I don’t know if you’re refering to me or not, but I made it clear in my first post to this thread tha I can separate out different things he did and admire the good things and not admire the bad things.
Der Trihs: You have no idea what your princlpes would’ve been had you been born 300 years ago. None of us does. It’s absurd to imply otherwise.
Well, I’ll go with agreeing with that too; I don’t mean to say that they’re helpless victims. But I do think that doing something wrong because of a personal incentive to do so shows bad morality, so I think the two are a bit closer than you do.
So what ? Making it legal doesn’t make it not rape.
In that case, the question should not have been asked.
“Rape” is a legal term, Trihs.
It’s also a description of a behavior. Sex with coercion is rape, whether or not it’s legally defined as such. Are you going to claim that no woman was every raped before governments existed to pass laws ? Was no woman ever raped when they were treated as chattel, slave or not ? If you beat a woman into submission or hold her at knifepoint and force sex on her, what else would you call it ?
The first part is true, the DNA evidence only proved that someone in Jefferson’s male line could have been the father. That isn’t all of the evidence though. As it turns out, no one other than TJ was in the same city as Hemmings when the children were conceived.
Let’s say you inherited property which included slaves that the two could not legally be separated. If you refuse the entire inheritance, the slaves will go to someone who will abuse them. There is no legal way to free them. If you just let them go, they don’t have the funds or the skills to survive (through no fault of their own.)
Then what would you do?
Yes.
You cannot judge his actions in that time by the social mores of our time. The fact that he owned slaves is meaningless. He helped shape and create a new nation and that is what he should be remembered for.
I tend to get annoyed with many of Clothahump’s posts, for various reasons. But this one is 100% on target, and deserves quite a bit of praise.
Historical figures are not plaster saints. Hell, the saints aren’t plaster saints, for the most part; they had their own foibles.
Thomas Jefferson did several remarkable things for this country. He gave quite freely of himself to do so. That’s what makes him great. Revisionist history that focuses on his faults is a needed corrective to the “put him on a pedestal” school of Parson Weems history. But it misses the point: take him “warts and all,” he did something remarkable – several things, actually. And that’s why he’s more important than George Mason or Button Gwinnett.
Smuggle them North, like I said. Teach them how to survive.
Easy to say now, with a 21st century perspective on things. Back then, it was unthinkable. Jefferson is to be commended on the fact that he even recognised there was a problem, much less went against everything his society and upbringing had taught him. Harry Stein once wrote an editorial for Analog magazine called “Ex Post Facto Ethics” that is required reading in my AP Euro class. I wish it was available online. He makes an excellent case against this kind of argument.
Correction: it was Stanley Schmidt, not Harry.
Wait…
Was Sally Hemmings coerced? How would we know that?
Garbage. If it was unthinkable in his society, that just means his whole society was evil, not just him. Not that I believe it; a society like that would never produce phrases like “all men are created equal”; it would never occur to them. I’ve felt for years that what made American slavery so nasty and crazy, even by slavery standards, was that the people involved knew better, and were in denial.
I read it and disagree.
She was a slave without the ability to deny him; any sex between master and slave involves coercion, and is therefore rape. Mind, that’s subtle enough that it really might not have occured to him.
He’s honored as a founding father, as is George Washington. If I remember correctly Jefferson did not think Negroes could be properly educated and therefore could not take care of themselves in a modern world. As a scientist he was prone to observation but as a slave owner it was probably a self-fulfilling prophecy to view slaves in this manner. I’d imagine a person born into slavery received little in the way of intellectual development in the formative years.
Care to elaborate, or is your opinion just inherently superior to Stan’s?
[Sophia Petrillo]Picture it, Harper’s Ferry, 1859…[/Sophia Petrillo]
John Brown leads his gang (he calls it an Army of God) on the ironically scarcely defended arsenal at Harper’s Ferry and takes it after a quick fight. That’s him there, the one with the wild eyes (called “apostolic” and “Christ-like” by some we’ll get to in a moment, “wild” and “crazy” by others [who I have to admit I side with a bit more]) and the bush white beard that looks not unlike the one on Michelangelo’s Moses. He’s waving a sword in his hand- an old and expensive one from the looks of it- we’ll talk about that sword in just a second.
