|
|
|
|
|
You have improperly paraphrased from the original and you have used synonyms for Jefferson’s actual words.
Jefferson believed that the relationship between master and slave had an unhappy impact on the manners of Americans. It led to violent passions and great despotism. 'Our children see this, and learn to imitate it,' he said. Could the liberties of the nation be secured when the people no longer thought that they were a gift from god? Ultimately, Jefferson feared some shift in fate that would make masters pay for enslaving Africans. He wrote, 'I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever.'
Your friend also points out that you used single rather than double quotes for the verbatim passage, and that you have neglected to provide page numbers for the whole. You revise the paragraph to read as follows:
Jefferson's concern with slavery united family practices with public politics. He believed that domestic habits had an important impact on national policy. Jefferson feared that slavery corrupted the slave owner, encouraging the misuse of power – the opposite of the kind of political liberty he advocated for American citizens. The master-slave relationship was for him "an exercise of the most boisterous passions," in which the children of white masters were “daily exercised in tyranny" (288). Jefferson cared most about the bad influence of slavery on the masters, rather than about the enslaved themselves. Indeed, it seems that his greatest fear was that God might one day reverse their roles. "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just," Jefferson wrote. He feared "a revolution of the wheel of fortune" which might place Africans in the position of superiors over Europeans (289). The safest course for whites, then, was to bring about an end to slavery.