Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves

by Henry Wiencek

  “Is this difference of no importance?” Jefferson asked rhetorically. He claimed that color had tremendous importance because skin color was the foundation of human beauty, and because black skin rendered the slaves impenetrable to the master’s gaze, made their responses and thoughts inscrutable; “eternal monotony…reigns in the countenances”; an “immoveable veil of black…covers all the emotions.”†

  Jefferson said that white people’s “flowing hair” and “more elegant symmetry of form” made them more sexually attractive than blacks. He claimed that all blacks lusted after whites. In triumphant proof, he wrote the ill-famed phrase—that black people seek sex with white people “as uniformly as is the preference of the Oranootan for the black women over those of his own species.” Jefferson had extracted this tidbit from Buffon’s report of travelers’ accounts of apes kidnapping and raping African women. Jefferson probably summoned up the fantastical image of an ape mating with an African woman to deflect attention from the actual reality of Virginia society—the pervasive rape of black women by white men.

  Seeming to assume that his readers in the French community of Encyclopedists and philosophes might have seen very few Africans, Jefferson presented a scientific description: “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 greater degree of transpiration renders them more tolerant of heat, and less so of cold, than the whites.” Blacks seemed to be indefatigable—“they seem to require less sleep”—though not in a productive way: “A black, after hard labour through the day, will be induced by the slightest amusements to sit up till midnight, or later, though knowing he must be out with the first dawn of the morning.”

  He enumerated racial differences in the emotions: “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.” He declared that “their griefs are transient,” that the “numberless afflictions” of their lives “are less felt, and sooner forgotten with them,” which led him to the conclusion: “In general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection.”

  In memory he judged “they are equal to the whites,” but “in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous” and “in reason much inferior,” advancing as proof that it would be all but impossible to find a black person “capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid.” (One might ask how many white Virginians could comprehend Euclid.) By this very imperfect logic Jefferson concluded that blacks were innately mentally inferior: “It is not their condition then, but nature, which has produced the distinction.” It was essential to Jefferson’s purpose that he establish in the minds of his readers that nature had produced the distinction and Jefferson was merely observing it, that he prove that black inferiority sprang from nature, whose laws ruled existence. But as John Stuart Mill observed: “Was there ever any domination which did not appear natural to those who possessed it?”7

  Having stated his contention, Jefferson backed away from it: “Further observation” was needed to verify the “conjecture” of inferiority, to be sure that “nature has been less bountiful to them in the endowments of the head.” Elsewhere he wrote that it was only “the opinion, that they are inferior in the faculties of reason and imagination,” and “a suspicion only.” These conjectures, opinions, and suspicions “must be hazarded with great diffidence.” To achieve certainty, the subject under discussion, in this case, human beings, had to be “submitted to the Anatomical knife, to Optical glasses, to analysis by fire, or by solvents,” and Jefferson the scientist was not prepared to go that far. He contradicted himself in another section where he wrote that slavery compels the concealment of talents, that the slave “must lock up the faculties of his nature.”

  Though he argued that the griefs of the blacks were transient, he admitted that the slave had the ability to see into the future, where he could perceive “his own miserable condition” passed perpetually to “the endless generations proceeding from him.”

  Jefferson wrote Notes at a time when Revolutionary fervor made some leading Virginians question slavery, while others began freeing their own slaves because of religious principles. Quakers and the new “dissenting” sects of Baptists and Methodists campaigned against slavery as an affront to the Almighty.

  Virginia came close to outlawing the continuation of slavery. When its legislature was putting together a new state constitution—just before Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence—George Mason submitted a draft that stated “all men are born equally free and independant, and have certain inherent natural Rights, of which they can not by any Compact, deprive or divest their Posterity.” This declaration would have ended perpetual, hereditary slavery in Virginia. But when Mason’s text was put to a vote, the legislature added a qualification that men take possession of their rights “when they enter into a state of society,” thus eliminating slaves, who were not adjudged part of society. It later sharpened this point when it limited citizenship to “all white persons born within the territory of the commonwealth.” But then, remarkably, it reversed course somewhat a few years later to include black people as citizens if they were already free; it deleted “white” from the citizenship definition and declared that “all free persons” born in Virginia were citizens.8

  As the historian Eva Sheppard Wolf writes, “Several Revolutionary-era Virginia laws seemed to signal a shift toward anti-slavery policies that could have led to universal emancipation.” Clashing notions of race and liberty “created turbulence and disarray out of a much more settled and ordered colonial world.” At this critical moment, Jefferson broke from the dominant progressive thinking of his time to construct an image of the black person as the Other, a being with no place in American society. Putting a scholarly sheen on the rationalizations of slaveholders, Jefferson made himself the theorist and spokesman for the reactionaries. “Jefferson was not as torn as he is taken to be,” writes the historian Michael Zuckerman. “He was not as confined by his culture as his apologists have often claimed…. In regard to race as in regard to so much else, he was a leader.” In a letter to a newspaper one Virginian referred to slaves as “the greatest part of the property of thousands of our best citizens, most of whom have acquired their slave property at the expence of much labour or risk.” Another Virginian said that what is useful for the majority is legal: “General utility is the basis of all law and justice, and on this principle, is the right of slavery founded.” Another Southerner wrote to a Pennsylvania newspaper to insist that emancipation was “totally blind to our ease and interest…the certain consequence would be that we must work ourselves.”9

