by David Barton
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
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
In 1788 Jacques Pierre de Warville, a leader in the French Revolution, started an antislavery society and invited Jefferson to become a member. Jefferson declined because he was in France as “a public servant” of America, therefore making it inappropriate for him to undertake something of a personal nature.70 But he wished hearty blessings on their efforts, reaffirming his private commitment to their 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.71
In 1789 the federal Congress took Jefferson’s antislavery proposal from 1784 and included it in the Northwest Ordinance, thereby causing Minnesota, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin to enter the United States as antislavery states.
In 1805, after nearly forty years of efforts to end slavery, Jefferson bemoaned that it had become a task much more difficult than he had ever imagined, lamenting the national stalemate over the issue:
I have long since given up the expectation of any early provision for the extinguishment of slavery among us. [While] there are many virtuous men who would make any sacrifices to affect it, many equally virtuous persuade themselves either that the thing is not wrong or that it cannot be remedied.72
In 1807 President Jefferson signed a law long anticipated by antislavery citizens across the nation. Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution had included a provision whereby Congress could ban the importation of all slaves after “the year one thousand eight hundred and eight.” At the time the Constitution was written and ratified, it was believed that within twenty years, the Southern states would be ready to relinquish slavery, and this law would pave the way.
Jefferson happily signed that law, telling a group of Quakers:
Whatever may have been the circumstances which influenced our forefathers to permit the introduction of personal bondage into any part of these states . . . we may rejoice that such circumstances and such a sense of them exist no longer. . . . I sincerely pray with you, my friends, that all the members of the human family may, in the time prescribed by the Father of us all, find themselves securely established in the enjoyment of life, liberty, and happiness.73
In 1808 President Jefferson sent a message to the Reverend James Lemen, an old friend from Virginia who in 1786 had moved to the Northwest Territory at Jefferson’s suggestion to work to ensure that it would be antislavery.74 Ohio was first organized from that territory, then Indiana—both as antislavery territories. In 1808, when Illinois was on the verge of becoming the third official territory, President Jefferson privately contacted Lemen, who explained:
I received Jefferson’s confidential message on October 10, 1808, suggesting . . . the organization of a church on a strictly antislavery basis for the purpose of heading a movement to finally make Illinois a free state. . . . I acted on Jefferson’s plan and . . . the anti-slavery element formed a Baptist church . . . on an antislavery basis.75
In 1814 Jefferson corresponded with Edward Coles, private secretary to President Madison. Coles, a Virginia planter, lamented to Jefferson that he wanted to free his slaves but that Virginia law made it impossible. He then asked Jefferson to head a new antislavery movement, to which Jefferson responded:
Your [letter] was duly received and was read with peculiar pleasure. . . . Mine on the subject of slavery of Negroes have long since been in possession of the public, and time has only served to give them stronger root. The love of justice and the love of country plead equally the cause of these people, and it is a moral reproach to us that they should have pleaded it so long in vain and should have produced not a single effort—nay, I fear not much serious willingness to relieve them & ourselves from our present condition of moral & political reprobation . . . [but] the hour of emancipation is advancing; in the march of time, it will come.76
But citing his advanced age of seventy-one, Jefferson declined to take the helm of the new movement proposed by Coles. He explained, “This enterprise is for the young—for those who can follow it up and bear it through to its consummation,” but he promised that his greatest contributions to the fight would be his fervent “prayers—and these are the only weapons of an old man.”77 He therefore encouraged Coles to take the lead:
I hope . . . you will come forward in the public councils, become the missionary of this doctrine truly Christian, insinuate & inculcate it softly but steadily through the medium of writing and conversation, associate others in your labors, and when the phalanx [large battalion] is formed, bring on and press the proposition perseveringly until its accomplishment. . . . That your success may be as speedy and complete . . . I shall as fervently and sincerely pray.78
Five years later, in 1819, Coles packed up everything, including his slaves, left Virginia, and moved into the “to the country North West of the River Ohio”79 (recall that in 1789 Congress had adopted Jefferson’s 1784 provision to make that territory antislavery). When Coles arrived, he settled in the Illinois territory, emancipated all his slaves, gave them each 160 acres, and then joined with the Reverend James Lemen in his antislavery endeavors. Coles later became governor of Illinois.80
In 1815 Jefferson corresponded with the Reverend David Barrow, the Virginian who moved to Kentucky and became a cofounder of the Kentucky Abolition Society. Barrow had penned an antislavery work and sent it to Jefferson, who responded:
The particular subject of the pamphlet you enclosed me [emancipation] was one of early and tender consideration with me; and had I continued in the councils [legislatures] of my own state, it should never have been out of sight.
