unfounded?
Opinion by Team Thomas
Assaulted from Within …
A statue honoring founding father George Washington was torn down recently by protestors in Portland, Oregon. An American flag was draped over the bronze likeness of our revered first president of the United States and burned. “Genocidal Colonialist” was spray painted on the fallen Washington.
The statue also featured the number “1619.” 1619 represents “The 1619 Project,” an ongoing project developed by The New York Times Magazine in 2019 to re-examine the legacy of slavery in the United States, timed for the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first Africans in Virginia.
Images of statuary violence in Portland were beamed around the world, reminiscent of some critics of the protests, of the toppling of statues of Saddam Hussein, Vladimir Lenin, and other American protagonists. President Trump even rushed, without consent from either house of Congress, an ill-advised Executive Order that would saddle protestors with harsh long-term prison sentences if they were found to have attacked these monuments.
United States Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), a leading potential Democratic vice presidential candidate, told CNN’s State of the Union on the day after Independence Day that she is open to discussing tearing down statues of founders like George Washington. Duckworth is a decorated former military officer awarded the Purple Heart for severe combat-related injuries.
Weeks before Senator Duckworth’s shocking announcement, Thomas Jefferson’s bronze likeness was torn down from a high school bearing his name in Portland as well. Our third president and the author of the U.S. Declaration of Independence had likewise been defiled for a controversial portion of his life that has been rumored and recounted since his expansive days in the White House.
Two days after America celebrated Independence Day, a direct descendant of Jefferson, Lucian Truscott IV, a great-great-great-great-grandson, advocated that the federal government replace the Jefferson Memorial on the Tidal Basin with a tribute to Harriet Tubman, the founder of the Underground Railroad from the Civil War era, instead.
Truscott said, "I think we've paid enough attention to the founding fathers over the years to find the America that came, and it's time to celebrate some of the women who helped found this country. I describe Harriet Tubman as helping to found the America that came along after slavery."
Truscott was joined by Shannon LaNier, another direct descendant of Jefferson, who added, “These public statues were put in place for the wrong reasons and to glorify flawed people. We must start looking at these people as human beings, not gods, not idols.”
The White House itself, a symbol of American pride and prestige, was built in part with the skill of enslaved people. Do we tear it down as a result?
Do we level the Washington Monument?
The Jefferson Memorial?
How about the Lincoln Memorial, too? After all, Honest Abe once said that Jefferson is due all honor for his vision of America. Was our 16th president not, therefore, complicit as well?
Martin Luther King, Jr. was personally flawed. Do we remove his recently added statue to the National Mall, where he gave his life-altering I Have A Dream Speech?
Do we go to Africa and insist that Africa tear down all remnants of memorials to enslaved people who were traded from Africa by Africans to America and Europe?
Do we cut off diplomatic relations with much of Europe because they engaged in the slave trade centuries ago?
No.
Washington and Jefferson enslaved people on their Virginia plantations in the 1700s and early 1800s. That is an undeniable fact of American life.
Slavery was a global event, not just a Revolution-era or pre-Civil War-era occurrence.
Slavery is and was an abomination—a crime against humanity.
However, it is wrong that Washington, Jefferson, and our other founding fathers should be convicted by protestors as having done nothing better for America, deserving of any celebration, including the monuments that now stand for their ultimate contribution to America.
Protestors have recently equated these founding fathers with Confederates who had treason against the United States in the American Civil War more than half a century after their revolutionary contributions to our nation. A convenient charge so that pillaging and rampaging are better justified?
In our opinion, this is an unfounded comparison based on history.
Every Forefather Should be Considered a Confederate?
At the time the Jefferson statue was destroyed in Portland, protester Triston Crowl, 26, told the Washington Post that he believed that statues of U.S. leaders like Thomas Jefferson, who served during periods of slavery, should not stand.
Protestor Crowl celebrated Jefferson’s violent statuary end, saying, “There should be a line at the Civil War. Every forefather before that should be considered a Confederate.”
Every forefather before the Confederacy included names such as James Madison, author of the U.S. Constitution, President John Adams, John Jay, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and Alexander Hamilton, the first Treasury Secretary.
George Washington, history will testify, led our nation through the American Revolution. The fight for independence made him a marked man with the King of England and invading British redcoats.
Alexander Hamilton, made famous recently by the outstanding Broadway performance Hamilton by the remarkable Lin-Manuel Miranda, is under assault by protestors for having not done enough to end slavery in the United States.
An effort to cancel Hamilton on Disney+ has been trending on Twitter at #CancelHamilton. Although Hamilton did not directly own enslaved people, history notes that he did sell enslaved people for his employer Beekman & Cruger as well as marry into a prominent family who enslaved people in New York.
The play was designed to be entertaining first, and it did a good job, not the best job, of being historically accurate.
Historical accuracy was not Hamilton’s primary purpose. If it were, we would take issue with how Thomas Jefferson was depicted. Jefferson was not as cavalier or dismissive as presented.
