Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 2: Thomas Jefferson and slavery

Today, I want to excerpt some quotations from Jefferson at Home by Gordon Wood New York Review of Books 10/13/93, a review of Jeffersonian Legacies. These are not meant so much to address any particular element of Lost Cause mythology, but rather to give a picture of the complexity of the slavery issue, even in the life of a slavery opponent like Thomas Jefferson. Wood writes:

Surely there is no greater irony in American history than the fact that America's supreme spokesman for liberty and equality was a lifelong aristocratic owner of slaves. Jefferson hated slavery, it is true, but, unlike Washington and some of his fellow Virginians, during his lifetime he freed only eight of his nearly two hundred slaves. "In the fifty years from 1776 until his death in 1826, a period of extraordinary public service, he did little," says Finkelman, "to end slavery or to dissociate himself from his role as the master of Monticello." On the contrary: he bought, bred, and flogged his slaves and hunted down fugitives in much the same way his fellow Virginia planters did - all the while declaring that American slavery was not as bad as that of the ancient Romans. Even when some of his younger countrymen like Edward Coles sought his blessing in liberating their slaves, he refused to encourage them and offered only excuses for delay.

I would add here that manumitting (freeing) slaves was not quite so simple as just releasing them as property, at least if you wanted, as Jefferson did, for them to be able to make a living. And he did attempt to arrange for his slaves to be freed upon his death, but sought to make arrangements to insure that they would be able to support themselves. (However, see the reference below to what happened to his estate.)

Later defenders of slavery claimed as a sign of the benevolence of their Peculiar Institution that they sometimes freed loyal slaves later in the slaves' lives. Mostly that meant that elderly slaves - not many slaves lived to be elderly - when they became too old and disabled to work, were legally freed and left to fend for themselves. It wasn't exactly a pension plan.

Most embarrassing in today's climate are Jefferson's views of blacks. Jefferson could never really imagine freed blacks living in a white man's America, and throughout his life he insisted that any emancipation of the slaves had to be accompanied by their expulsion from the country. He wanted all blacks sent to the West Indies, or Africa, or anywhere out of the United States. He feared that former slaves would take revenge on their former masters for the "ten thousand…injuries they have sustained." In 1797 he told a fellow Virginian and slaveholder that "if something is not done and soon done, we shall be the murderers of our own children." "But," says Finkelman, "he had no idea what that 'something' might be. A man who fearlessly pledged his life to fight the king of England and his mighty armies trembled at the idea of black slaves acting as free men."

Jefferson's remedy of expulsion was based on racial fear and antipathy. While he had no apprehensions about mingling white blood with that of the Indian, he never ceased expressing his "great aversion" to miscegenation between blacks and whites. When the Roman slave was freed, he "might mix with, without staining the blood of, his master." When the black slave was freed, however, he had, said Jefferson, "to be removed beyond the reach of mixture." Although Jefferson believed that the Indians were uncivilized, he always admired them and made all sorts of environmental explanations for their differences from whites. Yet he was never able to do the same for the African American. Instead, he continually suspected that the black man was inherently inferior to the white in both body and mind.

This is important, and does touch on a key argument of Lost Cause pseudohistory. Neo-Confederates argue that racism among Northern whites is proof that the Civil War couldn't have been about slavery. The argument also carries an assumption that only for generous, humanitarian motives on the part of the Yankees would slavery have had anything to do with the war.

In fact, that's completely unhistorical. What we would now call white-supremacist assumptions could and did go together with opposition to slavery, as in Jefferson's case. Virtually all antebellum whites had some more-or-less racist belief in the inferiority of blacks. Probably the best-known white American of pre-Civil War times who believed in racial equality in the present day sense was John Brown, antislavery guerrilla fighter and "terrorist".

"I love industry and abhor severity," said Jefferson in 1805, and he himself apparently never physically punished a slave. But he certainly ordered disobedient slaves whipped; and those he could not correct he sold, often as a lesson to the other slaves. Jefferson ordered one particularly unmanageable slave to be sold so far away that it would seem to his companions "as if he were put out of the way by death."

To protect himself from the realities of owning human beings, says Stanton, Jefferson "needed the same psychological buffers as other well-intentioned slaveholders." Sensitive as he was, he had to numb himself to what was going on at Monticello, close his mind in a way that distanced and dehumanized the black families among whom he lived for his entire life. In the infrequent descriptions of his slaves in his correspondence, Jefferson, writes Stanton, singles them out "for characteristics - trustworthiness or unreliability, intelligence or stupidity, sobriety or drunkenness - that bear entirely on performance." To Jefferson the slaves could not be real human beings, never mind persons who might be equal to him and other whites. For Jefferson, as for most of the southern planters, the bulk of the slaves were and had to be merely names in an account book, and, as Stanton adds, "only first names, and diminutives at that." Only by regarding his slaves as inferior beings could he justify what he was doing at Monticello. As he reportedly told a visiting Englishman in 1807, the "Negro race were ... made to carry burthens."

