We live in an era when Blacks and Whites, despite the end of de jure segregation, tend to live in different neighborhoods, go to different churches and schools, and socialize within their own racial groups. Thomas Jefferson’s world was quite dissimilar. He interacted with African Americans on a daily basis, in the most intimate circumstances, from the beginning of his life to the end. This is because he was born into a slave society.
A Black woman was almost certainly young Thomas’s earliest nursemaid, and an enslaved Black woman was likely his wet nurse. Later, when his wife, Martha, had difficulty nursing their first child, the “good breast of milk” of the enslaved Ursula Granger allowed the child to thrive. In his old age Jefferson recalled that his earliest memory was of being handed up on a pillow to an enslaved person on horseback before their family made a journey from their home at Shadwell, Virginia, to Tuckahoe, where they lived for several years during his early childhood. Enslaved people were his primary attendants during his final days. They may have been the last people he saw before he died.
No prominent member of the Founding Fathers engaged more directly, and some would argue more disastrously, with the subject of race than Thomas Jefferson. The man who wrote what has come to be called the American Creed, the Declaration of Independence, proclaiming the “self-evident” truth “that all men are created equal,” enslaved hundreds of people of African descent over the course of his life, even as he wrote extremely critical words about the institution and believed himself to be antislavery. How could this be? How could a person hold such contradictory positions?
We ask these questions today, but it’s important to know that people also asked them in Jefferson’s lifetime. He asked the question himself, poignantly, when writing to the French author and politician Jean Nicolas Démeunier in June 1786:
What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes [whippings], imprisonment or death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment be deaf to all those motives whose power supported him thro’ his trial, and inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose. But we must await with patience the workings of an overruling providence, and hope that that is preparing the deliverance of these our suffering brethren. When the measure of their tears shall be full, when their groans shall have involved heaven itself in darkness, doubtless a god of justice will awaken to their distress, and by diffusing light and liberality among their oppressors, or at length by his exterminating thunder, manifest his attention to the things of this world, and that they are not left to the guidance of a blind fatality.
Jefferson was in Paris when he wrote Démeunier, and the matter looked different from abroad. When he and the American colonists had decided that there was no path toward reconciliation with the mother country, and that they were going to break with Great Britain, Jefferson saw that there was an opportunity for a new beginning, not only for the new country but for his home state of Virginia. He felt it imperative that the new state reform its property laws to do away with feudal systems like primogeniture and entail. He also pushed for the disestablishment of the Anglican Church, with the goal of complete separation between church and state, which he believed was necessary in a republican government.
The third area that required reform was, of course, slavery. Jefferson recalled participating in an effort to establish a plan for emancipation when he was a young member of the House of Burgesses, the Virginia Colony’s legislative body. The measure was summarily shot down. One gets the impression from his writings that the vehemence of this rejection convinced him that there could be no legislative solution to the problem of slavery anytime in the foreseeable future. Through the years, well into his old age, Jefferson referenced the “prejudices” of his fellow Virginians against Black people. At times he suggested that their prejudice against Black people was greater than his.
One can see in the Démeunier letter the basic Jeffersonian position—recognition of the wrongness of slavery, condemnation of it in the strongest terms, exasperation with people’s acceptance of and support for the institution, and a call for patience with its eradication. It is that last turn—putting the brakes on a swift and decisive end to slavery—that frustrates so many today. His insistence that the problem could be solved only after some period of time, even a long one, makes his commitment to ending slavery suspect. Yet it is hard to overstate how much this notion of solving problems gradually, over time, was in keeping with Jefferson’s adherence to Enlightenment philosophy. As time went by, new cures for diseases, new inventions, and new ideas would emerge and make life better. “When I contemplate the immense advances in science, and discoveries in the arts which have been made within the period of my life,” he wrote in March 1818 to the Virginia jurist Spencer Roane,
I look forward with confidence to equal advances by the present generation; and have no doubt they will consequently be as much wiser than we have been, as we than our fathers were, and they than the burners of witches.
But it is important to ask why a society should ever acquiesce to a grave moral wrong, particularly one that Jefferson himself predicted would be ultimately corrosive. Why was he unwilling to spend social and political capital, as he did when he participated in the rebellion against Great Britain at considerable risk to himself and his family, to rid Virginia of a practice that he viewed as morally reprehensible and damaging to the future success of his home state?
