New York City Hall banishes founding father Thomas Jefferson

A statue of Thomas Jefferson, who drafted the Declaration of Independence but was a slaveholder, will be moved from City Hall.

The Thomas Jeffersn statue in New York City Hall. Picture: Supplied.

A statue of Thomas Jefferson, who drafted the Declaration of Independence but was a lifelong slaveholder, will be moved from the council chamber at New York City Hall.

The eviction of a founding father from the chamber was agreed by a unanimous vote, following a long campaign by black and Latino council members. Some historians had argued that it should remain somewhere in the building.

However, the committee that voted to move the statue then infuriated those calling for its expulsion by deciding to delay its removal until the end of the year while they considered where it should go.

“We are deeply disappointed that the Public Design Commission voted to prolong the indignity of having the statue of Thomas Jefferson … lord over our members as they conduct the people’s business,” the council’s Black, Latino and Asian Caucus said in a statement. Its members worked “on behalf of more than five million New Yorkers of colour, who themselves do not measure up to Jefferson’s own standards of liberty and equality, as his own personal correspondence suggests,” it said.

Jefferson held more than 600 people as slaves during the course of his life and fathered at least six children with one of them, Sally Hemings. He later freed all her children and is also credited with allowing several runaway slaves to remain unpursued. The rest were sold upon his death to pay off his debts.

Though he wrote that slavery was evil, he espoused a “paternalistic racism”, according to the foundation that manages his former estate, Monticello, and compared freeing slaves to “abandoning children”.

Seven years after his death, in 1833 Uriah Phillips Levy, a New Yorker who was one of the first Jewish officers to serve in the US navy, commissioned a statue of Jefferson to honour legislation he had passed establishing religion freedom in the armed forces. The bronze statue now stands in the US Capitol Rotunda but a painted plaster model was taken to New York where it was placed in the governor’s room at City Hall in 1834 and installed in the chamber in 1915.

The Jefferson statue at City Hall is of the human being who conceived of these astonishing ideas. They weren’t ‘false ideals’ because he owned slaves. They were new ideals which he failed to fulfil. However, the ideals were real, and he conceived of them. That can't be escaped.

— Raymond Lavertue (@RaymondLavertue) October 19, 2021

Ahead of a public meeting to discuss whether it should be moved, an editorial by the New York Daily News warned that if Jefferson was unfit for City Hall then “so is the statue of George Washington, owner of 577 human beings”.

A group of historians argued that it should be put back in the governor’s room. “Jefferson articulated the causes of the Revolution,” Raymond Lavertue, a fellow at Oxford’s Rothermere American Institute, said yesterday on Twitter. “The Jefferson statue at City Hall is of the human being who conceived of these astonishing ideas. They weren’t ‘false ideals’ because he owned slaves.”

The Times