Fluent Essays

Discuss the following reading: Norton A: 702-704; 712-716 Biography and From Notes on the State of Virginia: "Query XIV. Laws [Slavery]" (Jefferson) 7 0 2 | T H O M A S J E F F E R S O N given only to waste itself, as it were, on an im mense desert of space glitter- ing with shows. It is only by contemplating what he calls the starry heavens, as the book and school of science, that he discovers any use in their being vis i ble to him, or any advantage resulting from his immensity of vision. But when he con- templates the subject in this light, he sees an additional motive for saying, that nothing was made in vain; for in vain would be this power of vision if it taught man nothing. 1793 1794 THOM AS JEFFER SON 1743–1826 In June 1776, the Second Continental Congress met in Philadelphia to consider whether to declare their alliance of colonies in de pen dent of Great Britain. The delegates turned to a thirty- two- year- old representative from Virginia, Thomas Jef- ferson, to be the principal drafter of a statement that the full congress would then debate, amend, and vote to either accept or reject. Jefferson was an awkward speaker but a talented prose stylist, and his reputation as a writer had preceded him to Phil- adelphia. While serving in the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1774, he had written an induential and daring pamphlet, A Summary View of the Rights of British Amer- i ca, which denied all parliamentary authority over Amer i ca and argued that ties to the British monarchy were voluntary and not irrevocable. On June 11, 1776, after some maneuvering by John Adams, Jefferson was chosen to head the committee charged with drafting a declaration of in de pen dence. The other members of the com- mittee who helped Jefferson re"ne his draft were Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston. On June 28, the draft declaration was presented to Congress, where it underwent some further modi"cations before it could pass unanimously, as it did on July 4. These alterations were a source of regret to Jef- ferson. In his Autobiography (1829), he included the original draft and indicated changes made by the Congress. One of the omitted passages speaks to a central tension of Jefferson’s legacy. Admired as a prophet of equality and liberty, he is also widely recognized as an owner of some two hundred slaves, including several men and women who were most likely his children with the enslaved woman Sally Hemings. This paradox in Jefferson’s personal life resonates with a larger circumstance memorably captured by the En glish writer Samuel Johnson in his 1775 pamphlet “Taxation No Tyranny.” “Why is it,” Johnson asked, “we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” In his draft declaration, Jefferson seeks to turn the tables by blaming George III, “the christian king of Great Britain,” for refusing to allow the colonists to limit the slave trade and inciting enslaved people “to rise in arms among us, . . . thus paying off former crimes committed against the LIBERTIES of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.” In this formulation, Jefferson proposes an equivalence between the colonists, who are said to be resisting “slavery” to Great Britain, and those subjected to race- based chattel T H O M A S J E F F E R S O N | 7 0 3 slavery. At the same time, he invokes the specter of racial warfare—of whites against the “merciless Indian savages” as well as black slaves—to unite the colonists against the Crown. Jefferson wrote his Autobiography in 1821, and he may have been prompted to restore this passage of the draft declaration by a national crisis regarding whether to admit Missouri to the Union as a slave state and Maine as a free state. On March  3, 1820, the Missouri Compromise legislated a balance between free and slave states. Writing of the slave system in April 1820, he observed that “we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self- preservation in the other.” As the restored text of the Declara- tion shows, Jefferson’s fear of race war had long been a power ful—and powerfully distorting— factor in his thought. In the 1780s, it led him in Notes on the State of Virginia to support the colonization movement that sought to remove people of African descent from the United States. Jefferson’s complex stance is related to his roots in the Virginia planter society that had developed over the eigh teenth century. He was born at the Shadwell plantation, in what is now Albemarle County, Virginia. His mother, Jane Ran- dolph, came from one of the state’s most prominent families. His father, Peter Jefferson, was a county of"cial and surveyor. When Thomas was fourteen, his father died, and he inherited twenty- seven hundred acres of land and slaves to work it. Over the years he added to this expanse of property, which reached a peak of almost ten thousand acres. In 1760 Jefferson entered the College of William and Mary, in Williamsburg, the capital of Virginia. There Jefferson met three men who strongly induenced his life: Governor Francis Fauquier, a fellow of the Royal Society, a famous scienti"c organ- ization based in Eng land; George Wythe, one of the best teachers of law in the colonies; and Dr. William Small, an emigrant from Scotland who introduced Jef- ferson to the Scottish Enlightenment, including the work of Francis Hutcheson, author of An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), and Henry Home, Lord Kames, author of Essays on the Princi ples of Morality and Natu- ral Religion (1751), whose ideas shaped his aesthetic and po liti cal