Hey Everyone,
I was watching C-Span (Book Tv) and had witnessed a most exciting description of the war on the middle class. I happen to believe that Mr. Hartmann's work is brillant. I'm beginning to contemplate on a career in Law as well as History. My Question concerns jerrson however. I quote Mr. Hartmann when he said "Thomas Jefferson essentially fought to have Colonial America remain as an Argicultral society (means of economic gains). We do all know that free labor done by enslaved africans and the like is what allowed for the society to gain such wealth i.e. prestige, influence and ultimatley domiance globally. I would like a factual answer to the this question. Was President Jefferson an adovcate for free labor performed undisputedly by african slaves? If so, would he have supported acts enforced by government to keep africans as slaves to further his ideal image of a democratic nation? Thanks for the response in advance.

Jefferson's _ideal_ was a nation of free, independent country yeomen--every family self-sufficient on its own land, freely trading their surplus as they saw fit.

As far as being compromised by slavery--well, on one hand, back in 1776 he tried to put in a clause in the Declaration of Independence that charged George III, among his many other enumerated crimes, with transporting Africans overseas to be forced into slavery, violating their own freedom and threatening to reduce his white American subjects to a similar level of subservience by the "competition." But a majority of delegates at the Continental Congress voted to strike that out.

OTOH--he owned slaves. He used some of them sexually and didn't free even them or his own children by them until after his death. He never freed many of his own slaves at all. His notions of how fine and refined a life a "free yeoman" might live were doubtless skewed by the fact that "his" farm was actually worked with forced labor.

Furthermore, I have to sadly say that Jefferson's great rival, Alexander Hamilton, had a much clearer vision of what would actually happen in America economically and socially than Jefferson did. Hamilton and Jefferson agreed that urban working people were a poor foundation for a democratic republic, because people who work for a wage and have nothing to fall back on if fired might feel compelled to vote the way their bosses want them to. So if that is so, then giving universal sufferage to people who don't live independently off their own property would be tantamount to just giving the franchise to rich people in proportion to their wealth anyway. Which is why Hamilton logically enough favored restrictions on the franchise to property owners and expected the US government to be all about fostering the schemes of the already rich--the people Hamilton thought were the only really important citizens anyway, the only ones capable of seeing the big pictures and dealing wisely with issues. Hamilton was basically the template for the conservatives of Jefferson's lifetime and his views were openly espoused by the "Federalist" party (called "Tories," aptly, by Jefferson's Democrat-Republicans) and, after such open championing of propertied privilege was soundly repudiated by the American voters in the time of Andrew Jackson, they learned to go underground, disguise the candidates of the rich as astroturf "log cabin" types with the campaign of Harrison on the Whig platform, as well as take over the Democrats. After Jackson, American conservatives became experts at pretending to be of, for, and by the common people, while actually carrying out Hamilton's priorities.

Meanwhile Jefferson the political philosopher was completely blindsided by the beginnings of the rise of American industrialism; Jefferson the President acquired vast new territories for his yeomen to colonize (never mind at what cost to Native Americans...) but found himself endorsing element after element of the old Federalist program of Washington and Adams as obvious requirements for industrial prosperity. It was left to later generations of Democrats to rework their vision of democracy to include urban working folk, and the division between Southern slaveowners (who did indeed pose as "working" people because they were farmers, and indeed the natural leaders of agrarian populist interests since they were very rich and successful farmers, with common interests such as opening up the West for settlement) and the working class masses of the Northeastern cities led by people like Martin Van Buren tore apart the Democratic Party.

According to Arthur Scheschinger's _Age of Jackson_, published during WWII, the urban Democrats did indeed eventually do the right thing and repudiate slavery. But I'm not sure that book is a fair description of what happened. I hope that part is right.

Anyway if things had worked out the way Jefferson hoped, we might or might not be a happy nation of yeoman families, but we certainly would not be a global industrial power nor could there possibly be so many of us. Jefferson treated slavery like an embarrassment, but it is not clear what, other than moral revulsion, would have led a nation of farmers to forbid it, nor is it clear what Jefferson would have had the freed slaves do.