Thomas Jefferson Town Hall #1

Outside of John Brown, who was my Town Hall character, I thought the most interesting person was Thomas Jefferson. 

Thomas Jefferson had this war inside his own head over whether or not slavery should stay legal in the United States. I did not know any of Thomas Jefferson's views on slavery prior to this Town Hall. 

Thomas Jefferson, the 3rd President of the United States

What I find interesting is that Jefferson knew slavery was morally wrong, but he supported it for other motives. I learned that he believed abolishing slavery would cause whites and blacks to split off in to two separate countries. He was partially correct, because after the Civil War, whites and blacks were separated due to segregation laws, but these laws were because of white people, not because of both sides hating one another. 

Jefferson also believed that slavery was so embedded in to the country's economy that abolishing it would cause an economic collapse in the North and South. He was once again partially correct. After the War, the South had to rebuild drastically. With the abolishment of slavery, plantation owners had to find new ways of having their fields worked. So what'd they do? They came up with a brilliant idea- Slavery 2.0, or sharecropping. 

Sharecropping was legal slavery, or indentured servitude. Plantations were so dependent on a slave-like workforce that even after slavery was abolished they still needed to have some type of slavery-like practice to keep the economy afloat. Of course there were others reasons why a slavery-like practice was still enforced, but that's for a different blog post. In short, Jefferson's reasons for being pro-slavery in the early half of his life made logical sense. 

However, toward the end of Jefferson's life, I learned that he had a change of heart, like Ebenezer Scrooge from A Christmas Carol. He freed all of the slaves that he owned before he died and in the latter half of his life started to oppose slavery more publicly.

Jefferson's statements/views on slavery remind me of George Washington's farewell address, in the sense of he predicted the future if we attempted to mess with slavery. This is to me why Jefferson and Washington were brilliant people. They could see a vision of the world and of the country that no one else could even begin to fathom.