Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for February 16, 2025

History lesson #1: It doesn’t have to make sense to be history.

Well according to the new curriculum the slaves liked it and learned things and everyone was happy. Florida was the testing ground, soon to go nation-wide. Larry Elder the GOP candidate for governpor in the last California election said the descendants of slave owners are the ones who deserve reparations. It is a brave new world indeed.

My understanding is that releasing his slaves would have bankrupted him, which is the only reason he didn’t do it. He hated slavery, but I guess he hated being broke more.

Ben Franklin came up with “self-evident” Jefferson had written “sacred & undeniable”

He probably didn’t think slaves were fully human. Most wealthy white men didn’t. Shoot a lot of them held the same view of women.

And yet, trump burned the Constitution EXCEPT to hide from his felonies. Only took him about 2 days…a new record

The Jefferson tragedy is the American tragedy…

The answer to rat’s question is independence is the enemy of freedom.

It’s because they were not thought of as human beings.

Magats still don’t think they are.

Some people are more equal than the others.

Never underestimate man’s ability to rationalize anything. Rationalize = rational lies.

It was a whole twisted economy that spun around slavery back then. It took 100 years for the culture to grow out of that dark abyss so that Lincoln could finally put the last nail in that coffin by sacrificing 360,000 union lives. Never forget that.

Funnily enough the hypocrisy of that line was called out at the time as well.

Jefferson did say that the constitution should be rewritten every few decades because the dead should not govern the living. He wasn’t wrong especially since the interpretation of it seems to be extremely loose now. Doesn’t help that our constitution is harder to add amendments to than almost any other.

Rich people owned slaves. Not just in Jefferson’s time, but for millennia before his birth. It wasn’t unthinkable, like today. For them, and through most of known history around the world, slavery it was normal and accepted. Context is crucial to those who want to understand the past.

People thought it was okay to own slaves because they didn’t consider them to be fully human. The same type of reasoning was used by the Nazis about Jews and has been used in a number of other cases as well.

I remember when he was funny. Enough of this.

Maybe Jefferson didn’t like slavery. But you know how it is. When somebody in the neighborhood gets a slave, suddenly everybody has to have one. /s

A long gone, thankfully, way of life.

Slavery was how things were for thousands of years…if you were really unlucky.

It continues with the sex trade today.

He felt that only privileged White people like him should own slaves. He bore children of Sally Hemings the half sister of his wife’s. Not much of a President to be proud of. I’m a graduate of the University of Virginia and I feel that be the case.

He didn’t, but there was no way out of it at the time.

History is made up of the actions of people. And people are contradictory creatures. Therefore, history will always be contradictory.

Now, now. There were no proof of that!

Who said he was ok with it? We don’t actually know. Historically, some owned the slaves as a means to save them from cruel owners who treated them like property, not people, and helped better their lives on the down low as much as possible. From what I recall, a few of the Founding Fathers had this mindset too. They had to fight one battle at a time and establishing the country was a huge one they needed to win first.

As my handle might suggest, I’m an actor. Among other things I perform a solo play as Thomas Jefferson. Of course I tell the story of the Declaration, but I also do a long section on his repeated failures to end slavery, starting with his first term in the House of Burgesses. He was finally able to stop (at least on paper) the importation of slaves in 1808 when he was president.

Well, Jefferson probably didn’t consider the people he owned to be “people”. All the beautiful writing was for rich, white men only.

We are in another period of history like that.

Don’t think slavery could happen again? Don’t bet on it. Too many people never learn from history; case in point, giving Trump a second chance at destroying our country. And he’s doing it.

Fun fact: The food that USAID sends overseas to help starving people is bought from our small farmers, helping sustain the small farms across the country. President Musk and his idiot Trump are going to bankrupt hundreds of small farmers.

I watched ‘The Butler’ (2013) for the first time recently. A true story starring Forest Whitaker as Cecil Gaines, a black American born into slavery and then serving (literally) several Presidents in the White House.