When the British colonized North America, a society with a fixed racial hierarchy was born. Whites were at the top, and enslaved African Americans were at the bottom. (I prefer to capitalize both “Black” and “White”; to lowercase “white” is to imply that it is the norm, and “Black” the other.) When Americans broke away from the British, slavery still existed in all thirteen colonies, though it was much more entrenched in the South, including Jefferson’s Virginia.
War created the opportunity for Blacks, enslaved and free, to challenge their status. Even before Lord Dunmore’s famous proclamation in November 1775 offering freedom to men enslaved by the American patriots if they joined the British Army, enslaved men and women started to leave plantations and follow the British. After the proclamation, still more left. There were also some, including free Blacks in the North, who joined the patriot forces. These actions created a different way for Blacks to view themselves, and a different way for Whites to view them.
Jefferson wonders about this in perhaps his most cited letters about slavery, written to his young, idealistic Virginian protégé Edward Coles in 1814. Coles, who wanted to enlist Jefferson in a public effort to end slavery, wrote to him about his plan to leave Virginia with his slaves and free them once resettled in Illinois. He was frank about how the Revolution changed Virginians’ views—and of course he included his own—about African Americans and what their presence meant for the new nation.
Jefferson thought that slavery would damage the new republican society that he championed. How could a truly republican society, based on equality, claim to be moral while containing a class of enslaved people? At the same time, there was the question of what was to become of Black people after emancipation. Could they become a part of “the People”? He explained in the only book he wrote and published, Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), that he did not believe that the races could come together. Whites would never give up their bigotry, and Blacks would never forgive Whites for what they had done. He feared Black people, particularly Black men, whom he saw as potential soldiers who would fight to assume their place in the United States.
The Revolution had created a republican society. How could that society function with a “captive nation”—that is to say, Black people—in its midst? He wrote:
Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions, which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.
And crucially, Blacks and Whites could not form legitimate families with one another because of the strictures—which Jefferson supported but did not live by—against interracial sex.
Even as a young man, well before he entered public life, Jefferson had recognized the gross injustice at the heart of the American project: Europeans had forced millions of African people from their homelands and into slavery on the American continent. “The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies,” he wrote in 1774, in his Summary View of the Rights of British America, the pamphlet that first brought him to attention outside Virginia.
Previous to the enfranchisement of the slaves we have, it is necessary to exclude all further importations from Africa; yet our repeated attempts to effect this by prohibitions, and by imposing duties which might amount to a prohibition, have been hitherto defeated by his majesty’s negative.
Jefferson invoked the “lasting interests of the American states” and “the rights of human nature, deeply wounded by this infamous practice.”
He did so again more famously in his first draft of the Declaration of Independence, in words that were excised by members of the Continental Congress who feared offending the southern delegates. Given the uses that have been made of his words in the preamble to the Declaration, it is maddening to think of what could have been made of his characterization of Africans as “men” and “people” who had the “sacred rights of life and liberty” taken away.
How could a person write that passage, along with other trenchant criticisms of slavery, and then fail to advance the cause of abolition in the newly constituted United States? The only plausible explanation is that Jefferson’s attitude about the institution of slavery as it was practiced in the Americas—that is to say, racially based slavery—was shaped by his attitude toward Black people. Jefferson simply did not feel a sense of urgency about ending a form of oppression to which Black people were peculiarly subjected. Nor did he imagine that the interests of Black people in escaping from that oppression should ever override the thoughts and feelings of his White neighbors. They could not be asked to give anything up on behalf of Black people.
It was one thing to champion the rights of White men and women in his pamphlet and to risk execution by writing and signing the Declaration of Independence and participating in an armed revolt against king and country. The freedom and self-determination of White colonists demanded such action and sacrifice; the freedom and self-determination of people of African descent did not. In our desire to take the notion of contingency seriously—and, perhaps, in our tendency to imagine the people of that era as more open to persuasion on the questions of slavery and race than they actually were—we may too quickly dismiss Jefferson’s assessment of how unready his fellow Virginians and other White southerners were to give up their way of life and how hostile they were to the Black people in their midst.
There is little reason to believe that Virginians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries could have been persuaded to forsake the institution of slavery. As dispiriting as it may be, we have to at least consider that Jefferson was right on this point. It is very likely that, had he decided to press the case for emancipation to the extent that we wish he had, he would not have maintained the important base of support that helped propel him from state politics to the forefront of national politics.
