The Truth About Thomas Jefferson | Founding Fathers Series Part 5

What did Thomas Jefferson really give America?

Jefferson’s declaration that “all men are created equal” became the moral foundation of the American experiment, even as the nation struggled to live up to those words.

In this episode, I reveal why Jefferson’s words endured through Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Luther King Jr.—and how the Declaration created the pathway for America to become a better and freer country.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
In one sentence, Thomas Jefferson not only laid the foundation
stone for a new nation, he also set that new nation,
the United States of America, on a path we still
follow today. His affirmation in the Declaration of Independence that
quote all men are created equal and endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable rights, may be the most influential

(00:39):
words ever written this side of the Bible. The US Constitution,
ratified a little more than a decade later, was guided
by those words. Subsequent amendments, including the Fourteenth Amendment passed
after the Civil War, granting quote equal rights under the
law seem for all their grandeur to be restatements of
the equality principle and Jefferson's original declaration. Yet, Jefferson is

(01:03):
controversial today because he embodies the contradictions of the founders. Indeed,
progressive scholars say he was the worst of them, the
most hypocritical, because the very man who insisted that all
men are created equal not only permitted slavery, but himself
owned slaves. To Jefferson not see the glaring contradiction between
his principles and his practices, between the principles and practices

(01:26):
of the infant American nation. According to Chief Justice Roger Tawny,
who authored the notorious eighteen fifty seven dread Scott decision
affirming slavery in the territories, neither Jefferson nor the other
founders could have seriously meant that all men are created equal.
They didn't act on the principle, so they couldn't have
believed it. Modern progressive jurists such as Thurgood Marshall, as

(01:50):
well as historians like John Hope Franklin, have, again, with
an irony that should not go unnoticed, adopted the Tawny view.
In Franklin's words, the founders quote betrayed the ideals to
which they gave lip service. They wrote, quote eloquently at
one moment for the brotherhood of man, and in the
next moment denied it to their black brothers. No defense

(02:14):
of Jefferson or the American Founding is possible that agrees
with this assessment. How then, can Jefferson and the Founding
itself be vindicated against this most serious charge. For the answer,
let's look again at the declaration and what comes immediately
after the statement all men are created equal. That governments

(02:35):
derived their legitimacy from the quote consent of the governed
end quote. This is the democracy principle, and it is
no less important, no less foundational, than the equality principle.
With this in mind, let's turn to the practical choice
space by the founders. Progressive say they should have outlawed
slavery in the original Constitution. Yet slavery was legal in

(02:59):
all the states that sent representatives to Philadelphia in seventeen
eighty nine. How could these representatives outlaw slavery without the
consent of the people in their states. Were they expected
to do so by overriding popular consent. In that case,
they would be overthrowing democracy itself before it was even

(03:20):
introduced as the bedrock of the new constitution. Furthermore, as
everyone in Philadelphia knew at the time, many states would
not have joined a union that forbad slavery at the outset.
Perhaps a few would have done so, but no more.
Had those who opposed slavery held firm on the issue,
the union would have consisted of a handful of states,

(03:41):
or it would have remained a utopian idea affirm by
a group of high minded founders. But they would be
founders of nothing. As Jefferson himself said about the slavery issue, quote,
we have the wolf by the ear, and we can
neither hold him nor safely let him go. It is
not reasonable, in fact, it is downright obtuse to ask

(04:03):
of statesmen to do what they manifestly cannot do. It
is only reasonable to ask them to make the best
choices available to them, under the circumstances, to hold the wolf,
in Jefferson's own terms, until he can safely be let go.
In Abraham Lincoln's view, the American Founders did just that.

(04:24):
They temporarily allowed slavery in practice while constructing a framework
based on anti slavery principles and Lincoln's words. The founders
quote declared the right so that enforcement of it might
follow as fast as circumstances would permit. Lincoln's interpretation of
Jefferson and the Founding was echoed by runaway slave and

(04:47):
brilliant abolitionist leader Frederick Douglas. Slavery, Douglas said, was merely
the scaffolding for the new Constitution, allowed provisionally by Jefferson
and the other Founders, but with the clear objective that
it would be taken down once the edifice no longer
needed it. Martin Luther King echoed these same sentiments in

(05:09):
his famous I Have a Dream speech. That Jefferson didn't
live up to his highest values is not in dispute,
but to deny his greatness and his indispensable role in
the creation of the nation is both narrow minded and foolish.
His declaration undergirded the Civil War and the Civil rights movement,

(05:29):
and to this day it remains the anchor of our
rights and our democracy. Lincoln, Douglas, and King all understood
that Jefferson created the pathway for America to become a
better country than it was at the start, a country
in which the glorious idea that all men are created
equal is closer to reality than anywhere else in the world.

(06:00):
He