Posted by Roberta Grimes • November 01, 2025 • 0 Comment
Book News, Slavery, The American Revolution, Thomas Jefferson
… O beautiful for spacious skiesFor amber waves of grainFor purple mountain majestiesAbove the fruited plain!
… America! America!
God shed His grace on thee,And crown thy good with brotherhoodFrom sea to shining sea!
O beautiful for pilgrim feet,
Whose stern, impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!
Katharine Lee Bates (1859-1929), from “America the Beautiful” (1893)
Ours is a spiritual, and not a political blog. But Thomas and I hope you will indulge our wish to talk this week about something that matters to us very much indeed, because unless Americans remain free to think for ourselves, then a healthy spiritual life will not remain possible for any of us. And, my dear ones, despite its flaws, next Fourth of July in the United States we will celebrate the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of this nation’s birth. For two and a half centuries, through great and also through some pretty awful presidents, and through the kinds of bitter strife that we are witnessing now again; through even a bloody civil war; the United States of America has seen the continuous calm election of presidents every four years, and the steady, ongoing protection of each citizen’s sacred personal rights and freedoms by a strong Constitution administered by a Congress of the people, and by a highly respected Supreme Court. And by now, all of these sacred institutions have been battered enough to have been proven able to withstand whatever would be thrown at them. There is no other nation on the face of this earth that has had such an amazingly long, unbroken stretch of one continuous government. And our winning that longevity contest is not even close!
It is time for us who are privileged to be Americans to marvel together at what we possess, and to stop just taking it all for granted. Because it does not have to be this way! In every other country, even now, if you slip and say the wrong thing in public, you risk jail time. But not in the United States, where we know that our First Amendment protects us. Some people tease that Donald Trump might get a third term as president, if perhaps JD Vance is elected president with Trump as his vice president, and then Vance resigns. But, nope! We’ve got our Twenty-Second Amendment safely in their way. And we know by now that no foreign country ever will try to conquer this nation, since our Second Amendment sacred right to individually bear arms means that Americans own tons of guns and bullets, so any foreign army would have to conquer us house by house and street by street! It’s wonderful, the way so many Americans can rattle off even the numbers of these important Constitutional amendments that protect each of our sacred rights.
But, arguably, our key founding document is not the American Constitution at all. Instead, it’s the single sheet of parchment that was signed on the Fourth of July in 1776. Our Declaration of Independence from Great Britain’s monarch, who before that day could claim to own the thirteen north American colonies is this nation’s true founding document, and it has set our country’s flavor and tenor ever since. Only marvel at the way that parchment even begins!
In Congress, July 4, 1776. The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America. When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness….
This document is frankly amazing! In a world in which no people anywhere on the face of this earth had ever before that sacred date been free from a strong, overbearing, often brutal, and always highly fallible human government of and by the very few, our Declaration of Independence does not only declare our colonies’ separation from Great Britain. Also, and far more importantly, our Declaration of Independence claims for all the people living in these colonies a whole new human reality! It sets forth the overriding principle that only the people have the power and the right to rule themselves, individually! And furthermore, if the people as individuals are ever not happy with their government, then it is their absolute and unfettered right as individuals to peacefully change their government, whenever and however they like. In a place in which some people were still being held as slaves by other people, it sets forth the overriding principle that all men are created equal! And to deny slaveholders the right to declare other human beings to be their property, this document revises what was then the standard mantra of rights from “life, liberty, and property”, and instead it proclaims our universal rights to be “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”. This seems actually to invite those still being held as slaves in the American colonies to claim the great happiness of their own freedom, just as soon as they can manage to do that.
The preamble to the Declaration of Independence is followed by a long list of the colonists’ grievances against the British king, the most prominent of which in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence is this:
He (the British King) has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.
Of course, this tirade against slavery was not allowed to remain in the Declaration of Independence. Indignant representatives of the Southern states removed it right away. But those same Southerners missed the anti-slavery nuances that the Declaration’s clever principal author had hidden in the Declaration’s preamble, so there they remained. And that principal author of the Declaration of Independence was a Southerner himself, and someone who had inherited hundreds of slaves. He was thirty-three-year-old Thomas Jefferson. The same Thomas who, soon after he finished one final earth-incarnation as a Welsh farmer, which he tells me that he took in order to “get back into balance” after his extraordinary Thomas Jefferson life, then became my spirit guide. He co-authors this blog post, and while he is not now any longer Thomas Jefferson – more on that later – the way Jefferson got so much of that language past the slaveholders still to this day makes my Thomas smile.
