Thomas Jefferson and Equality: Making America | 5 Minute Video — Transcript

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1. 0:01In one sentence Thomas Jefferson not only laid the foundation stone for a new nation
2. 0:07he also set that new nation, the United States of America, on a path we still follow today.
3. 0:14His affirmation in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal,” and
4. 0:20“endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” may be the most influential words
5. 0:26ever written this side of the Bible.
6. 0:28The US Constitution ratified a little more than a decade later, was guided by those words.
7. 0:34Subsequent amendments, including the Fourteenth Amendment, passed after the Civil War, granting
8. 0:39“equal rights under the law,” seem, for all their grandeur, to be restatements of
9. 0:44the equality principle in Jefferson’s original Declaration.
10. 0:48Yet Jefferson is controversial today because he embodies the contradictions of the founders.
11. 0:54Indeed, progressive scholars say, he was the worst of them, the most hypocritical, because
12. 0:59the very man who insisted that “all men are created equal” not only permitted slavery,
13. 1:05but himself owned slaves.
14. 1:07Did Jefferson not see the glaring contradiction between his principles and his practices,
15. 1:12between the principles and practices of the infant American nation? According to Chief
16. 1:18Justice Roger Taney, who authored the notorious 1857 Dred Scott decision affirming slavery
17. 1:25in the territories, neither Jefferson nor the other founders could have seriously meant
18. 1:30that “all men are created equal.” They didn’t act on the principle, so they couldn’t
19. 1:35have believed it.
20. 1:36Modern progressive jurists such as Thurgood Marshall, as well as historians such as John
21. 1:41Hope Franklin, have, again with an irony that should not go unnoticed, adopted the Taney
22. 1:47view. In Franklin’s words, the founders “betrayed the ideals to which they gave
23. 1:52lip service.”  They wrote, “eloquently at one moment for the brotherhood of man and
24. 1:57in the next moment denied it to their black brothers.”
25. 2:00No defense of Jefferson or the American founding is possible that agrees with this assessment.
26. 2:06How, then, can Jefferson and the founding itself be vindicated against this most serious
27. 2:12charge?
28. 2:13For the answer let’s look again at the Declaration and what comes immediately after the statement
29. 2:18“all men are created equal”—that governments derive their legitimacy from the “consent
30. 2:24of the governed.” This is the democracy principle and it is no less important, no
31. 2:30less foundational, than the equality principle.
32. 2:33With this is in mind, let’s turn to the practical choice faced by the founders. Progressives
33. 2:38say they should have outlawed slavery in the original Constitution. Yet slavery was legal
34. 2:43in all the states that sent representatives to Philadelphia in 1789.
35. 2:48How could these representatives outlaw slavery without the consent of the people in their
36. 2:54states? Were they expected to do so by overriding popular consent? In that case, they would
37. 2:59be overthrowing democracy itself, before it was even introduced as the bedrock of the
38. 3:04new Constitution!
39. 3:06Furthermore, as everyone in Philadelphia knew at the time, many states would not have joined
40. 3:11a union that forbade slavery at the outset. Perhaps a few would have done so, but no more.
41. 3:18Had those who opposed slavery held firm on the issue, the union would have consisted
42. 3:23of a handful of states, or it would have remained a utopian idea affirmed by a group of high-minded
43. 3:30founders—but they would be founders… of nothing.
44. 3:33As Jefferson himself said about the slavery issue, “We have the wolf by the ear, and
45. 3:38we can neither hold him nor safely let him go.”
46. 3:42It is not reasonable—in fact, it is downright obtuse—to ask of statesmen to do what they
47. 3:47manifestly cannot do. It is only reasonable to ask them to make the best choices available
48. 3:53to them under the circumstances—to hold the wolf, in Jefferson’s own terms, until
49. 3:58he can safely be let go.
50. 4:01In Abraham Lincoln’s view, the American founders did just that. They temporarily
51. 4:06allowed slavery in practice, while constructing a framework based on antislavery principles.
52. 4:12In Lincoln’s words, the Founders “declared the right, so that the enforcement of it might
53. 4:17follow as fast as circumstances would permit.”  Lincoln’s interpretation of Jefferson and
54. 4:22the founding was echoed by runaway slave and brilliant abolitionist leader, Frederick Douglass.
55. 4:28Slavery, Douglass said, was merely the scaffolding for the new Constitution, allowed provisionally
56. 4:35by Jefferson and the other founders, but with the clear objective that it would be taken
57. 4:40down once the edifice no longer needed it.
58. 4:43Martin Luther King echoed these same sentiments in his famous “I Have a Dream Speech.”
59. 4:49That Jefferson didn’t live up to his highest values is not in dispute. But to deny his
60. 4:54greatness and his indispensable role in the creation of the nation is both narrow-minded
61. 5:00and foolish. His Declaration undergirded the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement, and
62. 5:06to this day it remains the anchor of our rights and our democracy.
63. 5:10Lincoln, Douglass, and King all understood that Jefferson created the pathway for America
64. 5:16to become a better country than it was at the start: a country in which the glorious
65. 5:21idea that “all men are created equal” is closer to reality than anywhere else in
66. 5:27the world.
67. 5:29I’m Dinesh D’Souza for Prager University.