Friends of History Lecture
Thomas Jefferson: The Myth and the Man

Carl Peterson, History (photo BA)

"The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions," wrote Thomas Jefferson in Notes on the State of Virginia. "The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals un-depraved by such circumstances.... I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever." This oft-quoted passage appears in the same book that includes language so offensive it is rarely quoted in public. "Jefferson detailed his belief in the biological inferiority of the Negro slave. It was six or seven times as long as anything he had to say about the evils of slavery," said Carl Peterson, History, in "Anti-slavery, Race, and Identity in the American Revolution," a lecture presented in the Friends of History Lecture Series on November 5.

Jefferson's contradictory positions occur in the context of his desire to be seen by Americans and Europeans as cosmopolitan, the new nation's need for identity, and the prevailing European view of America as a place of ongoing degeneration. The Comte de Buffon, the respected naturalist, concluded that in America's swampy environment, everything "languishes, spoils, suffocates," and it could support only enfeebled men. Other European thinkers concluded that not only was America a place of degenerate plants, animals, and humans, but any Eurpeans moving there would also suffer degeneration.

At the time of the revolution, America was one of many slave-holding societies. Peterson explained that not only was it a revolution of slaveholders, but "the most general and obvious consequence of the American revolution with respect to slavery was to prolong its life and death in the American states." In other slave-holding societies, the central government could, and eventually did, oppose slavery. In America, slaveholders were granted "political autonomy, freedom from interference from a central authority," said Peterson.

While European countries experienced antislavery movements during the eighteenth century, the only serious antislavery actions in America came from the Quakers, who were harassed for their antislavery view.

Peterson examined the life of Thomas Jefferson as an example of the deep and abiding interrelationship between colonial identity and slavery. Jefferson, the quintessential American revolutionary liberal, was one of the wealthiest plantation owners, with over 10,000 acres and about 260 slaves. He was rarely solvent, however, because of his extravagant lifestyle, a lifestyle tied to his desire to be seen as the most cosmopolitan of Americans. By living such a lifestyle, he could refute the European views of American degeneracy. To this end, he wrote Notes on the State of Virginia, structured as essays responding to a series of questions. "Jefferson catalogued the excellence of the new continent in topics ranging from its natural history to its civil constitution," said Peterson. "The book was revolutionary America's definitive answer to Europe's doubts about the new world."

To address Europe's doubts, Jefferson had to address the issue of slavery. He did so by writing about "total emancipation," assuring Europeans there was "a change already perceptible, since the origin of the present revolution. The spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust."

Peterson continued, "At the same time, and this was equally essential to his project, Jefferson had to insist on the racial inferiority of blacks, for only in this way could he show that the failures of his society…slavery itself, were not the fault of the American, but instead of the Negro. Similarly, it was the racial inferiority of the Negro that made it so difficult to emancipate him. Some years earlier, in the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson had attempted to lay the responsibility for the existence of slavery in Virginia on the British goverment."

Peterson explained, "Jefferson pursued a course of arguments at once sympathetic to European liberals, consistent with eighteenth-century science, and gratifying to Americans.... He accomplished this extraordinary feat by shifting the definition of America from a matter of geography to a matter of race. Essentially, Jefferson claimed that the Negro was to blame for his own slavery."

During his lifetime, Jefferson manumitted two slaves, one of whom bought his freedom. In his will, Jefferson freed another five. All seven were members of the Hemmings family, related to Jefferson "by marriage and by blood, some of them his own children." Contrast these manumissions with the story of Jefferson's slaves Joseph Fosset, a blacksmith, and his wife, Edith, a cook. Fosset was freed in Jefferson's will, but he watched as his wife and five children were sold to three different buyers. Fosset worked as a blacksmith and within ten years managed to buy and free his wife, three of his children, and several grandchildren. Peterson pointed out, "Joseph Fosset had freed more persons than ever did the rich, liberal…the Master of Monticello."

BA