Thomas Jefferson saw himself as, and desperately wanted to be seen as, a progressive—a man of the future always on the lookout for the new improvements that science and the education of the general population would bring. During his late-in-life correspondence with John Adams, he wrote that he liked “the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.” In that same letter, he predicted that the United States would take the lead in standing guard against the “returns of ignorance and barbarism,” because “old Europe” would still be under the influence of old-world structures and beliefs. Jefferson, it seems, had believed since his youth in the inevitability of progress. He was enormously influenced by the Enlightenment, and considered Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke his “trinity of the three greatest men the world has ever produced.”
His correspondence with Benjamin Banneker, an African American astronomer and almanac writer, is particularly significant. In 1791 Banneker sent Jefferson a copy of his almanac and requested his aid in dealing with the issue of slavery and improving the status of Black people in the United States. Banneker noted that Jefferson had a reputation as one who would be amenable to his entreaty. Jefferson responded quickly, thanking Banneker for the almanac and saying that he had forwarded it to the Marquis de Condorcet. Jefferson’s cordial response—he signed off as “Your most obedt. humble servant”—drew derision from enemies, who said that he had demeaned himself with the respectful valediction and that he was gullible in believing that Banneker had done the work for the almanac on his own. This last charge got to Jefferson. He attempted to backtrack by suggesting that Banneker had received help in preparing his almanac. Perhaps because he was so sure of his status, and because it reinforced his view of himself as a fair-minded individual, Jefferson never had a problem extending small courtesies like the use of honorifics like Mr. or Mrs. to people of color. Members of his cohort took these things more seriously than he did.
Although there is no written record of his involvement, Jefferson insisted over the course of his life that he was partly responsible for introducing early legislation in the House of Burgesses to strike blows against slavery. Given his record otherwise, there is no reason to doubt him. But even more important is the fact that Jefferson wanted to be associated with antislavery efforts. He could easily have emphasized other achievements or, like most of his fellow Virginians, not associated himself with the question at all, and still accomplish everything he did. This indicates that he knew the institution was a problem and would be seen as a problem for succeeding generations. He wanted people in his time and in the future to see him as having been on the right side of that issue.
And then there is the Jefferson who periodically latched on to quixotic methods to attack slavery or at least to make it more palatable. Letters and notations in his Farm Book and Memorandum Books show his enthusiasm for sugar from maple trees, which he saw as one possible way to destroy West Indian slavery, on which the Caribbean sugarcane industry was so dependent. Uniting morality with self-interest, he substituted maple sugar for cane sugar at his residences and made an unsuccessful attempt to grow maple at Monticello. The horrors of the cane fields could be avoided, and the US, or at least those regions with the right climate, might be able to produce a salable crop.
Looming over all of this, of course, is Jefferson’s relationship with the Hemings family, the mixed-race enslaved people who came into his life when he married Martha Wayles Skelton. Martha Jefferson shared a father, John Wayles, with six members of the Hemings family. They were all brought to Monticello in the early 1770s upon John Wayles’s death. The family was treated differently from other enslaved people, and it appears that Jefferson viewed himself as an enslaver through the prism of his relationship with them. The men were allowed to travel relatively freely, take jobs, and keep the money they earned. Jefferson had clothes made for them, gave them spending money, and for periods of time paid them full wages for their work. The only people he freed were members of the Hemings family. Most important of all, Jefferson maintained a thirty-eight-year liaison with Sally Hemings, which produced seven children, four of whom lived to adulthood: Beverly, Harriet, Madison, and Eston Hemings.
On the surface, his documents betray no special connection to them. But if you look carefully, over time, it is clear that to him they were different. He placed the three boys under the tutelage of his best artisan, their uncle John Hemings, with whom Jefferson spent a good deal of time at Monticello and his country retreat, Poplar Forest. The daughter, Harriet, learned to spin and weave. None of them worked as servants, and all four were freed upon adulthood. A Farm Book listing notes that the two eldest, Beverly and Harriet, “ran away” in 1822, when they were actually allowed to leave. Harriet was put on a stagecoach with money, most likely to join her brother, who had left months earlier. The two disappeared into the White world. The two youngest Hemingses, Madison and Eston, were freed formally in Jefferson’s will.
The lack of information about Jefferson’s hidden family was planned, and that is tragic. His relationship to the young country’s racial predicament was more than what he wrote down; it was also a matter of blood. The omission of this truth from the record that he made is deeply revealing. What Jefferson kept out of his writing goes to the heart of the American story.
English (US) · 