The Hypocrisy Of Thomas Jefferson Regarding Slavery

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Pages: 7
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Jake Harrison
Mr. Webb and Mrs. Hany
Freshman Program: H1
1 May 2017
The Hypocrisy of Thomas Jefferson Regarding Slavery
“In the remarkable year of 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, including those timeless words all men are created equal. That same year, he recorded a census of the ‘Number of souls in my family.’ The total was 117, and it included his wife, daughters, sixteen freemen - overseers and other paid workmen - and eighty-three slaves” (Davis, 145). Thomas Jefferson was the third president of the United States and the author of the Declaration of Independence, as well as a diplomat, philosopher, inventor, scholar, and architect. He, along with many other recognizable names like George Washington and Benjamin …show more content…
The same man who wrote the words, “all men are created equal” and advocated for the abolition of slavery was a lifelong slave owner. Some may argue that the hypocrisy of Thomas Jefferson is being analyzed too much from a modern perspective, and that he was merely a man of his times. However, it must be taken into consideration that Jefferson went against his own words. The aristocratic society that Thomas Jefferson grew up and lived his life in revolved around agriculture and slave labor, so he was always exposed to the horrors of the practice, which helped him develop his own anti-slavery opinions. However, everyone, including Jefferson, knew that slaves were irrevocably ranked as sub-human, and he treated them as such with his lifelong status as a slave owner. Marc Aronson states in Race that “Each group has a distinct level of brain power and moral refinement, thus they are naturally and unchangeably ranked” (3). Thomas Jefferson was practically a genius. He saw things that other people didn’t see and analyzed things from every angle. It is possible that his sympathetic views of slaves were overshadowed by the opinions of those around him. While he may have thought slavery was wrong, Jefferson nonetheless regarded slaves as property. After all, he legally owned 175 of them. And slaves were at the very bottom of the hierarchy pyramid. They had no rights at all. They were not granted the freedoms bestowed in the Declaration of Independence. They were “savages” compared to “civilized” white people. And Thomas Jefferson, the man behind the Declaration, was a hypocrite who let societal laws overtake his own
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