Conquer Club

john9blue wrote:

Symmetry wrote:Not my line of thinking John. Chang was sharp to point out that the strawman here is yours, not mine.

- TJ had sex with an underage slave, therefore he must be a rapist.
- TJ is a rapist, therefore he has questionable moral character.
- TJ has QMC, therefore he is an untrustworthy and unsavory person.

These however, I can agree with.

so it is true that you think TJ having sex with an underage slave means he must have been an untrustworthy person? even considering the environment in which he lived? if so then i don't think this thread is going to convince anyone of anything.

xeno wrote:On a related note, when do you all think girls peak in beauty?

tkr4lf wrote:

xeno wrote:On a related note, when do you all think girls peak in beauty?

Late teens/early twenties.

Symmetry wrote:I can be pretty absolute when it comes to the enslavement and rape of kids. I finds it evil, and wrong.

chang50 wrote:

Night Strike wrote:To claim that he was a rapist because she was 14 years old is pretty dubious considering adulthood was much earlier than it is today.

You have a marginally more convincing case with the fact she was a slave, but considering that Jefferson is known to have been a genial slave owner (versus an abusive/violent) one, the implication that this was a forcible relationship would probably be unfounded.

Genial slave owner???The very fact she was a slave is a forcible relationship,and actually adulthood as in the onset of puberty occurred much later then.

john9blue wrote:so you're just going to keep making absolute statements using vague terminology, sym? i don't like that. in fact i think i'm going to be very explicit about your thought process here, since you aren't willing to:

SYMMETRY'S ARGUMENT:
- TJ had sex with an underage slave, therefore he must be a rapist.
- TJ is a rapist, therefore he has questionable moral character.
- TJ has QMC, therefore he is an untrustworthy and unsavory person.
- TJ is a UUP, therefore we should not give very much credit to his ideas.

i leave it as an exercise to the reader to find the fallacies in this line of argument. unless you disagree with any of the above, sym?

Symmetry wrote:What do you think?

Sarah "Sally" Hemings (Charles City County, Virginia, circa 1773 – Charlottesville, Virginia, 1835) was an enslaved woman of mixed race owned by President Thomas Jefferson through his wife's inheritance. The youngest of six siblings by the planter John Wayles and his slave Betty Hemings, Hemings was the half-sister of Jefferson's wife Martha Wayles Skelton.[1] The Hemings' and all of Wayles' slaves were inherited by the Jeffersons a year after their marriage and were taken to Monticello. The Hemings children and their descendants were trained as domestic servants and artisans.
In 1787, Sally Hemings at the age of 14 was chosen to accompany Mary (Polly), the youngest daughter of Jefferson, to Paris to rejoin her father; the widower was serving as the United States Ambassador to France. She spent two years there. Hemings and Jefferson are believed to have begun a sexual relationship then or soon after their return to Monticello. She had a total of six children of record born into slavery; four survived to adulthood and were noted for their resemblance to Jefferson. Sally Hemings served in Jefferson's household as a domestic servant until his death.
The historical question of whether Jefferson was the father of her children has been known as the Jefferson-Hemings controversy. Following renewed historic analysis and a 1998 DNA study that found a match between the Jefferson male line and a descendant of her last son, Eston Hemings, a consensus among historians supports that the widower Jefferson fathered her son Eston Hemings and likely all her children.[2] Some historians disagree.[3]
Even though he was deeply in debt, Jefferson freed all of Sally Hemings' children: Beverly, Harriet, Madison, and Eston, as they came of age. They were seven-eighths European in ancestry, and three of the four entered white society as adults. Their descendants identified as white.[4][5] As the historian Edmund S. Morgan has noted, "Hemings herself was withheld from auction and freed at last by Jefferson’s daughter, Martha Jefferson Randolph, who was, of course, her niece."[6] Hemings lived her last nine years with her two younger sons in Charlottesville, and saw a grandchild born in the house her sons owned. After their mother's death in 1835, Eston and Madison Hemings migrated with their families to Chillicothe in the free state of Ohio.

BigBallinStalin wrote:it's a black-and-white issue.

BigBallinStalin wrote:Haha, wow. I can't believe how absolutist he is. You'd think he'd stop being an avid supporter of the government--with such inflexible morals.

A draft requires the use of force for involuntarily forcing people into a particular field of labor: the military. This is essentially slavery because:

(1) no consent was given,
(2) the slave/'new recruit' is coerced into working and becomes the property of someone else/an organization,
(3) the Social Contract is a bunch of rubbish.
(4) and contracts involving coercion are not legitimate.

Therefore, Sym would have to conclude that anyone who supported any draft is untrustworthy for they are slavers and/or are abetting slavers--which makes little difference.


I wonder if Sym favors any politicians who supported a draft...
(At least the anarchists are morally sound on this one).

BigBallinStalin wrote:

Symmetry wrote:I can be pretty absolute when it comes to the enslavement and rape of kids. I finds it evil, and wrong.

But the slavery of adults is morally acceptable to you?

rdsrds2120 wrote:

BigBallinStalin wrote:

Symmetry wrote:I can be pretty absolute when it comes to the enslavement and rape of kids. I finds it evil, and wrong.

