THOMAS JEFFERSON

THE DREAM AND THE REALITY

by Dee Finney

Before I even start this article, everyone needs to know that Native American Indians practiced slavery on each other, long before Europeans arrived to practice it on them. For several tribes in the American Northwest, slaves constituted between l0 and l5 percent of the population. The Cherokee employed "slave catchers" to retrieve wounded combatants from other tribes, although the Cherokee preferred to kill enemies rather than take them captive. In some Indian tribes, slaveowners routinely killed large numbers of slaves in potlatch ceremonies to prove how wealthy they were.  

African blacks also practiced slavery in their own tribes as well as humans in all countries from as far back in written history that we've found.  There has never 'NOT' been slavery, but that doesn't make it right.

For a meaningful discussion of the development of civil rights in the United States, and the position of African Americans in particular, it is crucial that such matters are set straight. A preliminary note is in order. The question of civil rights and the question of race. It is often overlooked that the two issues are not necessarily related to each other; but in U.S. history, civil rights have been linked inextricably to the question of race indirectly by the author of the document which helped establish the country back in 1776. According to the Declaration of Independence, it is a self-evident truth "that all men are created equal"; however, when Thomas Jefferson wrote "men," he only meant white, upper middle-class males.
 Familiar Jefferson quotations

Popular conception has it that the United States was founded on Plymouth rock; the U.S. originate in the settlement founded in Massachusetts by the Pilgrim Fathers who came on the Mayflower in 1620. However, the Mayflower sailed for Virginia, where English settlers had been already struggling for a dozen years, surviving only with the help of Indians. And at Jamestown, Virginia, a Dutch ship had unloaded the first cargo of slaves in 1619 . . . the first Africans had arrived in North America a year before the Puritans ventured across the Atlantic. The colony in Virginia only grew profitable with the introduction of slaves. The economic system set up by the Virginia cavaliers was essentially feudal. It depended on cheap labor to work the large plantations . . . so much so, that in the first decades, the colonists took as slave whoever was to be had, whether white, red, or black. Whites were either recruited in English prisons or taken on as indentured servants . . . people who agreed to work for a plantation owner for a number of years in return for their transatlantic fare.

During the era, Benjamin Franklin published twenty-six treaty accounts and represented the state of Pennsylvania as an Indian commissioner. In the pre-Revolutionary period, when he and his friends were advocating a federal union of the colonies, no European model was found to be suitable. Franklin 's contact with the Iroquois influenced many key ideas for a new form of government federalism, equality, natural rights, freedom of religion, property rights, etc. At the 1744 treaty council, by Franklin 's account, Canassatego, speaker for the great council at Onondaga, recommended that the colonies form a union in common defense under a federal government: "We are a powerful Confederacy, and by your observing the same methods our wise forefathers have taken, you will acquire much strength and power; therefore, whatever befalls you, do not fall out with one another."

In arguing for such a plan, Franklin stressed the fact that the individual nations of the confederacy managed their own internal affairs without interference from the Grand Council.

Twenty years after Franklin 's plan was defeated at the Albany congress, it reappeared in the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation. Franklin, Jefferson, John Adams, and George Washington were all familiar with the Iroquois polity. There is also strong scholarly evidence that European philosophers such as Locke, Roussea, More, and Hobbes were familiar with the societies of the American Indians. The integration of this knowledge into their theories of utopias and natural societies further inspired the U.S. founding fathers.

The system of black slavery developed only gradually. The words "black" and "slave" became synonyomous by the 1750s. The harshness and brutality that our time associates with black slavery date from the nineteenth century; they are the result of a change in the plantation system. Near the end of the 18th century, it seemed as if that economic system had outlived itself. The first aim of the old planters had been self-sufficiency; cash crops for exportation had been cultivated only in addition. But the plantation economy was suffering; tobacco, the most profitable crop, had depleted the soil.

In 1753, Thomas Jefferson gave his Williamsburg private law practice to  Edmund Randolph so that he could devote his full attention to the growing rebellion.