The Civil Rights movement is a powerful chapter in the movie.

How much truth can people handle?

Stop snorting the kool-aid and pick up a different book, Rat. Jefferson, in an early draft of the Declaration of Independence, included a passage condemning slavery. He blamed England for perpetuating the slave trade, but for legal and financial reasons, he could not simply declare the immediate emancipation of enslaved people. The passage was ultimately removed because the Colonies were deeply divided on the issue and would not have presented a united front against England.

It is hard to think of human beings in terms of commodities but that is exactly what slaves were. Without such human commodities the Roman Empire, for example, would never have thrived for as long as it did. The Roman economy was completely dependent on slavery.

Throughout the ages, slavery was an acceptable practice and a necessary evil until civilizations realized that it was more economically feasible to pay workers a pittance and force them to fend for themselves.

Freedom meant freedom from responsibility for the rich. They no longer were responsible for feeding, clothing, and sheltering their workers.

I am not trying to be an apologist for slavery but it has been historically proven that slaves, by and large, because they were such a valuable commodity, were treated better by their owners, who wanted to protect their assets, than the poor freedman.

Wait till you hear about Ronald Regan. He used to have a monkey.

I think that Stephan just likes to poke the hornet’s nest sometimes.

Using the norms of today, to judge people and events that are 250 years old, is cheap, and indeed, misleading history.

He actually wasn’t okay with slavery, and owned them anyway. There’s a character like that in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Augustine St. Clair. Opposed to slavery and owns slaves. I suspect that sort of total dissonance wasn’t all the uncommon, and people came up with tortured justifications for why, in their case, it was a “regrettable but necessary.” (“This is a big estate and can’t be maintained without staff, I treat them well,” etc.)

This was in Jefferson’s original Declaration. It was removed because the South refused to accept the Declaration if it wasn’t:

“He [King George] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and 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 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, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.”

Time to tear somemore statues.

Well, he, and other founding parents of the country, were writing about idealism. Great way to make hypocrites of us all.

He should have let the slave go & go on a book tour.

Same way cartoonists talk big about liberty and independence, then slave away for the party of statist totalitarianism and thought-control.

Money (and its power) is the cause of a lot of immorality. True then. Just as true today. The Gulf of America has changed very little.

I disagree; you did need the megaphone…

The fact that he had slaves doing all the work for him is a big part of why he was able to do all those things.

A lot of us could be that “brilliant” if we had unlimited free time to dabble in whatever we wanted.

I wonder what Rat’s descendants 200 years hence will think of where we are now?

In those days slaves weren’t considered to be humans

I heard he hated slavery, and he pointed the way out of it.

Perhaps he was both morally and financially bankrupt—trapped in denial and unwilling to face the consequences.

Back in the day, it’s what they all did, unfortunately. A very big stain on human history, to say the least. ☹️

But mean while, today in DC, Nazism, Fascism is taking hold and it seems no one is doing anything to stop it…everyone is bought and paid for including the NOT so Supreme Court.

And “they” said it should never happen again…..☹️

It’s about economics: Economics—money—will trump morality nearly every single time. If the peoples of the world who eventually embraced Christianity actually believed in Christian values, slavery would have disappeared from those countries by, the latest, 1000 AD. But, no: too much wealth to be made on slave labor, even today.

We were actually learning about the whole of history – the good and the ugly. They can and do co-exist, and understanding both could make us better people. All too soon, we’re back to learning just one very lopsided view. Sad.

It’s complicated Rat. As the former Governor of Virginia, he was following the culture of the times. Does that stiil mean it was OK? No, but a little easier to understand. Different times and culture.

Ephesians 6:5–8: Paul instructs slaves to obey their masters with fear and trembling, and to do God’s will.

Black History IS America’s History.

KEEP ABORTION FREE!!!!

We don’t have a proud history which is why MAGA is whitewashing our history

Rat is late to the party. And Pastis went after some low hanging fruit. Overall, not one of his best.

