Quote from: Severian on April 24, 2013, 05:25:19 PM

Quote from: Hawker on April 24, 2013, 01:18:39 PM

Thomas Jefferson had no problem with slavery or taxation.

Jefferson despised the institution of slavery but ceased all talk of emancipation when he realized there were as many blacks as whites in Virginia. He was instrumental in ceasing the importation of slaves into Virginia and burned a lot of political capital trying to outlaw slavery when he was president.

The Continental Congress removed the anti-slavery paragraph Jefferson had written into the Declaration of Independence:

Quote

He (George III) has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobium of INFIDEL Powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the LIBERTIES of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the LIVES of another.

Jefferson has many shortcomings to criticize. But perhaps one should be informed before criticizing them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson_and_slavery

Opposed freeing of slaves. Refused to recognise Haiti. Never freed his own slaves. Had children with his slave girls and refused to free the children. Allowed the wife of his son and their 8 children be sold to 4 separate owners. Disgusting.

I'm really pleased you asked me to get more informed on that.