His plan is simple: seize the armory, add the guns and ammo seized to the ones you already own, go into the Maryland and Virginia countryside distributing them to slaves and encourage an uprising that will make the mass murders Brown caused in Kansas look like a shaving cut. And he’s doing it because he hates slavery, so he’s the good guy, right?
Best laid plans of mice and madmen being what they are, Federal forces surround Brown and after a short but bloody fight in which several of his followers (including two of his sons) are killed, Brown surrenders. Seeing himself as a general in the service of God, however vanquished he may be the powers of unrighteousness, he does what any other general who is taken alive would do and surrenders his sword to the victor of the battle. The conquering colonel recognizes that sword instantly because, as fate would have it, the sword once belonged to his wife’s grandfather. (Technically it belonged to his wife’s step-great-grandfather, but since the man adopted her father as his son that makes him adoptive grandfather.)
Okay, since most of you already know who the victor is and who the sword belonged to I’ll go ahead and skip the crapspenseful nature of it. The sword Brown was wielding belonged to George Washington (Brown stole it in a raid on the property of Washington’s nephew and heir, Supreme Court Justice Bushrod Washington). Washington owned many slaves in his lifetime and came to hate the practice with a passion, but until the final decade of his life he did not have the financial resources to do much about it. Finally he could, and in his will he decreed that upon the death of his wife all of his slaves would be free. Since his wife owned in her own right more slaves than he did, or more precisely she had control over more slaves than he did as they were inherited either from her father or her first husband or descended from slaves who were [some intermarried with George’s slaves- their children were owned by whichever spouse owned the mother] and were held in a sort of trust first for her two children (who both died young) and then for her young grandchildren, he beseeches her in the same will to free hers as well. She does not, instead bequeathing the lion’s share in her own will to her grandson and the rest to her granddaughter, both of whom were adopted and reared as the children of her husband, George Washington. (Remember those slaves they inherited.)
Washington knew that his slaves were not going to be miraculously transformed into capable independent farmers and business owners upon their manumission. They were illiterate, they had never managed money other than perhaps a few coins they somehow received or worked for, they were going to be seen as unequal and unworthy by their neighbors, so he bequeathed them plots of land to work in a sort of sharecropping system and he bequeathed them small pensions for most of their basic needs. Sixty years later the few surviving freed slaves of Washington are still receiving the pensions because they’ve never been able to “catch up” to their free neighbors.
They were fortunate enough to be able to remain in Virginia because they are protected by a grandfather clause following the passage of legislation declaring all freed slaves must leave Virginia within one year of manumission or else revert to slavery. That same clause did not apply to their own children and grandchildren born after the implementing of the same laws, incidentally, hence many of Washington’s slaves left the area and most ended up living in poverty or at a subsistence level. (Perhaps on their way out of the state they passed by or stopped for dinner at the Albemarle County cabin of Madison and Beverly Hemings and their mother Sally, freed slaves who did continue living in the state more than a year after being freed due to a sheriff strangely willing to overlook the law in their special case- remember that for a second as well.)
Now, remember those slaves Martha left to her grandson? He accepted them, used them to build a grand house and successful plantation for himself, and of course like most planters lived in debt most of his life because there were always enough bad harvests to make you go into the hole. He had many children (according to some sources 15 were with his slaves) but only one of his legitimate children survived, a daughter named Mary who married the man who arrested John Brown, Westpoint graduate and career soldier Robert E. Lee.