The only “resource” we’ve carelessly & cruelly exploited as much as our fellow humans is the fragile living veneer on our 3rd rock from the sun, akin to no more than the skin of an apple. We need the wisdom of 3 lifetimes to understand what we’re doing.

This is how many people envision Reparations: The rich white people will give money to the blacks and native Americans.How it will actually work:Tax Rules for Reparations – No rich person of any race gets any dough. Blacks and Native Americans can recoup the portion of their taxes that go to reparations. If they don’t pay taxes, then they get a “reparations tax credit.” Mixed-race people get a “reparations tax credit.” If you are a poor white person, you get some free money, but that’s a different issue. Now where was I. Oh yes, if you emigrated from Africa after 1870, you don’t get anything unless you were abused somewhere along the line, which during the Jim Crow era was almost certainly the case. Blacks and native Americans who have committed felonies don’t get any dough. If you are black or native American and you were married 5 years or more to a white person, you don’t get any dough. For clarification, see Section 501c(iii) of the Reparations pamphlet.

Jefferson himself admitted that his wealth was his slaves – worth more than his land and estate, Monticello. Raising a child, teaching him/her a skill such as blacksmith or cloth weaving, then selling that person brought in more money than raising a crop of wheat or cotton.

The pre-industrial world required a great deal of hard daily human labor. Much / most of that labor was performed by people who had no choice in the matter. There were many ways one could find oneself in slavery, and virtually all human societies had some form of it.

The Founding Fathers didn’t include Founding Mothers (no sufferage), Founding Slaves, Founding Indians (genocide), or Founding Poor People (no property). Happy Mattress Sale Day.

In 1776 slavery was legal in the Americas and around most of the world. It came with the very first conquest of one people over another people. In 342 A.D. when the Christian Bible was assembled, owning slaves and the manner with which they are to be treated was in writing. In the middle of the 15th century Gutenberg’s press made the Bible available to the masses. Everyone who had one had the directions for owning slaves, and those that didn’t could get lessons on Sunday. Slavery was common, accepted practice. It was Biblical.

Many of our Founders wanted ‘all men are created equal’ to apply to American slaves as well. John Adams was on record, Jefferson, himself a slave owner, supported including slaves in our Declaration by freeing them. Slavery was a financial issue. The Southern states would not support ending slavery for our independence. Our Founders knew that all 13 colonies were not likely to win a war with the world’s super power, let alone do it with just 7 colonies. The end of slavery was sacrificed for the greater good.

Equality was announced in the U.S. 249 years ago. Slavery in the U.S. has been stopped for 164 years. It is well past time that we in the U.S. put into practice that with which we so love to boast about, and treat all as created equal.

“Indentured servitude” is something I think that is similar to what at some point in our life we had to do for the sake of paying a debt. But I always wondered about the concept of that line as Rat did.

He tried to free some slaves. They panicked and begged to stay. They had been institutionalized their entire lives, and feared the world beyond the confines of Mount Vernon.Younger people would probably have done better – they were older folks. So not a free pass. But yes it occurred to him that owning people was wrong.

Before everyone starts virtue signaling HOW they would have behaved had they been Jefferson, I am reminded of the wise words of a historian (might have been Hannah Arendt) who said (I’m paraphrasing): “Everyone likes to think that if they lived in NAZI Germany, they would have been in the resistance, they would have sheltered Jews. If they had been Jefferson, they would have freed their slaves. Statistics, unfortunately, argue elsewise.”In fifty years time your descendants will probably be telling each other: “If I had lived then, I would have resisted cancel culture” just as members of my generation said: “I would have resisted McCarthyism.” Statistics, unfortunately, argue elsewise.

People can convince themselves of whatever they want

Don’t even get me started about that guy.

This is, unfortunately, true. He was a living contradiction.

I think what’s worse is that the people who sold the slaves were their own FAMILIES.

It’s a cinch once you deny their humanity.

