The Jefferson Lies (15 page)

The Southern colonies (North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia) were almost polar opposites. Racism was institutionalized. Churches where both blacks and whites worshipped together, such as those pastored by black minister Andrew Bryan of Georgia, were the exception rather than the rule. The possibility of blacks holding office or voting was virtually nonexistent, and political leaders who spoke out against slavery were attacked. Freedom for slaves? Never! Equality for blacks? Unthinkable! This was the dominant view with only a few individual exceptions, such as Founding Father John Laurens of South Carolina. Abolition societies were rare, and the ones that existed were impotent.

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The Middle colonies (Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware) were somewhat a mix of the two other regions, but they were much closer in philosophy to the Southern colonies than the Northern ones. The majority strongly supported slavery, but there were definitely vocal minority groups advocating civil rights. Institutionalized racism was present but not as rigidly enforced as in the Southern colonies. Many ministers and a few civil leaders—such as Jefferson, George Washington, Richard Bland, George Mason, Richard Henry Lee, William Hooper, William Few, and others—spoke openly for emancipation. But when doing so they often received a cold and sometimes even a hostile reception yet usually not with the virulent reaction and intolerance so common in the Southern colonies.

While the Northern colonies wanted emancipation immediately and the Southern colonies not at all, the Middle colonies believed that if emancipation was to occur, it must be gradual with relocation. Thus the Middle colonies had colonization societies rather than abolition societies. They sought emancipation for slaves, and then planned to transport them back to Africa from whence so many had originally been stolen. This Middle colony approach acknowledged that slavery was wrong, but it also recognized that blacks had greater freedom and opportunity in Africa than in the prejudice-filled Middle and Southern colonies.

The different views in each region required that differing political tactics be used. That is, abolition laws introduced in the North would never have seen the light of day in the South; and the colonization approach of the Middle would have been unacceptable to the other two regions, although each would have opposed it for opposite reasons. Therefore, those wishing to change the national culture on slavery had to start at different levels, depending on the region in which they lived.

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It is evident that Jefferson was acutely aware of these distinct regional differences. A 1785 exchange he had with the Reverend Richard Price of England demonstrates this. Price had sided with America during the Revolution and written several pro-American pieces. He sent one of his pamphlets on the American Revolution to South Carolina where it met a very cold reception. Political leaders there condemned it “because it recommend[ed] measures for . . . abolishing the Negro trade and slavery.”
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Based on their reaction, Price was concerned that he had misread American intentions toward liberty, and he asked Jefferson whether South Carolina was representative of the other states.

Jefferson reassured Price that South Carolina was not representative of the country on the issue of slavery and then explained to him the three different reactions his pamphlet would likely receive. From the Southern colonies, Jefferson affirmed what Price had already discovered: “Southward of the Chesapeake, it will find but few readers concurring with it in sentiment on the subject of slavery.”
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The Chesapeake is the large bay between Maryland and Virginia, so “southward of the Chesapeake” means the colonies below or south of Virginia.

Concerning the Middle colonies, Jefferson told him: “From the mouth of the head of the Chesapeake [the Middle colonies], the bulk of the people will approve it in theory, and it will find a respectable minority ready to adopt it in practice.”
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Regarding the Northern colonies, Jefferson explained:

Northward of the Chesapeake, you may find here and there an opponent to your doctrine as you may find here and there a robber and murderer, but in no greater number. In that part of America, there being but few slaves, they can easily disencumber themselves of them; and emancipation is put into such a train that in a few years there will be no slave northward of Maryland.
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Jefferson therefore reassured Price: “Be not therefore discouraged. What you have written will do a great deal of good. . . . I wish you to do more, and wish it on assurance of its effect.”
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Jefferson explained these geographic distinctions to others as well. He lamented to the Reverend David Barrow, who had lived in Virginia but moved to Kentucky and founded the Kentucky Abolition Society, that emancipation would be slower in the Southern and Middle colonies than the Northern ones.

Where the disease [slavery] is most deeply seated, there it will be slowest in eradication. In the Northern states, it was merely superficial and easily corrected. In the Southern, it is incorporated with the whole system and requires time, patience, and perseverance in the curative process.
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Jefferson was optimistic about change in Virginia, but as he had acknowledged to the Reverend Price his own desire to abolish slavery had placed him in the “respectable minority” in his own state.

But before chronicling Jefferson's many emancipation declarations and actions, the elephant in the room must be addressed: if Jefferson was indeed so antislavery, then why didn't he release his own slaves? After all, George Washington allowed for the freeing of his slaves on his death in 1799, so why didn't Jefferson at least do the same at his death in 1826? The answer is Virginia law. In 1799 Virginia allowed owners to emancipate their slaves on their death; in 1826 state laws had been changed to prohibit that practice.

