A decades-long historical injustice is in progress—and it is exponentially increasing. Thomas Jefferson’s character, integrity, and importance have all been questioned and even traduced. This is because he owned slaves. The context of that slave ownership is never considered. A recent example can be seen here. (As noted in the article—even the staff of Monticello, his home, is jumping on this particular bandwagon.) George Washington and other slave-owning founders are not attacked to the same degree—perhaps because Washington arranged for all of his slaves to be freed upon the occasion of his wife’s death. (Why Washington could arrange for this and Jefferson could not will be explained below.)
Thomas Jefferson was born in Albemarle County, Virginia in 1743. He was born into a slave-owning family and raised among slaves, in a slave-owning society, near what is now Shadwell, Virginia. (Nearly all societies to that point had slavery. It existed on every continent except Africa and among myriad races.) When he was fourteen years old, his father, Peter Jefferson, died. As Thomas Jefferson inherited his father’s cultural milieu and family, so he inherited his father’s slaves as a fourteen-year-old. (He would later inherit his other slaves in his thirties when his father-in-law, John Wayles, died.)
In eighteenth century Virginia, manumission (settling slaves free) was difficult if not impossible. There were legal restrictions on it in slave states. It was expensive. (Jefferson was in tremendous debt throughout his entire life, unlike Washington. Shortly after his death, his property was seized and it and his slaves were auctioned off. In an important sense, he didn’t really own them.) The economies of the slave states at the time, including Virginia, could not absorb influxes of manumitted slaves. Few job opportunities were available for them.
While Jefferson had inherited his cultural milieu and its mores, attitudes, and customs, he was above it in many ways. He avidly read the works of the leading Enlightenment thinkers of his day. The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement long ago snuffed out, except in vestigial embers that yet survive, that emphasized the efficacy of the human mind, the transformative power of science, the sanctity of the individual human, the importance of human liberty, and the promise of life on Earth as opposed to it being a superficial prelude to an afterlife. Jefferson absorbed some of the most erudite and sapient of these thinkers, including Francis Bacon, John Locke, and Hugo Grotius.
Due to his understanding of these liberating intellectuals as well as his own perspicacious intellect, he became “the leading dissenter in Virginia on slavery and the slave trade”, according to author Norm Ledgin.
As a young man, Jefferson was elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses. As biographer Joseph J. Ellis has pointed out, the young legislator introduced no less than a dozen bills to the legislative body that would have ended slavery, in whole or in part, at least in Virginia.
All were soundly defeated.
No one else in the colony of Virginia but this vicenarian legislator was doing this.
Young Thomas Jefferson was trying to abolish slavery despite the fact that he was born into a family and community that took it for granted, that taught him that it was the will of God and something as moral and normal as music and sailing—and repeatedly asserting and underscoring to young Thomas Jefferson that slavery was moral, normal, and necessary.
Simply questioning any or all of this, to say nothing of acting to curtail it, is a feat of intellectual independence, in thought and action, that few evince in their lifetimes. (Jefferson’s current critics certainly are not.)
As the author of the “Declaration of Independence”, America’s founding document, Jefferson condemned slavery and the slave trade in a draft, listing it as one of George III’s crimes that necessitated separating from the mother country. Others later struck the passage. (To be fair: the late, great Christopher Hitchens, in his book Thomas Jefferson: Author of America, called into question the idea that Jefferson had nothing to do with the deletion of the passage and was entirely opposed to it. In his autobiography, Jefferson stated that the Continental Congress deleted the passage.) The passage:
He has waged cruel war on human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation hither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of INFIDEL powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them: 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. [emphases original]
This is the last of George III’s “oppressions” in Jefferson’s draft, as if he was determined to select it for special emphasis. With one exception, Jefferson expended far more words excoriating George III than he did while writing all of the other oppressions.
These actions, extraordinary in the context of the time (even for one who did not inherit slaves), are already more exemplary of courageous, independent, intransigent, maverick thought—and action—than almost anyone throughout history, in any age. (HL Mencken infamously wrote that at least eight out of ten people go through life without an original thought. The Age of Enlightenment, one of the few eras in which individualistic, rational thought was in vogue, was exceptional in that regard, and Mencken could be too cynical, but he had a point.) For the above reasons—even without further consideration—Thomas Jefferson should be—and would be in a culture with a modicum of decency and ratiocination—celebrated for being a crucial progenitor of the abolition of slavery and a pioneer that helped start what others finished in a more opportune era.