. . . We are not in a world ungoverned by the laws and the power of a Superior Agent. Our efforts are in His hand and directed by it; and He will give them their effect in His own time. . . . That it may finally be effected and its progress hastened will be [my] last and fondest prayer.81
By 1820 only a little antislavery ground had been gained nationally. In 1789 Congress banned slavery from the Northwest Territory; in 1794 it banned the exportation of slaves from America; in 1808 it banned the importation of slaves into America. But in 1820 Democrats gained control of Congress for the first time. They enacted the Missouri Compromise, thus reversing the 1789 policy and allowing slavery into some federal territories where it had been previously prohibited.82 For the first time slavery was being not just tolerated but officially expanded by the federal government.
The Missouri Compromise was strenuously opposed by the few Founding Fathers still alive at that time. Elias Boudinot, a president of Congress during the Revolution and a framer of the Bill of Rights, warned that this new pro-slavery direction by Congress would bring “an end to the happiness of the United States;”83 a frail John Adams feared that lifting the slavery prohibition would destroy America;84 James Madison confessed that the new policy “fills me with no slight anxiety,” and foreseeing what would become the Civil War, he worried that pitting slave states against free states would result in “awful shocks against each other.”85 But perhaps no one from that generation was as greatly distressed as the elderly seventy-seven-year-old Jefferson, who was dismayed, frustrated, and even depressed by the passage of that law and the retreat from emancipation that it represented. He lamented, “In the gloomiest moment of the Revolutionary War, I never had any apprehensions equal to what I feel from this source.”86
Jefferson confided to a fellow political leader:
I had for a long time ceased to read newspapers or pay any attention to public affairs, confident they were in good hands, and content to be a passenger in our bark [small ship] to the shore from which I am not distant [death]. But this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell [funeral bell] of the Union. . . . I regret that I am now to die in the belief that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776 to acquire self-government and happiness to their country is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons. . . . [This is an] act of suicide on themselves, and of treason against the hopes of the world.87
He concluded with a reaffirmation of his desire to end slavery and his frustration at America not having already done so:
I can say with conscious truth that there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would to relieve us from this heavy reproach in any practicable way. The cession of that kind of “property,” for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle [an insignificant trifle] which would not cost me a second thought if in that way a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected. . . . But as it is, we have the wolf by the ears and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go.88
In 1825 Jefferson corresponded with Frances Wright, a young, energetic antislavery enthusiast. Frances first met Jefferson in 1824 when the famous American hero French general Marquis de Lafayette returned to America for his farewell tour, bringing with him Frances, whom he considered an adopted daughter. When Lafayette returned to France, Frances stayed behind to become an American citizen and help fight slavery. She eventually founded Nashoba, Tennessee, as a model to illustrate Jefferson’s plan of emancipation. Writing a very elderly Jefferson (who would die the next year), she asked him to help her with the effort. Jefferson replied:
At the age of eighty-two, with one foot in the grave and the other uplifted to follow it, I do not permit myself to take part in any new enterprises, even for bettering the condition of man—not even in the great one which is the subject of your letter and which has been through life that of my greatest anxieties. . . . I leave its accomplishment as the work of another generation, and I am cheered when I see that one on which it is devolved taking it up with so much good will and such minds engaged in its encouragement. The abolition of the evil is not impossible; it ought never therefore to be despaired of. Every plan should be adopted, every experiment tried, which may do something towards the ultimate object.89
In 1826, just two weeks before his death, Jefferson reiterated:
On the question of the lawfulness of slavery (that is, of the right of one man to appropriate to himself the faculties of another without his consent), I certainly retain my early opinions.90
With such a clear and unbroken train of words and actions against slavery and in favor of emancipation and civil rights, it is no surprise that previous generations of abolitionists and civil rights leaders regularly invoked Jefferson’s words in their own efforts. Sadly, these words and actions are deliberately ignored today by those from all five groups of historical malpractice who decry Jefferson as an unrepentant racist.
