My mom’s series on colonial views of slavery will be wrapping up with a look at three Founding Fathers. Today’s post is on Thomas Jefferson.
Thomas Jefferson’s View of Slavery
Like members of Christian churches, the statesmen of late colonial America held an ideal of liberty that for the most part was restricted to white people. Speeches, pamphlets, clubs, debates, and demonstrations in favour of liberty abounded in the colonies. However, in a fashion similar to the ambivalence among Christians that we have already seen, there was this great inconsistency. Freedom was meant to be only for some, in certain ways, so as not to threaten any white person’s lifestyle.
The contradiction between profession and action can be seen in Thomas Jefferson’s point of view. He was typical of his social class in owning hundreds of slaves who worked at Monticello, his plantation in Virginia [pictured at the top of the post]. By the time of the Revolution, he was a young man in his thirties, and was making some effort at legislative reform to eliminate the importation of slaves into Virginia. In his draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson even included a clause condemning the slave trade, but delegates from South Carolina and Georgia insisted that this be deleted from the final form known today.
As he matured, Jefferson’s private letters revealed that he considered slavery a “hideous blot”, a “moral depravity”, and an “abomination”, but he continued to keep his own slaves in bondage. He supported measures toward gradual emancipation such as ending the trans-Atlantic trade, improving living conditions, and eventually freeing all born into slavery after a certain date. Nevertheless, he was extremely cautious because he thought that “to give liberty to, or rather, to abandon persons whose habits have been formed in slavery is like abandoning children.” He was obstinate that emancipation had to be achieved by legislation rather than individual actions, yet his reluctance was such that he impeded any concrete progress toward such legislation.
Jefferson shared with other political philosophers the belief that a majority of independent, tax-paying property owners was necessary for social stability. He therefore had a horror of a mass of landless labourers flooding the society. For this reason and also because of racism, like many others of his day, he preferred that freed slaves leave the country, as he didn’t really want another race mixing with white people. Yet there is strong evidence that he was the father of six children by his slave Sally Hemings!
Jefferson believed that it was unwise to have some states in the union being pro-slavery and others anti-slavery, and prophesied civil war if this were allowed. Even so, he and the other writers of the Constitution were willing to capitulate to Southern plantation owners’ demands that slaveholding be permitted in the new United States of America. National unity trumped humanitarianism every time.