But the slavery of adults is morally acceptable to you?

This is also an unfair statement. It's like if I say "I like dogs" and you follow up with "why don't you like cats?".

BMO

rdsrds2120 wrote:

BigBallinStalin wrote:Haha, wow. I can't believe how absolutist he is. You'd think he'd stop being an avid supporter of the government--with such inflexible morals.

A draft requires the use of force for involuntarily forcing people into a particular field of labor: the military. This is essentially slavery because:

(1) no consent was given,
(2) the slave/'new recruit' is coerced into working and becomes the property of someone else/an organization,
(3) the Social Contract is a bunch of rubbish.
(4) and contracts involving coercion are not legitimate.

Therefore, Sym would have to conclude that anyone who supported any draft is untrustworthy for they are slavers and/or are abetting slavers--which makes little difference.


I wonder if Sym favors any politicians who supported a draft...
(At least the anarchists are morally sound on this one).

That connection's a stretch with what the implied definition of 'slave', 'slavery', etc. was within the context of this thread. That's an unfair statement, BBS.

BigBallinStalin wrote:

Symmetry wrote:I can be pretty absolute when it comes to the enslavement and rape of kids. I finds it evil, and wrong.

But the slavery of adults is morally acceptable to you?

This is also an unfair statement. It's like if I say "I like dogs" and you follow up with "why don't you like cats?".

BMO

Symmetry wrote: If she couldn't freely consent, even within the narrow strictures of the time? It was certainly within his power to make her free.

PLAYER57832 wrote:

Symmetry wrote: If she couldn't freely consent, even within the narrow strictures of the time? It was certainly within his power to make her free.

Yes, but would her life truly have been better? We tend to glamourize the issue today, but while I in no way shape or form justify slavery as OK, to pretend that the standards of a non slave society are the same as they were then is just wrong. A freed person who was black had few real options. In many cases, they had more opportunities and were just plain safer, both physically and financially in slavery.

The argument is always "but they were not free..." or "but he could have freed her and still kept her". But in truth, given the mores of the time, he probably could not have done so. His having her as a slave was "permissable". Keeping her as free would not have been. Even the case of the children.. not freeing them until they were "of age" was reasonable, given the mores of the day.

There are a lot of things that were wrong back then. That is why its called "progress". However, to expect one man, even a great thinker, to have just changed all of that is to expect too much. Jefferson was an intelligent man who set forth the stage that eventually did lead to the end of slavery, but it took time .... and a big, nasty war. Personally, I am grateful that we have the country we have today. That it came to be imperfectly is a reflection of us being human.


OH... and here is another point you sidestep. To be truly fair, you would have to compare how she was treated to how a white wife would have been treated. The truth, again, is that she was treated pretty well, given the standards of the say. Again, you want to take today's standards and apply it to what happened then. That is not a reasonable thing to do.

I mean the whole "I am OK with sexual slavery" is no more "objective" than Viceroy's evolution pole... truly. The idea of "sexual slavery" as you put forward was not even considered then as it is today. The fact is that many legal wives were essentially "sexual slaves".. not entitled to any rights. In many cases children had more rights than adult women, particularly male children. As much as I would definitely not want to have been in her position back then, (would not have wanted to live back then period!), if I had to be a woman in that time, to have been her would not have been that bad of a choice.

pimpdave wrote:If he was, I say we abolish the presidency in favor of a new system.

Gillipig wrote:

pimpdave wrote:If he was, I say we abolish the presidency in favor of a new system.

Well said! I suggest the person with biggest hands is to be declared president. Large hands will make other nations leaders feel small when they shake hands with your president.

/ wrote:

Symmetry wrote:
Legal rape is rape.

Then I suppose yes, under that definition Thomas Jefferson probably did rape her.

BTW, just to clarify my position. I'm not trying to do some knee-jerk reaction patriot routine here, I'm honestly interested in the discussion from a thought-exercise perspective.

show

stahrgazer wrote:

/ wrote:

Symmetry wrote:
Legal rape is rape.

Then I suppose yes, under that definition Thomas Jefferson probably did rape her.

BTW, just to clarify my position. I'm not trying to do some knee-jerk reaction patriot routine here, I'm honestly interested in the discussion from a thought-exercise perspective.

Insufficient information to determine whether she was raped.

If she would have preferred to say no, you could argue it was rape.

If she would have preferred to say "yes" but was under age, you could argue it was statutory rape.

If she was within the age of consent and would have preferred to say "yes" then it was not rape at all.

For the guy who thinks that anything done when it was legal then makes it illegal now, does that mean that anyone who ever wed when ages of consents were lower, were also rapists? Does that mean the male spouse in an "arranged marriage" as was fashionable for centuries, are all rapists?

Can you know for sure that if the woman had not been a slave, Jefferson would not have pursued the relationship, and can you know for sure that she wouldn't have welcomed being his mistress?

So, insufficient information to determine whether he was a rapist.

However, since he did free her children as they became of age, he doesn't sound like a typical rapist (most rapists are doing it for power, and wouldn't easily relinquish power over her or any children.) Especially when he could have sold them for profit at any time. Given this, I'd say, he was not a rapist.