Thomas Jefferson Claimed He Introduced Bill to Free Enslaved Blacks 100 Years Before Civil War. Was He Lying?

Imagine a world where the civil war never happened. Slavery would end the century earlier than it did, saving the country of decades of division and bloodshed that cost thousands of Americans and created an ideological jam that lasts to this day.

Abraham Lincoln, 16. US President, may have even lived in a mature age, instead of killing him at the beginning of his second term.

A new documentary with six episodes Thomas Jeffersonwhich premieres on February 17th on the historic channel and broadcasts over the next two nights, touches on the claim of the third US president that he invented a plan for the release of enslaved black Americans in the years before the US Revolution.

‘Thomas Jefferson’ of the historic channel.

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“In the part of Jefferson’s biographies, he even mentions that when he was at the Burgeseses’ house, he and another member wanted to have an emancipation plan,” confirms historian Annette Gordon-Reed in the first episode.

If Jefferson had his way, according to his memoir, which he began writing in 1821 at the age of 77, slavery would have been abolished long before the blood shed to end it. His plan, he claimed, took place and in the end failed when he was a member of Virginia House of Burgesses of 1769, when he was only 26 years old, until 1775.

Memorial Thomas Jefferson in Washington DC

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Narrator Thomas Jefferson briefly explains the plan, as set up in Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson More than half a century after he allegedly introduced him while he was at the Burgesesa house. “In his autobiography, which he wrote 52 years later, Jefferson says that in 1769 he and his cousin proposed a proposal to transfer control of emancipation with a general court over the owners of slaves. ”

“He says he once saw people reacted to emancipation plans, basically closed them, left alone,” Gordon-Reed adds.

But should we take Jefferson’s word for that? Is the man who owned hundreds of enslaved people he never freed, the guy who had the phrase “all people were created equal”, but for a long time he wrote about the inferiority of the Black race in his 1785 Book of 1785. Notes on the State of VirginiaIn fact, intend to practice what he would preach a few years later in the Declaration of Independence.

Paul Finkelman from Marquette Law in Milwaukee, Wisc., Doubt. “The strange thing is that there is no other evidence except Jefferson who say that such a proposal has ever been proposed,” he says in the first episode.

Frank Cogliano, author Revolutionary friendship: Washington, Jefferson and American publicagrees. “The Burgesses home record does not reflect it,” he says. “It could be now that the records are simply incomplete. Saying it, other historians have done a rather strong case that this has not happened and that it does in their autobiography.”

Memorial Thomas Jefferson in Washington DC

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He continues: So we have to ask ourselves, “Why does it say that when he assembles his autobiography 50 years later?” When we think about autobiographies, people construct a version of their past, and he wants to create a narrative to show that he and the United States are upset by slavery and have tried to do something about slavery from the beginning – truth or not. ”

In 1807, during his second term of the President, Jefferson signed a law that passed the congress that ended the import of enslaved people from Africa. However, he also made the so -called buy of Louisiane from 1803 from France, overwhelmed by his presidential forces that doubled the size of the United States and led to the spread of slavery, making the civil war almost inevitable.

Andrew Davenport in ‘Thomas Jefferson’.

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“Thomas Jefferson’s aspirations and imperfections embody the promises and challenges of the American Democratic Experiment in self-governing,” Andrew Davenport, the historian and descendant of those enslaved on Jefferson’s Monticello Plantation, who appears in documents, is the story of highly educated people. “, a great writer and thinker, and a visionary builder of the nation.”

“But his ability to realize that the vision was deeply restricted by the institution of slavery. However, he gave humanity immortal words” that all people were created equal, “and generations of Americans have expanded his vision, struggling to make their promise.”

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Source: HIS Education