But this is not a decent or rational culture, which is why most commentators, myopic and gormless as they are, miss a more fundamental point.
Jefferson’s advocacy and embodiment of Enlightenment ideas and ideals, consistently followed, gradually led to slavery’s ineluctable eradication. Those ideas—reason, individualism, and liberty—implied that all men (to use an old-fashioned gender-neutral term) had the same individual rights and that race was a superficial factor that had nothing to do with ethics or (rational) politics. This Enlightenment intellectual framework is what led to the eventual abolition of slavery (in the West—some less Enlightened areas still have it). So, even if Jefferson had not been such a vocal opponent of slavery, he still would have had a significant influence on its eventual eradication. (The fact that this flies in the face of everything one hears these dark days does not change the fact that it is the truth.)
There is abundant evidence that Jefferson literally could not free more than the two he freed in his lifetime and the six in his will. Right or wrong, he may well have decided that, whether or not he could free them, the Virginia economy of his time could not absorb an influx of freed slaves and that they were better off at Monticello and Poplar Garden being treated as humanely and benevolently as possible.
Thomas Jefferson was a genius and a hero; almost all of his critics are neither.
Was he perfect? Was he fully consistent?
No.
Were some of his inconsistent actions unfortunate and wrong?
Yes.
He did not completely forbid whipping on his property. He advertised for the safe return of at least one runaway slave. At least for part of his life, he wrote some unfortunate writings about black people, in Notes on the State of Virginia and elsewhere. (There is some evidence he privately disowned those views later, perhaps in part because of his relationship with Sally Hemings—another complicated topic for another day.) He had conflicting views on miscegenation (as it was then called) and wrote at length on the topic, seemingly rationalizing it when one of the partners had “sufficient” white ancestry. He told the brilliant mathematician and polymath Benjamin Banneker that his success was a fluke, and he really wasn’t all that smart due to his race. All of this is unfortunate.
They are footling trifles compared to the good he did (on the subject of slavery alone). Every American owes him a debt of gratitude. (Unfortunately, there aren’t all that many left.)
Instead of Americans, the culture is rank with sequacious, squawking parrots who are retailing discredited ideas that are fundamentally unAmerican (or even anti-American): collectivist, statist, tyrannical, and racist. And now, one of those unAmerican ideas is now the trashing of Thomas Jefferson and his character. Most of these people may not advocate anything as barbaric and evil as chattel slavery (some do), but many are essentially racist (at least insofar as they consider race to be a defining attribute of an individual—and yes, there were unfortunate and inconsistent elements of that in Thomas Jefferson that were more than ameliorated by his essential nature).
I recall reading about a professor (whose name and other details I cannot recall, unfortunately) who asks each class of his a hypothetical question: If they were white people in the antebellum south, would they support the abolition of slavery? Of course, virtually all of them say yes. His profane response, paraphrased, is that that is nonsense. Unless they held openly held heterodox views and suffered for them, personally or professionally, he didn’t believe them.
If any of Thomas Jefferson’s modish, conformist critics are fit to carry his water or worthy of being mentioned in the same sentence as he, I am unaware of any.
Sources:
Ellis, Joseph J. American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson. New York: Knopf, 1996.
Gordon-Reed, Annette. The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008.
Gordon-Reed, Annette. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 1997.
Halliday, E.M. Understanding Thomas Jefferson. New York: Perennial, 2001.
Hitchens, Christopher. Eminent Lives: Thomas Jefferson: Author of America. New York: Harper Collins, 2005.
Koch, Adrienne, and William Peden, eds. The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson. 1944. New York: The Modern Library, 1993.
Ledgin, Norm. Diagnosing Jefferson: Evidence of a Condition that Guided His Beliefs, Behavior, and Personal Associations. 1998. Arlington, Texas: Future Horizons, Inc., 2000. Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 1997.