Lee was born to one of Virginia’s most distinguished families, a dynasty made rich by tobacco and slaves but his, Lighthorse Harry Lee, succeeded through bad investments, bad luck, gambling and high living to pile drive the family fortune into the ground. Lighthorse Harry abandoned the family for Georgia and the Caribbean (in large part to avoid debtor’s prison) and his creditors seized his slaves, properties and the Lee’s century old manor house just upriver from Mt. Vernon. They’d have been indigent had it not been for the house and slaves Lee’s mother inherited from her father and first husband; most of their cash money came from the lease of her slaves as farm workers and domestics. When she died Robert inherited eight slaves; already hating slavery he manumitted three and gave the rest to a sister and brother who were in poor circumstances financially. (Now, he could have freed them all, but from his letters we know he had serious concerns as to whether they would be able to feed themselves and he also would have been unable to help a family member in need with the only valuable property he owned outright.)
G.W.P. Custis lived used his slaves to make himself rich by the standard of the time and build that magnificent house overlooking the city named for his adoptive father, but he never forgot the same man’s teachings about the evils of slavery, and perhaps at some point he’d even promised that he’d follow his example. In any case he did- he manumitted many of his slaves during his life (living just across the river from D.C. helped because they could go there and seek livelihood- remember, they could not remain in Virginia more than one year). All of the rest, sixty some odd, he bequeathed to his daughter and son-in-law with the express direction they be freed in five years time.
This seems a simple direction to follow. Hell, Robert E., you don’t like slavery, you’ve said so- just go ahead and free them now. Unfortunately it’s not that simple, for like most rich Southerners Custis’s estate was very complicated. There was a lot of property, a lot of equipment and a huge amount of assets, but there was also (almost always the case with Southern aristocracy) very little cash and a lot of debts owed.
Lee could possibly have freed the sixty-three slaves immediately, but it would have essentially bankrupted his father-in-law’s estate. This means that Lee’s salary as a Colonel in the United States Army would have been the sole means of support for himself (which he could have managed just fine on, perhaps) and for his seven children (including a special-needs daughter) and for his wife, a near invalid (later a total invalid). His daughters would have had no dowry other than their surname and genealogy, his sons would have had no money for education or for having their own property one day, the mansion at Arlington would have to be sold and the money given to creditors- I won’t ask what you’d have done in his case as it’s conjecture, but can anybody here honestly say that they can’t see his justification for immediately freeing the slaves? (Remember also that for a man of Lee’s clout living in a state that had no love for freed blacks, it would probably have been very easy to overturn his father-in-law’s will- “he was a good man but he turned a little loopy towards the end, you know- they get that way”- and sold or used the slaves and retired from the army to a life of wealth and ease.)
So what Lee did was request an assignment in the D.C. area so that he could manage his father-in-law’s estate in such a way to honor the old man’s wishes while at the same time leaving the estate solvent and ideally providing an inheritance to his children (the old man’s grandchildren). He essentially leased most of his father-in-law’s lands and slaves to others, rental income being easier to budget than agricultural, applied it to the estate debts and in 1859 when he arrested Brown (because he was in the area- there were only 200 soldiers in all of D.C., believe it or not, and Lee the highest ranking with battle experience) and retrieved his wife’s family heirloom he had managed to free some slaves (and he had ordered the whipping of three runaways for fear they would encourage others to do likewise), was in the process of freeing the others and would complete the process by the deadline of 1862. (He later lost the house, of course, when it was confiscated and used as a cemetery as a deliberate slap in the face to him, but his son was well compensated for it in a lawsuit later and split the monies with his siblings.)
Now, back to Brown- he’s arrested and goes to jail. Let’s fast-forward and see him at his trial.
See the guy with the big bushy beard on Brown’s defense team? No, not that one, the other guy with the big bushy beard on Brown’s defense team. No no no, one more over, THAT one. Okay, funny story about him, he’s really less a defense lawyer than he is a double agent serving Brown and, behind his back, serving Brown’s supporters… confused? I’ll explain.
