“There’s No Forgiveness for Our Being Human”: What Robert Penn Warren Can Teach Americans
“I never expect to see a perfect work from imperfect man.” - Publius, Federalist 58
Thomas Jefferson wanted the world to remember him as the author of three things: the Declaration of Independence, the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and the charter of the University of Virginia. This year, the United States celebrates her semiquincentennial, and the Sage of Monticello’s hope has been achieved. At barbecues and bonfires just a few short weeks ago, friends and families gathered to read passages from the document that freed us from the British Empire. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” the Declaration proclaims, “that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Jefferson’s rhetoric has become the fountainhead of the American political tradition. “All honor to Jefferson,” Abraham Lincoln wrote in an April 5, 1859 letter,
to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.
The self-evident truth of equality has inspired statesmen and citizens from 1776 until today. On the left and right alike, politicians cloak their agendas in Jefferson’s beautiful words because they move our hearts. His vision of equality inspires us still.
Yet something dark mars that beauty: hypocrisy. Jefferson, freedom’s prophet, personally owned over 620 human beings during his lifetime. Whatever his abstract protests about chattel slavery, he still subjected hundreds to the plantation economy’s brutality. The Virginian was utterly complicit in an all-too-real tyranny; he was an active—if sometimes reluctant—participant in injustice. Whatever honor Jefferson deserves is mixed with intense shame over the American Republic’s original sin and a sense of guilt echoing through our history, during the Civil War and Jim Crow segregation, and in persistent simmering racial tensions. Is our Founding tainted by a terrible crime?
Read more in Civitas Outlook.