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As previously acknowledged, Virginia was rigid in its proslavery laws and had been so for more than a century before Jefferson. As early as 1692, it began placing significant economic hurdles in the way of those wanting to emancipate slaves, requiring:

[N]o Negro or mulatto slave shall be set free—unless the emancipator pays for his transportation out of the country within six months.
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Subsequent laws imposed even harsher restrictions, mandating that a slave could not be freed unless the owner guaranteed a full security bond for the education, livelihood, and support of the freed slave.
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Then, in 1723 a law was passed that forbade the emancipation of slaves under
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circumstance—even by a last will and testament. The only exceptions were for cases of “meritorious service” by a slave, a determination that could be made only by the state governor and his council on a case-by-case basis.
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But in 1782, for a very short time, Virginia began to move in a new direction. An emancipation law was passed, declaring:

[T]hose persons who are disposed to emancipate their slaves may be empowered so to do and . . . it shall hereafter be lawful for any person, by his or her last will and testament, . . . to emancipate and set free his or her slaves.
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It was as a result of this law that George Washington was able to free his slaves in his last will and testament in 1799.

But in 1806 Virginia repealed much of that law.
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It technically retained emancipation but placed an almost impossible economic burden on emancipators, requiring that freed slaves who were young, old, weak, or infirm “shall respectively be supported and maintained by the person so liberating them, or by his or her estate.”
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The law even allowed a wife to reverse an emancipation made by her husband in his will.
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Furthermore, the law required that a freed slave promptly depart the state or else reenter slavery, thus making it almost impossible for an emancipated slave to remain near his or her spouse, children, or family members who had not been freed. Many, therefore, preferred to remain in slavery with their families rather than become free and be separated from them.
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It was under these laws that Jefferson was required to operate. In 1814 he lamented to an abolitionist minister friend in Illinois that in Virginia “[t]he laws do not permit us to turn them loose.”
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And even if Jefferson had done so, he certainly did not have the finances required by law to provide a livelihood and support for each of his freed slaves. Jefferson had received the bulk of his slaves—187 of them—through inheritance
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and had done so at a very young age. As he acknowledged: “[A]t fourteen years of age, the whole care and direction of myself was thrown on myself entirely without a relation or friend qualified to advise or guide me.”
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He did not have the economic means to conform to that oppressive state law. Recall that at one point his own personal economic shortages had caused him to approach Congress about buying his cherished library in order to generate much-needed operating cash.
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Part of Jefferson's cash shortage was caused by a major devaluation of money. After placing large amounts of money in the loan office during the American Revolution, those funds were returned “back again at a depreciation out to him of one for forty.”
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That is, the amount he received back was worth only 2.5 percent of what it had been worth when he placed it into the government loan office.

Jefferson's economic hardship was also exacerbated by his practice, unlike other slave owners, of paying his slaves for the vegetables they raised, meat obtained while hunting and fishing, and for extra tasks performed outside normal working hours. He even offered a revolutionary profit-sharing plan for the products that his enslaved artisans produced in their shops.
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Despite the fact that Jefferson was unable to free his slaves under the requirements of state law, he nevertheless remained a local, national, and even a global voice advocating emancipation. He helped steadily turn the culture in a direction that would allow equal civil rights to eventually be secured for all Americans regardless of race. For this reason, early blacks viewed Jefferson in a much more favorable light than they did many other leaders from the South. In fact, one of the earliest black Americans to acknowledge Jefferson's relatively advanced views on race—at least when compared to the dominant views of others in the Middle and Southern colonies—was Benjamin Banneker, whom Jefferson hired to survey the brand-new city of Washington, DC.

Banneker was a highly accomplished and self-taught mathematician and astronomer. The scientific almanac he prepared was in high demand because of his accurate predictions for sunsets, sunrises, eclipses, weather conditions and even for his calculation of the recurrence of locust plagues in seventeen-year cycles. Banneker sent a handwritten copy of his almanac to Jefferson, beginning his letter by acknowledging that Jefferson had secured a reputation of favoring civil rights:

[I] hope I may safely admit in consequence of the report which hath reached me that you are a man far less inflexible in sentiments of this nature than many others—that you are measurably friendly and well-disposed towards us and that you are willing to lend your aid and assistance for our relief from those many distresses and numerous calamities to which we are reduced.
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Banneker then appealed to Jefferson to further exert himself in behalf of blacks and throw off any remaining prejudice he might hold:

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Now, sir, if this is founded in truth, I apprehend you will readily embrace every opportunity to eradicate that train of absurd and false ideas and opinions which so generally prevails with respect to us; and that your sentiments are concurrent with mine, which are that one universal Father hath given being to us all, and that He hath . . . made us all of one flesh [Acts 17:26]. . . . Sir, if these are sentiments of which you are fully persuaded, I hope you cannot but acknowledge that it is the indispensable duty of those who maintain for themselves the rights of human nature and who possess the obligations of Christianity to extend their power and influence to the relief of every part of the human race from whatever burden or oppression they may unjustly labor under.
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Having thus expounded to Jefferson on the unequal position of blacks across much of the nation, Banneker then returned to his original purpose in writing Jefferson, presenting him “a copy of an almanac which I have calculated for the succeeding year . . . in my own handwriting.”
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Jefferson responded:

I thank you sincerely for your letter of the 19th instant and for the almanac it contained. Nobody wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit—that nature has given to our black brethren talents equal to those of the other colors of men, and that the appearance of a want [lack] of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence both in Africa and America. . . . I have taken the liberty of sending your almanac to Monsieur de Condorcet, Secretary of the Academy of Sciences at Paris and member of the Philanthropic Society, because I considered it as a document to which your whole color had a right for their justification against the doubts which have been entertained of them. I am with great esteem, sir, your most obedient humble servant.
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