A Founding Father on Trial: Jefferson’s Rights Talk and the Problem of Slavery During the Revolutionary Period

Thomas Jefferson’s one-time image as a serious opponent of slavery has been heavily criticized by academics for nearly fifty years. Indeed, Jefferson’s reputation as a principal and principled progenitor of the American political tradition suffered badly in the closing decades of the twentieth century as historians, cultural commentators, and legal scholars focused on his racism, personal commitments to slavery, and intimate relationship with Sally Hemings—the enslaved Monticello domestic who was almost certainly the mother of one or more of his children. But while progressive thinkers soured on Jefferson at the close of the twentieth century—many libertarians, small government enthusiasts, neo-federalists, and champions of civic virtue remained committed to ideals and rhetoric they associated with Jefferson more than with any other Founding Father. When the Tea Party movement exploded onto the national political scene in the 2010 election, critics of the modern American state were quick to laud Jefferson as the favored spokesman of an allegedly simpler and purer alternative to the corrupted and degenerate federal government of the present. The original conception of America the Tea Party claimed to favo