Just because we are “created equal” doesn’t mean we stay equal. Look at corporations whose owners make millions while their employees make just enough to get buy. Look at governments where the leaders make $$$ while the people are taxed way too much. Look at slavery that still goes on in parts of the world, even here in the US with the sex trade. It was a different time back then, and it’s easy to judge them from our perspective, but also hypocritical when we just ignore the problem in our own back yard.

He believed that all men are created equal, and endowed with an inalienable right to liberty, and also that people could be born into slavery.

Compartmentalization is a powerful thing, and the more intelligent you are, the greater your capacity to hold contradictory ideas in your mind.

Wait, if this is about black history month, you can’t do that any longer.

Jefferson and I were once shipwrecked on a desert island. I searched the length and breadth of the island for anything edible and found exactly ten bananas. I brought them back to our camp and turned them over to him. He gave me one, used the other nine to make himself a pitcher of daquiris, lay back in a hammock drinking them, and treated me to a brilliant, stirring explanation of how, in a just society, we would each have five bananas.

This strip is getting worse than Doonesbury.

The excuse word for today is “chattel,” but since Thomas and his cronies are illegal aliens, Trump is likely going to erase their history, immediately after he zero’s out our National Debt. Raising the tariffs tax on them just might work.

Remember, back then blacks were chattel, not men.

Which is why I believe Adams is the only true good guy out of all of them.

I demand that the entire Jefferson Airplane and Jefferson Starship catalog be reissued with new band names!

Because “men” meant white male landowners. Duh.

The term didn’t exist at the time, but Jefferson apparently was what we now would call a shopaholic.

And now you know why the GOP hates woke>

Ah, Sally Hemings …..Jefferson’s wife owned her half sister. (Hemings) When one of Jefferson’s daughters came to Paris to joins Jefferson…(US ambassador to France) The daughter came with Sally Hemings. Sally was 14-15 & her Master~Jefferson was in his 40’s. They ended up with 6 children. Jefferson freed all his slave children when they reached a certain age.

By men he meant men, not women, so he was more concerned about people with dangly bits. Also, those men had to own property.

Because everyone was doing it.Because the System had taught him over and over that it was the correct thing to do.You know, – reasons.

And therein lies the difference between slavery in America and slavery throughout world history – the other slave-owning societies weren’t hypocritical about it. Slavery, as terrible as it was, was just part of society. But when Jefferson wrote those words, and the very second the founding fathers signed that document, the slaves should have been freed.

Actually, he didn’t. We all have to buy products from a country where the government sanctions organ harvesting from dissidents.

I wish there was a million-like button for today’s strip! And yes, a megaphone (at least a virtual one) IS necessary, especially in this era of revisionist history.

Sadly, the Brits built their southern colonies to be profitable off cheap labor. When the colonies sought to form the USA, prohibiting slavery would have prevented a union. But the issue wasn’t forgotten. It took 76 years, but slavery was finally outlawed by the 13th amendment to the document that never would have been ratified if “no slaves” had been in the original.

Judging the past by current moralities is dumb. Morals are cultural and not absolute.

Times were different, my main man, times were different….dan aka…ps it warms my heart to see some evidence that RAT has some decency….Too bad that’s a more unbelievable concept than talking animals in this comic strip!!!!! Dan aka…ps yay, RAT’S RIGHT!!!!!!

The discussion of slavery and its aftereffects in America is not designed to create villains or to make certain people feel guilty. It’s factual history, and it’s there to help ensure that we never allow such a thing to happen again. There’s no reason for anyone to feel defensive about the truth, just as there is no reason for men to feel defensive about the history of women’s struggles in America. Instead, it should make men want to stand with women to see that they receive equal rights.

How could he have held an opinion held by almost all of humanity from the dawn of time? What a moron.