thought. Jeffer- son remained in Williamsburg to study law after graduation and was admitted to the bar in 1765. Three years later he began clearing the mountaintop at his plantation, named Monticello, Italian for “ little mountain.” There, he eventually built the neoclassical mansion of his own design, completing the proj ect in 1808. The year after he started his building proj ect, he was elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses and began a prominent career in the legislature. After serving in the Continental Con- gress during the catalytic summer of 1776, he left to take up a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates that September. He was elected governor in 1779 and reelected the following year. Jefferson’s term of of"ce came to an ignominious end after the British captured Richmond in 1781. Jefferson and the legislature moved to Charlot- tesville, and he and the legislators barely escaped imprisonment when the pursuing British Army descended on them at Monticello. Jefferson’s ensuing resignation and the lack of preparations for the defense of the city were held against him, and it was some time before he regained the con"dence of Virginians. From 1781 to 1784, Jefferson withdrew from public life and remained at Monti- cello, completing his only book, Notes on the State of Virginia, a work of natu ral and social history that also pres ents Jefferson’s thinking on a range of volatile issues, including slavery and race, religious liberty, and the economic basis of the future United States. He was appointed minister to France in 1784 and served with Benjamin Franklin on the commission that signed the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Revolutionary War. He returned to Monticello in 1789, and the follow- ing year George Washington appointed him to be the "rst secretary of state under the newly adopted Constitution. After three years, Jefferson retired once again and 7 0 4 | T H O M A S J E F F E R S O N 1. On June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia proposed to the Second Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, that “ these united Colonies are, and of a right ought to be, free and in de pen dent states.” Lee’s resolution was passed on July 2, and the Declaration was adopted on July 4 with the changes noted by Jef- ferson in this text, taken from his Autobiography. On August 2, a copy on parchment was signed by all the delegates but three, who signed later. The text is from The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (1903), edited by  A.  A. Lipscomb and  A.  E. Bergh. temporarily withdrew to Monticello. He ran for president in 1796, losing to John Adams and taking the of"ce of vice president instead, as was then the practice. However, he won the watershed election of 1800, becoming the nation’s third pres- ident and the "rst to be inaugurated in Washington,  D.C. He named Benjamin Latrobe surveyor of public buildings and worked with Latrobe in planning a great city to be the new nation’s capital. When Jefferson returned to Monticello in 1809, his public life was over. In his later years, he kept up a copious correspondence. His exchanges with John Adams offer a study in contrasting personalities as well as fascinating insights into revolu- tionary history. On the Fourth of July, 1826—the "ftieth anniversary of the Dec- laration of In de pen dence—Jefferson died a few hours before Adams, his longtime collaborator, rival, and correspondent. At the time of his death, he was deeply in debt, and his family was forced to sell Monticello. Despite the discomfort with the slave system that he frequently expressed, Jefferson ultimately freed a total of just seven of the people he held in bondage, all members of the extended Hemings family. President of the United States, "rst secretary of state, minister to France, gover- nor of Virginia, and congressman, Thomas Jefferson once said that he wished to be remembered for only three things: drafting the Declaration of In de pen dence, writ- ing and supporting the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1786), and founding the University of Virginia (1819). Jefferson might well have included a number of other accomplishments in this list: a remarkable architect, he designed not just Monticello but also the Virginia state capitol and the original buildings for the University of Virginia; he had a library of some ten thousand volumes, which served as the basis for the Library of Congress, and a collection of paintings and sculpture that made him the greatest patron of the arts in the early United States; and he was known the world over for his spirit of scienti"c inquiry and as the creator of several remarkable inventions. The three acts for which he wished to be remembered testify to Jefferson’s life- long passion to liberate the human mind from tyranny, whether imposed by the state, the Church, or human ignorance. The fact that he was unable to liberate his own mind from the tyranny of racialist thought remains part of his ambiguous leg- acy. The Declaration of In de pen dence has directly induenced in de pen dence move- ments around the world, from Haiti to India and from Venezuela to Rhodesia. It offers an im por tant argument for viewing “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” as “unalienable Rights” best achieved through the exercise of popular government. From The Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson1 From The Declaration of In de pen dence * * * It appearing in the course of these debates, that the colonies of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Mary land, and South Carolina were not yet matured for falling from the parent stem, but that they were fast 7 1 2 | T H O M A S J E F F E R S O N 5. This sentence fragment represents a pro- posed revision to the Virginia state constitu- tion (“the act”). 