Brown you see was in the odd experience of being a combination of Fred Phelps (i.e. wildly psychotic and violent Kansas minister with a congregation made mostly from his enormous and fanatically mono-maniacally obsessed family) and Mumia (i.e. beloved cause of the northeastern liberal literati). Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne- they all LOVED him, they wrote about his Christ-like demeanor and how he looked like a prophet and how he was doing the work and will of the transcendental God, bless his holy beard hairs! And it’s a good thing they did love him so much, because Brown was a monumental failure in business and at farming- he and his wife and his 20 children missed many meals along the way because they were in dire poverty- until he met the abolitionist elite. They supplied him with glorious press and with… money. A good bit of it for the day. Reverend Henry Ward Beecher (the Billy Graham of his day- later fell from grace in a sex-scandal) supplied him outright with money to buy guns and ammunition; so did Reverend Beecher’s sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, the woman who made the biggest literary fortune in America to that time for her runaway bestseller based on a sensationalized tale set in a part of the country she’d never set foot in. Of course it was one thing when they knew their money was going to keep slavery out of the new western territories, violence that was far offstage and by the time it was reported in the east coast newspapers had been spun a bit; it’s quite another when this man who was a guest at their balls and fundraisers comes east with a militia gang and takes over an arsenal with the express purpose of causing a bloodbath like Haiti. But at least he’s doing it because he believes in racial equality, right?
Well no actually, he doesn’t. Not by a stretch. Brown is a white supremacist, purely and simply. Oh make no mistake- he really does think that slavery is a dehumanizing evil and really does even have admirable views on it by our standards- but he also believes blacks are the race of Ham and all that jazz and that there’s no way they can rule themselves. Brown, a lifelong failure and non-entity, mocked by many for his poverty and his madness (he hears voices among other things) and a total nothing in white society- will be a godlike figure (as he sees it) to the blacks- he’ll lead them in conquest, and then he’ll lead them. He’ll teach them, he’ll guide them, he’ll tend to their souls and bring them to Jesus, and maybe eventually they’ll be able to govern themselves but til then that’s what he and his boys are there for. (Sounds just a little bit like something another wide eyed mass murderer would think about in California [where Brown’s widow and surviving children ended up, I mention for no real reason] a century and a decade later doesn’t it? Bloody violence + race war + me showing the darkies how to rule…)
Anyway (I promise, this will all have a point in a moment), that defense lawyer that I mentioned… he’s paid for as a “gift” to Brown by the siblings Beecher and by Emerson and by some other of Brown’s supporters (who aren’t writing much about him at the moment) because they want to see him get acquitted, of course. Or, failing that, or in addition to that, they want the frigging incriminating letters and receipts and other documents that may be in his possession back and PRONTO, today would be nice. (He gets them- there aren’t many on Brown’s person, but he convinces Brown to hand him over and then he drops him like a piece of glowing horseshoe and goes back to Boston, leaving the damned-from-the-get-go defense to the others.) And before we leave the trial look towards the back… do you see him? How could you not… he.is.so.just.ohmigod.gorgeous.dreamy.and.lickable! I’m talking about the guy with the alabaster skin and that curly black hair and those beautiful penetrating black eyes… he should be on the stage with looks like that, he’d be a matinee idol…
Oh, he is? Or at least that’s his ambition? He’s whose son? You mean as in THE Junius Brutus Booth? That means he’s Edwin’s brother, right? John Wilkes is his name you say… hmmm. Wonder whose side he’s on in this trial…
Really? Does he own slaves? No? Odd that he’s so passionate about it then. You say he outright despises free blacks even though he was half raised by one at his father’s farm? Strange. Well, no accounting. Fast forward.
There goes Brown to the scaffold, stops and kisses his wife… doesn’t look a lot like the pictures. He makes a good death, I’ll say that for him.
The transcies are silent for a while… then when a respectable grieving period has passed during which, incidentally, it’s become clear they are no longer connected to him by incriminating documents, no longer able to be embarrassed or terrified by his actions, his planned race riot having failed and his terrorism and murders a spinnable thing of the past, they write about him again. WHAT A HERO WAS JOHN BROWN, OH… A SECOND GIDEON! A SOLDIER OF THE LORD! WONDERFUL AND MARTYR TO THE no, John Brown’s deranged surviving son number 4, we are not giving you money to resume your crazy ass dad’s work, now lose this address! MOST GLORIOUS OF CAUSES, THE SCION OF I mean it, get the hell away from me or I’ll wire for the Pinkertons you little freak…THE SPIRIT OF FREEDOM AND BROTHERHOOD! Your body lies a mouldering in its grave… hmm, that’s kind of catchy.