But Jefferson was, in Hamilton, more entertaining, which was the intent. So be it. Well, he did, nevertheless, Mr. Miranda!
The Jefferson Story
At least 12 presidents are said to have enslaved people during their lifetime, eight of whom enslaved people while serving as commander-in-chief. Only three of our founding fathers - John Adams, Samuel Adams, and Thomas Paine - did not own or trade in slavery, which was rampant in their life and times.
James Madison, who owned a plantation near Jefferson’s Monticello, was the fourth president of the United States and enslaved people.
Benjamin Franklin did not speak out against slavery until near the end of his storied and accomplished life. Was Franklin thus complicit?
As for Jefferson, Hofstra University in New York voted on June 23 to remove its statue of Jefferson’s greatness from a prominent location to a more obscure site after a successful campaign led by Rosario Navalta called “Jefferson’s Gotta Go!” The 21-year-old senior at Hofstra is the daughter of Filipino immigrants.
“There is no point in having these statues,” Rosario says. “All they do is remind everybody of the history of the United States and its role in perpetuating white supremacy and the institutionalization of anti-blackness.”
“Jefferson is not ‘the’ father of this nation,'” Navalta told the Washington Post. We cannot sit there pandering to the past.”
We believe that Hofstra University, in moving the Jefferson statue, took the easy road out of the controversy about our founding fathers. We believe Hofstra University should have capitalized on the opportunity to explain what history knows about our founding fathers, like Thomas Jefferson. We believe that Hofstra University had and has a moral obligation not to permit “pandering to the past,” as notoriously alleged by their protesting students.
Navalta noted that in his lifetime, Jefferson fathered four children with Sally Hemings, only a teenager of 16 years when she bore Jefferson’s first child in Paris. Records at Jefferson’s Monticello indicate that Jefferson and Hemings had at least six children, but only four survived to adulthood.
Sally Hemings was reportedly free in Paris with Jefferson from 1787 to 1789. Monticello, Jefferson’s estate and presidential library, says that Hemings negotiated with Jefferson while in France to return to enslavement at Monticello in exchange for “extraordinary privileges” for herself and freedom for her unborn children.
Rather than hide from the story of this founding father, Monticello has done what we consider to be an admirable job in trying to right the historical record, regardless of its potential negative impact on the homestead’s popularity and financial stability.
Fifty years to the day after they signed the Declaration of Independence on which they had staked their lives, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died. In their lifetimes, Adams and Jefferson had been both compatriots and mortal adversaries. Jefferson, 83, and Adams, 90, had mended their relationship over the years as death approached, exchanging letters, ideas, and reminiscences.
Adams’ last words were, “Thomas Jefferson survives.” He was mistaken by about five hours but may have been more accurate than history initially believed because it appears that Mr. Jefferson still lives.
We know this about Thomas Jefferson, his life, and the struggle over slavery in America:
As far back as 1776 itself, Thomas Jefferson publicly criticized slavery.
Jefferson saw slavery as the greatest threat to the new nation’s survival.
He drafted a Virginia law that would have banned the importation of enslaved Africans.
Jefferson sought to prohibit slavery in the Northwest Territories.
Thomas Jefferson freed enslaved people, although not all, from his plantation over time and then through his will.
He advocated for the gradual emancipation of enslaved people in America.
Thomas Jefferson knew that slavery was wrong and tried to right it, but failed to do so in a more reasonably timely fashion. Those were their times.
The Thomas Perspective
The record on Thomas Jefferson and slavery is indeed complicated.
Did Jefferson rape a teenage Hemings, or was he perhaps the first president of the United States to love a woman of color? Who knows? We do not have an account from Sally Hemings herself. We have historically unsupported speculation.
It is reported that Sally Hemings negotiated a return to Monticello. Was that return by mutual agreement or through coercion? We do not know. Again, there is no record to rely upon.
We may never know the truth about Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, but we applaud Jefferson’s Monticello for continuing to try to unearth documentation that will support the discovery of the truth.
In the meantime, the story of our founding fathers continues to unfold, not disappear.
thomas invites you to read more on:
the declaration of independence
the us constitution
The bill of rights
Do we take down the monuments to the founding of American democracy in the meantime? Are the founding fathers like the officers of the Confederacy in their protection and promotion of white supremacy and anti-blackness, as charged?
In that same Washington Post article about Triston Crowl and Rosario Navalta, we were struck by another observation made by Manisha Sinha, a University of Connecticut civil war historian who counseled that the removal of the statues should be done after “thoughtful discussion” rather than by “indiscriminate” action.
Sinha was further quoted as saying that by targeting Founding Fathers like Washington and Jefferson, activists risk playing into the conservative political narrative that the removal of statues is a “slippery slope” toward an erasure of the country’s history.
President Trump used several occasions to decry protestors as being a “mobocracy.” Trump says protestors like Crowl and Navalta are new far-left fascists and left-wing Marxists demanding absolute allegiance to their cause.
