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Who are George Washington and Thomas Jefferson?

Who were George Washington and Thomas Jefferson?

  • Great people

    Votes: 8 29.6%

  • People with great character flaws

    Votes: 1 3.7%

  • Great people with great character flaws

    Votes: 18 66.7%
  • Total voters
    27
SCitizen said:
Many people at that time opposed slavery.
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They probably didn't farm vast tracts of land either.

Decades after both of their deaths, the country officially dealt with the issue.

There was a time in US history when many things were allowed that society later determined shouldn't be. Do you want to go down that road a pick at every one of them?

I know it's fun sport for the SJW world to play this slavery game, but it only plays among those so afflicted.
 
I'd say they were a mixture of good and bad. Since I was a kid I felt bad seeing an animal get abused in any way. It's hard to believe they didn't inherently know abusing Africans was bad. And it's a shame that they were maybe the two most outstanding leaders in our country's independence yet they didn't care to use that positive exposure to show our country that freeing our slaves was in our best interest by freeing their own. Jefferson lived way beyond his means and died in debt, which was passed onto his daughter who had to sell his slaves, more than likely breaking up the families.

They both of course did excellent things for our country as well as we all know, and I feel like their positive actions should be celebrated but they themselves should not be deified.
 
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SCitizen said:
George Washington and Thomas Jefferson played a major role in establishment of the United States of America. And yet they have owned slaves. At the time of Washington’s death he owned 123 slaves. Slave living quarters/ would remind one of Gulag. Thomas Jefferson owned 200 slaves during the peak years of his prosperity. Thomas Jefferson supported slavery:
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the founders believed slavery would end after their deaths.

Jefferson would be denouncing that 1 state is meddling in the affairs of another state, which they are not to do and the federal governments duty would be to put that medding to an end.
 
SCitizen said:
Di UK engage in war crimes in their colonies in XIXth and early XXth centuries?
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Yes. In fact the British were the first to utilise concentration camps for civilian populations in the 2nd Boer War.
 
SCitizen said:
George Washington and Thomas Jefferson played a major role in establishment of the United States of America. And yet they have owned slaves. At the time of Washington’s death he owned 123 slaves. Slave living quarters/ would remind one of Gulag. Thomas Jefferson owned 200 slaves during the peak years of his prosperity. Thomas Jefferson supported slavery:
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You forgot one.

Great people with character flaws.
 
spud_meister said:
Yes. In fact the British were the first to utilise concentration camps for civilian populations in the 2nd Boer War.
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That is true. It seems USA has been guilty of many more war crimes in Vietnam and Korea.
 
They were 2 of the founding fathers who fought for freedom and equal rights for themselves and other White men,but not for Blacks and women.

Now we're a little further along but we've still got some work to do.



"Better days are coming." ~ But not for today's out of touch,running out of time,GOP.
 
SCitizen said:
That is true. It seems USA has been guilty of many more war crimes in Vietnam and Korea.
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No. The British Empire delivered death and destruction on an incomparable scale. Millions dies from preventable famine in Bengal. millions of innocent civilians were interred in China, Kenya, South Africa and Cyprus. Thousands were massacred and tortured in places ranging from India to Yemen. The US cannot be compared to the British in terms of war crimes and inflicted suffering.
 
Mac77 said:
Understood.

But
the American revolution led to the freedom of everyone including slaves from Africa
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And Washington and Jefferson were an indispensable part of that
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Wrong,the Civil War did that.

Just sayin'.
 
SCitizen said:
Many people at that time opposed slavery.
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Many people oppose global governance responsible for Global Public Goods today.
 
shrubnose said:
Wrong,the Civil War did that.

'.
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Within the framework of the Constitution

Without Washington and Jefferson you dont have Lincoln.
 
shrubnose said:
They were 2 of the founding fathers who fought for freedom and equal rights for themselves and other White men,but not for Blacks and women.
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Actually they did. They just were not able to accomplish it. Facts of that is even shown right here in this thread.
 
spud_meister said:
No. The British Empire delivered death and destruction on an incomparable scale. Millions dies from preventable famine in Bengal. millions of innocent civilians were interred in China, Kenya, South Africa and Cyprus. Thousands were massacred and tortured in places ranging from India to Yemen. The US cannot be compared to the British in terms of war crimes and inflicted suffering.
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I do not know. USA inflicted about a million civilian deaths in Japan bombing 1945, another million in Korean War 1950 -- 53, and another million in Vietnam War 1965 -- 73.
 
