nunia
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加入时间: 2005/11/04
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作者：nunia 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
Introduction: The Three-Fifths Clause
The election of Mr. Jefferson to the presidency was, upon sectional feelings, the triumph of the south over the North - of the slave representation over the purely free. -- John Quincy Adams
Garry Wills:
In this book, then, I shall neglect Jefferson's many other claims on our admiration and gratitude - material I shall be returning to in my next book. Here I concentrate solely on his role as a protector and extender of the slave system. To highlight that aspect of the man, I review the trenchant criticisms of him voiced by one of his most vociferous congressional critics, Timonthy Pickering of Massachusetts. Pickering is, for my purposes, a useful anti-Jefferson, a kind of mirror image in reversal. My concentration on just one aspect of Pickering's career, taken from a long and controversial public life, does not mean that I wish Pickering had prevailed over Jefferson, any more than I wish that John Adams had won in 1800. Pickering is Jefferson's critic, not his equal. On one point at issue between them, the slave system, Pickering is seen at his most creditable, and Jefferson at his least creditable. Their conflict clarifies what was at stake in the preservation of the slave system.
That system ruled the South. It cowed and silenced the North. Pickering could see the evil, but could do little about it, because of the very power he was denouncing. Jefferson felt he had no choice but to defend the evil. There was no large-scale political career open to southerners who refused to defend it. That is the tragedy of Jefferson, and of the nation. We may admit that he was trapped in the system - which is all the more reason for deploring the trap.
Chapter 9
1804: Pickering and Aaron Burr
One of the two or three things historians tend to know about Timothy Pickering is this: he tried, in 1804, to separate the northeastern states from the Union.
Epilogue: Farewell to Pickering
God never made a more honest man than Timothy Pickering - James Madison, 1801
...
The main personal quality that Pickering lacked and Adams posessed was a sense of humor. On this point Pickering resembled, rather, the humorless Jefferson, but without the latter's philosophical wit ( a quality quite different from humor). Each of these two men considered politics a realm for testing virtue. Each admired his father, in both cases a farmer of rugged enterprise, though Pickering came to see the merits of the merchant class into which he married - something that would never happen to Jefferson. Though Pickering did not have what Jefferson called his own "canine appetite" for reading, he was a bookish man, one who spent a large part of his little money on law books ordered from England. He and Jefferson excahnged books and documents on ocassion. ...
Coming from a Puritan background, Pickering achieved, by a harder effort than was required of the more sophisticated Jefferson, a similar rational religiosity - a fact each recognized in the other. In 1821, when both were in their seventies, Pickering sent Jefferson a sermon by the liberal Unitarian, William Ellery Channing, with some reflections on his own upbringing and the way he gave up belief in miracles and the Trinity:
There are some doctrines taught in Protestant churches, in Europe and America, so repugnant to the ideas I entertain of the perfect wisdom, justice, and benevolence of the Deity as to authorize the opinion that they could not be the subjects of a divine revelation...They constituted parts of parental and school instruction, from my earliest remembrance; but I never taught them to any of my children.
Jefferson answered amiably. He admired the Channing sermon and agreed with Pickering on the basics of belief:
When we shall have done with the incomprehensible jargon of the Trinitarian arithmetic, that three are one and one is three; when we shall have knocked down the artificial scaffolding reared to mask from view the simple structure of Jesus; when, in short, we shall have unlearned everything which has been aught since his day and got back to the pure and simple doctrines he inculcated, we shall then be truly and worthily his disciples.
It is strangely comforting to take leave of these two as they write each other, both with an old man's clear handwriting still, to affirm their agreement on important matters.
America was a better place for the labors of all three of these men; and if Pickering's contribution cannot be weighed in the same scale with that of the other two, his words still have something to teach us that the larger messages of his betters left unspoken. Pickering has not yet received his due.
作者：nunia 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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Negro President - Jefferson and the slave power