Are they?
According to the Post, Sinha made these observations as well:
I don’t think we should feed into that narrative.
We should all be careful and deliberate about which ones should go and which should stay with historical contextualization.
Confederate statues are in a separate category from others because they commemorate men who committed treason against the United States to defend human bondage.
For others, such as Jefferson and Washington, who enslaved people who worked their large plantations, we should be able to judge them precisely for their shortcomings and achievements.
We can commemorate certain people for their achievements while criticizing certain actions they took that we don’t approve of today.
We could not agree more with Manisha Sinha on these points. They are reasonable and thoughtful. It’s worth taking to heart and profoundly respecting.
We believe a strong case has indeed been made, and it is justified to remove monuments around the nation that honor leaders of the Confederacy.
We subscribe to the argument that Confederate leaders were seeking to destroy our nation, not build it up or protect her. That they were the ones who were seeking to preserve white supremacy.
How we should tell the Confederate side of the story and what we should do with those removed Dixie monuments is subject to further debate and consideration, however. The story of war and discussion must be repeated but in proper context.
The position that more women should be honored for their accomplishments with monuments of their own is a noble idea. Yet, we also believe that America needs to pay even more attention to the words and actions of our founding fathers than ever before. Not less. Not through the erasure of history.
We need to teach the American Constitution and its meaning to schoolchildren with even greater effort and frequency, not retreat from its tested and tried experience.
We must seek out and achieve even greater protections for all our citizens. Not denigrate or neglect the need to do so.
We need to prosecute those who would vandalize and destroy public and private property under the ruse of protest for the damage they commit. Not yield on the rule of law in America.
We need to respect differences of opinion and voiced opposition to who we are differences, what we are, and why we are who we are. Not suppress freedom of speech, the press, or respectful political differences.
Not surprisingly, you will probably guess that we strongly disagree with Rosario Navalta’s argument that statues of our founding fathers perpetuate white supremacy and anti-blackness. This is not a thoughtful recourse.
These statues of our founding fathers do not perpetuate white supremacy and anti-blackness.
These statues to our founding fathers do perpetuate, we believe, the still-evolving idea that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that their Creator endows them with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
These were the words of the same Thomas Jefferson that uneducated American protestors seek to relegate to the shadows that have denied, in many cases, their own true stories over these past decades.
Replacing one extreme with another is not responsible for governing in America today.
It is our opinion that our founding fathers did, contrary to these protestors’ protestations, put in place an organized government that, despite our shortcomings or flaws, did ultimately lead to constitutional protections abolishing slavery in the United States, giving women the right to vote, and reaffirming anti-discrimination rules that better protect and ensure the rights of immigrants, Catholics, Jews, the Irish, the Italians, gays and lesbians, and much more.
We believe that Rosario Navalta would not have enjoyed U.S. citizenship and the right to protest, as a first-generation American no less, without the progress our American Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution, and Bill of Rights afforded her, starting with the words Thomas Jefferson first penned.
The same Thomas Jefferson Rosario Navalta chose to disparage and remove.
To Lucian Truscott and Shannon LaNier’s point, the Jefferson Memorial does not depict the Declaration of Independence’s author as either a god or an idol. That silly statement detracts from the more significant point they are trying to make.
Suppose Jefferson had not freed Sally Hemings’ children on his own accord, and Abe Lincoln, who admired Jefferson, had not prevailed over the Confederacy in abolishing American slavery. In that case, Shannon LaNier might not be free today to voice her opinion.
Do we tear down their monuments, acknowledging the power of freedom and democracy? Shannon and Thomas Jefferson did walk the talk.
The Jefferson Memorial celebrates his role in drafting the American freedom document and the words that have made us a better enduring nation over the centuries.
True, the Tidal Basin memorial does not go into greater detail of Jefferson’s life. That was not the place to tell that comprehensive story of Thomas Jefferson and his family.
As Lucian Truscott sees it, Monticello does, and that is also fittingly proper from our perspective. So is the American classroom. Our documentaries and films about the founding fathers and their challenges are also included.
“A nation that will stop acting divided will end being divided even if it takes at least 244 years to accomplish. ”
So are inspiring plays like Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton.
Suppose there is a groundswell of interest in honoring the Underground Railroad’s Harriet Tubman with a monument in Washington or elsewhere. In that case, it should be constructed on its own merits, not at the expense of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, or other greats from our founding days.
Lucian, you are doing Ms. Tubman a disservice by suggesting that you give her someone else’s monument.
This journey of our founding fathers reinforces the notion that this journey in time has indeed been about examining the American experiment.
We celebrate our differences. We celebrate our respective heritages.
We remember, or should, all our history for its glory and its agony.
This is the grand notion that we celebrate with statues of our founding fathers and other national heroes of the American adventure.
A nation that stops acting divided will end up being divided, even if it takes at least 244 years to accomplish.
This is what true American independence is all about.
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Equally, shortcomings and all.
God bless the USA!