This is a very savory book, and makes a very useful compendium of racial bad-faith by our supposed leaders. One representative tidbit: "To further avoid offending white southerners, Roosevelt banned black reporters from his first press conference in 1933 and every other press conference for the next eleven years." (p. 115).
I disagree with Doug somewhat: Jefferson's concern for democracy, at least late in his life, I think appears genuine, and was not a narrow concern for country squires.
Chomsky makes use of some of Jefferson's later thoughts on democracy in a talk, "Democracy and Education", which can be found at http://www.worldmedia.com/archive/talks/9410-education.html, which is a worthwhile read on its own.
Bill
With Thomas Jefferson keeping to the rut, the silence of the presidency thundered. For the eight years beginning March 4, 1801, Jefferson was chief executive of the world's largest slave-holding nation. Nine-hundred thousand slaves in all. One-hundred thousand more than the entire British empire. One of seven Americans woke, worked, and died a slave, while Jefferson pretended it was not so. The government came to Washington, D.C., in 1801, the same year that he came to office, and with Congress placing the District and its 3,244 slaves under Virginia and Maryland law one could stand in the Capitol Building doorway and watch processions of chained men, women, and children shuffling to the pens to await sale and new southern homes. On Pennsylvania Avenue the St. Charles Hotel catered to visiting owners by advertising the wall rings adorning six basement cells. Ignoring these sights as well, the new president brought his household slaves up from Monticello. This property included Fanny and Eddy, whose baby was born in the White House. The baby died there, too, before its second birthday.
Jefferson's silence thundered because this president had written the great words of the Declaration of independence. In an early draft (what he called "the original paper"), Jefferson described slavery as "cruel war against human nature itself." "This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of *infidel* powers," he charged, "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 distinguished die, he is now exciting these very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom *he* also obtruded them."
More an attack on the African slave trade than slavery itself, the lines never made the Declaration's final draft. "Struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia," Jefferson grumbled, and perhaps also at the insistence of "our Northern brethren ... [who] felt a little tender under those censures; for though their people had very few slaves themselves, yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others." The charge itself (that the British crown bore sole responsibility and guilt for American slavery) was implausible. At the time Jefferson ranked as Albemarle County's second largest owner with 175 slaves on his books. No doubt some of them wanted to know, with Samuel Johnson, "how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of negroes?"
Political rhetoric about a Christian king aside, Jefferson's emphasis on slaves as *men* transcended his ownership of men. The wondrous five words of equality that remained in the Declaration of Independence would prove an eighty-four-year burden for his southern brethren. Even the peculiar institution's Virginian advocates would distance themselves from their own giant as the nation crept toward civil war. They called him a feeble man of "strange eccentricities, quaint expressions, gleaming paradoxes, and sweeping assertions."
Jefferson knew that slavery violated every imperative of nature and every natural law of God and man. He called it, in the privacy of his correspondence, a "moral and political depravity," an "abominable crime," a "hideous blot." With North Carolinas Hugh Williamson, he was one of two southerners to support a bill in 1784 to exclude slavery from the Northwest Territory. Exclusion triumphed three years later with the Northwest Ordinance. Public condemnation of the institution as a whole came, if only for a non-American audience, in *Notes on the State of Virginia*. He tried to prevent publication in the United States of the only book he ever wrote because "the terms in which I speak [against] slavery ... may produce an irritation."
It did produce an irritation though not in the way Jefferson suspected. *Notes on the State of Virginia* first appeared in Paris (1785) and London (1787) before a pirated edition surfaced in Philadelphia and alerted the American public to Jefferson's advocacy of both emancipation and colonization (that is, the costly proposition of freeing the slaves and then sending them back to Africa or some other "congenial" place). Having raised the question ("why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the State, and thus save the expense"), Jefferson answered it: "Deep-rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances ... which will probably never end but in the extermination of one or the other race."
Jefferson then moved to the "physical and moral" spheres, continuing what one scholar called "a semi-Joycian" screed that carried a single paragraph for six pages. He asked "whether the black of the negro resides in the reticular membrane between the skin and the scarf-skin, or in the scarf-skin itself; whether it proceeds from the color of the blood, the color of the bile, or from that of some other secretion." Next came "the circumstance of superior beauty" which the slaves confirmed in "their own judgment in favor of the whites, declared by their preference of them, as uniformly as is the preference of the Oranootan for the black woman over those of his own species." Finally, intelligence: "In memory they are equal to whites; in reason much inferior ... in imagination ... dull, tasteless, and anomalous."
