Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves
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These men took America at its word, particularly the words of Jefferson. Gazing across the Atlantic in hope and expectation, Condorcet declared, “The spectacle of the equality that reigns in the United States and which assures its peace and prosperity can be useful in Europe…. What had been for [European liberals] only words and paper had, in America, become flesh and blood.”3 What Americans had accomplished made European hopes soar: “everything tells us that we are bordering the period of one of the greatest revolutions of the human race.” 4
The equality was not universal. When the fighting subsided during the Revolutionary War after the Battle of Yorktown, Chastellux had taken the opportunity to visit Jefferson at Monticello. On his way he saw that in Virginia the planters had impoverished free whites working alongside still enslaved blacks. Chastellux wrote that he had never, “since I crossed the sea,” seen white poverty in America to compare with what he found in this slave state:
Humanity has still more to suffer from the state of poverty in which a great number of white people live in Virginia. It is in [Virginia], for the first time since I crossed the sea, that I have seen poor people. For, among these rich plantations where the Negro alone is wretched, one often finds miserable huts inhabited by whites, whose wan looks and ragged garments bespeak poverty. At first I found it hard to understand how, in a country where there is still so much land to clear, men who do not refuse to work could remain in misery; but I have since learned that all these useless lands and those immense estates, with which Virginia is still covered, have their proprietors. Nothing is more common than to see them possessing five or six thousand acres of land, but exploiting only as much of it as their Negroes can cultivate. Yet they will not give away or even sell the smallest portion of it, because they are attached to their possessions and always hope to eventually increase the numbers of their Negroes.5
While Jefferson served in France, a tide of anti-American propaganda poured from England’s presses. In order to ruin America’s chances of forming commercial alliances with the Continent, the British spread stories that the new American experiment in republican government was sinking into disorder and bankruptcy. “The British ministry,” Jefferson wrote, “have so long hired their gazetteers to repeat and model into every form lies about our being in anarchy, that the world has at length believed them.”6 Naturally suspicious of republican government, many French officials were inclined to believe the propaganda. France’s small circle of ardent Americanists formed a bulwark against it.
In response to British slanders, both Jefferson and Franklin emphasized America’s virtue, enlightenment, liberality, and commitment to equality. Condorcet had declared that equality assures a nation’s peace and prosperity. Jefferson wrote that agricultural pursuits made the United States “more virtuous, more free, and more happy.”7 In his campaign to break the traditional, royal-sponsored monopolies that governed the European economy, Jefferson argued a liberal ideology, pressing the notion that free trade emerged from intellectual enlightenment and the advance of “liberal sentiment,” whereas monopolies had their roots in “remote and unenlightened periods.”8
But to keep the support of the Americanists, Jefferson had to confront an ideology of human rights purer than his own. An outspoken opponent of slavery (and a distinguished mathematician and economist), Condorcet wrote that the slave owner “abjured his own rights” and that “to reduce a man to slavery, to buy him, to sell him, to keep him in servitude, all these are real crimes that are worse than stealing.”9 He insisted, in direct contradiction of Jefferson, that “Nature has endowed [blacks] with the same genius, the same judgment, the same virtues as the Whites.” Addressing the slaves directly, Condorcet wrote, “I know how often your fidelity, your probity, your firmness have put your masters to the blush.”10 He advanced a proposal to compel the French government to “examine the means of destroying the slave trade and preparing for the destruction of black slavery.”11
With men such as Condorcet in mind, Jefferson created the impression in Notes that a sweeping emancipation law would very soon be passed in Virginia, but that was not the case at all. (Thus he was deeply afraid of having the antislavery statements he tailored for the French circulated in America.) He succeeded in convincing Condorcet of the imminence of change. Condorcet wrote, “It is true that Negro slavery still exists in some of the United States; but all enlightened men feel its shame, and its danger, and this blemish will not long continue to sully the purity of American laws.”12
Jefferson assiduously courted the editor of a major encyclopedia, a publication that was to be widely circulated and would shape opinions about the United States for decades to come, so that he could propose changes in the draft for the entry on the United States. The editor, Jean Nicolas Démeunier, had described Virginia’s slave laws and pointed out that the gradual emancipation act whose imminent passage Jefferson had promised in his book had not been enacted. Realizing that this failure put the United States, and Virginia especially, in a very poor light, Jefferson hastened to explain the reason, which he hoped Démeunier would add to the entry: “Persons of virtue and firmness” in the Virginia Assembly had decided that the time was not right; “they saw that the moment of doing it with success was not yet arrived, and that an unsuccessful effort, as too often happens, would only rivet still closer the chains of bondage, and retard the moment of delivery to this oppressed description of men.”*13
Jefferson omitted mentioning that the Virginia legislature had liberalized the slave laws so as to enable individual owners to free people at will, for Démeunier would then have asked why persons of virtue and firmness had not yet freed their slaves, particularly why Jefferson had not freed his. Jefferson also did not mention that in revising the slave code, he had suggested a law compelling a white woman who bore a mixed-race child to leave Virginia or be placed “out of the protection of the laws.”14
