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The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson
The Dark Side of Thomas JeffersonA new portrait of the founding father challenges the long-held perception of Thomas Jefferson as a benevolent slaveholder
The critical turning point in Jeffersons thinking may well have come in 1792. As Jefferson was counting up the agricultural profits and losses of his plantation in a letter to President Washington that year, it occurred to him that there was a phenomenon he had perceived at Monticello but never actually measured. He proceeded to calculate it in a barely legible, scribbled note in the middle of a page, enclosed in brackets. What Jefferson set out clearly for the first time was that he was making a 4 percent profit every year on the birth of black children. The enslaved were yielding him a bonanza, a perpetual human dividend at compound interest. Jefferson wrote, I allow nothing for losses by death, but, on the contrary, shall presently take credit four per cent. per annum, for their increase over and above keeping up their own numbers. His plantation was producing inexhaustible human assets. The percentage was predictable.
In another communication from the early 1790s, Jefferson takes the 4 percent formula further and quite bluntly advances the notion that slavery presented an investment strategy for the future. He writes that an acquaintance who had suffered financial reverses should have been invested in negroes. He advises that if the friends family had any cash left, every farthing of it [should be] laid out in land and negroes, which besides a present support bring a silent profit of from 5. to 10. per cent in this country by the increase in their value.
The irony is that Jefferson sent his 4 percent formula to George Washington, who freed his slaves, precisely because slavery had made human beings into money, like Cattle in the market, and this disgusted him. Yet Jefferson was right, prescient, about the investment value of slaves. A startling statistic emerged in the 1970s, when economists taking a hardheaded look at slavery found that on the eve of the Civil War, enslaved black people, in the aggregate, formed the second most valuable capital asset in the United States. David Brion Davis sums up their findings: In 1860, the value of Southern slaves was about three times the amount invested in manufacturing or railroads nationwide. The only asset more valuable than the black people was the land itself. The formula Jefferson had stumbled upon became the engine not only of Monticello but of the entire slaveholding South and the Northern industries, shippers, banks, insurers and investors who weighed risk against returns and bet on slavery. The words Jefferson usedtheir increasebecame magic words.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-dark-side-of-thomas-jefferson-35976004/?no-ist=&preview=_page%3D2_page%3D3&page=3
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The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson (Original Post)
shrike
Nov 2015
OP
roxanne dunbar-ortiz talks about jefferson and jackson in "an indigenous people's history
niyad
Nov 2015
#1
I remember getting this magazine & article a few yrs ago but it still is a good read
Person 2713
Nov 2015
#2
niyad
(113,600 posts)1. roxanne dunbar-ortiz talks about jefferson and jackson in "an indigenous people's history
of the united states"--and it is a very different view from the pablum we are fed in school;
link here to an interview with her:
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=12568
Person 2713
(3,263 posts)2. I remember getting this magazine & article a few yrs ago but it still is a good read
They had another article about other founders too that was interesting I will try to link it here later
Buzz cook
(2,474 posts)3. Jefferson was a nasty piece of work.
While he was Secretary of State he worked with newspaper owner James Callender, leaking damaging information about the Washington administration and writing pseudonymous editorials critical of Washington and the Federalists.
He wrote eloquently against abuse of government power, then when he was in office he used draconian measures to enforce the Embargo Act.
Slavery was his worst sin but not his only one.