Long before I knew that Thomas was my spirit guide, he guided me in researching and writing a very accurate account of Thomas Jefferson’s ten-year marriage to Martha Wayles Skelton, which marriage neatly spanned the Revolutionary War. Thomas and Martha were married on January 1, 1772, and it truly was a love-match! But Patty – her nickname – was repeatedly pregnant, and she became ever more sickly with each child she bore. Her father was an importer of slaves, and her mother had died young, so Betty Hemings, her father’s half-white slave mistress and the woman who had raised Patty, had made of Jefferson’s future wife an adamant abolitionist. And so, apparently, was Thomas Jefferson an abolitionist as well, at least while his adored wife was alive. Thanks to Jefferson, the colony of Virginia became the first place on earth to ban the importation of slaves. And we have seen above what he did with the first draft of the Declaration of Independence, when he had the chance to make his beloved Patty’s feelings about slavery known there! Jefferson made it clear in his contemporary writings that as soon as the Revolutionary War ended, he meant to retire “to my family, my farm, and my books.”
But that was not to be. Patty’s illness was diabetes, and in September of 1782, just as the Revolutionary War was winding down, she delivered her last child, Lucy, and four months later Patty died with her husband at her side at the age of just 34. Jefferson was devastated! He really was never the same man again. And he burned all their letters to one another, and all her personal papers, no doubt to protect her from the judgment of those who might not share her abolitionist views.
Martha Jefferson’s death had major historical ramifications. Before her death, it was her husband’s clear intention to devote the rest of his life to the abolition of slavery in the new nation that he had helped to found. But the problem was that racism was rampant, so whenever slaves were freed, they were horribly treated. His first sympathetic thought, to offer to send the slaves back to their native countries, wouldn’t work because they had been here for generations. So, by the time of Patty’s death, Jefferson was looking at experimenting with how we might do a proper emancipation by giving the newly freed slaves their own state initially, where they could farm checkerboarded with sympathetic white farmers in the wild interior perhaps, and people could get to know one another and come together gradually, peacefully, and with appropriate Christian supports in place. Personally, I have no doubt that if fixing this racial problem had become his and Patty’s whole life’s goal, they could have fixed it all by, perhaps, 1820. So, then there would have been no American Civil War. And no Jim Crow racial strife for most of the century thereafter. Then Thomas Jefferson would be known only for his Declaration of Independence, and for his brilliance in having so well and properly freed the slaves. Instead, the poor man fled Monticello right after Patty’s death, to help to negotiate the peace in France. He became the first Secretary of State, the second Vice President, and the third President of the United States. He lived an illustrious life, but it was a consolation life, and not the life he had wanted.
When I researched My Thomas at Monticello, I discovered that Jefferson had been a most surprising slaveholder. He had inherited this institution that he hated, and for much of his life, emancipation was not even legal in Virginia. So his hundreds of inherited people lived communally with him at Monticello in family cabins with gardens behind where they grew vegetables that they sold to their master’s kitchen. Yes, really! And since Jefferson often didn’t have the cash to pay them right away, he would keep account books, which I saw, listing what he owed to his slaves for these vegetables. They had Sundays off, and often Saturdays, except in harvest season, when everyone had to work. Their overseer was himself a slave, since white overseers were generally brutal. There is no record of Jefferson’s ever allowing a slave to be beaten or mistreated in any way, except for once, in his old age, when he allowed it for an insufferable young man. But then that once upset him so much that he never allowed it again.
When, in 2015, my spirit guide came out to me as having been Thomas Jefferson in an earlier lifetime, I had just one question for him. You likely know what it was. I had done enough research to be pretty sure that the father of the Sally Hemings children who had Jefferson DNA had been Thomas’s younger brother, Randolph, and not Thomas at all; but I wanted to know that for certain. My Thomas insisted that I must ask Thomas Jefferson that question directly, so that next night, while my body slept, he whisked me to the astral plane, and to a small eighteenth-century-style reception room, where stood Thomas Jefferson himself. Wow! Picture this. Two tall men, Jefferson wearing eighteenth-century garb for me, and my Thomas, even taller and in his long blue sixth-level robe and his Fu Manchu mustache. We recognize people in the astral by their spiritual vibrations, and these two vibrated almost identically, although Thomas did vibrate a bit higher than Jefferson. But, notice that they are two different people now? Fascinating! When I am in my astral body, I think I look as I did when I was about thirty, with long hair. Thomas nudged me to ask my question, so I did, shyly.
Thomas Jefferson smiled gently at me. He could see that I was embarrassed to be asking him such a personal question. Then he said in his beautiful soft, southern voice, “I could not have been intimate with Sally Hemings because she was my property so she could not have consented.”
Above all, the man was a gentleman.
O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!
Katharine Lee Bates (1859-1929), from “America the Beautiful” (1893)
(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)