Now, what the hell does this have to do with Jefferson? Not a lot and everything.
The answer to this and other queries when we return to AS THE SYSTEMIC EVIL TURNS.
He didn’t spend himself into debt, IIRC. He married into a rich family only to find out that they were in a lot of debt, and his inheritance, in fact, was debt. And slaves and land.
Oh, if only Lucinda had said yes.
BTW, “smuggling” slaves north wouldn’t have accomplished much. This was the 1700’s, not the 1850’s. While all northern states by 1790 (or thereabouts) had made laws that phased out slavery, slavery was still mostly legal in the north. He could have taken slaves on his trips to Europe (more than he did), sent them to Africa, and claimed they died, maybe, I don’t know.
Do you unforgiveably condemn the other founding fathers too (except Adams)?
Jefferson did say that he doubted whether black people could be educated, but he also said that his own observations were his only evidence, and he knew that his sample was biased. Later on, he was corrected and replied:
How much of that is polite covering, you may decide.
The point of the above is to use a microcosm moment (Harper’s Ferry) and the individuals associated with it to show just how complicated a mess slavery was all around. It was evil, but it was a systemic evil, and it was not limited just to the slaveowners.
For starters- Lee, Washington, Jefferson- these were all three men who wanted to free their slaves, but they could not. The laws would not allow the slaves to stay and they sure as hell didn’t have the money to buy them all passage and means of livelihood in a free state, and for most of them they were in debt up to their eyeballs (very often to northern banks who loaned them money to buy more slaves) and it was not an option. When it was an option (the case of Lee and his father-in-law’s slaves, for example)- to quote Alfred Doolittle from My Fair Lady, “It’s easy to say ‘chuck it’, but I 'aven’t the 'eart…”, and whoever can unequivocally and absolutely say that they would is a liar. (I’m not saying that you wouldn’t have- there were some who did- Dolly Madison’s father [who died broke] comes to mind- but until you’ve been in the situation you just don’t know and therefore can’t come down with great wrath on those who having this choice didn’t free the slaves.
“Gentlemen you mustn’t think our northern friends merely see our black slaves as figures on the ledger… no sir, they see them as figures on the block.” Edward Rutherford (direct ancestor of Goldie Hawn/Kate Hudson, incidentally) in the musical 1776
Slavery was a systemic evil, but it was an AMERICAN systemic evil, not just a southern one. Prior to the railroads where did the great northern fortunes come from?
Banking. Shipping. Brewing. Textile mills. Factories of all kinds. For a quick ten points, which of these businesses were up to their eyeballs in their benefit of the slave trade?
If you answered “all of them”, give yourself a hug. As already mentioned, banks loaned money to southern farmers and to textile factories. Textile factories imported cotton grown by slaves (think they’d have imported as much or sold as much cloth if the slaves had been paid workers?) as did other factories that depended on both the southern market and on slave labor produced southern raw materials. Even after the infamous triangle trade brewers still imported their molasses and various seasonings and herbs from the Caribbean where they were produced by, you guessed it, slaves. Cuba and Brazil were both huge trade partners of the northeastern factories and industries, and both made their money from slave labor industries. Some of the abolitionists came from wealthy families whose money came directly from these trades, or they wore to their meetings clothing made from slave picked cotton that was a lot cheaper because it was slave picked. (No way of knowing but it would be interesting to know nevertheless how many people who condemn Jefferson and other slaveowners on this board and elsewhere live in houses furnished with or wear clothing made by overworked starvation wage third world factory workers.)
