the poor patriot's face and passed him down to the engravers as a rather sleepy-looking butcher's block. There is not a portrait of Washington extant which a man of taste and knowledge would suffer to hang on the wall of his stable. Then the historians jumped in, raping all the laurels from the brows of the man's great contemporaries and piling them in confusion upon his pate. They made him a god in wisdom, and a giant in arms; whereas, in point of ability and service, he was but little, if at all, superior to any one of a half-dozen of his now over-shadowed but once illustrious co-workers in council and camp, and in no way comparable with Hamilton. He towers above his fellows because he stands upon a pile of books."

"George Washington was perhaps the one indispensable man among the founders. It is hard to imagine any of the others commanding the respect needed to lead the Continental Army to victory over Great Britain, preside over the Constitutional Convention, and serve the United States as its first president. Little in Washington's early life gave a hint of the great achievements to come."

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

"Jefferson was kind to his servants to the point of indulgence, and within the framework of an institution he disliked he saw that they were well provided for. His ‘people’ were devoted to him."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Who was it wrote that – “all men created equal”? It was Jefferson. Jefferson had more slaves than anybody else."

"I believe that in the next century, as blacks and Hispanics and Asians acquire increasing influence in American society, the Jeffersonian liberal tradition, which is already intellectually untenable, will become socially and politically untenable as well. I also believe that the American civil religion, official version...will have to be reformed in a manner that will downgrade and eventually exclude Thomas Jefferson. Finally, I believe that Jefferson will, nonetheless, continue to be a power in America in the area where the mystical side of Jefferson really belongs: among the radical, violent anti-Federal libertarian fanatics: the very same paranoid conspirators against whose grasp President Clinton is rightly resolved to defend “our sacred symbols.”"

"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.""

"If we look at our history with honesty and clarity we will be forced to admit that our Federal form of government has been, from the day of its birth, weakened in its integrity, confused and confounded in its direction, by the unresolved race question. We seldom take note or give adequate significance to the fact that Thomas Jefferson’s text of the Declaration of Independence was revised by the Continental Congress to eliminate a justifiable attack on King George for encouraging slave trade...Jefferson knew that such compromises with principle struck at the heart of the nation’s security and integrity."

"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."

"when Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark to explore the Northwest, he hoped they’d find live mastodons roaming around. He really just couldn’t believe, even though he was very interested in fossils—he had a fossil room at the White House when he was there—he couldn’t believe these animals had gone extinct. It just wasn’t what happened. It wasn’t what the creator, you know, had planned for them."

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

"the great fathers Jefferson, Lincoln and Jackson had given way to Carnegie, Morgan and DuPont."

"The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society. And yet they are denied and evaded, with no small show of success. One dashingly calls them ”glittering generalities.” Another bluntly calls them “self-evident lies.” And others insidiously argue that they apply to “superior races.” These expressions, different in form, are identical in object and effect – the supplanting the principles of free government, and restoring those of classification, caste and legitimacy. They would delight a convocation of crowned heads plotting against the people. They are the vanguard, the miner and sappers, of returning despotism. We must repulse them, or they will subjugate us."

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

"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.'"

"Consider this simple syllogism: Slavery is bad; Thomas Jefferson owned slaves; so, Thomas Jefferson was bad. Consider this simplistic precept: Racism is bad. Both are anything but profound and certainly not illuminating, but they typify, with due consideration for hyperbole, the quality and blinkered approach to Jeffersonian scholarship in the past several decades. The focal issue has been Jefferson’s racism, and the issue within the issue has been his assumed relationship with Sally Hemings. Jeffersonian scholarship has become an exercise in battology — a useless, fatuous repetition of the same claims but with a slightly different twist. "Jefferson was a racist but he really loved Sally Hemings" versus "Jefferson was a racist and he raped Sally Hemings," and so on. Those twists are what merit publication. The collision of radically different, but historically reasonable, ideas, needed for advances in historical scholarship, has become anathema. ... The situation at Monticello is toxic. They are unwilling to aim to settle the issues of Jefferson’s paternity and of his avowed racism by rational debate concerning the evidence, or even concerning what ought to count as evidence. Members of TJF — and many of them are, I suspect, sufficiently unfamiliar with Jefferson to be judges of the issue of paternity — have elected themselves to be the sole arbiters of Thomas Jefferson’s legacy, which is no longer open to debate. ... TJF’s depiction of Jefferson, jaded as it is, has won the day. It is now no longer necessary to recognize others who disagree with TJF, to read their arguments, to assess critically those arguments, and to engage in debate with them. ... While it is laudable that members of the TJF wish to be viewed historically as paladins of human rights, they are doing so by constructing an image of Jefferson that is warped by political ideals. Their Jefferson is an opportunist, hypocrite, racist, and perhaps even rapist, and they do not give voice to scholars who disagree. The climate is authoritarian — certainly not in keeping with Jefferson’s republican thinking."

