The Jefferson Lies (16 page)

96

When Jefferson sent the almanac to Marquis de Condorcet, a leading antislavery voice in France, he told him:

I am happy to be able to inform you that we have now in the United States a Negro . . . who is a very respectable mathematician. . . . [H]e made an almanac for the next year, which he sent me in his own handwriting, and which I enclose to you. I have seen very elegant solutions of geometrical problems by him. Add to this that he is a very worthy and respectable member of society. He is a free man. I shall be delighted to see these instances of moral eminence so multiplied as to prove that the want [lack] of talents observed in them [blacks] is merely the effect of their degraded condition, and not proceeding from any difference in the structure of the parts on which intellect depends.
³⁹

Many of those today who call Jefferson an unrepentant racist also claim that he believed blacks were inferior to whites. For example, in the true spirit of Academic Collectivism:

Jefferson . . . was convinced . . . blacks had to be seen as lower beings because of their inferiority.
⁴⁰

Jefferson . . . believed . . . blacks were inferior to whites in body and mind.
⁴¹

Thomas Jefferson . . . thought black people intellectually inferior to whites.
⁴²

Thomas Jefferson was not interested in abolition. . . . Thomas Jefferson considered blacks inferior.
⁴³

To “prove” this charge, such writers point to comments Jefferson made in his
Notes on the State of Virginia
(1781) in which he expressed not only his ardent desire for the emancipation of slaves but also twice lightly questioned whether blacks
might
be inferior.
⁴⁴
But the callous conclusion reached by modern Minimalist writers is possible
only
if they cite just those two Jefferson comments and ignore the rest of the lengthy emancipation treatise from which those statements are cut.

97

In fact, in order to mitigate his own two comments, Jefferson openly acknowledged that his personal experience with blacks had been limited almost exclusively to the context of slavery—that is, his personal dealings had been with oppressed blacks who had been denied education. Very few analysts, either then or now, would dispute that under such conditions blacks might well appear inferior in intellectual abilities, for they had absolutely no opportunity to prove otherwise. Jefferson candidly acknowledged his own subjective situation and his lack of objective data on which to base any fixed opinion. He even openly lamented:

To our reproach, it must be said that though for a century and a half we have had under our eyes the races of black and of red men, they have never yet been viewed by us as subjects of natural history. I advance it, therefore, as a
suspicion only
that the blacks . . . are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.
⁴⁵
(emphasis added)

He also explained that “[i]t will be right
to make great allowances
for the difference of condition, of education, of conversation, of the sphere in which they move”
⁴⁶
(emphasis added). Jefferson understood that slavery was certainly
not
a favorable condition in which to compare intellectual abilities. He therefore eagerly invited and even sought outside evidence to disprove what he had called his “suspicion only.” Recall that he told Banneker:

Nobody wishes more than I do to see such proofs . . . 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 [due] merely to the degraded condition of their existence both in Africa and America.
⁴⁷

98

And he had similarly told Condorcet that “I shall be
delighted
to see [that] . . . the want [lack] of talents observed in them is merely the effect of their degraded condition, and not proceeding from any difference in the structure of the parts on which intellect depends.”
⁴⁸

Jefferson made the same point to Henri Gregoire, a Catholic priest, ardent abolitionist, and leader in the French Revolution. Gregoire had prepared and sent Jefferson a book with the literary compositions of blacks, designed to demonstrate their equal intellectual capacity. Jefferson told him:

Be assured that no person living wishes more sincerely than I do to see a complete refutation of the doubts I have myself entertained and expressed on the grade of understanding allotted to them by nature, and to find that in this respect they are on a par with ourselves. My doubts were the result of personal observation on the limited sphere of my own state, where the opportunities for the development of their genius were not favorable, and those of exercising it still less so. I expressed them therefore with great hesitation; but whatever be their degree of talent, it is no measure of their rights. Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others.
⁴⁹

Decades after Jefferson had made his two 1781 comments, he lamented to his old friend Joel Barlow, an American diplomat who had served with Jefferson during the American Revolution, about how some had taken his casually expressed “suspicions” and tried to misrepresent them. He pointed to his exchange with Gregoire as an example:

99

He wrote to me also on the doubts I had expressed five or six and twenty years ago in the
Notes of Virginia
as to the grade of understanding of the Negroes. . . . It was impossible for doubt to have been more tenderly or hesitatingly expressed than that was in the
Notes of Virginia
, and nothing was or is farther from my intentions than to enlist myself as the champion of a fixed opinion where I have only expressed a doubt.
⁵⁰

In my opinion, for today's writers and academics to convert Jefferson's loosely held and cautiously and rarely expressed “suspicions” into unwavering resolute racism is a complete misrepresentation.