Then the blatant hypocrisy of people like the transcendentalists above (the Brown supporters) fueled the hatred of southerners and made them feel more justified in their assertions. Haiti scared the hell out of southerners- they were surrounded and in many cases outnumbered by black slaves- Nat Turner and lesser rebellions proved that it could happen here. Suppose you’re a free white yeoman farmer living in a county with 2,000 white inhabitants and 2,000 slave inhabitants- you really want to see these people suddenly freed, suddenly with the right to buy guns, suddenly in direct competition with you? It was evil, but it was evil to the core and something that had to be lived with because there simply was no feasible plan to peacefully end it. We cannot judge by far removed abstract standards of the 21st century.
Even the abolitionists had very different views on race from our own. Many, like the evil and crazed John Brown, did not see the blacks as equal to themselves- they had a paternal attitude that they needed to be protected. There were more “send them back to Africa” abolitionists than many realized. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book was performed by white men in blackface IN THE NORTH because the racism was entrenched up there as well and blacks didn’t suddenly start getting equal opportunity treatment once they reached the Delaware Welcome Station. Blacks in the 19th century were just simply and royally screwed all around and there was little anything an individual could do about it- even the president of the United States. (Wanna cite? Here’s one- the Civil War killed 600,000 soldiers and about as many civilians and totally devastated half the country.)
Slavery could not be feasibly done away with by Jefferson’s time. The bankers would not have allowed it, the slaveowners weren’t thrilled with the prospects with being indigent, the free whites weren’t jumping up and down to be equal to the one strata of society they had the psychological security of being superior to (ALL societies have the “by virtue of birth” inferior classes- in the north it was immigrants). And because it was a hopeless situation southerners rationalized it- blacks were inferior. They cannot be taught to read because it would make them dangerous and besides which they’re not intelligent enough because hell- they can’t read. And northerners seeing the planks in southern eyes but not the wood in their own didn’t help the enmity. It was simply a hopeless situation.
As for Sally Hemings, I have no illusions about the relationship being a love match as we would understand the term, but neither do I think it’s a proven point it was rape. Yes, she was young- a teenager when she became her master’s concubine- but teenagers younger than her married everyday in the free world. It is true that she was his slave and could not have resisted his advances had she wanted to, but it is also true that she could have left him in France and been a free woman- her brother left Jefferson’s service in France and took his freedom. Yes, she was young enough to be his daughter- younger than his oldest daughter in fact- but MANY men have had sex with women young enough to be their daughters, and Jefferson lived in a time when the Bible informed even the most liberal of Christians moral codes to an extent, even a Deist was likely not immune, and Jefferson revered it as great mythology, and it’s filled with men taking young concubines who bear them children (who get special treatment but may not be full heirs like Isaac or Joseph were), which to us seems remote and barbaric but then so does slavery and shitting in a pot in your bedroom or people living in one room houses with seven kids where privacy is something found under a bed- these people lived a much rougher and less refined life than ours.
What’s in it for Sally? Well, for starters let’s look at Minerva, a Monticello slave she would have known. Minerva was born on Jefferson’s father’s plantation and inherited by T.J… She was an unskilled field worker who most of the year would have worked 16 hours per day planting and tending and harvesting- hard work and hot as hell in summer and cold in winter. She married along the way and had many children, some of whom grew up to be skilled artisans, and that meant that after 16 hours in her master’s fields she returned to her 240 square foot house and prepared her family’s dinner, tended her children’s clothes (they’d have had at most 2 sets of clothing each so it had to be mended), maybe she got 4 hours of sleep before repeating the process the next day.
By the time she was in her late 50s Minerva was worn from a lifetime of hardwork and she was rewarded with one hell of a retirement package. She watched as her children were sold off to pay dead Master Jefferson’s debts, some for high prices because they were skilled. She was listed on the inventory as having a value of…
$0.00.
