Politicians From Virginia

"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."

"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?"

"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."

"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."

"Jefferson was not ashamed to call the black man his brother and to address him as a gentleman."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"[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."

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

"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."

"Wake up, America. Your liberties are being stolen before your very eyes. What Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln fought for, Truman, Acheson, and McGrath are striving desperately to nullify. Wake up, Americans, and dare to think and say and do. Dare to cry: No More War!"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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.""

"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."

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

"The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite."

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

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

"I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it."

"Equal rights for all, special privileges for none."

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

"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."

"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."

"Mr. Js Mechanics and his entire household of servants...consisted of one family connection and their wives."

"Dissent is the highest form of patriotism."

"When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny."

"A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither."

"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have ... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."

"Dispersed as the Jews are, they still form one nation, foreign to the land they live in."

"A child raised every 2. years is of more profit then the crop of the best laboring man. in this, as in all other cases, providence has made our duties and our interests coincide perfectly.... [W]ith respect therefore to our women & their children I must pray you to inculcate upon the overseers that it is not their labor, but their increase which is the first consideration with us."

"I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology."

"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance."

"There is no justification for taking away individuals' freedom in the guise of public safety."

"Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God."

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and the corporations which grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."

"I sincerely believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a money aristocracy that has set the government at defiance. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs."

"A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where 51 percent of the people may take away the rights of the other 49."

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

"Almighty God, Who has given us this good land for our heritage; We humbly beseech Thee that we may always prove ourselves a people mindful of Thy favor and glad to do Thy will. Bless our land with honorable ministry, sound learning, and pure manners. Save us from violence, discord, and confusion, from pride and arrogance, and from every evil way. Defend our liberties, and fashion into one united people, the multitude brought hither out of many kindreds and tongues. Endow with Thy spirit of wisdom those whom in Thy name we entrust the authority of government, that there may be justice and peace at home, and that through obedience to Thy law, we may show forth Thy praise among the nations of the earth. In time of prosperity fill our hearts with thankfulness, and in the day of trouble, suffer not our trust in Thee to fail; all of which we ask through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen."

"The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first."

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

"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."

"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."

"I forgot to ask the favor of you to speak to Lilly as to the treatment of the nailers. it would destroy their value in my estimation to degrade them in their own eyes by the whip. this therefore must not be resorted to but in extremities. as they will again be under my government, I would chuse they should retain the stimulus of character."