Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power by Jon Meacham
In the past year, when Thomas Jefferson was getting attacked for what he did wrong, and not celebrated for what he did right, I told myself I had to learn more about the writer of the Declaration of Independence.
Recently I read about the protesters in Prague reading Jefferson aloud in 1989 as they protested communism. So I started reading both Jon Meacham's biography of Jefferson and The Federalist Papers. Alexander Hamilton wrote most of the weekly articles that comprise the case for the Constitution. But I thought it important to read them together to see what Hamilton thought so important about keeping the slave states in the union that he did not propose two Americas in 1787.
I knew that Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence at just 32 years old. What I did not know was that the first statesman to make a public declaration for the abolition of slavery was Thomas Jefferson in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence.
Jefferson wrote the first draft of that document, but it had to be approved by the Continental Congress. It was largely approved but about a quarter was struck out, including the anti-slavery passage. The original text is here.
Before the Declaration of Independence, the divine right of kings was taken for granted. The Declaration of Independence said America would not follow the track nearly all of humanity followed for all of previous history.
The freedom that Christianity promised and fucked up so badly in state churches began to become real in 1776. It took nearly 200 years to extend freedom to all even in law, but unless the Trump Republicans throw away democracy and end what Jefferson began, America will continue to be the place the world looks for freedom.
Without America and the people who risked their lives to found America, freedom would never have become a dream and a goal and a reality for large parts of the world.
From 1776 to 2016, the trend in America was toward more freedom for more people. Every other country in the world that in the same period was ruled, at oleast some of the time, by a monarch or a tyrant or totalitarian horror. America had a peaceful transfer of power from Washington to Obama until the Trump broke the tradition. No other country has ever done that.
Jefferson started the 240-year march to more freedom for more people here in America and around the world.
