Sunday, January 31, 2016

Why Scholars Love to Hate Thomas Jefferson

Jefferson 3 

Henry Wiencek’s Master of the Mountain (2012), which depicted Jefferson as a greedy and racist slave-owner, sold well but was given an ambivalent reception. Though the book has been fairly well received by the general public,its author has been censured severely by Jeffersonian scholars who too have written of Jefferson as a greedy, racist slave-owner. Why are the jackals, feasting on the carcass of Thomas Jefferson, turning away from the carcass and toward another jackal? Is not the carcass of Jefferson, a large man even in the eyes of most bashers, large enough for another jackal?

Annette Gordon-Reed lambasted Wiencek, whose motive, she asserted, was unadulterated hatred. “Henry Wiencek is not at all conflicted. He loathes Thomas Jefferson. … His attempted takedown of the man, the third president appears as a demonic figure warped one summer day by a sudden discovery that being a slaveholder could pay.” She continues:

2 comments:

  1. Maybe...."If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey it, he is obligatedto do so." Thomas Jefferson
    Must be Henry's insecurities.

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