Now let us move from the question of Jefferson's perception of innate value in black Americans to his actions and writings advocating emancipation and equality—actions and writings largely ignored today.

In 1769 at the age of twenty-six, Jefferson began his political career as a member of the Virginia legislature. Shortly after entering that body, he approached respected senior legislator Richard Bland and proposed that the two of them undertake an “effort in that body for the permission of the emancipation of slaves.”
⁵¹
Colonel Bland offered the motion and Jefferson seconded it, but it was resoundingly defeated. In fact, for even proposing that measure, Bland was vehemently “denounced as an enemy of his country” by the other legislators “and was treated with the grossest indecorum.”
⁵²
Jefferson lamented that as long as Virginia remained a British colony, no emancipation proposal “could expect success”
⁵³
—a condition that he hoped would change.

100

In 1770 Jefferson represented a slave in court, arguing for his freedom. Jefferson explained:

Under the law of nature, all men are born free. Everyone comes into the world with a right to his own person, which includes the liberty of moving and using it at his own will. This is what is called personal liberty, and is given him by the Author of Nature.
⁵⁴

Jefferson lost the case. In
1772
, he also argued a similar case.
⁵⁵

In 1773 and 1774 a number of American colonies, including Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania, passed antislavery laws, all of which were struck down by the king in 1774.
⁵⁶
That year Jefferson penned “A Summary View of the Rights of British America.” His purpose was to remind the British that legitimate American concerns were being ignored—one of which was the king's veto of American antislavery laws.

The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state [by Britain]. But 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 . . . have been hitherto defeated by His Majesty's negative [veto].
⁵⁷

In 1776 Jefferson wrote a draft of the original state constitution for Virginia and included a provision that “[n]o person hereafter coming into this country [Virginia] shall be held in slavery under any pretext whatever.”
⁵⁸
That provision was rejected by the state convention.

Later in 1776, as a member of the Continental Congress, Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence. Among the grievances impelling America's separation from Great Britain, Jefferson listed the fact that the king would not allow individual colonies to end slavery or the slave trade, even when they wished to do so:

101

He [King George III] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people which never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. . . . He has . . . determin[ed] to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold.
⁵⁹

Unfortunately, Jefferson's antislavery clause was deleted from the Declaration “in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who, on the contrary, still wished to continue it.”
⁶⁰

Although Jefferson's clause was not included in the Declaration, the grievance was very real. Following the separation from Great Britain, many individual states were finally able to begin abolishing slavery. Pennsylvania and Massachusetts did so in 1780; Connecticut and Rhode Island in 1784; Vermont in 1786; New Hampshire in 1792; New York in 1799; and New Jersey in 1804.
⁶¹

In 1778 Jefferson introduced a bill in the Virginia legislature to at least ban the importation of slaves into Virginia from other countries. According to Jefferson, “This passed without opposition and stopped the increase of the evil by importation, leaving to future efforts its final eradication.”
⁶²

In 1779 Jefferson became governor and undertook the next step toward what he had called slavery's “final eradication” by introducing a measure to “emancipate all slaves born after passing the act.”
⁶³
That measure was not successful,
⁶⁴
but Jefferson held firm to his personal conviction that “[n]othing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free.”
⁶⁵

102

In 1781 Jefferson penned answers to twenty-two questions posed him by the secretary of the French delegation to America. Those responses became the book
Notes on the State of Virginia
(1781) in which Jefferson declared:

The whole commerce between master and slave is . . . the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. . . . And with what execrations [denunciations] should the statesman be loaded who permit[s] one half the citizens thus to trample on the rights of the other. . . . And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis—a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? . . . Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever. . . . [T]he way, I hope, [is] preparing under the auspices of Heaven for a total emancipation.
⁶⁶

In 1784 Jefferson returned to service in the Continental Congress where he introduced a provision to end slavery in every territory that would eventually become a state in the nation. His proposal stated that “after the year 1800 of the Christian era, there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the said states.”
⁶⁷

Jefferson's law fell one vote short of passage. As he explained:

There were ten states present. Six voted unanimously for it, three against it, and one was divided. And seven votes being requisite to decide the proposition affirmatively [i.e., to pass the measure under the Articles of Confederation], it was lost. . . . Thus we see the fate of millions unborn hanging on the tongue of one man, & heaven was silent in that awful moment! But it is to be hoped it will not always be silent & that the friends to the rights of human nature will in the end prevail.
⁶⁸

103

In 1786, while Jefferson was serving as American ambassador in France, he responded to an article in a French encyclopedia written by French official Louis Dominique de Meunier stating that Virginia did not allow the emancipation of slaves. Jefferson wanted to make sure that de Meunier knew not only that he had wanted it otherwise but also that someday it
would
be otherwise:

We must await with patience the workings of an overruling Providence & hope that it 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.
⁶⁹