WhY MR. JEFFERSON DESERVES AN APOLOGY FROM KENYON BONNER

At last month's UVA graduation ceremony, Vice President of Student Affairs Kenyon Bonner impugned Thomas Jefferson's character and intelligence, chastising him for "ignorance and hubris." The charge is empirically unfounded and displays both a profound lack of historical knowledge by the speaker–and considering the time and place of the speech, a profound lack of professional judgment.

Jefferson was among the most progressive thinkers of his era.  And few of his contemporaries did more to challenge slavery in a time when that institution was rife throughout the world.

In 1774, Mr. Jefferson published‍ ‍A Summary View of the Rights of British America, directly denouncing Britain for introducing and perpetuating slavery in the colonies. Two years later, his original draft of the Declaration of Independence included a sharp condemnation of King George III for the same — language that, had it survived the final text, would have stood as one of the most powerful antislavery statements of the age.

In 1782, Jefferson backed the Virginia manumission bill, which made it far easier for enslaved people to be freed by their owners — a meaningful reform at a time when emancipation often required government approval. Likewise, his Notes on the State of Virginia explored legal paths to ending slavery altogether. In 1784, as a member of Congress, he drafted an ordinance that would have banned slavery in U.S. territories after 1800; it failed by one state’s vote, but its language directly shaped the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which prohibited slavery in the new territories.

In fact, when the Thirteenth Amendment was introduced, its sponsors adopted language drawn almost verbatim from the Northwest Ordinance, which itself traced back to Jefferson's 1784 proposal. Thus, Jefferson's anti-slavery language finally became part of the Constitution eighty years later.

Finally, in 1806, President Jefferson urged Congress to abolish the slave trade the moment the Constitution permitted it in 1808. Congress acted, and the importation of enslaved people became illegal effective January 1, 1808.

Jefferson's record is clearly not one of “ignorance and hubris”— and while it does not erase the undeniable contradiction that Jefferson owned slaves, unlike many of his contemporaries, he openly acknowledged slavery as a moral wrong and repeatedly pursued legislative and political measures designed to restrict its expansion and place it on a path toward eventual extinction. His record deserves honest engagement, not a cheap shot from an exorbitantly compensated so-called leader in a commencement address at the University founded by the individual he so inappropriately attacked.