During the summers of 1773 and 1774, several other groups of thirty to forty armed men each were also roaming through Kentucky and along the Ohio, surveying likely town sites for George Washington and other eastern speculators (of whom Jefferson was one) and provoking increasingly violent retaliation by the Shawnees and Cherokees.

Heckewelder, the Moravian missionary who visited the region in 1772-1773, recalled conditions on the frontier at the time: "The whole country on the Ohio river, had already drawn the attention of many persons from the neighbouring provinces; who generally forming themselves into parties, would rove through the country in search of land, either to settle on, or for speculation; and some, careless of watching over their conduct, or destitute of both honour and humanity, would join a rabble (a class of people generally met with on the frontiers) who maintained, that to kill an Indian, was the same as killing a bear or a buffalo, and would fire on Indians that came across them by the way;--nay, more, would decoy such as lived across the river, to come over, for the purpose of joining them in hilarity; and when these complied, they fell on them and murdered them.

See the Story of Logan - Before the Logan massacre, John Connolly, Lord Dunmore's man in Pittsburgh, had circulated an inflammatory statement falsely accusing the Indians of planning a general war. It was after this declaration of war that the massacre of Logan's family occurred. Historians and contemporary observers have intimated that the massacre of Logan's family was planned by Lord Dunmore or other Virginians with the expectation that the inevitable retaliation by Indian kinsmen would so terrorize the frontiers that Virginia would be forced to conquer the Shawnees and Delawares and terminate the presence of these tribes in Kentucky and western Pennsylvania.

In the early colonial days, slavery and the system of indentured servants were not confined to the South, but could be found north of the Mason-Dixon line as well . . . in Delaware, New Jersey, New York, even in New England. But the Northern economy grew more diversified and less dependent on slave labor, whereas the Southern economy remained predominantly agricultural and feudal.

Trappers and mountain men had been trading with native tribes for decades when Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1776. When he became the nation's third president, Jefferson pursued a policy of westward expansion: in 1803, the U.S. purchased the 828,000-square-mile Louisiana Territory from Napoleon of France for three cents an acre. The land deal, which included all of what would become South Dakota, more than doubled the size of the young nation.

It is not surprising therefore that at the very same day that the Declaration of Independence was adopted that a committee consisting of Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson prepared a seal for the U.S. which showed Pharaoh in pursuit of the Israelites in the Red Sea with Moses standing on the shore with his hands outstretched. The motto the seal is "Rebellion to Tyrants is obedience to God."

In 1776, the Declaration of Independence was written to seek independence from England. The colonies were heavily in debt and did not have the means to fight a war. What did they do? They borrowed money of course! From whom did they borrow? Bankrupt France, who else!  

The resulting "war" with England was "won" by the colonies, but while they won this war, the real war was lost, because "the borrower is slave to the lender."

Who were the men who led us to "victory" over England and forged a "new nation by writing the Constitution of the United States? A majority of them were...lawyers. Forty of them held government bonds. Fourteen were land speculators. Twenty-four of them made their living lending money at interest. Eleven were involved in mercantile, manufacturing or shipping. Fifteen owned slaves. Do not confuse these men with those who signed the Declaration of Independence. Only Roger Sherman of Connecticut, Robert Morris, George Clymer, James Wilson and Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, and George Read of Delaware, signed both.

Several of our founding fathers were in the back pockets of the usury bankers. In 1781, the private Bank of Pennsylvania was formed. It later became the Bank of North America. Among those who were able to get in on the original subscription of this bank were: (1) Benjamin Franklin, (2) Thomas Jefferson, (3)Alexander Hamilton, (4) James Monroe, (5) John Jay, (6) John Paul Jones, (7) Commodore John Barry.

The Constitution, as signed in 1786, was no more than a minimal compromise that the two sides could agree on. A document that established a precarious balance, it said nothing about slavery or who was to decide on it; only that the importation of new slaves was to be disallowed after 1806. For representation in Congress, blacks were to be counted as three-fifths of a white man.