But among those early leaders who favorably cited Jefferson was President John Quincy Adams, called the “Hell Hound of Abolition” for his relentless pursuit of that object. In a famous 1837 speech, he told the crowd gathered before him:
The inconsistency of the institution of domestic slavery with the principles of the Declaration of Independence was seen and lamented by all the southern patriots of the Revolution; by no one with deeper and more unalterable conviction than by the author of the Declaration himself [Jefferson]. . . . Such was the undoubting conviction of Jefferson to his dying day. In the Memoir of His Life, written at the age of seventy-seven, he gave to his countrymen the solemn and emphatic warning that the day was not distant when they must hear and adopt the general emancipation of their slaves.91
Daniel Webster, whose efforts in the US Senate to end slavery paralleled those of John Quincy Adams in the US House, similarly invoked Jefferson in order to bolster his efforts. In 1845 he issued an address to the nation, reminding them:
No language can be more explicit, more emphatic, or more solemn than that in which Thomas Jefferson, from the beginning to the end of his life, uniformly declared his opposition to slavery. “I tremble for my country,” said he, “when I reflect that God is just—that His justice cannot sleep forever.” “The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.” . . . [T]o show his own view of the proper influence of the spirit of the Revolution upon slavery, he proposed the searching question: “Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment, and death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment . . . inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose?”92
Abraham Lincoln likewise cited Jefferson to support his own crusade to end slavery and achieve civil rights and equality for blacks, specifically in 1854, when the Democratically controlled Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In 1820, when Congress expanded the federal territories in which slavery was permitted through passage of the Missouri Compromise, they had retained a ban on slavery in the Kansas-Nebraska territory (which included not only Kansas and Nebraska but also Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, North Dakota, and South Dakota). But the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act changed those restrictions, allowing slavery into even more territories. Lincoln invoked Jefferson to condemn that act, explaining:
Mr. Jefferson . . . conceived the idea of taking that occasion to prevent slavery ever going into the northwestern territory . . . and in the first Ordinance (which the acts of Congress were then called) for the government of the territory, provided that slavery should never be permitted therein. . . . Thus, with the author of the Declaration of Independence, the policy of prohibiting slavery in new territory originated. . . . But now [in May 1854], new light breaks upon us. Now Congress declares this [law constructed by Jefferson] ought never to have been.93
Black abolitionists, such as Fredrick Douglass also regularly invoked Jefferson to assist their own efforts. Douglass had lived in slaver
y until he escaped to New York, later going to work for the Massachusetts antislavery society and also serving as a Zion Methodist Church preacher. During the Civil War Douglass helped recruit the first black regiment to fight for the Union and advised Abraham Lincoln on the Emancipation Proclamation. Following the war he received presidential appointments from four Republican presidents. Concerning Jefferson, Douglass declared:
It was the Sage of the Old Dominion [Virginia] that said—while speaking of the possibility of a conflict between the slaves and slaveholders—“God has no attribute that could take sides with the oppressor in such a contest. I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just and that His justice cannot sleep forever.” Such is the warning voice of Thomas Jefferson, and every day’s experience since its utterance until now confirms its wisdom and commends its truth.94
At a speech in Virginia following the Civil War, Douglass declared:
I have been charged with lifelong hostility to one of the cherished institutions of Virginia [i.e., slavery]. I am not ashamed of that lifelong opposition. . . . It was, Virginia, your own Thomas Jefferson that taught me that all men are created equal.95
And describing Jefferson’s dealings with Banneker, Douglass reminded an audience:
Jefferson was not ashamed to call the black man his brother and to address him as a gentleman.96
On numerous other occasions Douglass invoked Jefferson as an authority in his crusade to end slavery and achieve full equality and civil rights.97 Additional civil rights crusaders who invoked Jefferson in a similarly positive manner included Henry Highland Garnet,98 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,99 Colin Powell,100 and others.
Was Jefferson impeccable on race and civil rights? Certainly not. He recognized and admitted that he had some prejudices, but he also openly acknowledged that he wanted to be proven wrong concerning those views. Yet despite his self-acknowledged weaknesses, Jefferson faithfully and consistently advocated for emancipation and civil rights throughout his long life, even when it would have been easier and better for him if he had remained silent or inactive.