6. Abilities, capacities. From Query XIV. Laws * * * [slavery] To emancipate all slaves born after passing the act.5 The bill reported by the revisors does not itself contain this proposition; but an amendment contain- ing it was prepared, to be offered to the legislature whenever the bill should be taken up, and further directing, that they should continue with their par- ents to a certain age, then be brought up, at the public expence, to tillage, arts or sciences, according to their geniusses,6 till the females should be eigh- teen, and the males twenty- one years of age, when they should be colonized to such place as the circumstances of the time should render most proper, sending them out with arms, implements of house hold and of the handicraft arts, seeds, pairs of the useful domestic animals, &c. to declare them a free and in de pen dent people, and extend to them our alliance and protection, till they shall have acquired strength; and to send vessels at the same time to other parts of the world for an equal number of white inhabitants; to induce whom to migrate hither, proper encouragements were to be proposed. It will prob ably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expence of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave? 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 pro- duce convulsions which will prob ably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.— To these objections, which are po liti cal, may be added others, which are physical and moral. The "rst difference which strikes us is that of colour. Whether the black of the negro resides in the reticular membrane between the skin and scarf- skin, or in the scarf- skin itself; whether it proceeds from the colour of the blood, the colour of the bile, or from that of some other secretion, the difference is "xed in nature, and is as real as if its seat and cause were better known to us. And is this difference of no importance? Is it not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty in the two races? Are not the "ne mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of colour in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immoveable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race? Add to these, dowing hair, a more elegant symmetry of form, their own judgment in favour of the whites, declared by their preference of them, as uniformly as is the preference of the Oranootan for the black women over those of his own species. The circumstance of superior beauty, is thought worthy atten- tion in the propagation of our horses, dogs, and other domestic animals; why not in that of man? Besides those of colour, "gure, and hair, there are other physical distinctions proving a difference of race. They have less hair on the face and body. They secrete less by the kidnies, and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odour. This N O T E S O N T H E S T A T E O F V I R G I N I A | 7 1 3 7. Crawford [Jefferson’s note]. British scientist Adair Crawford (1748–1795). 8. Greek mathematician (d. c. 300 b.c.e.). greater degree of transpiration renders them more tolerant of heat, and less so of cold, than the whites. Perhaps too a difference of structure in the pul- monary apparatus, which a late ingenious experimentalist7 has discovered to be the principal regulator of animal heat, may have disabled them from extricating, in the act of inspiration, so much of that duid from the outer air, or obliged them in expiration, to part with more of it. They seem to require less sleep. A black, after hard labour through the day, will be induced by the slightest amusements to sit up till midnight, or later, though know- ing he must be out with the "rst dawn of the morning. They are at least as brave, and more adventuresome. But this may perhaps proceed from a want of forethought, which prevents their seeing a danger till it be pres ent. When pres ent, they do not go through it with more coolness or steadiness than the whites. They are more ardent after their female: but love seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation. Their griefs are transient. Those numberless afdictions, which render it doubtful whether heaven has given life to us in mercy or in wrath, are less felt, and sooner forgotten with them. In general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than redection. To this must be ascribed their disposition to sleep when abstracted from their diversions, and unemployed in labour. An animal whose body is at rest, and who does not redect, must be disposed to sleep of course. Comparing them by their facul- ties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid;8 and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous. It would be unfair to follow them to Africa for this investigation. We will consider them here, on the same stage with the whites, and where the facts are not apocryphal on which a judgment is to be formed. It will be right to make great allowances for the difference of condition, of education, of con- versation, of the sphere in which they move. Many millions of them have been brought to, and born in Amer i ca. Most of them indeed have been con- "ned to tillage, to their own homes, and their own society: yet many have been so situated, that they might have availed themselves of the conversa- tion of