Painfully aware that French hands were bloody from slavery, Lafayette helped to form the Society of Friends of the Blacks in 1788 with the purpose of abolishing slavery in French colonies and elsewhere. The group included the famous chemist Lavoisier and, of course, Condorcet, who was elected president.15 Among the other founders were some of America’s most avid supporters, including the Marquis de Chastellux and the Duke de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt. Jefferson declined to join the society while expressing fulsome support for its goals: “You know that nobody wishes more ardently to see an abolition not only of the trade but of the condition of slavery: and certainly nobody will be more willing to encounter every sacrifice for that object.” But in order to ensure his effectiveness as an antislavery activist in the United States, “prudence” required that he “avoid too public a demonstration of my wishes.”16
During his tenure as America’s spokesman in Europe, Benjamin Franklin had trod the same fine line as Jefferson, as the historian David Waldstreicher discovered when he took a fresh look at Franklin’s diplomatic career: “He played very carefully with antislavery to gain peace and favorable trading conditions—including access to the Caribbean islands—for the new nation. Whether [Franklin] believed that North American slavery was being eliminated or not…it was extremely useful to say it was.” Waldstreicher continues: “Everything Franklin did in France reflected the need to depict America as virtuous.”17
Though wary of Lafayette, finding him vain and ambitious, Jefferson cultivated his relationship with him, since Lafayette had vital connections at court. Lafayette helped persuade the foreign minister to establish an “American Committee” to examine trade issues. To ensure that American interests would be strenuously represented, Lafayette arranged to get himself appointed a member.18 When he argued the case for importing tobacco from the United States, someone submitted to the committee a persuasive set of agricultural statistics in support of the American position. The author of these complicated statistical tables is not known, but the quality of the work has led scholars to speculate that Condorcet compiled the statistics. Persuaded th
at slavery would soon be expunged, the abolitionist mathematician quietly used his talent in service to America.19
One of Jefferson’s most damning pronouncements about black people—on a par, perhaps, with his speculation that African women copulated with apes—is that it was impossible to free them because they were like children. The key sentence reads: “to give liberty to, or rather, to abandon persons whose habits have been formed in slavery is like abandoning children.” Given Jefferson’s experience managing slaves, many observers have felt comfortable taking this as the well-considered opinion held not only by Jefferson but by “virtually all” of the Founders.20 But the full context of this remark puts it in a vastly different light. It was not a statement of the impossibility of emancipation but the preamble to a plan for emancipation. So we have reversed Jefferson’s meaning, and we have stepped into the Bancroft Paradox.
This famous assessment came out of a dinner party at a country house outside Paris, attended by officials in a position to advance American trading interests. Whatever Jefferson said at this dinner would soon be repeated at court, not only in Paris, but in London as well. Pestered by questions about the injustice of race relations in the United States, Jefferson did what Southerners would do for the next two centuries: he painted a picture for these outsiders of the difficulties and burdens of a white man living among black people.
The dinner took place at the country house of the Chevalier de La Luzerne, who had been France’s wartime ambassador to the United States. The king’s minister of household affairs, a well-known lawyer named Malesherbes, was also at the table. Jefferson regarded him as a “good and enlightened minister,” an important ally at court to whom he personally sent a copy of Notes on the State of Virginia. Also present was Edward Bancroft, an American with connections at the highest levels of British society and officialdom. Bancroft also had ties to important French progressives and to English abolitionists. The signal fact about his career in France at this time was, unfortunately, that he was operating not only as a spy for the Americans but also as an agent for the British, playing them off against each other.
Jefferson addressed the delicate question of why there had not yet been a general emancipation in the cradle of liberty. Emancipation had actually been tried in Virginia, he said, and had failed, not because the white people did not have the right spirit, but because the blacks were incompetent. Worse, it turned out that many blacks—the most sensible ones, Jefferson said—actually preferred slavery. Given their freedom, they found it very difficult to handle and asked to be taken back as slaves.*
We know what was said at this dinner because Bancroft recapitulated the conversation in a letter to Jefferson, seeking additional information:
You mentioned the Case of a Gentleman in Virginia, who had benevolently liberated all his Negroe Slaves and endeavoured to employ them on Wages to Cultivate his Plantation; but after a tryal of some time it was found that Slavery had rendered them incapable of Self Government, or at least that no regard for futurity could operate on their minds with sufficient Force to engage them to any thing like constant industry or even so much of it as would provide them with food and Cloathing and that the most sensible of them desired to return to their former state.21
Bancroft had repeated the table talk, as Jefferson expected, in England. The abolitionists Bancroft knew were keenly interested in getting an exact statement of the circumstances, as they were then campaigning for the emancipation of West Indian laborers “who have been long habituated to Slavery.” Not discouraged by Jefferson’s account, they hoped rather to learn from the Virginia experiment.22
Jefferson replied to Bancroft with a long letter, offering his assessment of “the experiments which have been made,” when “many quakers in Virginia seated their slaves on their lands as tenants.” The experience ended very badly, he said. And then he formulated the oft-quoted creed: “to give liberty to, or rather, to abandon persons whose habits have been formed in slavery is like abandoning children.”
