Thomas Jefferson Was Smart Because He Agrees With Me

Okay, Thomas Jefferson was flawed. He enslaved other people. He almost certainly had a relationship with Sally Hemmings that was... unsavory. (My favorite part: Hemmings was the HALF-SISTER of Jefferson's late wife Martha, because Hemmings was the child of Martha's father and one of his slaves. The South didn't invent gothic literature for nothing.)

But Tommy also had many worthwhile things to say. Perhaps you've noticed I'm somewhat obsessed with the potential of new communication technologies. That's because I believe anything that makes it easier for people to exchange smutty gossip, kitten pictures, and frothing political screeds is a big net positive.

So I was pleased to discover that Jefferson would likely feel the same. He wrote this in an 1823 letter to John Adams:

The generation which commences a revolution rarely compleats it. Habituated from their infancy to passive submission of body and mind to their kings and priests... their ignorance and bigotry make them instruments often, in the hands of the Bonapartes and Iturbides to defeat their own rights and purposes. This is the present situation of Europe and Spanish America. but it is not desperate. The light which has been shed on mankind by the art of printing has eminently changed the condition of the world. as yet that light has dawned on the midling classes only of the men of Europe. The kings and the rabble of equal ignorance, have not yet recieved it's rays; but it continues to spread. And, while printing is preserved, it can no more recede than the sun return on his course. A first attempt to recover the right of self-government may fail, so may a 2d. a 3d. &c. but as a younger, and more instructed race comes on, the sentiment become more and more intuitive, and a 4th. a 5th. Or some subsequent one of the ever renewed attempts will ultimately succeed... all will attain representative government... to attain all this however rivers of blood must yet flow, & years of desolation pass over, yet the object is worth rivers of blood, and years of desolation. For what inheritance, so valuable, can man leave to his posterity?... You and I shall look down from another world on these glorious atchievements to man, which will add to the joys even of heaven.

So I think Margaret Atwood was right to say this to Americans:

The British used to have a myth about King Arthur. He wasn't dead, but sleeping in a cave, it was said; in the country's hour of greatest peril, he would return. You, too, have great spirits of the past you may call upon: men and women of courage, of conscience, of prescience. Summon them now, to stand with you, to inspire you, to defend the best in you. You need them.

(Jefferson letter courtesy of the mailing list run by Doug Henwood.)