“This institution [the University] will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.”

Jefferson did not want to suppress “error,” but to allow competing claims to the truth to do battle in the intellectual marketplace of ideas. We call that “academic freedom.”

Facts affirm the wisdom of Jefferson’s vision in this instance. Censoring Sullivan’s references to Jefferson would impoverish our students and faculty alike, and — as is so often the case with censorship advocates — it is premised upon ignorance.

When Jefferson inherited slaves upon the deaths of his father and father-in-law, it was unlawful in Virginia to free slaves without permission of the governor and his council based upon extraordinary service. In 1769, Jefferson drafted a statute permitting manumission of slaves — a rule finally enacted in 1782.

In his draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson denounced King George III for having “waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere… ” The language was deleted to keep South Carolina and Georgia from walking out of the convention.

Among his other antislavery efforts, Jefferson drafted an amendment to prevent the importation of new slaves into Virginia that was enacted in 1778 — and proclaimed that all children born to slaves in Virginia after 1800 would be born free, and “should be brought up, at the public expense, to tillage, arts, or sciences according to their geniuses… ” That radical proposal was never introduced, because the votes clearly did not exist. Jefferson wanted to have it ready, knowing public opinion would eventually change.

Like virtually every other national leader of his generation — including many who, like Jefferson, spoke out passionately against the evils of slavery — Thomas Jefferson was a racist. But he was a reluctant racist. In a Feb. 25, 1809, letter to Henri Grégoire, Jefferson clarified:

“Be assured that no person living wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a complete refutation of the doubts I have myself entertained and expressed on the grade of understanding allotted to the negro by nature . . . . But whatever be their degree of talent, it is no measure of their rights. Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others.”

As a member of the Second Continental Congress in 1787, Jefferson drafted rules for the governance of the Northwest Territories, Article Six of which read: “There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted… ” If the language sounds familiar, that’s because seven decades later the authors of the Thirteenth Amendment selected Jefferson’s language to honor his courageous struggle against slavery.

More here.

NOTE: Which makes the rambling of this jerk, calling for the removal of his statue…..buffoonish.