One of America’s greatest and most paradoxical presidents and leaders is featured on today’s #stampoftheday, which is a 3-cent stamp showing Thomas Jefferson that was issued on June 16, 1938.

Jefferson, of course, was an American statesman, diplomat, lawyer, architect, philosopher, and Founding Father who served as the third president of the United States from 1801 to 1809. The principal author of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson drafted a Virginia law on religious freedom that was a source for the Bill of Rights’ guarantee of that freedom. As president, Jefferson pursued the nation’s shipping and trade interests against Barbary pirates and aggressive British trade policies. Starting in 1803, he promoted a western expansionist policy, organizing the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the nation’s land area.

While he primarily was a planter, lawyer and politician, Jefferson also mastered many disciplines, including surveying, mathematics, horticulture, mechanics, architecture, religion and philosophy. (At a dinner for Nobel Prize winners held at the White House in 1962 John F. Kennedy famously said, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”

While Jefferson is regarded as a leading spokesman for democracy and republicanism in the era of the Enlightenment, there is an obvious contradiction between his famous declaration that “all men are created equal” and the fact that over the course of his life he owned more than 600 slaves. Moreover, it is almost certain that he had a sexual relationship with his slave Sally Hemings, a mixed-race woman who was a half-sister to his late wife and that he fathered at least one of her children.

On the policy front, Jefferson generally opposed efforts to expand slavery in the United States and as president he signed the 1807 law banning the importation or exporting of slaves. But he also backed some compromises allowing for the expansion of slavery into at least part of the new Louisiana Territory. And he often chose to remain silent on the issue fearing it was so divisive it might tear the union apart. In an 1805 letter, he observed, “I have long since given up the expectation of any early provision for the extinguishment of slavery among us.” Given this assessment, he wrote in another letter, “I have most carefully avoided every public act or manifestation on that subject.”

Despite – or perhaps because – of his views and actions on slavery, Jefferson, whose reputation has waxed and waned in the centuries since his death, generally is regarded as one of the nation’s most successful presidents. The Siena Research Institute poll of presidential scholars, begun in 1982, for example, has consistently ranked Jefferson as one of the five best U.S. presidents, and a 2015 Brookings Institution poll of American Political Science Association members ranked him as the fifth greatest president. Some recent protesters, however, have had a less positive assessment. Such assessments led historian Gordon Wood to note: “”Although many historians and others are embarrassed about his contradictions and have sought to knock him off the democratic pedestal…his position, though shaky, still seems secure.”

But this may be changing, not only literally but also figuratively. Three days ago, for example, protesters in Portland (OR) tore down a statue of Jefferson that stood in front of Jefferson High School, which is located in the heart of Portland’s historically black Albina neighborhood.

I’m not sure where I come down on this question. It clearly makes little sense to honor Jefferson so publicly in a black neighborhood. But it also makes no sense to ignore his important, perhaps seminal contributions to the American ideal including the fact that his words, more than his actions, have been such an important articulation of who we hope to be even though we know that we’re not close to really living up to those ideas and ideals. That, perhaps, is what we need to put on pedestals for all of us to ponder and see.

What do you think?

Stay safe, be well, fight for justice and work for peace.