Ultimately patriarchal benevolence was irrelevant to what was increasingly seen by the late eighteenth century to be the inhumanity of slave-holding. All the kindness in the world could not hide the horrors of black slavery, one hour of which, said Jefferson in 1786, was "fraught with more misery" than ages of the tyranny that the American revolutionaries had just thrown off. Yet Jefferson eventually learned to deaden whatever stings of conscience holding other humans in bondage caused him. As Stanton says, "He appears to have convinced himself that those who were, as he suspected in print in the Notes on Virginia, 'inferior in the faculties of reason and imagination,' and whose griefs were 'transient,' might find happiness in a bondage mitigated by a benevolent hand." He said he could not free most of his slaves because it would be "like abandoning children": they could not survive outside of his kindly rule. In the end, however, he died so deeply in debt that his "family" that he had nurtured and controlled for sixty years had to be sold and dispersed throughout the land. He abandoned his "children" after all.

This was the ugly reality of slavery. One can take such situations as a reason to interpret historical leaders of democracy like Jefferson as merely cynical businessmen, which interpretations like those of Charles Beard tend in practice to do.

Or we can recognize it as part of reality-bsed. And observe that, despite his own intimate connection with the Peculiar Insitution, Jefferson could also see its radical contradiction to the basic assumptions of the Declaration of Independence and the American Republic. And indeed it certainly was.

Jefferson's career as plantation slave-holder was the career of many other southern slaveholders, and no degree of deification of the man can change that fact. Thus we should stop the deification, stop searching for legacies that supposedly pass directly from this eighteenth-century man to our present. No doubt Jefferson made many ringing statements on behalf of liberty and equality and freedom of speech and freedom of conscience that have resounded throughout our culture, and indeed the world's culture, during the past two hundred years; and we quite sensibly renew our belief in these values by periodically reinvoking and rereading Jefferson's statements. Yet we ought always to remember that Jefferson's eighteenth-century statements have been glossed, refracted, expanded, and developed by two centuries of subsequent historical experience that is just as important in sustaining our values as the original statements themselves. The legacies we have received from the past are not and could not be the products of a single man of the eighteenth century, or for that matter all the "founding fathers" put together; instead, our legacies are the products of our entire accumulated historical experience.

We Americans make a great mistake in idolizing our so-called "founding fathers"; we seriously err in canonizing, and making symbols of, authentic historical figures who cannot and should not be ripped out of their own time and place. By turning Jefferson into the kind of transcendent moral hero that no authentic historically situated human being could ever be, we leave ourselves demoralized by the time-bound weaknesses of this eighteenth-century slaveholder. If we continue to make Jefferson stand for America and represent the country's moral character, we will end up stressing our deficiencies and ignoring just how far we have progressed since the eighteenth century. Heroes and founding fathers are wonderful things for a culture to have, but they must be mythical characters like Romulus and Remus or King Arthur, obscured in the mists of the distant past; they cannot be, like Jefferson and the other "founding fathers," real human beings about whom an extraordinary amount of historical detail is known. (my emphasis)

I'm also opposed to idolizing historical figures. (Andrew Jackson and William Faulkner more-or-less excepted.)

But I disagree with the general thrust of his observation here. And I think it's a misreading of the function of how the symbolism of the Founders like Jefferson and Jackson (Old Hickory fought in the Revolution as a very young man) function in society.

By Athena, is it really a surprise that Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, one of the most important leaders of the democratic movement in the early years of the Republic, and a genuine opponent of slavery came to symbolize the cause of freedom and democracy?

I suppose there are people who would turn Jefferson and other Founders into "transcendent moral hero[es]". Although I can't recall encountering any of them at the moment. But if we want to understand democracy as something that occurs among fallible human beings in real history, how could we fail to recognize the achievements that moved democracy forward? Their democratic achievements aren't remarkable because they were creatures of their time. They are remarkable because they moved their country forward toward a more democratic life and a freer future.

Neo-Confederates and other reactionaries are perfectly happy to trash to greatest leaders of American democracy, from Jefferson and Jackson to Lincoln and FDR. I take a critical attitude toward all of them. But I'm not willing to dismiss their critical political achievements, either.

We don't need any of them to be a "transcendent moral hero" for that.

confederate heritage month 2008, slavery, thomas jefferson