  Jefferson’s intellectual peers in Europe and America rejected the idea that black people could be legitimately held as slaves. Montesquieu derided the notion that racial difference could justify slavery: “That all black persons might be slaves is as ridiculous as…that all red haired persons should be hanged.”10 On the subject of slavery Samuel Johnson remarked to his biographer James Boswell that “men in their original state were equal” and that although many countries may have had slavery in the past, he doubted whether slavery “can ever be supposed the natural condition of man.” A criminal or prisoner of war could be enslaved, “but it is very doubtful whether he can entail that servitude on his descendants.”11

  In Notes, Jefferson compiles an overwhelming bill of indictment against the black race that unavoidably creates the impression that their enslavement is justifiable, but he never explicitly comes to that conclusion—he leaves it to the reader’s judgment. When Jefferson sent the manuscript of Notes for comment to Charles Thomson of Pennsylvania, who had served as the secretary of the Continental Congress and inherited slaves and a tobacco plantation, Thomson clearly discerned the thrust of Jefferson’s argument. He suggested deletions: “
though I am much pleased with the dissertation of the difference between the Whites and blacks & am inclined to think the latter a race lower on the scale of being yet for that very reason & because such an opinion might seem to justify slavery I should be inclined to leave it out.” Thomson and his wife freed their slaves.12

  One of Jefferson’s closest intellectual acquaintances, Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, also took a careful scientific look at race and, as a result, helped establish the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. In keeping with many other thinkers of the time who speculated on the effects that environment might have on humans, Rush postulated that the heat of the African climate had made its inhabitants indolent in mind and body; he also theorized that the Africans were dark-skinned because they suffered from genetic leprosy, which not only darkened the skin but thickened the lips, flattened the nose, made hair tightly wired, and increased the libido. Rush and others were certain that the American climate would eventually “cure” the Africans of their dark skin.

  Yet Rush insisted that, dark-skinned or not, indolent or not, the Africans were as human as whites: “Human Nature is the same in all Ages and Countries; and all the difference we perceive in its Characters in respect to Virtue and Vice, Knowledge and Ignorance, may be accounted for from Climate, Country, Degrees of Civilization, form of Government, or other accidental causes.” Furthermore, he declared, “all the claims of superiority of the whites over the blacks, on account of their color, are founded alike in ignorance and inhumanity.”13

  While Jefferson pleaded for extra time for America to develop its geniuses and strengths, he consigned the blacks to perpetual inferiority. They had already enjoyed exposure to white society and had not shown any signs of uplift. Though “most of them indeed have been confined to tillage, to their own homes, and their own society,” Jefferson said that some slaves “have been liberally educated…and have had before their eyes samples of the best works from abroad…. But never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration.”

  He had to backtrack immediately to account for the most famous and most acclaimed poet in America, Phillis Wheatley, who was, very unfortunately for Jefferson’s argument, unquestionably black. She had been brought to Boston as an enslaved African at the age of about six, learned English and Latin as a child, and began writing poetry as a teenager. Her published works earned accolades on both sides of the Atlantic. Among her admirers were Voltaire, who praised Wheatley’s “very good English verse,” George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and even the naval hero John Paul Jones, who addressed her as “the celebrated Phillis the African favorite of the Nine [Muses] and Apollo” when he sent her some of his own verses. Dr. Rush cited her as a proof of black ability, listing her accomplishments when he wrote in 1775, “We have many well attested anecdotes of as sublime and disinterested virtue among them as ever adorned a Roman or a Christian character.”14 Franklin went to see Wheatley when she was in London, a literary celebrity on book tour. The acclaim irked Jefferson: “The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.”15

  To account for this apparent refutation of his inferiority argument, he redefined poetry, insisting that a poem had to be about love—a definition that would exclude a large portion of the world’s literature. He then declared that Wheatley, who seems to have enraged him, could not be a poet because she wrote about religion.

  One of Wheatley’s most famous works not only undermined Jefferson’s contention that blacks could not write but stood as proof of African-American loyalty to the American cause. In 1775, Wheatley wrote a long paean to the American army facing the British in Boston and sent the verses to General Washington, who personally arranged for the poem’s publication and invited Wheatley to his headquarters. Elsewhere in Notes, Jefferson suggested it was impossible that blacks could be patriotic because slavery had irreparably destroyed their “amor patriae,” and without love of country blacks could never live in America. A patriotic Wheatley compromised his argument as much as Wheatley the poet did.