In 1787, the Constitution was fittingly put together in Philadelphia, the home of the Bank of North America.1 Hamilton and his backers wrote the original document for the Constitution, to the dismay of most of the attendees of the meeting. Many were horrified that an entirely new kind of government was being formulated, when in fact they had been sent only to revise the Articles of Confederation. Patrick Henry, himself a lawyer, went home to fight against the Constitution. Like so many of our present day pieces of legislation, out of 62 delegates, only 39 signed the final document. Through the efforts of Hamilton, who wrote the majority of the Federalist Papers, the people were finally convinced that the Constitution would, if the people were "vigilant," safeguard their liberties.

John Jay, another writer of the Federalists Papers, later became Secretary of State under President John Adams. It was discovered that Jay had made a secret treaty with England to pay war reparations to our defeated foe. All in a day's work! It was a great con job foisted upon a nation of people. The banks were in, the people and their properties were out!

In 1789, Washington was elected President. He gave Hamilton the appointment as Secretary of the Treasury. The fox was now guarding the hen house. Two years later Hamilton created the First Bank of the United States. It was a private bank to which all of the new governments money was entrusted. The successor to this bank was the Second Bank of the United States. When it went bankrupt 50 years later, it was found that 64% of the banks 25,000 shares were owned by foreigners. Many were British!

In 1794, taxes forced Pennsylvania farmers to revolt. Washington did what all rulers do when a country is in debt to the bankers. He sent thousands of Federal troops to crush the rebellion. He did to his own people what he had led his people to revolt against in the war with England. But then the bankers must be paid.

Thomas Jefferson who signed the Declaration of Independence, but fought against the Constitution and who in fact left the country during its inception, thinking that without him it did not stand a chance of being passed; in 1806, as President of the United States, signed into effect the Articles of War which provided for International Law venue in America.

The Big Hole River was originally named the Wisdom River by Captain Clark. He named it because of President Thomas Jefferson's "wisdom" in buying the Louisiana Purchase from France in 1803. The name was changed around 1890.

The first great massacre, of the Pequots, was imposed upon us by "base Canadian fiends," the President of Yale University explained. Thomas Jefferson attributed the failure of "the benevolent plan we were pursuing here for the happiness of the aboriginal inhabitants of our vicinities" to the English enemy, who forced upon us "the confirmed brutalization, if not the extermination of this race in our America.

"Felling Trees and Indians"  by Noam Chomsky

The English colonists in North America pursued the course laid out by their forerunners in the home country. From the earliest days of colonization, Virginia was a center of piracy and pillage, a base to raid Spanish commerce and plunder French settlements on the coast of Maine -- and to exterminate the "devil worshippers" and "cruel beasts" whose generosity had enabled the colonists to survive, hunting them down with savage dogs, massacring women and children, destroying crops, spreading smallpox with infected blankets, and other measures that readily came to the minds of barbarians fresh from their Irish exploits.

Hugo Grotius, a leading 17th century humanist and the founder of modern international law, determined that the "most just war is against savage beasts, the next against men who are like beasts." George Washington wrote in 1783 that "the gradual extension of our settlements will as certainly cause the savage, as the wolf, to retire; both being beasts of prey, tho' they differ in shape." What is called in official PC rhetoric "a pragmatist," Washington regarded purchase of Indian lands (typically, by fraud and threat) as a more cost-effective tactic than violence. Thomas Jefferson predicted to John Adams that the "backward" tribes at the borders "will relapse into barbarism and misery, lose numbers by war and want, and we shall be obliged to drive them, with the beasts of the forests into the Stony mountains"; the same would be true of Canada after the conquest he envisioned, while all blacks would be removed to Africa or the Caribbean, leaving the country without "blot or mixture." A year after the Monroe Doctrine, the President called for helping the Indians "to surmount all their prejudices in favor of the soil of their nativity," so that "we become in reality their benefactors" by transferring them West. When consent was not given, they were forcibly removed. Consciences were eased further by the legal doctrine devised by Chief Justice John Marshall: "discovery gave an exclusive right to extinguish the Indian right of occupancy, either by purchase or by conquest"; "that law which regulates, and ought to regulate in general, the relations between the conqueror and conquered was incapable of application to...the tribes of Indians, ...fierce savages whose occupation was war, and whose subsistence was drawn chiefly from the forest."

