Extra: Cara Rogers Stevens on Thomas Jefferson and Slavery

thomas jefferson slavery aristotle nicomachean ethics american founding domitian


What legacy does Thomas Jefferson deserve? NEW ASW author Winston Tingle takes you into the question in this Great Antidote Extra. 
On September 18, 96 A.D., the Roman Emperor Domitian was assassinated in a plot by court officials. Upon word of his death, the Senate, whose power had been severely limited under his rule, immediately appointed his successor and passed damnatio memoriae [1] on the late Emperor. Domitian’s coins and statues were defaced, his arches destroyed, and his name erased from all official records. 

Of course, Domitian’s legacy was not destroyed. This was never the goal of the Senate’s verdict. Rather, the void left by the absence of his public works was obvious to anyone. The Senate’s goal was disgrace, not destruction.

On December 21, 2020 A.D., a statue of General Robert E. Lee, one of two statues representing the state of Virginia in the United States Capitol, was removed upon request from the state’s governor. Local, state, and federal initiatives have also removed Confederate names and symbols from U.S. military bases and public spaces in various former slave states. Other parties have passed legislation making this more difficult.

The problem of redefining historical legacies is nothing new, but the debates surrounding the latest efforts have been particularly shrill. One of the most contentious of these centers on Thomas Jefferson. In in her interview on The Great Antidote podcast with Cara Rogers Stevens, author of Thomas Jefferson and The First Against Slavery, Juliette Sellgren sums up the point at issue: “why [do we have] the need to study him . . . to give a pedestal to someone who has done things that are not good, to someone who's not perfect?” [11:56] Stevens explained that her “study of Thomas Jefferson started with the question, how could the guy who wrote, ‘All men are created equal,’ also have owned slaves?” [19:14]

Jefferson was, of course, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence. For this and other achievements, he has been immortalized in American cultural life via statues, stamps, pocket change, and public mythology. As more details of Jefferson’s activities as a slave owner enter public consciousness, interest in reevaluating his legacy has grown. For some, this means virtual removal of his presence from American cultural life. For their dissenters, it means a doubling down on his positive legacy without attempting to reconcile it with his flaws. 

The impossibility of erasing the cultural presence of such a significant figure was self-evident to the Romans. The impossibility of simply ignoring such a figure’s wrongdoing was self-evident to the Virginia legislature.

The problem seems intractable. Those whose impulse is to criticize Jefferson do so on the basis of the enlightenment values of liberty and equality he himself professed. Those whose impulse is to celebrate him desire to do so because of his role in the promotion of those very values. Inevitably, the problem becomes one of morally evaluating Jefferson the man. What legacy does he deserve? This is not a new problem, either.

Perhaps the most popular long-serving authority on the question of evaluating an individual is Aristotle. Over 2000 years ago, he described the fickle nature of moral legacy in The Nicomachean Ethics. Besides the “internal” moral virtues, he enumerates “external” goods that are just as essential to moral flourishing. Crucially, these external goods are distinguished by the fact that they are not directly in an agent’s control. One of these external goods is timē, often translated as “honour”, referring to one’s moral reputation with others—posthumous included. 

The internal/external framework highlights the degree to which goods, such as moral legacy,  are not controllable. This insight can help us understand that the movement to amend Jefferson’s legacy is not an anomaly. Rather, these puzzles are an ordinary feature of moral life. 

As Stevens remarks: “it is natural to look back…and reevaluate the founders and their ideas and try to determine whether those ideas were any good…whether there's anything of value that can be held onto, or if things need to be thrown out and reinterpreted or rewritten entirely.” [13:18] 

However, this still doesn’t answer the evaluative question: What legacy does Jefferson deserve?

Fortunately, Aristotle also explores how to judge the quality of a moral life. He writes that to adequately judge a life, one must both be virtuous themselves and regard a life in its entirety, leaving out nothing in the verdict. Unfortunately, Aristotle is unsuccessful in giving a satisfying account of how to accomplish this. It is neither clear what it would take to become virtuous enough to render judgement, nor what it means to perceive a life in its literal entirety. As ever, in seeking out a straightforward solution to our problem, we are disappointed. 

In the case of Domitian, the emperor whose legacy was effaced, it was the Senate, a small, self-interested group of elites, which unilaterally decided to damn his memory. In the case of the Lee statue at the United States Capitol, we might be tempted to regard it as another decision made in the self-interest of a presiding body. However, we could instead see it as an instance of the people and governments collaboratively reevaluating some of their most significant cultural figures. 

But in the case of Jefferson, we might not find it appropriate to take the reevaluation so far. Additionally, one worries that strong cultural movements like those in favour and against him might not be capable of this kind of nuance. The cultural cliché of “separating the art from the artist” usually feels more like a rhetorical technique than a legitimate call to action, and it’s often debatable whether doing so is appropriate.

This illustrates why Aristotle’s lack of rigid ethical rules was actually intentional. Aristotle recognized that practical morality requires flexibility.[2] Deciding rightly is a highly context-specific and autonomous task. With appropriate ethical modesty and trust in our ability to be rational, we must try, at the very least, to make the best decision we’re capable of—and hopefully in time, the right one.

Near the end, Stevens shares a personal anecdote about moving to America from apartheid South Africa: “one of the first things that I noticed, even though I was a little kid, was the ability to become friends with somebody of any race. And the fundamental belief that everybody shared, that we were all equal and deserved to be treated with respect…this vision of a future where people can pursue the same values together…I know that that's rare in the history of the world, and it's fragile…it's worth fighting for that kind of a society, the society that Jefferson maybe couldn't even fully imagine himself. But his ideas helped start this country on the road in that direction.” [44:57] 

Maybe we’ll discover that we’re not as morally adrift as we feel—maybe even to some small extent, we’re already on the right track.


[1] “Damnatio memoriae” is a modern coinage.
[2] Aristotle’s work emphasizes the virtue of phronesis, or “practical wisdom”.

Read more:

Anything But Compromising by Christa Dierksheide at A Call to Liberty
Our Liberty Matters symposium, Jefferson in Time: Perspectives Through His Eyes
A Little Lower than the Angels: What the Founders Learned from Adam Smith, Part 1 and Part 2 by Samuel Fleishacker


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