their masters; many have been brought up to the handicraft arts, and from that circumstance have always been associated with the whites. Some have been liberally educated, and all have lived in countries where the arts and sciences are cultivated to a considerable degree, and have had before their eyes samples of the best works from abroad. The Indians, with no advantages of this kind, will often carve "gures on their pipes not destitute of design and merit. They will crayon out an animal, a plant, or a country, so as to prove the existence of a germ in their minds which only wants cul- tivation. They astonish you with strokes of the most sublime oratory; such as prove their reason and sentiment strong, their imagination glowing and elevated. But never yet could I "nd that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never see even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture. In music they are more generally gifted than the whites with 7 1 4 | T H O M A S J E F F E R S O N 9. Estrus: period of (sexual) receptivity and fer- tility; heat. 1. Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753–1784), the "rst published African American female poet, whose poems appear later in this volume. 2. In his mock- heroic Dunciad, the En glish poet Alexander Pope (1688–1744) satirizes hack writ- ers. Jefferson is saying that just as the severely unhealthy and deformed Pope was not the myth- ological hero Hercules, so Wheatley was less tal- ented than Pope’s targets. 3. Black Briton, composer, actor, and writer (c. 1729–1780), known for his posthumously pub- lished letters, an early account of African slavery by a former slave. 4. As in the highly inventive novel Tristram Shandy, by the Anglo- Irish writer Laurence Sterne (1713–1768). 5. I.e., during the period when Augustus (63 b.c.e.–14 c.e.) was Rome’s "rst emperor (27 b.c.e.–14 c.e.). accurate ears for tune and time, and they have been found capable of imag- ining a small catch. Whether they will be equal to the composition of a more extensive run of melody, or of complicated harmony, is yet to be proved. Mis- ery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry.— Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry. Love is the peculiar œstrum9 of the poet. Their love is ardent, but it kindles the senses only, not the imagination. Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Whately,1 but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism. The heroes of the Dunciad are to her, as Her- cules to the author of that poem.2 Ignatius Sancho3 has approached nearer to merit in composition; yet his letters do more honour to the heart than the head. They breathe the purest effusions of friendship and general phi- lanthropy, and shew how great a degree of the latter may be compounded with strong religious zeal. He is often happy in the turn of his compliments, and his stile is easy and familiar, except when he affects a Shandean4 fabri- cation of words. But his imagination is wild and extravagant, escapes inces- santly from every restraint of reason and taste, and, in the course of its vagaries, leaves a tract of thought as incoherent and eccentric, as is the course of a meteor through the sky. His subjects should often have led him to a pro cess of sober reasoning: yet we "nd him always substituting senti- ment for demonstration. Upon the whole, though we admit him to the "rst place among those of his own colour who have presented themselves to the public judgment, yet when we compare him with the writers of the race among whom he lived, and particularly with the epistolary class, in which he has taken his own stand, we are compelled to enroll him at the bottom of the column. This criticism supposes the letters published under his name to be genuine, and to have received amendment from no other hand; points which would not be of easy investigation. The improvement of the blacks in body and mind, in the "rst instance of their mixture with the whites, has been observed by every one, and proves that their inferiority is not the effect merely of their condition of life. We know that among the Romans, about the Augustan age especially,5 the condition of their slaves was much more deplorable than that of the blacks on the continent of Amer i ca. The two sexes were con"ned in separate apartments, because to raise a child cost the master more than to buy one. Cato, for a very restricted indulgence to his slaves in this par tic u lar, took from them a certain price. But in this coun- try the slaves multiply as fast as the free inhabitants. Their situation and manners place the commerce between the two sexes almost without restraint.— The same Cato, on a princi ple of œconomy, always sold his sick N O T E S O N T H E S T A T E O F V I R G I N I A | 7 1 5 6. I.e., from chapter  2 of De Re Rusticâ, also known as De Agri Cultura (Latin for Of Agricul- ture or Of Farming), by the Roman statesman Cato the Elder (234–149 b.c.e.). The Latin quo- tation is preceded by its En glish translation. 7. Pres ent- day Tiber Island, in the Tiber River, which runs through Rome. “Expose”: abandon to die. 8. Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero (10 b.c.e.–54 c.e., reigned 41–54). 9. Publius Vedius Pollio (d. 15 b.c.e.), Roman equestrian and friend of Augustus. 