"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."

"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."

"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.""

"Then there's the odd, of course, fact that he had a very long love affair with a woman who he owned, who he inherited from his father-in-law, who was his wife's half-sister, and produced several children by her, whose descendants have mainly been brought up on the white side of the color line. So in a strange way, his own patrimony disproves his own belief that there couldn't be coexistence between black and white Americans."

"Jefferson hosted the United States' first iftar at the White House. It was an unintentional event, one that occurred as a result of Jefferson's scheduled meeting with an invited envoy from the Tunisian government. It was the end of the first Barbary War, and Jefferson was anxious to establish better diplomatic relations with the North African states while ensuring the security of American interests in the Mediterranean. Upon being informed of the envoy's fasting to observe the Islamic month of Ramadan, Jefferson had the mealtime at the White House changed from 3:30 in the afternoon to "precisely at sunset" in an effort to accommodate his guest. This gesture on behalf of the president was not simply a diplomatic one, but one that demonstrated Jefferson's familiarity and comfort with Islam, a faith that interested him since his time as a student at the College of William & Mary. Indeed, Jefferson's interest in the Qur'an and his own study of Arabic led to his active promotion and eventual creation of an Oriental Languages department at his alma mater. As a scholar and a diplomat, Jefferson was keenly aware and interested in the world outside of America and the importance of cultural and intellectual capital to the success of the United States."

"Jefferson, moved by anger and scorn against the planter class for its fellowship and partnership in the tyranny of the Crown, threw off its allurements, so congenial to his tastes and habits, and allied himself absolutely, unreservedly, actively, permanently with the wronged masses. In the struggle in that agricultural community between the "planters," or large landowners, and the "settlers," or small landowners, Jefferson's heart was always with the latter."

"His anti-slavery sentiments, so forcibly given in his Notes on Virginia, will be quoted with impressive effect as long as slavery exists in our land. It is true, he was a slaveholder; and hence his theory was better than his practice. It is apparent, moreover, that he had clearer views of the impolicy of the slave-system, than of its guilt. But he never dishonored his judgement, or perverted his good sense, by attempting to prove the lawfulness of holding the colored race in bondage."

"Truly, I believe we need a new Declaration of Independence. Is there no modern Jefferson or Adams?"

"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."

"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 invention of the Wheel Cypher represents a contribution to cryptographic science so far in advance of his time that at least a century had to elapse before a similar invention was independently made by a second inventor in the field."

"Jefferson saw in the widespread ownership of land, in families made self-sufficient and independent by their farming, the best defence that could be erected against the arrogation of additional powers by the State, or by any who might wish to construct an economic or political oligarchy. Men, he frequently said, had not sought freedom in order to acquire property, but, rather, had acquired property in order to ensure freedom... Jefferson's analysis of democracy is one that still possesses a certain relevance. In so far as he believed that even the democratic State could become an elective tyranny, he spoke prophetically. In so far as he believed that property provided the best defence against that tyranny, he reminds us all of the importance of property, and of the dangers to democracy that result from its abolition."

"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."

"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."

"One cannot question the genuineness of Jefferson’s liberal dreams. He was one of the first statesmen in any part of the world to advocate concrete measures for restricting and eradicating Negro slavery."

"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."

"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."

"To the twentieth-century mind Jefferson's views on race stand in contrast to the liberal stance that he took on most of the major issues of the day; yet his repeated condemnation of the instutition of slavery and his insistent arguments that steps must be taken to bring it to an end placed him in advance of most, but far from all, eighteenth-century persons."

"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?"

"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."

"He honored religious teachers who did not use mystifications to gain illegitimate power, eventually believing Jesus the greatest of these. He appreciated the role of religious institutions. But he was very leery of any priesthood and had almost no involvement with any organized religious sect, possibly because he found the options available to him so uninviting... Jefferson never doubted such a creative and providential god, even when he tried without success to understand the views of authentic atheists. This cosmology remained the foundation of his private religious beliefs and a support both for objective knowledge and moral confidence. He was so certain of his beliefs in such a creative god, in a planned and ordered universe, and in a divinely implanted moral sense in each person, that he assumed, quite incorrectly as we know, that such beliefs were universal, at the heart of all religions. When anyone challenged such beliefs, he easily and routinely referred to the evidence of design in nature and in the human mind. Such evidence made belief in a creative and purposeful god unchallengeable, self-evident."

"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."

"[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."

"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."

"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."

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