He offered persuasive details:
I remember that the landlord was obliged to plan their crops for them, to direct all their operations during every season & according to the weather. But what is more afflicting, he was obliged to watch them daily & almost constantly to make them work, & even to whip them…. These slaves chose to steal from their neighbors rather than work; they became public nuisances and in most instances were reduced to slavery again.*
He asked Bancroft “to make no use of this imperfect information,” but on the other hand he released Bancroft to spread the story by word of mouth, “in common conversation.”
Jefferson did everlasting damage with his dinner-table story about the incompetence of black people. He knew it would circulate widely, but he could not have known that his comparison of blacks to children would resound for centuries. And it was a lie.
A group of Quakers in Virginia had indeed freed their slaves in the 1770s, alarming slaveholders across the region. As one of the emancipators, Warner Mifflin, wrote, “Great stir was made, as if the country was going to be overturned and ruined. It seemed as if the living spirit had gone forth, to deceive the people.” He continued: “When the subject of setting the blacks free [arose], the prevailing opinion was, that negroes were such thieves, that they would not do to be free…. this was chiefly the plea of slave-holders.” Not only did the Quakers declare that it was God’s wish “that the Black People should be free as well as the White people in society,” but they held, more ominously, that God had made all people “of one blood.”23
Warner Mifflin’s father, Daniel, had freed ninety-one slaves on Virginia’s Eastern Shore in 1775, inspiring a spate of emancipations by Quakers in that region—all of which were illegal at the time. One emancipator appealed directly to Governor Patrick Henry for relief from the “meddling people,” local officials who seized the freed people and put them back into slavery. So successful were the manumissions that the Virginia legislature eventually ratified these extralegal acts after a petition from the Quakers, and they even turned aside individual requests from disgruntled heirs to invalidate manumissions. In 1782, Quakers spent fifteen days in Richmond lobbying the assembly for the emancipation law allowing owners to manumit their property at will. Governor Henry supported them.24 Jefferson was no longer governor, but he could not have been ignorant of the extraordinary lobbying effort, and of the law that was its result.25
Southern planters reacted hysterically to this early success of the abolitionists, as Warner Mifflin recounted, and set out “to deceive the people.” The empire of slavery made its own reality in a propaganda war against the Quakers. It was essential to the preservation of slavery to discredit anyone who actually did set slaves free, smothering dissent in a cloud of rumor. Jefferson obliquely acknowledged the shakiness of his sources, admitting he “never had very particular information.” It is possible that Jefferson knew the actual results of the Quaker emancipation program but disparaged it in order to protect Virginia’s image. He could blame the victims. Emancipation was slow in coming because the blacks were like children, not because the slaveholders lacked virtue.
And then comes the Bancroft Paradox. In the same letter in which Jefferson forcefully states that it is nearly impossible to free slaves, he says he is going to do it:
Notwithstanding the discouraging result of these experiments, I am decided on my final return to America to try this one. I shall endeavor to import as many Germans as I have grown slaves. I will settle them and my slaves, on farms of 50 acres each, intermingled, and place all on the footing of the Metayers [sharecroppers] of Europe. Their children shall be brought up, as others are, in habits of property and foresight, & I have no doubt but that they will be good citizens.
“Citizens”! The soaring hope summoned by that word! Jefferson had written notes eight months earlier about German farmers who “might be had in any number to go to America and settle lands as tenants on half stocks or metairies.”26 They typically worked plot
s of fifty acres each. And then Jefferson wrote to his private secretary, William Short, in great excitement about a plan involving German tenant farmers: “I have taken some measures for realizing a project which I have wished to execute for 20 years past without knowing how to go about it.”27
The Bancroft letter connected to something Jefferson had been mulling for months, which connected to a project in his mind for two decades. Twenty years takes us back to the fiery revolutionary who had envisioned “the enfranchisement of the slaves we have.” In France, Jefferson had been compelled to defend his country against the suspicion that it was delaying the justice it had promised. Jefferson counseled patience; the minds of white Americans needed to be “ripened” to accept emancipation. He explained the division in Southern society between “a respectable minority ready” for emancipation and the greater number whose consciences were “inquiet” but who needed an injection of courage to divest themselves of slaves. And there were those who had no qualms about slavery, to whom slaves were “legitimate subjects of property” on the level with “their horses and cattle.”28 Someday, he wrote to a Frenchman, God will make a better world: “we must await with patience the workings of an overruling providence.”29