In respect to grave goods and human remains in burials, laws were initiated in 1788 for European American burials but not extended to include Native Americans. Even Thomas Jefferson had his slaves dig a trench through a burial mound on his Monticello plantation.

The George Washington Presidency (1789-1797)-   He felt betrayed by the resignation of Thomas Jefferson who was Secretary of State. Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton did all the legislation during Washington's presidency. Thomas Jefferson told Washington, “North and South will hang together if they have you to hang on”, this was one of the many demands that kept Washington from retiring after his first term.

The Heming's and Jefferson Controversy Thomas Jefferson had a number of children by his slave Sally Hemings. Sally Hemings, whose given name was probably Sarah, was the daughter of Elizabeth (Betty) Hemings and, allegedly, John Wayles, Thomas Jefferson's father-in-law. She became Thomas Jefferson's property as part of his inheritance from the Wayles estate in 1774 and came with her mother to Monticello by 1776. The Jefferson/Heming's DNA testing.

Thomas Jefferson had 187 slaves. We know that because he kept meticulous hand-written records, which we still have. On January 14, 1774, after he inherited slaves from first his mother and then his father-in-law, Thomas Jefferson wrote his inventory of 187 slaves. In his last inventory, taken 50 years later in 1824, Thomas Jefferson also had 187 slaves.

In October, 1802, while he was president, the story was published in the newspapers that Thomas Jefferson, whose wife had died in 1782, was keeping his wife's slave half-sister, Sally Hemings, as a concubine and was producing children from her. Jefferson, who lived for 44 years after the death of his wife and who never remarried, never denied the story, but he never admitted it either. Sally Hemings was at his bedside when he died. All five children of Sally Hemings were freed by Thomas Jefferson either before his death or in his will. Thomas Jefferson made provisions for Sally Hemings in his will. These were almost the only slaves which Thomas Jefferson ever freed.

Thomas Jefferson and the Republicans

Jefferson and Madison held the view that any action not specifically permitted in the Constitution was thereby prohibited. This is the "strict" interpretation, and the Republicans opposed the establishment of Hamilton’s national bank on this view of government. The Jeffersonian supporters, primarily under the guidance of James Madison, began to organize political groups in opposition to the Federalist program, and called themselves Republicans.

Frontier Problems

Indian tribes on the Northwest and Southwest borders were increasingly resisting the encroachments on their lands by the American settlers. British authorities in Canada were encouraging the Indians in their depredations against frontier settlements.

 Americanizing the Native Americans - The Cherokees had a lot of money and Jefferson didn't like it that they were so successful.

The Shay Rebellion - 1786 -

Thomas Jefferson writes to James Madison

"I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good
thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms
in the physical. Unsuccessful rebellions, indeed, generally
establish the encroachments on the rights of the people
which have produced them. An observation of this truth
should render honest republican governors so mild in
their punishment of rebellions as not to discourage them
too much. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health
of government. "

More on Shay's Rebellion  

More on Shay's Rebellion with drawings:

A former Revolutionary Army captain, led a rebellion by farmers against unsettled economic conditions and against politicians and laws which were grossly unfair to farmers and working people in general. They protested against excessive taxes on property, polling taxes which preented the poor from voting, unfair actions by the court of common pleas, the high cost of lawsuits, and the lack of a stable currency. They rallied for the government issue of paper money, since at the time there were a variety of paper monies in circulation, but not much was honored at face value. A campaign for "sound money" rallied for the issue of a gold-backed currency. The rebels suffered four dead and twenty wounded in the attack.