For all its qualifications, Winthrop Jordan observed, Notes on the State of Virginia constituted the most "extreme formulation of anti-Negro 'thought' offered by any American in the thirty years after the Revolution." While Jefferson's God created all men equal, his science "proved" blacks inferior to whites. Even as he stoked abolition's great engine (the printed word) with his own timeless words from the Declaration, he stoked slavery's great engine (cotton) with the Louisiana Purchase and his mind-boggling "diffusion' theory. That theory held that slavery would shrivel and die if allowed to extend to all territories. The president proposed to kill the "malign twins" (the plantation system and slavery) by giving them free run across the entire continent.
The Federalists, vowing to make an issue in the election of 1800, accused Jefferson of degrading "the blacks from the rank which God hath given them in the scale of being" and otherwise advancing "the strongest argument for their state of slavery!" They tried again in the 1804 elections. Clement Moore, who went on to write "A Visit from St. Nicholas," asked "where Mr. Jefferson learnt that the orang-outang has less affection for his own females than for black women.' "No doubt from some French traveller," he suggested, in true Federalist spirit. The Federalists may have mocked these "scientific" musings, but Jefferson's words mattered (because of who he was) and were deeply disturbing (because they fed the racist myths that roared through his time and into ours). "Mr. Jefferson's remarks respecting us," Boston's black radical David Walker wrote in 1829, "have sunk deep into the hearts of millions of the whites and never will be removed this side of eternity."
In 1788, when asked to join the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, Jefferson said "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." For the next twelve years and the eight years after that in which he served as the nation's third president, however, Jefferson sacrificed nothing. When several religious sects advocated Negro education, he showed no interest. He also made no effort to persuade Congress to exclude slavery from the Louisiana Territory in its entirety. Or to accept slavery in Orleans in exchange for exclusion in the remainder of the Louisiana Purchase. The coming struggle between the free-labor North and the slave-labor South for primacy in the national domain was, as the historian John Chester Miller noted, perhaps "the immediate, and probably the only truly irrepressible, cause of the Civil War." Either Jefferson did not see the chance or lacked the courage to act. Perhaps he believed that his incredible diffusion theory would actually work.
The French sold their North American empire largely because General Charles Leclerc's troops in St. Domingo (Haiti) failed to crush Toussaint Louvertute's slave army. That revolt convinced Napoleon that the cost of empire in this hemisphere was too high, and convinced Jefferson that the race issue was primarily a security issue. Thousands died in St. Domingo from yellow fever, from the British blockade's grim efficiency, from battle and massacre. Even the massacre of white men by black men. On New Year's Day 1804 black revolutionaries proclaimed Haiti the hemisphere's second independent nation-a declaration that terrified the white men in this country who surrounded themselves with slaves.
Jefferson feared Haiti as the spark that might ignite race war in the South. The president defended his country by tracking Haitians who came to the United States, always believing that they were plotting insurrection. He warned Madison, on a bill calling for trade with Toussaint, to "expect therefore black crews, and supercargoes and missionaries thence into the southern states... If this combustion can be introduced among us under any veil whatever, we have to fear it." Republicans even accused Federalists of supporting Haiti's blacks. (Adams had sent warships to blockade the island and bombard Toussaint's enemy; but Federalist guns fought for Britain against its enemy and not for black revolutionaries.) Congress banned trade with Haiti in 1806 and withheld *de facto* and *de jure* recognition until 1862 when southern owners no longer sat in the House and Senate to block such things. The irony is that without Haiti's blacks and their struggle for independence the United States would not have doubled in size when it did. And slavery would not have spread as quickly or dug its roots as deeply.
Whether the subject was Haiti's revolutionaries or the American South's chattel, demands of security and property always dominated. Jefferson intended to free his own slaves. He could scarcely call them slaves (preferring "servants" or even "family"), and hoped to transform them into tenants. Once he "cleared off" his debts he would "try some plan of making their situation happier, determined to content myself with a small portion of their labour." But financial considerations blocked manumission as did Jefferson's belief that "to abandon persons whose habits have been formed in slavery is like abandoning children." He was nonetheless wealthy enough to include "25 negroes little and big" in daughter Martha's dowry. Also master enough to work slave children in the nailery and small textile factory he ran in retirement.
For every dream of manumission blocked only by personal debts, it should be noted, the Monticello aesthete offered a thought that could have come from an accountant's pen. "I consider the labor of a breeding woman as no object, and that a child raised every 2. years is of more profit than the crop of the best laboring man," he wrote. "In this, as in all other cases, providence has made our interests and our duties coincide perfectly." He disliked slavery only in theory.
