“hahahah. Well, we’ll have to agree to disagree here. When you have contributed nothing to philosophy, science, or art I tend to think that your culture is “lesser” than the ones that have.”
Well I think that is silly. Just because there are great thinkers does not mean that the people whom they associate with are better. I do not think that the aspect of individualism is fully appreciated by you. Our greatness is dependent upon our actions, not the actions of strangers.
“I said in my first post not to go all libertarian about history because it is unfruitful. “Libertarianism” grew out of what, particularly, Jefferson reasoned about state power (and Locke and a few others, I know).”
Jefferson has his spot, in classical liberalism.
“This wasn’t the case. I pulled up several places where Jefferson suggested adding them to the list of “citizens” of the U.S. JACKSON (whom Jefferson did not like) is the one who wanted to push them out and SHERMAN is the one who wanted to kill them.”
“No, I found the EXACT quote that you took out of context.”
“I never claimed he was against using violence. I claimed he wasn’t inclined toward racism. His use of violence was always mentioned as defensive. Jefferson didn’t found the colonies and live for 250 years oppressing them in various ways, but you wish to attribute those actions to him. Something that I think is intellectually dishonest.”
I will put these responses together because I wrote out a response and then it was deleted because I hit the wrong button and really I do not want to write out another long response for each. I will say this:
For the whole day you have been blubbering about how Jefferson wanted peace and friendship with the Indians. Finally, you are now actually talking sense by stating he was not against violence. He was not above using violence and he was not above driving whole tribes, his words, across the Mississippi. If you are claiming he was not inclined toward a racist view of the Indian, then you are claiming something I did not really touch upon. I am talking about the stadial theory of history, something you seem to think actually exists. The stadial method could be used to produce racist impliciations but for Jefferson’s time it was an environmental belief. You see this in his second inaugeral address in which he discusses how Indians grew up in savage land. They cannot help but be savage for they are a produce of their environment. Thus you take the savage out of the barbarous environment and they stop being savage. That is what the “empire of liberty” was meant to do. Bring civilization to the savages. That has been one of my points all along. Also I specifically stated that Jefferson cannot be held accountable for the racist hatred that was inflicted upon the Indians. I specifically stated that. Jefferson’s method was to push them into civilization, as you saw in the quote, and if they pushed back then they should be pushed across the Mississippi. Assimilate or be pushed aside. That is an aggressive notion. Was Jefferson burning wigwams on the plains? No. He was not overtly shooting down Indians. What he was trying to do was push them out of their present state and into a “civilized” state. It is after Jefferson’s time when people think that an Indian will always been an Indian. An Indian cannot be civilized. It is the beginning of biological racism.
Anyways, a good book on early American relations with Indians is Patrick Griffin’s American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier. Griffin is terrible on understanding and applying Hobbes but he is good on other stuff.
I will give Jefferson this, he lived in a time where people broke out murderers of Indians because they thought killing Indians was a good thing. So at least he was not overtly shooting them.