The Jefferson Question

By JOONYOUNG HEO ‘25

Ought we celebrate Thomas Jefferson?

For better or worse, this question had a definitive answer in early America — of course we should celebrate such a man as Jefferson — and anything to the contrary was unthinkable. In modern America, however, when society has been so radically transformed by newer ideals and ideologues, and when there is an ever-growing movement to reappraise how history has been taught in previous decades, that answer has shifted in the other direction.

Image courtesy of Mike Scott

While this question concerns Thomas Jefferson, moreover, it’s relevant to all of history itself. The modern audience is increasingly prone to criticize our predecessors, from Wilson and Roosevelt to even Washington and Lincoln. Taken to an extreme, this tendency is exaggerated in recent cases of public statues being vandalized in parks and universities. Hence, the real question at hand is a broader inquiry: armed with all the facts and the privilege of retrospect, how should we go about weighing between several opposing factors to fairly examine an individual? It’s a complicated question with convoluted implications. I simply take the Jefferson case as a revealing model to work through it.

Let us first look at the obvious facts, which are particularly critical for this debate. Born in colonial Virginia in 1743, Jefferson most famously wrote the Declaration of Independence. He was also a masterful diplomat in France and led the crusade for religious freedom, among other individual liberties, after the American Revolution. And when he became the third president of the United States, he dealt with foreign pressure and strengthened the country.

Of course, not all the facts are in his favor. In Monticello, his home plantation, he owned hundreds of slaves throughout his lifetime. It has also been proven very likely by a recent genealogical test that he fathered several children with an enslaved young woman named Sally Hemings. While the nature of the relationship remains unclear, his conduct from a position of ownership is morally impermissible. These are facts, just as true and indisputable as his many national contributions, and they must be equally accepted to engage in this discussion.

This is the point where “common knowledge” ends — with the Declaration and his slaves. It is quite easy, then, to picture Jefferson as a cruel, twisted man who happened to be a Founding Father. Taking this as a premise, it seems understandable that many of us refuse to celebrate Jefferson for his grave moral failings irrespective of his achievements. When the question becomes a choice between historical contributions and quality in character, we are naturally inclined to favor the second.

But Jefferson’s story, like that of most other figures from the past, is of far greater nuance than it initially appears. As it turns out, presuming his devotion to slavery contradicts a number of other facts from his life — primarily that he did hold anti-slavery views. For one thing, Jefferson included a paragraph in the Declaration condemning slavery (though the section was eventually vetoed). Later, he abolished the international slave trade as president and even advocated for a plan of gradual emancipation within the country. The moral evils of slavery, it seems, were clear to Jefferson.

The objection is obvious: If he cared so much about slavery, why didn’t he free his own slaves? Simply put, he could not afford to part with them. His entire estate was tied to slavery, and even then he died with some two million dollars in debt (in today’s currency). Freeing his slaves would have directly defied his creditors, ruining his finances and condemning his family to poverty. His personal refusal to treat his slaves cruelly aligns with this notion of necessity. Thus, if sheer moral ignorance and evil are on one side of the spectrum and abolitionism on the other, Jefferson would be somewhere in between.

Whatever his financial situation was, of course, we ought to roundly criticize him for shrinking from his great duty to free his slaves. He was indeed a coward and a hypocrite when it mattered most, ultimately prioritizing his own financial security over his moral qualms. But even as we acknowledge that Jefferson was a far cry from a perfect human being, we must remember he was just that — a human being. We can recognize his defects without attributing a profound depravity to his character. After all, how many of us, born in colonial Virginia and raised in a culture that has always normalized slavery, would find it in ourselves to sacrifice our lives and our families for a moral cause? If anything, the very fact that he publicized and implemented into national policy his misgivings about his own way of life should be counted favorably — and, at the very least, it shows us that developing historical empathy makes it much harder to dismiss his moral worth as a “vile slaveholder.”

We can apply a similar approach to Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings. Nothing can justify what happened, but I reiterate — the purpose of this article was not once to justify. Rather, we must examine the full scope of these incidents to better understand Jefferson’s character. Here too it seems that his moral sense burdened him a great deal, as there is evidence that he regretted fathering her illegitimate children. Notably, the Hemingses were the only slaves he freed upon his death, and Sally herself lived the rest of her life a free woman. Before her death, she even left her children several mementos of her former master — not the embittered loathing for him that we might expect. 

Of course, it is very possible that Hemings was emotionally manipulated or could not otherwise appreciate the full extent of her abuse, but these circumstances do leave ambiguity. We can see that drawing from the Hemings case to characterize Jefferson as a heartless monster is not nearly as straightforward as it’s commonly believed.

How, then, to make sense of all this? We have clearly established that passing judgment on Jefferson is convoluted to no end — so how must we proceed? Are we to perceive Jefferson as the great man who wrote the Declaration of Independence and condemned slavery in the public sphere, or the slaveholder who had children with young Sally Hemings? If he was the first man, surely we must celebrate him; if he was the second man, not so. Which is it?

The answer is surprisingly straightforward and concurrently frustrating — he was both. The question of celebrating Thomas Jefferson cannot be definitively resolved. This is ultimately the point. We do not study history to simply sort through facts “for” and “against” an individual, then plug them into some grand calculus to determine whether or not he is worthy of celebration. My argument here is not to dictate a yes or no, but to expose the real complexities of that question. We can commemorate his achievements and at once acknowledge his flaws and contradictions.

And indeed, the Jefferson question has revealed a number of significant considerations to this end. For one, we must not allow his defects to distort his many contributions to the United States. That he wrote the Declaration of Independence is just as much a reality as his ownership of hundreds of slaves. For another, we must exercise historical empathy before we pass judgment on our predecessors. A choice that seems obvious now, plucked from context and presented under modern scrutiny, was likely not so for them. 

“ Most importantly, we ought not settle for the deceptively simple facts at face value. ”

Most importantly, we ought not settle for the deceptively simple facts at face value. We tend to rely on these two-dimensional caricatures, ascribing great evil to an individual at a moment’s notice, because it’s convenient. I reject the disturbingly popular tendency to dismiss historical figures as two-dimensional caricatures the likes of “slaveholder” and “racist,” without knowing and seriously engaging in the realities and the contextual nuances of their time. When we do explore beneath the surface and take the time to understand — to really understand — we find that there is far more to the picture than we imagined.