The Founding Father takedown we didn’t know we needed.
When Chief Justice John Roberts was named this year’s recipient of a Thomas Jefferson medal for law, a lot of people had the same reaction: seriously?
Roberts has spent the last two decades weakening voting protections, expanding executive powers, and presiding over a Court that has voted against Civil Rights the vast majority of the time.
While honoring that record in Jefferson’s name feels like irony, the joke’s on us. Turns out, our Founding Father had a real soft spot for white supremacy. Puts a whole new shine on America’s 250th birthday, doesn’t it?
The Declaration of Independence, after all, was essentially a press release. It was written for mass distribution to justify our separation from England to other colonists and the rest of the world. As a document, it is clear, persuasive, and wildly effective. But it says nothing about Jefferson, the lawyer and plantation owner. That Jefferson, it seems, was way less into liberty and equality.
SIGNED, SEALED, YIKES
His book Notes on the State of Virginia sounds like a man stumping for privilege. He literally wrote that Black people were less than whites, not just socially or politically, but naturally. Like it was a fact of life. To this Jefferson, emancipation was a threat that could only end in separation, violence, or removal.
This is hardly an icon falling short of his ideals. Here’s a Founder explaining very explicitly who those ideals were for. We give him credit for expressing conflicted feelings about slavery, but to him, it was a simple case of self-preservation. Without forced labor, gentried Americans couldn’t sustain the grand society where they enjoyed political influence. Sorry, folks. Wig powder doesn’t grow on trees.
He had it out for Native people too. In Notes, he praised Indigenous bravery, speaking skills, and intelligence, then used that praise to argue that Black people must be naturally deficient. As Governor of Virginia, Jefferson ordered a state militia commander to push hard against Indian communities, making clear that coexistence wasn’t happening.
EMPIRE’S GONNA EMPIRE
As president, his plan to expand westward was diabolical: he told white settlers to sell Native Americans goods they can’t afford, then collect on debts with land. The Louisiana Purchase was similarly shady – Jefferson technically didn’t have the authority to buy a continent. And Napoleon sure didn’t have ownership rights to sell one.
But America needed land, so Jefferson committed $15 million the US didn’t have and then made the deal so big and public that the Senate had little choice but to ratify it. He forced this acquisition through by betting no one would challenge him. No one did.
Jefferson pushed executive power again when he halted U.S. exports, hoping to choke supplies while Britain and France were at war. When New England merchants kept trading anyway, he declared the whole region in a state of insurrection. He sent gunboats into Lake Champlain and, in a very ICE-like way, empowered federal agents to search and seize with no warrant required.
His own judges told him it was wrong, but he ignored them. Similarly, when Aaron Burr was on trial for treason, Jefferson attacked the judge who acquitted him, and moved to stack the federal courts in his favor moving forward.
Jefferson’s use of executive power is one that Justice Roberts and his boss, Donald Trump, would understand well: Assertion first, authorization later. Accountability never.
COURSE CORRECTION
The chief justice is not a betrayal of Jefferson’s legacy, but its continuation. Their version of America is a republic designed for white people, premised on the removal of everyone else, and haunted by the fear that whites may not be able to keep it that way.
Happy 250th birthday, anyway, America. Bring on the fireworks! Loud, vivid, and volatile as democracy itself. Join your neighbors, see the light. The story is not finished. Together, we can still make the best parts true.
JEFFERSON, UNFILTERED
On Black people:
“I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.”
On emancipation:
“Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.”
On slavery and self-preservation:
“But, as it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.” — Jefferson’s April 22, 1820 letter to John Holmes during the Missouri Crisis
On Native removal:
“to promote this disposition to exchange lands which they have to spare & we want, for necessaries, which we have to spare & they want, we shall push our trading houses, and be glad to see the good & influential individuals among them run in debt, because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop th[em off] by a cession of lands.”
“in this way our settlements will gradually circumscribe & approach the Indians, & they will in time either incorporate with us as citizens of the US. or remove beyond the Mississippi.”
“should any tribe be fool-hardy enough to take up the hatchet at any time, the seizing the whole country of that tribe & driving them across the Mississippi, as the only condition of peace, would be an example to others, and a furtherance of our final consolidation.”
“[We] must leave it to yourself to decide on the object of the campaign. If against these Indians, the end proposed should be their extermination, or their removal beyond the lakes or Illinois river. The same world will scarcely do for them and us.” — Thomas Jefferson to George Rogers Clark (1780)
✅ Tad Stoermer is a public historian and a scholar of American history at Johns Hopkins and the University of Southern Denmark. He’s also the author of the book, A Resistance History of the United States, one of Barnes and Noble’s “must read” history titles for America’s 250th summer. tadstoermer.com | @tadstoermer | @Tad.Stoermer on youtube.
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