I suppose a strip like this can create a greater discussion, which in it’s ideal form would be a good thing, but it also is a glaring example of what is wrong with today’s “discourse.” I use the word discourse in its loosest sense. Outrage before understanding is the order of the day. So rare is the desire to actually understand an issue. What has happened to complexity, nuance, critical thinking, context, etc, etc… ?

They have found several skeletons under Mr Franklin’s old houses.

Mr. Pastis, thank you. History repeats itself.

Cognitive dissonance has been with us long before Festinger coined the phrase.

Forgive me if this is a repeat from someone else’s comment, but I read that Jefferson also said slavery was “…like having a wolf by the ears. You don’t like it, but you don’t dare let it go.”

My understanding of the “men created equal” has to do with the European/British conviction that there are qualitative and immutable differences between the nobility and “common people” which are, therefore, justly written into laws and how they’re enforced. It was by no means a declaration that everyone is the same, has the same strength, the same talents, the same faults, the same appearance, or anything of that sort.

Don’t forget TJ also gave us the mess of the current Electoral College due to his temper tantrum when he lost to Adams in 1796. We went from per district electoral representation to “all or nothing” whole state electors.

I read Jefferson sold his biological children with his favorite black mistress to other plantations.

To Trump and Musk, I say upon you these words to Oliver Cromwell and Neville Chamberlain. “YOU HAVE SAT HERE FAR TOO LONG FOR ANY GOOD THAT YOU HAVE DONE. DEPART I SAY, AND LET US BE DONE WITH YOU. IN THE NAME OF GOD GO!”

The British always did have a better way of stating the obvious

oh heck, I meant that for Doonesbury

Humans are masters of juggling moral contradictions. It’s the only thing keeping us from suicide as a species

I agree. My morals class I took in college taught me that the problem most people have is they put today’s morals on people in history.

he was a hemp farmer…and when Washington won the first election, African Americans, Native Americans and women could vote, you just had to own land…when the woman of New Jersey gave the next election to John Adams, Jefferson put an end to their voting rights once he took office

Rat speaks the truth! In regards to Jefferson owning people, so did our first President George Washington. I’m not sure Jefferson hated slavery. He certainly used it to his own advantage, taking Sally Hemming’s as his mistress, and having children with her. His children with her also became slaves.

Ever hear the expression: “putting a round peg in a square hole”?

Slavery was nearly universal for 5600 years of recorded history. And 40,000,000 people are in slavery today.

No man is an island. This is what is meant by not having done it yourself. It takes an entire society for any one person to be successful. Jefferson was a man of his time. The Southern economy was built on the backs of slaves. While an entire society can and should shrug off such an evil institution, it is quite another for a single person to do it alone.

Perhaps if the idiot who wrote this actually read history instead of virtue signaling he would know

Why are we judging behavior in the 1700s by today’s standard? Societal norms affect behavior. Or simply put, the way things are at a specific point in time, be it economic or peer pressure.

As far as the framers, they needed to wage one war at a time. The fight for independence from Britian was currently on the plate and compromise was needed to attain that end.

He started the USA along the path to ending slavery. And, we can tell from the recorded discussions at the time the Constitution was written that folks expected slavery to be naturally ended in the USA by 1820 or so.

The recently renamed my alma mater from James Madison Memorial High for the same reason.

Renaming Madison, Wisconsin would prove a lot more challenging, I would imagine.

I believe he did NOT believe in slavery, but knew if he freed his slaves, they would suffer due to the lack of jobs, discrimination, etc. Times were very different then.

This keeps coming up. “Created equal” had nothing to do with slaves. It had to do with commoners and kings. Jefferson wrote that there was no case for birthright kingship and a caste system making commoners inferior. All men are NOT created equal in ability, and only idiots think so – he was dissing royalty and George III.

Fonzie just jumped the shark

Oh, no, Goat, Rat did indeed need that megaphone.

It always bugs the cr@p out of me when people try to judge 18th century practices by 21st century morals. What if your grandchildren think you were a horrible person for thinking you could own a sentient being, aka a cat or dog?