Intellectual History Commons^™

Secular Damnation: Thomas Jefferson And The Imperative Of Race, Robert Forbes

Robert P Forbes

Race, we are told, is a “social construction.” If this is so, Thomas Jefferson was its principal architect. Jefferson consciously framed his only published book, Notes on the State of Virginia, to check the rising status of Africans and to combat growing critiques of slavery from America’s European friends. Jefferson did this by importing the slaveholder’s sense of slaves as chattel into an Enlightenment world view, providing a metaphysical foundation for prejudice by transmuting the traditional Christian concept of the saved vs. the damned into material and aesthetic terms. Recasting in quasi-scientific language the ancient doctrine of the mark …

Secular Damnation: Thomas Jefferson And The Imperative Of Race, Robert P. Forbes

Torrington Articles

Race, we are told, is a “social construction.” If this is so, Thomas Jefferson was its principal architect. Jefferson consciously framed his only published book, Notes on the State of Virginia, to check the rising status of Africans and to combat growing critiques of slavery from America’s European friends. Jefferson did this by importing the slaveholder’s sense of slaves as chattel into an Enlightenment world view, providing a metaphysical foundation for prejudice by transmuting the traditional Christian concept of the saved vs. the damned into material and aesthetic terms. Recasting in quasi-scientific language the ancient doctrine of the mark …

Federalists Vs. Republicans: The Nature Of Man In A Republic 1787-1800, Benjamin J. Barlowe

Senior Honors Theses

During the early years of the American Republic known as the Federalist Era (1787-1800), a conflict arose which led to America’s first formal political parties and the formation of the two-party system. The parties’ disagreements, characterized most succinctly by the exchanges between the two party leaders, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, involved some of the most basic ideology of the American experiment. The conflicts of the Jeffersonian Republicans and the Hamiltonian Federalists set the precedent of the nature of the political atmosphere of the United States to this day.

This thesis examines the basic viewpoint of the two parties in …