A friend of Jefferson’s daughter who had known her for a long time bought her for $20 as an act of charity. He also bought her husband for about the same price (he was old and almost blind), so at least she had somebody she presumably loved with her. Their new master essentially put them out to pasture, retiring them to a tiny cabin and whatever work they could do to earn their keep. Perhaps one of the gods smiled enough for some of her children and grandchildren to have been sold to people nearby so perhaps she could see them once in a blue moon before she died.
Sally herself was old by the time Minerva was sold, but the quarters would have been full of stories of Minervas dating back to the 17th century. To be a Minerva would have been a slave’s worst horror. You make the best of the hand you’re dealt.
Thomas Jefferson was a charismatic and tall man who would have seemed very nearly like a god to a Monticello slave, even a Hemings (an illegitimate half-sister of the late Martha Jefferson). Not only was he the master you were taught from the tit to revere and fear, he was a man that other white men feared and revered. (Like Clinton, not even Jefferson’s many and worst enemies regarded him as less than brilliant.) He’s a man of great importance, and who can make your children free. And he did. (Technically two of her children “ran away”- at the same time as each Jefferson’s ledger, which recorded every penny he spent, has an unexplained entry for $50 disbursed- could it be that this was the 1810s equivalent of the gifts and sheep that Abraham’s sons with Keturah received?)
As mentioned above, Sally lived with her sons Beverly and Madison in Albemarle County until her death in 1835 even though it was against the law. This shows what her relationship with Jefferson bought her: status. Other freed slaves had to leave the state, but her sons, who went free even though their father died deeply in debt, were free and they were allowed to stay. True, they weren’t rich- Jefferson didn’t provide for them handsomely at all, they had a cabin and paid the rent with odd jobs- but then Jefferson’s own surviving white daughter spent the remainder of her own life living with various of the children and grandchildren she’d borne because she, the person Jefferson loved most of all, was also left penniless at his death. He gave Sally’s children the one thing that he could.
It’s easy to see why Sally would have agreed to a long term relationship with her master: he was important, he was powerful, he could make her and her children free. For Jefferson he got a warm bed when he wanted one with an attractive woman who looked a lot like his wife and who he couldn’t marry if he wanted to, thus he could keep the vow he made to his wife on her deathbed that he would not remarry.
It’s far from a Harlequin romance, it’s a simple sexual arrangement that was mutually beneficial. But neither was it rape. (Sally’s son Madison did not seem to feel it was rape either and stated that it was an agreement from the beginning that Sally and her children would be free.
Two of Sally’s relatives (other than her children) were freed before Jefferson died. Her brother who left Jefferson while in Paris later came back to Monticello as a paid worker (he was a chef), then returned to Paris and other places as a free man, and ultimately committed suicide. Of Sally’s many siblings and half-siblings (her mother had 14 children, half by her white master and the other half by an African born slave) and her many nephews and nieces, every last one of them was sold on the block after Jefferson died.
For the actual OP, however, Jefferson was a brilliant man who benefitted this country greatly. He was also a hypocrite capable of blinding himself to anything he did not wish to see. He was in short a great man with great flaws like most of the founders. Whether you should adulate him or not is entirely a personal choice.
Why yes, yes it is. 
Seriously, I take the view that there are certain basic principles that anyone with a brain should be able to figure out - if they want to. Unfairness, for example; even a chimp can recognize unfair behavior from another chimp, and retaliate ). The more sophisticated a society, the more they can figure out. I don’t think the people of the time were too primitive to figure out slavery is wrong; if nothing else, it’s logically implied by their own principles.
I do believe that one can, at least roughly, objectively define morals/ethics. No, there’s no magic way to define one side as good and one evil, but that doesn’t mean you can’t identify the sides themselves, and decide who’s on yours and who’s on the other one. If you don’t like calling them good and evil, call them Ethical System A and Ethical System B. I’m on one side; anyone who owns slaves is on the other; and the two are incompatible.
I don’t believe in absolute moral relativism, nor do I believe our ancestors were our equals morally. We have progressed.
Yes. I see no reason to lionize people just because they founded the country I happen to live in. Slavery is pretty much the ultimate evil, by my standards.