Word: jeffersonism
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...fact that the U.S. was not more supportive of its smaller, slightly younger neighbor had a great deal to do with Louverture's roots, which were African and which were now planted in America's backyard. For Jefferson, who had drafted the declaration that defined his nation's insurgency and who had witnessed and praised the French Revolution, knew exactly what revolutions meant. Their essence was not in their instantaneous bursts of glory but in their ripple effect across borders and time, their ability to put the impossible within reach and make the downtrodden seem mighty. And he feared that...
...have not seen echoes of his struggle in the Haitians' urgent desire for self-rule? Possibly because as a slave owner and the leader of slaveholders, he could never reconcile dealing with one group of Africans as leaders and another as chattel. So Haiti's independence remained unrecognized by Jefferson, who urged Congress to suspend commerce with the nascent republic, declaring its leaders "cannibals...
Timothy Pickering, a Senator from Massachusetts who had served as John Adams' Secretary of State, wrote Jefferson to protest his refusal to aid the new Haitian republic: "Are these men not merely to be abandoned to their own efforts but to be deprived of those necessary supplies which for a series of years, they have been accustomed to receive from the United States, and without which they cannot subsist...
...recognition--an amount estimated to be worth nearly $22 billion today, which some Haitians insist should be repaid--began its perilous slide toward turmoil and dependency, resulting in a 19-year U.S. occupation and two subsequent interventions in the past 100 years. In Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson presented dire warnings about what might happen to the U.S. political system in a worst-case scenario, but his words turned out to be a more accurate prophecy for America's plundered neighbor: "The spirit of the times ... will alter. Our rulers will become corrupt ... The shackles ... which shall...
...Founding Fathers, it was Thomas Jefferson for whom the issue of race loomed largest. In the roles of slaveholder, public official and family man, the relationship between blacks and whites was something he thought about, wrote about and grappled with from his cradle to his grave. Jefferson's first memory was of being carried on a pillow by a slave when he was two years old; on his deathbed, the last face he saw was that of the slave who attended him in his final hour. The interest in Jefferson's racial views, long the subject of scrutiny, has reached...