Jefferson owned slaves yet he fought for freedom, does that make sense?
In this day when most people live in subdivisions and travel long distances to work, many people hate cars and what they do to the environment. Nevertheless, they are trapped in an economy that requires cars and they can’t necessarily make a living without one. They can work to change the way towns are built for the future or work to design better cars for the future. Jefferson was in the same situation. In many places it was illegal to free slaves. If you did free them, they were subject to being picked up and beaten, or worse, as runaways if they didn’t have the proper papers on them. Even if they did have them, there was so much money at stake to hunters of runaway slaves that they might just destroy the papers and take the freedman anyway. No one would believe the word of a slave claiming to have papers anyway. It was illegal to educate slaves, so if you freed them, they’d have a hard time making a living. All in all, Jefferson’s slaves were safer being treated humanely on his plan
