Forum: Thomas Jefferson
	TIME contacted a number of scholars about Thomas Jefferson and his legacy. A sampling of their views

Posted Sunday, June 27, 2004
Jan Lewis, Professor of History, Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey
His complete, uncompromising, and abiding commitment to the principle of human equality [is what I admire most about Jefferson]. This idea remains as radical today as it was when Jefferson first gave expression to it over two centuries ago. The idea of equality was in the air at the time, but Jefferson, a magnificent stylist, was able to bring it to life by expressing it clearly, simply, eloquently. And he connected equality to other ideas that remain equally compelling: liberty, self-government, freedom of religion.

[The most problematic thing about him was] his lifelong ownership of slaves and his inability to extricate either himself or his nation from the institution of slavery. Early in his life, Jefferson opposed slavery, writing, famously, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just." But as he aged, his optimism waned, and he came to fear emancipation even more than God's wrath. Committed to equality in principle, Jefferson's practice was compromised by his racism, which is so distasteful, so repugnant to us today, that I cannot read out loud to my students the passages in the Notes on the State of Virginia in which he described what he perceived as the physical badges of black inferiority. This is the contrast in Jefferson, and his legacy: Words about human equality and freedom that are as fresh today as the day he wrote them, and words about racial inferiority that are so jarring that we can't read them today without feeling a profound sense of shame.

The ideals of equality, freedom, and freedom of religion are indispensible, now more than ever. It would be instructive, for example, for both those who authorized the torture at Abu Ghraib and those who fight crusades and jihads and do unspeakable things in the name of God to read Jefferson's observations about the futility of torture, the utter ineffectiveness of coercion. "What has been the effect of coercion?" he asked. "To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth."

The standards by which we judge Jefferson are the ones he bequeathed us. We judge him harshly because he kept men and women in slavery, knowing that it was wrong — but it was Jefferson who told us that all people are equal, and that everyone is entitled to liberty and to human happiness. Don't expect history to offer us simple lessons or perfect heroes.

To his white family, Jefferson was both loving and manipulative. He gave them love to last a lifetime, and he left them impoverished. To his black family, he was remote but not unkind. He never acknowledged his black children, but he gave them their freedom, which is the greatest legacy that anyone born a slave ever wished for.

Clarence E. Walker, Professor of History and Cultural Studies, University of Calif., Davis
The most impressive thing about Jefferson was the Declaration of Independence, that is, its language. The language of the Declaration and the Constitution provided the intellectual framework for black people to stake a claim on American citizenship.

I do not see anything contradictory in his belief in freedom and being a slave holder. Blacks for Jefferson and others of his class were not civilized. Jefferson thought that black people were physically unattractive and mentally inferior to whites, as he makes clear in his Notes on the State of Virginia. This belief did not prevent Jefferson from having an affair with a women designated black by the American law of hypodescent. Sally Hemings passed the somatic test for Jefferson because she was a quadroon who looked like an octoroon. Jefferson perceived her as white and the children she bore him passed as white. Jefferson was a classic phenotypical American racist. He liked black people who did not look black. Like many white men he was attracted to a black woman whose phenotype was indeterminate. How else can we explain the popularity among young white men of the actress Halle Berry today? Berry satisfies for contemporary white men the same attraction repulsion sexual calculus that Hemings provided for Jefferson and his peers. Jefferson's racial hang ups tell us a great deal about race and sex in America today.

Roger Wilkins, professor of history at George Mason University and author of Jefferson's Pillow: The Founding Fathers and the Dilemma of Black Patriotism
Jefferson had an extraordinary capacity to seize the zeitgeist of the Revolution and to turn it into political poetry. In coupling that luminous talent to his profound belief in American freedom, Jefferson made an enormous contribution to our commitment to freedom and to our determination to retain it and to expand it (far beyond anything Jefferson ever dreamed of or would have deemed appropriate) in ways that have made us a more decent and more generous nation. This struggle continues as does Jefferson's contribution to it.

Jefferson's second great achievement was to understand that public education was essential if our republic was to thrive and then to labor to give us an excellent example of what he had in mind by founding the University of Virginia.

This man is problematic because his profound racism extinguished any impulse to act forcefully against slavery that his sure knowledge that it was a great evil (which he understood to hurt whites as well as blacks) might have generated in him. His life provides a powerful reminder to avoid absolutes whether in judging human beings (alive or dead), the origins of our nation or issues and people in our contemporary politics.

Peter Onuf, a professor of history at the University of Virginia, has written and edited numerous books on Jefferson and the early republic
Jefferson was the leading inventor of what it means to be an American. It was a leap of faith. He imagined a past for America and simultaneously projected an American future. He was constantly looking backward and forward and connecting generations — more so than any other Founder.

Why does Jefferson continue to hold sway in the public imagination? For one, he is an eloquent wordsmith. He says things that inspire us. In his first Inaugural Address, he projects a brilliant future that's very flattering: a series of generations fulfilling their destiny. In the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, he lays out the ideals that constitute our ideals, the ideals of the American people. It is also a charter for national independence — the legacy of a band of brothers who united to fight for a common cause.

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