1. Respectively, Greek phi los o pher in Rome (c. 55–135 c.e.), Roman dramatist (186 or 185– ?159 b.c.e.), and Roman Fabulist (c. 15 b.c.e– c. 50 c.e.). and superannuated slaves. He gives it as a standing precept to a master vis- iting his farm, to sell his old oxen, old wagons, old tools, old and diseased servants, and every thing else become useless. “Vendat boves vetulos, plaus- trum vetus, ferramenta vetera, servum senem, servum morbosum, & si quid aliud supersit vendat.” Cato de re rusticâ. c. 2.6 The American slaves cannot enumerate this among the injuries and insults they receive. It was the com- mon practice to expose in the island of Æsculapius, in the Tyber,7 diseased slaves, whose cure was like to become tedious. The Emperor Claudius,8 by an edict, gave freedom to such of them as should recover, and "rst declared, that if any person chose to kill rather than to expose them, it should be deemed hom i cide. The exposing them is a crime of which no instance has existed with us; and were it to be followed by death, it would be punished capitally. We are told of a certain Vedius Pollio,9 who, in the presence of Augustus, would have given a slave as food to his "sh, for having broken a glass. With the Romans, the regular method of taking the evidence of their slaves was under torture. Here it has been thought better never to resort to their evidence. When a master was murdered, all his slaves, in the same house, or within hearing, were condemned to death. Here punishment falls on the guilty only, and as precise proof is required against him as against a freeman. Yet notwithstanding these and other discouraging circumstances among the Romans, their slaves were often their rarest artists. They excelled too in science, insomuch as to be usually employed as tutors to their mas- ter’s children. Epictetus, Terence, and Phædrus,1 were slaves. But they were of the race of whites. It is not their condition then, but nature, which has produced the distinction.— Whether further observation will or will not ver- ify the conjecture, that nature has been less bountiful to them in the endowments of the head, I believe that in those of the heart she will be found to have done them justice. That disposition to theft with which they have been branded, must be ascribed to their situation, and not to any depravity of the moral sense. The man, in whose favour no laws of property exist, prob- ably feels himself less bound to res pect those made in favour of others. When arguing for ourselves, we lay it down as a fundamental, that laws, to be just, must give a reciprocation of right: that, without this, they are mere arbitrary rules of conduct, founded in force, and not in conscience: and it is a prob lem which I give to the master to solve, whether the religious precepts against the violation of property were not framed for him as well as his slave? And whether the slave may not as justi"ably take a little from one, who has taken all from him, as he may slay one who would slay him? That a change in the relations in which a man is placed should change his ideas of moral right and wrong, is neither new, nor peculiar to the colour of the blacks. Homer tells us it was so 2600 years ago. 7 1 6 | T H O M A S J E F F E R S O N 2. I.e., book 17, line 323 of the Odyssey, by the ancient Greek epic poet Homer. The Greek quotation is followed by Alexander Pope’s translation (1726). ’Ημισυ, γαζ τ’ dρ∈τdς dποαAνυళαι ∈DρAθπα Ζ∈Bز. ’Αν∈ροز, ∈υτ’ gν μιν κατb δaλιον nμαζ Fλησιν. Od. 17. 323.2 Jove "x’d it certain, that what ever day Makes man a slave, takes half his worth away. But the slaves of which Homer speaks were whites. Notwithstanding these considerations which must weaken their res pect for the laws of property, we "nd among them numerous instances of the most rigid integrity, and as many as among their better instructed masters, of benevolence, gratitude, and unshaken "delity.— The opinion, that they are inferior in the faculties of rea- son and imagination, must be hazarded with great dif"dence. To justify a general conclusion, requires many observations, even where the subject may be submitted to the Anatomical knife, to Optical glasses, to analy sis by "re, or by solvents. How much more then where it is a faculty, not a sub- stance, we are examining; where it eludes the research of all the senses; where the conditions of its existence are vari ous and variously combined; where the effects of those which are pres ent or absent bid de"ance to cal- culation; let me add too, as a circumstance of great tenderness, where our conclusion would degrade a whole race of men from the rank in the scale of beings which their Creator may perhaps have given them. 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 natu ral history. I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind. It is not against experience to suppose, that dif fer ent spe- cies of the same genus, or va ri e ties of the same species, may possess dif fer- ent quali"cations. Will not a lover of natu ral history then, one who views the gradations in all the races of animals with the eye of philosophy, excuse an effort to keep those in the department of man as distinct as nature has formed them? This unfortunate difference of colour, and perhaps of fac- ulty, is a power ful obstacle to the emancipation of these people. Many of their advocates, while they wish to vindicate the liberty of human nature, are anxious also to preserve its dignity and beauty. Some of these, embar- rassed by the question “What further is to be done with them?” join them- selves in opposition with those who are actuated by sordid avarice only. Among the Romans emancipation required but one effort. The slave, when made free, might mix with, without staining the blood of his master. But with us a second is necessary, unknown to history. When freed, he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture.