 |
| Thomas Jefferson |
By Paul Finkelman, The New York Times, November 30, 2012
THOMAS JEFFERSON is in the news again, nearly 200 years after his
death — alongside a high-profile biography by the journalist Jon Meacham comes
a damning portrait of the third president by the independent scholar Henry
Wiencek.
We are endlessly fascinated with Jefferson, in part because we seem
unable to reconcile the rhetoric of liberty in his writing with the reality of
his slave owning and his lifetime support for slavery. Time and again, we play
down the latter in favor of the former, or write off the paradox as somehow
indicative of his complex depths.
Neither Mr. Meacham, who mostly ignores Jefferson’s slave ownership,
nor Mr. Wiencek, who sees him as a sort of fallen angel who comes to slavery
only after discovering how profitable it could be, seem willing to confront the
ugly truth: the third president was a creepy, brutal hypocrite.
Contrary to Mr. Wiencek’s depiction, Jefferson was always deeply
committed to slavery, and even more deeply hostile to the welfare of blacks,
slave or free. His proslavery views were shaped not only by money and status
but also by his deeply racist views, which he tried to justify through
pseudoscience.
There is, it is true, a compelling paradox about Jefferson: when he
wrote the Declaration of Independence, announcing the “self-evident” truth that
all men are “created equal,” he owned some 175 slaves. Too often, scholars and
readers use those facts as a crutch, to write off Jefferson’s inconvenient
views as products of the time and the complexities of the human condition.
But while many of his contemporaries, including George Washington, freed their slaves during and after the
revolution — inspired, perhaps, by the words of the Declaration — Jefferson did
not. Over the subsequent 50 years, a period of extraordinary public service,
Jefferson remained the master of Monticello, and a buyer and seller of human
beings.
Rather than encouraging his countrymen to liberate their slaves, he
opposed both private manumission and public emancipation. Even at his death,
Jefferson failed to fulfill the promise of his rhetoric: his will emancipated only five slaves, all
relatives of his mistress Sally Hemings, and condemned nearly 200 others to the
auction block. Even Hemings remained a slave, though her children by Jefferson
went free.
Nor was Jefferson a particularly kind master. He sometimes punished
slaves by selling them away from their families and friends, a retaliation that
was incomprehensibly cruel even at the time. A proponent of humane criminal codes
for whites, he advocated harsh, almost barbaric, punishments for slaves and
free blacks. Known for expansive views of citizenship, he proposed legislation
to make emancipated blacks “outlaws” in America, the land of their birth.
Opposed to the idea of royal or noble blood, he proposed expelling from
Virginia the children of white women and black men.
Jefferson also dodged opportunities to undermine slavery or promote
racial equality. As a state legislator he blocked consideration of a law that
might have eventually ended slavery in the state.
As president he acquired the Louisiana Territory but did nothing to
stop the spread of slavery into that vast “empire of liberty.” Jefferson told
his neighbor Edward Coles not to emancipate his own slaves, because free blacks
were “pests in society” who were “as incapable as children of taking care of
themselves.” And while he wrote a friend that he sold slaves only as punishment
or to unite families, he sold at least 85 humans in a 10-year period to raise
cash to buy wine, art and other luxury goods.
Destroying families didn’t bother Jefferson, because he believed
blacks lacked basic human emotions. “Their griefs are transient,” he
wrote, and their love lacked “a tender delicate mixture of sentiment
and sensation.”
Jefferson claimed he had “never seen an elementary trait of painting
or sculpture” or poetry among blacks and argued that blacks’ ability to
“reason” was “much inferior” to whites’, while “in imagination they are dull,
tasteless, and anomalous.” He conceded that blacks were brave, but this was
because of “a want of fore-thought, which prevents their seeing a danger till
it be present.”
A scientist, Jefferson nevertheless speculated that blackness might
come “from the color of the blood” and concluded that blacks were “inferior to
the whites in the endowments of body and mind.”
Jefferson did worry about the future of slavery, but not out of moral
qualms. After reading about the slave revolts in Haiti, Jefferson wrote to a friend that “if something
is not done and soon done, we shall be the murderers of our own children.” But
he never said what that “something” should be.
In 1820 Jefferson was shocked by the heated arguments over slavery
during the debate over the Missouri Compromise. He
believed that by opposing the spread of slavery in the West, the children
of the revolution were about to “perpetrate” an “act of suicide on themselves,
and of treason against the hopes of the world.”
If there was “treason against the hopes of the world,” it was
perpetrated by the founding generation, which failed to place the nation on the
road to liberty for all. No one bore a greater responsibility for that failure
than the master of Monticello.
Paul
Finkelman, a visiting professor in legal history at Duke Law
School, is a professor at Albany Law School and the author of “Slavery and the
Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson.”
No comments:
Post a Comment