SCitizen said:
I do not know. USA inflicted about a million civilian deaths in Japan bombing 1945, another million in Korean War 1950 -- 53, and another million in Vietnam War 1965 -- 73.
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The war with japan could not have ended without civilian deaths

A war we did not start btw
 
Mac77 said:
The war with japan could not have ended without civilian deaths

A war we did not start btw
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But in Korea and Vietnam USA did inflict a total of about 2 million civilian deaths.
 
SCitizen said:
But in Korea and Vietnam USA did inflict a total of about 2 million civilian deaths.
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Again, we did not start those wars but merely resisted the aggression of the communist north at the invitation of the non communist south
 
BrewerBob said:
And there were people against slavery in America at that time as well so it wasn't impossible to come to the right decision.
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People are against abortion today. Would you say that our great-great-grandchildren will be right to assume that every pro-choicer was a hate-filled, mass-murdering, human rights atrocity? Had they lived now, no doubt, they would have founded active resistance movements to save children from murderous so-called "doctors" with their hands soaked in the blood of the innocent; they would have boldly stood for right, and...

...but of course, most wouldn't. Most folks are people, and our world defines much of how we look at it.

Hell, people eat meat today. A century and a half from now, they might look at our meat industry as inhumane, and ask how their ancestors (us) were so cruel, so idiotic, so inhuman, as to eat other living creatures.


Slavery as it was practiced since humankind first realized it was easier to force their neighbor to labor on their behalf than do the labor themelves is evil. Chattel slavery was forbidden in the New Testament (bondhood was modified - eventually as the West Christianized the practice partly died out, and partly was subsumed by feudalism), and those who wanted to build a case it was evil in the late 18th Century certainly had a lexicon to build on. In fact, they did so, which led to the 19th Century.

But ending one evil does not necessarily make for wise policy if the result is to replace it with a greater evil. We survived the Civil War not least because we had a century and some change under our belt operating as a nation - our institutions were developed, and capable of withstanding the blood. Even then it was a close-run thing. A century prior?


While attempting in all things to align our will most closely to that which is Good, we should retain some basic humility when it comes to the probability that future generations will look at us and identify at least as many (if not more) flaws than we identify when we look at our own forebears, and judge those forebears accordingly.
 
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Mac77 said:
Ok I see your point.
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It sounds like Progressives here.

They give a platform to speak, which is like giving enough rope to hang themselves.

They hope they say something that will land them in jail.
 
Kal'Stang said:
They hold no guilt. The only guilt there is about them is coming from those in modern times not willing to accede that they were simply practical men that had to live in the times that they did and as such behaved in such a way as to get the most good done. They were not able to get everything done that they wanted to. But they most definitely tried to do so.
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This thinking, which many in this thread have expressed, is so bizarre to me. We as a nation generally trace our reverence for individual liberty to those men. So to turn around and say we can't judge them by our conception of liberty when we got it from them (distilled, of course, from other political philosophers) is strange.

These men aren't criticized because they're random human beings from a previous era of history who owned slaves. There are lots of those. They're criticized because they weren't that at all.

They are, rightly, praised as revolutionaries and visionaries, who took philosophical ideas about freedom and individual liberty and built an entire political system around them. I don't know how one can read what they wrote and said about liberty and conclude that they lacked the moral imagination to apply their own thoughts to an institution that embodied the most basic antithesis of liberty imaginable.

Really, one has to live in "modern times" to recognize the absurdity of thinking "liberty is paramount, but also slavery is fine"?

So all right, they didn't have the moral understanding to recognize as we brilliant moderns do that liberty and slavery are opposite things. But wait! People making exactly that argument then muddy the waters by claiming they secretly must have felt bad about it. George Washington freed slaves after they could no longer benefit him financially (you know, because he was dead)! I would recommend against that argument, as it makes them look much, much worse when you tacitly point out they knew it was wrong but they just really liked being wealthy.

And spinning it as pragmatism only makes sense from a political perspective. John Adams was pragmatic, in that he found slavery abhorrent but understood that anything other than gradual abolition would be politically disastrous. But guess what? He wasn't a slave owner--because personal conduct and the politics of system-level change, where pragmatism actually matters, are different things. And the pragmatism argument certainly doesn't explain away Jefferson's habitual rape of at least one slave.
 
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