Jefferson did not engage, in his father-in-law's manner, in the commercial slave trade. He sold slaves most often if they habitually stole or ran away. On occasion he would also take men, women, and children over the age of ten to market if he needed to raise capital. More charitably, he sometimes bought the husbands, wives, or children of his own slaves, declaring himself "always willing to indulge connections seriously formed by those people, when it can be done reasonably." Between 1784 and 1794 Jefferson sold or gave away 161 people. When he died thirty years later $100,000 in debt, his daughter auctioned off slaves with little thought to family ties ("connections seriously formed"). The sale eased the debt but not by much, and eventually the house had to go, too.
Jefferson freed no slaves in his will either (unlike Washington), with detractors charging that he was loathe to free anyone besides the children born to the slave Sally Hemmings. Supposedly, these were Jefferson's children. John Adams, who never mentioned the allegation publicly and gave it no credence in private (calling it "a natural and almost inevitable consequence of the foul Contagion in the human Character, Negro Slavery"), took comfort nonetheless in realizing that it would remain "a blot on his [Jefferson's] Character." Those miscegenation and bastardy charges, first raised in 1802 by the scandalmonger and luckless federal office seeker James T. Callender, echoed in the anti-Jefferson press and dragged after his memory, as Adams predicted and historian Jordan noted, "like a dead cat through the pages of formal and informal history."
If Jefferson's words in the Declaration earned his memorial, his actions did little to honor that vision. Jefferson found no way to move against slavery in the first term and conceded as much to the Quaker George Logan while simultaneously promising not to give up the fight: "I have most carefully avoided every public act or manifestation on that subject. Should an occasion ever occur in which I can interpose with decisive effect, I shall certainly know and do my duty with promptitude and zeal." in the second term he found one (uncontroversial) occasion to act. With only South Carolina permitting entry of slaves from outside the United States and with a growing slave population already here, he asked Congress in March 1807 to abolish the foreign slave trade. Little opposition arose. On the first day permitted by the Constitution, January I, 1808, Congress rid the land of this blight, enacting a law, Jefferson said, to which "the morality, the reputation, and the best interests of our country have long been eager to proscribe."
Direct involvement never went beyond the suggestion that Congress move on the question. It never occurred to Jefferson for posterity's sake that this achievement ought to be among the things inscribed on his tombstone. It might be more accurate, on the broader subject of slavery in all its vices, to remember him as a chief executive who could dismiss an antislavery poem, *Avenia, or a Tragical Poem on the Oppression of the Human Species*, by Thomas Brannagan of Philadelphia, as "one of those little irritating measures." An endorsement, the president claimed, would "only lessen my powers of doing them [the slaves] good in the other great relations in which I stand to the public." Yet he sat rather than stood, and sat dead still. He moved only to tremble, and only then when he remembered that "God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever."
For his own generation Jefferson was especially pessimistic. "I have long since given up," he wrote in 1805, "the expectation of any early provision for the extinguishment of slavery among us." But things would be easier for future generations! "Interest is really going over to the side of morality. The value of the slave is everyday lessening; his burthen on his master dayly increasing. Interest is therefore preparing the disposition to be just; and this will be goaded from time to time by the insurrectionary spirit of the slaves. This is easily quelled in its first efforts; but from being local it will become general, and whenever it does it will rise more formidable after every defeat, until we shall be forced, after dreadful scenes and sufferings to release them in their own way, which without such sufferings we might model after our own convenience." Always the revolutionary and president for eight years of a nation born in revolution, he proposed that other generations of Americans fight a winnable battle later as opposed to an impossible battle now-completely unaware that the coming cotton culture, already evident in South Carolina if not in his native Virginia, would make it unimaginably harder for his descendants to root out slavery. He had it exactly backwards.
Perhaps the most disturbing element of Jefferson's tacit support of slavery was that this brilliant and eloquent leader raised all the central questions and by his day's moral calculus or ours often had the right answers. Could the Revolution of 1776 be considered complete while blacks remained enslaved? No. "[Could] the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm base, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath?" He knew they could not. Was slavery "the unremitting despotism" not only for what it took from the slave but for what it required of the master? Yes. Because slavery sucked freedom from everyone. From his first memory on this earth of a house slave carrying him on a pillow to the slave carpenter who made his coffin, Jefferson relied on slaves. That he sometimes rose above circumstance, asked his questions, and answered right is less a comment on his greatness than the situation's obviousness. Its hopelessness, too, everyone with power agreed. It took no great man to recognize that slavery was morally wrong if politically and economically confounding.
These contradictions immobilized Jefferson in the presidency, leaving a legacy that is, in any century, both wonderful and appalling. In his own century the only consistency lay in a refusal to lead or join any moral crusade. "It shall have all my prayers," Jefferson wrote a young abolitionist who tried to budge him one last time in 1825, "and these are the only weapons of an old man." A year later he was dead.