The Constitutional Convention of 1787 - There were plenty of arguments against it.

AGREEMENT OF PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA WITH THE FIVE NATIONS, SENECA, ONEIDA, STOCKBRIDGE, TUSCARORAS, CAYUGAS, AND ONONADAGA - APRIL 23, 1792

Priest of Brotherly Love - Absalom Jones c.1746–1818

Early on, Absalom Jones got in the habit of thinking of others ahead of himself. While serving as a slave in Philadelphia, he secured the help of several Quakers and his father-in-law, and bought his wife's freedom. Only then, six years later in 1778, did he buy his own.

Jones became active in Saint George's Methodist Episcopal Church, and with Richard Allen, was a key player in the emerging black church of Philadelphia. Jones was one of the blacks who left St. George's when they weren't allowed to sit where they pleased. With Allen and other blacks, he nursed and buried many of the nearly 4,000 who died in Philadelphia's 1793 yellow fever epidemic (while many whites, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, fled to the safety of the countryside).

In 1794, General Anthony Wayne decisively defeated the Indians at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, and the resulting Treaty of Greenville cleared the Ohio territory of Indian tribes.

The Whiskey Rebellion (1794)

More on the Whiskey Insurrection

Western farmers refused to pay the excise tax on whiskey which formed the backbone of Hamilton's revenue program. When a group of Pennsylvania farmers terrorized the tax collectors President Washington sent out a federalized militia force of some 15,000 men, and the rebellion evaporated, thus strengthening the credibility of the young government.

The Election of 1796

John Adams was the Federalist candidate, and Thomas Jefferson ran under the opposition banner of the Republicans. Since Jefferson received the second highest number of electoral votes, he became vice president. Thus, a Federalist president and a Republican vice president served together, an obviously awkward arrangement. Adams was a brilliant lawyer and statesman, but too dogmatic and uncompromising to be an effective politician, and he endured a very frustrating and unproductive term in office.

THE REVOLUTION OF 1800

The Election

Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Buff ran on the Republican ticket, against John Adams and Charles Pinckney for the Federalists. The Republican candidates won handily, but both received the same number of electoral votes, thus throwing the selection of the president into the House of Representatives. After a lengthy deadlock, Alexander Hamilton threw his support to Jefferson, and Buff had to accept the Vice Presidency, the result obviously intended by the electorate. This increased the ill-will between Hamilton and Buff and contributed to their famous duel in 1804.

THE JEFFERSONIAN ERA

Thomas Jefferson and his Republican followers envisioned a society in vivid contrast to that of Hamilton and the Federalists. They dreamed of a nation of independent farmers, living under a central government that exercised a minimum of control over their lives and served merely to protect the individual liberties guaranteed by the Constitution. This agrarian paradise would be free from the industrial smoke and urban blight of Europe, and would serve as a beacon light of Enlightenment rationalism to a world searching for direction. That vision was to prove a mirage, and Jefferson was to preside over a nation that was growing more industrialized and urban, and which seemed to need an ever stronger hand at the presidential tiller.

Jefferson the President

The new president tried to project an image of democratic simplicity, sometimes appearing so casually dressed as to appear slovenly. But he was a brilliant thinker and a shrewd politician. He appointed men to his cabinet who agreed with his political philosophy- James Madison as Secretary of State and Albert Gallatin to the Treasury.

The Impeachment Episodes

Jefferson began a campaign to remove Federalist judges by impeachment. One district judge was removed, and proceedings were begun to impeach Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase. That effort failed, but the threat had encouraged the judiciary to be less blatantly political.

Following the Constitutional mandate, the importation of slaves was stopped by law in 1808.

The Essex Junto (1804)

Some New England Federalists saw the Western expansion as a threat to their position in the Union, and they tried to organize a secessionist movement. They courted Aaron Buff's support by offering to back him in a bid for the governorship of New York Hamilton led the opposition to that campaign and when Burr lost the election, he challenged Hamilton to a duel, which resulted in Hamitton's death.

