The final portrait of Thomas Jefferson, painted by Thomas Sully in 1821, when Jefferson was 78. Despite earlier pledges, Jefferson still had not emancipated his 186 enslaved people at the time of his death, most of whom were sold at auction to pay off his creditors.

Conclusive evidence is in from new DNA tests: Thomas Jefferson fathered children with Sally Hemings.

To put it more bluntly: The primary author of the Declaration of Independence and third president of the United States raped one of more than 600 people he enslaved, starting when she was a teenager.

Does that seem disrespectful or ahistorical?

First, let’s deal with the often-heard claim that we shouldn’t judge people of another era by the standards of our time. Jefferson’s defenders argue that, yes, he owned slaves and expressed ugly racist beliefs, but those practices and ideas were prevalent in the world in which he lived, implying there was no way he could have acted or thought differently. This approach avoids a simple question: Were there people expressing alternative ideas at the time?

Of course there were—not only people of African descent but also some of Jefferson’s peers. Among them was Thomas Paine, another major figure in the establishment of the United States who is best known for his 1776 pamphlet Common Sense. What is less well known about Paine is that he was an active opponent of slavery. The year after he arrived in America in 1774, he published an anti-slavery article in the Pennsylvania Journal and the Weekly Advertiser. A few weeks later an anti-slavery society was formed in Philadelphia, with Paine as a founding member. His article started with a clear condemnation of slavery and the Americans who supported it:

That some desperate wretches should be willing to steal and enslave men by violence and murder for gain, is rather lamentable than strange. But that many civilized, nay, Christianized people should approve, and be concerned in the savage practice, is surprising; and still persist, though it has been so often proved contrary to the light of nature, to every principle of Justice and Humanity, and even........

© CounterPunch