Thomas Jefferson’s fight AGAINST Slavery!* - 5

22.In 1820, the Democrat party became a majority in Congress and passed the 1820 Missouri Compromise. What is that? In order to restrain antislavery states from gaining even more numerical advantage, the Compromise declared for every antislavery state allowed into the Union, a proslavery state must follow. The first antislavery state under this Compromise was Maine, and the first proslavery state was Missouri.
   Although Congress used the Northwest Ordinance in 1789 to ban slavery in the Northwest territory; and banned the exportation of slaves in 1794; and banned the importation of slaves in 1808; the Missouri Compromise was the first time the U.S. federal government ever officially promoted slavery!
   At this time there were only a few Founding Fathers remaining, they all opposed this legislation. For example,
1.Elias Boudinot, the former president of Congress, and a framer of the Bill of Rights said this legislation would bring “an end to the happiness of the United States.”
2.John Adams feared lifting the slavery prohibition would destroy America
3.James Madison declared the new policy “fills me with no slight anxiety”. What some believe to be a prophecy of the Civil War, Madison saw aligning the slave states against the anti-slave states would result in “aweful shocks against each other”!               (Barton, pg 143)
 
And finally, speaking to a political leader,the elderly Jefferson joined the chorus declaring: “I had for a long time ceased to read newspapers or pay any attention to public affairs, confident they were in good hands, and content to be a passenger in our bark [small ship] to the shore from which I am not distant [death]. But this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell [funeral bell] of the Union...I regret that I am now to die in the belief that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776 to acquire self-government and happiness to their country is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons...This is an act of suicide on themselves, and of treason against the hopes of the world.”
 
He concluded:
“I can say with conscious truth that there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would to relieve us from this heavy reproach in an practicable way. The cession of that kind of “property”, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle [an insignificant trifle] which would not cost me a second thought if an that way a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected....But as it is, we have the wolf by the ears and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go.”   (Barton, pg144)
 
23.In 1825, TJ wrote to a young female antislavery enthusiast name Frances Wright. Frances came to America from France with Marquis de Lafayette and remained to fight slavery. She loved Jefferson’s plan for emancipation and invited him to help her. He responded, “at the age of eighty-two, with one foot in the grave and the other uplifted to follow it, I do not permit myself to take part in any new enterprises, even for bettering the condition of man-not even in the great one which is the subject of your letter and which has been through life that of my greatest anxieties...I leave its accomplishment as the work of another generation, and I am cheered when I see that one on which it is devolved taking it up with so much good will and such minds engaged in its encouragement. The abolition of the evil is not impossible; it ought never therefore to be despaired of. Every plan should be adopted, every experiment tried, which may do something towards the ultimate object.... You are young dear madam, and have powers of mind which may do much in exciting others in this arduous task. I am confident they will be so exerted, and I pray to heaven for their success and that you may be rewarded with the blessings which such efforts merit” (Barton, pg 145).
 
24.In 1826, just weeks before his death, in his last Hurrah...Jefferson declared, “On the question of the lawfulness of slavery (that is, of the right of one man to appropriate to himself the faculties of another without his consent), I certainly retain my early opinions”   (Barton, pg145).
 
   If you were counting, you will find that the year 1826 marks 50 years of public declarations and actions of TJ fighting against slavery!
 
*Facts in this tidbit taken from historian David Barton’s incredible book “The Jefferson Lies”. It is a must read.
 
Quotebit
One of the major reasons why people are not doing well is because they keep trying to get through the day. A more worthy challenge is to try to get from the day   -Jim Rohn