Column on Jefferson's birthday

Column on Jefferson's birthday

I botched a sentence here previously. Here is a corrected line in the first paragraph.

Thomas Jefferson;’s birthday is April 13. Years ago, I drove to Monticello on my birthday in a mist. when I made one of the last turns up the serpentine driveway, there it appeared out of the mist. On April 14, 1865, Lincoln was assassinated on Good Friday.

Jefferson’s reputation has suffered. In all likelihood, the widowed Jefferson fathered a number of children of his deceased wife’s half sister, a slave. (His father-in-law- had fathered her through his slave, Betsy Hemmings). Jefferson not only held slaves but sold them, as he realized that was the best source of income for his continued profligate personal spending habit.Slavery and its terrible crimes are a blot on him forever. Still, can that evil system define him? Jefferson;s words shone like a bright guiding star for this country, and I wish to note some on his birthday.

Lincoln’s political creed was based, in part of Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, especially, all men are created equal. In speeches he referred to the Declaration often, and its words are the core notion in the celebrated Gettysburg Address. In the last debate here in Alton, Lincoln noted that African-Americans had to be included in the Declaration or else they could not strive to be treated as human beings. In a letter he wrote: “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 merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”

Lincoln, a consummate stylist, knew a fellow politician who could write well. Listen to the last letter Jefferson wrote when he could not attend a fiftieth celebration of the Declaration of Independence: “May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all), the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others.”  

I do note above, his slam against “monkish ignorance.” Jefferson was no orthodox Christian, and he tended to equate suppression of inquiry with the censorious hand of religion. He was an apostle of secular hope. Human beings, if left free of obstacles, would progress.In his old age, he founded the University of Virginia. his personal library became the base for the Library of Congress. the old revolutionary  lived on aspiration  and the dream of a better life for our country. As he told John Adams in that remarkable series of letters in their old age, that: “Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. Education and free discussion are the antidotes of both. ... What a stand will it secure as a ralliance for the reason & freedom of the globe! I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past. So good night. I will dream on,”