History Memes

I don't understand why we would grade on a curve like that when it's clear that he understood that slavery was wrong based on his writing, yet he did it anyway.

Wouldn't it be better to ask the people he enslaved rather than his peers?

There were plenty of abolitionists at the time, it's not exactly a hard moral question to answer; he just wanted to exploit and debase people for money. It was a horrible and vile institution all by itself; I don't see why he would need to be worse than his contemporaries to qualify as a genuine piece of shit.

No. Even his contemporaries called him on his bullshit. Jefferson's was hugely influential to the French revolution, and a lot of his French buddies constantly asked him how he could write about the equality of all men, etc. and still keep slaves. He used the same excuses that you're using. Besides that, there was a reasonably broad social awareness that slavery was wrong and it was a point of contention from the outset. People were calling out racism and white supremacy centuries ago and Jefferson was aware. That alone makes what you're saying a moot point, let alone the numerous times he's had to directly confront that reality.

He was a fully cognizant hypocrital dirt bag who knew how to write good. He also kept a teenager as a sex slave, which even back then was incredibly fucked up.