Imperfect Heroes

I tell my students every semester that our heroes are imperfect people, and some of them are complex enough to have some very good mixed with some very bad. We should still admire and aspire to those very good things, even as we recognize the very bad. And we should guard our biases in which ones we are more tempted to do one and which ones we are more tempted to do the other, without recognizing the full truth.

For example, Thomas Jefferson had some high ideals. He was instrumental in helping craft a government that recognized human rights at a level that hardly any government beforehand had done. There is much language in the documents he helped write and put together that I deeply resonate with, and there is much to be grateful in the work that he did.

At the same time, he thought he could own people. He thought he could have a sexual relationship with someone who he thought he owned, in a state where the laws gave him absolute authority over her. She wasn't a slave when the relationship began (at least not technically), but she was a child. By our standards today that would have been rape on those grounds also.

Furthermore, I'm convinced (though I know this is unpopular) that he wrongly supported an immoral war of violence against the divinely-instituted authority over him on hypocritical and inconsistent grounds, given that he justified the war by appealing to the principle that a government is illegitimate if the people don't consent (I don't think genuine Christians can agree with that, but he wasn't a Christian). The inconsistency is that he was enslaving people without their consent, thus governing over them without consent. And that authority was legally absolute, unlike King George's. Jefferson's hero John Locke would never have allowed that combination of views.
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