Jefferson and Slavery DBQ

A detailed Summary of Jefferson and Slavery DBQ


President Thomas Jefferson has recently been described as "the American Sphinx" by author Dr. Joseph Ellis in his book entitled American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson. A sphinx is defined as an enigmatic or puzzling person. The statement that Jefferson was "the American Sphinx" is largely true when it comes to Jefferson's hypocritical position on the American policy of slavery.

Foremost, Jefferson was a slave-owner who wrote the Declaration of Independence. In it he wrote, "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." This excerpted line at the time written does not mean to include slaves in the definition of "all men", just free-white citizens of the thirteen colonies.

In Jefferson's original draft, he accused the English king of being "determined to keep an open market where MEN should be bought and sold...and he is now exciting those very people to rise up in arms amo


In conclusion, Jefferson remains a confusing enigma to all who study him. There is little to disguise the fact that his professed values, personal as well as political, rarely measured up to his actual practices. Jefferson has suffered, then as now, from a plague of hypocrisy with regard to his conflicts between values and practices.

However, in Query XVIII ("Manners") from Notes on the State of Virginia Jefferson takes the position of opposition to slavery. He explains that taking away the unalienable rights from men would be morally wrong and it would eventually crumble the government because the liberties of the nation were the "only firm basis" at the time. He also thinks that the blacks should compel whites to listen to their opinions of freedom and eventually they might set in. Jefferson also wrote that " permitting one half of the citizens thus to trample on the rights of others" destroys the morals of the nation. The blacks already in slavery, according to Jefferson, should be emancipated on the master

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Approximate Word count = 689
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: History

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