  One verse of Wheatley’s poem in praise of Washington’s army challenged Jefferson’s philosophy on a deeper level, advancing the notion that love of country and love of liberty transcended racial divides to create a new American identity under God, a new class of people the poet called “freedom’s heaven-defended race.” Wheatley’s formula—simple, powerful, hopeful, and self-evident—linked the idea of freedom with divine Providence, with E pluribus unum.16

  In Notes, Jefferson described the status of blacks as fixed by nature and unalterable, but he shifted his thinking about Native Americans depending on the political situation. In the Declaration of Independence he had railed against the depredations of “the merciless Indian Savages” whom the king had unleashed against white Virginians. Their mode of warfare, he wrote, “is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.” As governor, Jefferson instructed his military commander in the West, George Rogers Clark, to unleash Anglo-Saxon ferocity: “If we are to wage a campaign against these Indians [the goal] should be their extermination, or their removal beyond the lakes of the Illinois river.”17 He followed with a remark that echoed his views on blacks: “The same world will scarcely do for them and for us.”

  But by the time he wrote Notes, the military crisis had passed, Indians would never again threaten Virginia, and his attitude toward them softened. They were, he thought, of the same species as whites. He praised Native American artworks, oratory, and even tobacco pipes: “The Indians, with no advantages of [association with white society], will often carve figures on their pipes not destitute of design and merit.” He judged “their reason and sentiment strong, their imagination glowing and elevated.” He went further in a letter written in 1785: “I beleive the Indian…to be in body and mind equal to the whiteman.”18 As president, Jefferson adopted a program of civilizing the Indians, believing that if they adopted white customs, then the two races could live together in the same world. In remarks he made to Indians while he was president, he said: “You will mix with us by marriage, your blood will run in our veins, and will spread with us over this great island.”19 Invoking the image of harmony that was so crucial to his worldview, he envisioned a joint future for whites and Native Americans: “The ultimate point of rest and happiness for [the Indians] is to let our settlements and theirs meet and blend together, to intermix and become one people.”20

  Jefferson may have welcomed Native Americans into the brotherhood of races because he was already kin to them. He had a family tie to Native Americans through his Randolph cousins at Tuckahoe plantation, who were descended from Pocahontas. The relationship came closer to Jefferson when his daughter Martha married Thomas Mann Randolph of Tuckahoe, mingling the bloodline of the Founder with that of the Powhatans. On a sheet of paper found among Jefferson’s records, Thomas Mann Randolph charted his family tree back to Pocahontas.21 Randolph left no explanation on the sheet, so we do not know if he calculated out of genealogical curiosity or racial anxiety, but he worked out the degree of Indian blood in each generation. Though the relationship was distant, the Randolphs bore its mark. Jefferson’s overseer Edmund Bacon commented that three of Jefferson’s grandchildren “had the fresh rosy countenance of the Jefferson family. The rest of the family, as far as I can remember…had the Randolph complexion, which was dark and Indianlike. You know they claim to be descended from Pocahontas. Virginia and Cornelia [Jefferson’s granddaughters] were tall, active, and fine-looking, with very dark complexions.”22

  Addressing the philosophes of France in defense of the rising nation, Jefferson thus turned the troublesome subject of slavery on its head and presented a progressive image of Virginia—yes, we have slavery, but we are working to get rid of it. He described in detail an emancipation plan he had helped to draft that Virginia’s legislature would soon consider.23 Ecstatic at the news, the Paris intelligentsia heaped praise on the plan to abolish this “horrible pract
ice, the shame of humanity,” and hailed Jefferson as a philosophe.24

  Under the plan as Jefferson accounted for it in Notes, enslaved adults would continue to toil as slaves their entire lives, but their adolescent children would be taken from them and put into training, at public expense, in “tillage, arts or sciences, according to their geniusses.”* When women reached age eighteen and men twenty-one, they would be equipped by the state with “arms, implements of household and of the handicraft arts, feeds, pairs of the useful domestic animals, &c.” and sent away to a place to be determined, where the United States could “declare them a free and independant people, and extend to them our alliance and protection, till they shall have acquired strength.” Jefferson did not specify where the people would be sent. To replace the lost labor, the state would dispatch fleets of vessels to find white immigrants, lured by “proper encouragements.”

  Jefferson knew that this elaborate and costly plan—a plan cruel to the people who would be wrenched from their families and exiled—would seem entirely unnecessary to a foreigner: “It will probably 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?” He hastened to explain his reasons. He imagined that keeping blacks in Virginia would lead inevitably to a race war: “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.”

  Jefferson phrased the other compelling reason to expatriate blacks in philosophical terms: “Will not a lover of natural 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 faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.”