thomas jefferson by christopher hitchens

He was an advanced opponent of the slave trade, whose 'Sketch of a Negro Code' was written in the early 1780s, and who before that had opposed the seating of American slaveholders at Westminster. He was an Irishman, probably a Catholic Irishman at that (even if perhaps a secret sympathizer), and for the greater part of his life he upheld the more liberal principles of the Whig faction. In point of fact Edmund Burke was neither an Englishman nor a Tory.

And such reductionism makes a sort of rough partnership with the simplistic view that Burke was the founder or father of modern conservatism in general, and of its English Tory form in particular. It is a frequent vice of radical polemic to assert, and even to believe, that once you have found the lowest motive for an antagonist, you have identified the correct one. This attribution of mercenariness to Burke (who had in fact accepted a small pension from the British government for services rendered, and who had also been the London lobbyist or representative of the colony of New York during his defense of the rights of the American colonists) is also to be found in the work of Thomas Paine and Dr. How mortifying that this evidence of the rottenness of his mind must oblige us now to ascribe to wicked motives those actions of his life which wore the mark of virtue and patriotism. I wish I could believe the latter proceeded from as pure motives as the former.

The Revolution of France does not astonish me so much as the revolution of Mr.

Thomas jefferson by christopher hitchens