Word: jeffersonism
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...After reading "Rebellion at Lamar," I am almost ready to concede that he does not. The actions of the adults who attacked helpless children were incredibly vicious, but that their neighbors, in the calmer moments afterward, applauded the attack as "what is right" is shocking beyond words. As Thomas Jefferson said in reference to a related problem: "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just...
This fantastic vision of a lily-white America appeared as early as 1713, with the suggestion of a white "native American," thought to be from New Jersey, that all the Negroes be given their freedom and returned to Africa. In 1777, Thomas Jefferson, while serving in the Virginia legislature, began drafting a plan for the gradual emancipation and exportation of the slaves. Nor were Negroes themselves immune to the fantasy. In 1815 Paul Cuffe, a wealthy merchant, shipbuilder and landowner from the New Bedford area, shipped and settled at his own expense 38 of his fellow Negroes in Africa...
Nevertheless, some of the noblest of Americans were bemused. Not only Jefferson but later Abraham Lincoln was to give the scheme credence. According to Historian John Hope Franklin, Negro colonization seemed as important to Lincoln as emancipation. In 1862, Franklin notes, Lincoln called a group of prominent free Negroes to the White House and urged them to support colonization, telling them: "Your race suffers greatly, many of them by living among us, while ours suffers from your presence. If this is admitted, it affords a reason why we should be separated...
American ambivalence toward blacks dates back most signally to Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the credo that men are created free and equal, yet believed that blacks were less equal than others. A second ambivalence, which Jefferson shared, concerned sex. Despite laws against miscegenation, there has been, over the centuries, a steady increase in the number of mulattoes...
Reviewing Jefferson Airplane's new album Volunteers (Columbia deleted the words of Amerika ), for example, Phil Primack discussed the Airplane's relation to the traditional politics of rock, attacking those who ooh'ed and aah'ed over Woodstock as "the start of the revolution...