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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
In this well-written 5 page essay, it is argued that Thomas Jefferson and various other 'Founding Fathers' of the United States were hypocritical in drafting that 'all men are created equal'- when many of them were known --among others things-- to be slave owners. The writer acknowledges that the Framers were aware of this hypocrisy and discusses the socioeconomic and political dilemma that they faced in making pertinent decisions. A number of rarely-known facts such as the Constitutional provision which outlawed the barring of slavery until at least 1808 are used to illustrate this essay's main points. Bibliography lists 5 sources.
Page Count:
5 pages (~225 words per page)
File: D0_Jeffslav.doc
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
for the United States of America. It seems hard to explain how a slave owner like Thomas Jefferson could declare that "all men are created equal" and so sincerely
express similar beliefs in drafting the first crucial U.S. documents. Nor is it obvious how a group of men in Philadelphia, many of whom were slave owners themselves, could
proclaim antislavery principles while endorsing a document that would permit slavery to continue in the Southern states. This is the force behind any assertion that these men could not have
meant what they said. Surely, the Constitution secured no rights for blacks that whites must respect. This idea leads me directly to the notion that the Founders were motivated
not by noble ideals but by foul self-interest instead. I believe the idea that American Founders like Thomas Jefferson were self-interested is impossible to deny.
After all, Jefferson owned a couple of hundred slaves (Cliff, 1994) and did not free them. Yet the case of Jefferson is revealing. Far from rationalizing plantation life by adopting
the usual Southern arguments about the happy slave, Jefferson the Virginian fiercely denounced slavery as being flatly inconsistent with justice. Jefferson recognized that blacks were not slaves "by nature," only
by convention. Although he agreed with the ignorant scientific view of his time, and suspected that blacks were inferior to whites in capacity, Jefferson expressed his wish that black accomplishment
prove him wrong. Moreover, Jefferson strongly denied that possible black intellectual inferiority justified white enslavement: "Whatever be their talents, it is no measure of their rights" (in Byrd, 1990). Consequently,
the only rationale for Jefferson not freeing his slaves is expediency. "Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in another" (in Byrd, 1990). The dilemma
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