The War of 1812

Congress had passed a modified embargo just before Madison's inauguration, known as the Non-Intercourse Act, which opened trade to all nations except France and Britain. When it expired in 1810, it was replaced by Macon's Bill No. 2, which gave the president power to prohibit trade with any nation when they violated our neutrality.

The Indian tribes of the Northwest and the Mississippi Valley were resentful of the govemment's policy of pressured removal to the West, and the British authorities in Canada were exploiting their discontent by encouraging border raids against the American settlements.

The Shawnee chief Tecumseh set out to unite the Mississippi Valley tribes and reestablish Indian dominance in the Old Northwest. With the help of his brother, the Prophet, and the timely New Madrid earthquake, he persuaded a sizeable force of warriors to join him. On November 11, 1811, General William Henry Harrison destroyed Tecumseh's village on Tippecanoe Creek and dashed his hopes for an Indian confederacy.

Southern frontiersmen coveted Spanish Florida, which included the southern ranges of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. They resented Spanish support of Indian depredations against the borderlands, and since Spain was Britain's ally, they saw Britain as the background cause of their problems.

The Congress in 1811 contained a strong pro-war group called the War Hawks, led by Henry Clay and John C- Calhoun. They gained control of both houses and began agitating for war with the British. On June 1, 1812, President Madison asked for a declaration of war, and Congress complied.

A three-pronged invasion of Canada met with disaster on all three fronts, and the Americans fell back to their own borders. At sea, American privateers and frigates, including "Old Ironsides," scored early victories over British warships, but were soon driven back into their home ports and blockaded by the powerful British ships-of-the line.

Admiral Oliver Hazard Perry constructed a fleet of ships on Lake Erie and on September 10, 1813, defeated a British force at Put-In Bay and established control of the take. His flagship flew the banner, "Don't Give Up the Ship." This victory opened the way for William Henry Harrison to invade Canada in October and defeat a combination British and Indian force at the Battle of the Thames.

The War in the Southwest

Andrew Jackson led a force of frontier militia into Alabama in pursuit of Creek Indians who had massacred the white inhabitants of Fort Mims. On March 27, 1814, he crushed the Indians at Horseshoe Bend, and then seized the Spanish garrison at Pensacola.

Fort Atkinson, Nebraska  - Hundreds of men died over winter. President Thomas Jefferson proposed an expedition to be undertaken by the U.S. Army. In a confidential message to Congress he stated:

"An intelligent officer, with ten or twelve chosen men,
fit for the enterprise and willing to undertake it, might
explore the whole line even to the Western Ocean,
have conferences with the natives on the subject of
commercial intercourse, get admission from them for
our traders, and return with the information acquired
in the course of two summers."

See:  HUMAN HISTORY IN THE BLACK HILLS

BATTLE OF LITTLE BIGHORN - Custer - More with Photos

On June 25, 1876, in the valley of the Little Bighorn River, Sitting Bull and his 4,000 warriors were encamped when Custer and his troops came upon them. In an infamous decision, Custer elected to divide his command and mount an attack. Hopelessly outnumbered, Custer and his entire force of more than 200 soldiers were killed.

GHOST DANCES

By 1890, reservation-restricted natives were seeking solace in the Ghost Dance, a ritual they believed would rid them of unwanted white settlers, prompt the return of the bison herds, and welcome back long-departed relatives and warriors

WOUNDED KNEE

On December 15, 1890, Sitting Bull was accidentally killed by tribal police and special agents as he attempted to leave the Standing Rock Reservation in north-central South Dakota.

The Navy Hymn - 1861

Civil War Music

The Music of the Civil War

The Historical Church

Christian Hymns with Guitar Chords to Play

Music of the Spirit

Civil Rights in America

The New Nation (1789-1824) The Federalist Era

Red Stick Confederacy

Jefferson and the Indians

Repatriation of Indian Remains

Slavery in America

Thomas Jefferson Papers

Dreams of the Great Earthchanges