The Jefferson Lies

by David Barton

  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.20

  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.

  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.21

  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.22 Then, in 1723 a law was passed that forbade the emancipation of slaves under any 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.23

  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.24

  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.25 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.”26 The law even allowed a wife to reverse an emancipation made by her husband in his will.27 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.28

  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.”29 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 inheritance30 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.”31 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.32

  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.”33 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.34

  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.35

  Banneker then appealed to Jefferson to further exert himself in behalf of blacks and throw off any remaining prejudice he might hold:

  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.36

  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.”37 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 So
ciety, 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.38

  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.

  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

  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:

  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.

  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 sl
avery 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:

  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