Thomas Jefferson: Radical and Racist

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Slavery

Among revisionist scholarly threats to Jefferson's place in the American pantheon is the work of William Cohen. His 1969 article "Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Slavery" is valuable principally for its analysis of Jefferson's position on free Negroes and escaped slaves and of the solution Jefferson proposed—"colonization"—but especially for Cohen's final summation of the contradictions in Jefferson's position on race and slavery. Cohen considers some 1776 legislative proposals of Jefferson's, of which the most significant were those that introduced new restrictions and penalties applying to free Negroes and to "miscegenation" involving white women.

Nevertheless, the bill was more than a digest of earlier codes and it contained some significant additions which were designed to prevent the increase of the state's free Negro population. It was to be illegal for free Negroes to come into Virginia of their own accord or to remain there for more than one year after they were emancipated. A white woman having a child by a Negro would be required to leave the state within a year. The individual who violated these regulations would be placed "out of the protection of the laws." This would have left them subject to re-enslavement or even to murder at the whim of their neighbors and was, therefore, a most severe punishment.

As eventually passed by the Virginia legislature, in 1785, the revising act did not contain Jefferson's "significant additions." It would seem that Jefferson's abhorrence of the presence of free Negroes, and of white women who gave birth to children of mixed race, was stronger than was normal among contemporaries of his own class. Jefferson probably treated his slaves somewhat better than other slaveowners did, but he seems to have been at least as harsh as other landowners in his treatment of slaves who escaped and were recaptured. Cohen writes,

During Jefferson's adult lifetime, more than forty of his Negroes attempted to escape …

In early September 1805, Jame Hubbard, a stout Negro who worked in the plantation nail factory, ran away, but was soon apprehended and returned. About five years later he escaped again. A year passed before Jefferson learned that Hubbard was living in the area of Lexington and dispatched Isham Chisolm to retrieve the bondsman. It was too late, however; Hubbard had departed only a few days earlier for parts unknown. When Chisolm returned empty-handed, Jefferson offered him a bonus of twenty-five dollars to go after the man a second time. This time Hubbard was caught and brought back in irons, and Jefferson reported: "I had him severely flogged in the presence of his old companions …" He then added that he was convinced that Hubbard "will never again serve any man as a slave, the moment he is out of jail and his irons off he will be off himself." Before Jefferson could implement plans to have him sold out of the state, Hubbard disappeared again.

In theory Jefferson's "solution" to slavery consisted in "colonization": the deportation of all the freed blacks from the United States, preferably back to Africa. 

Late in his life, however, Jefferson began to admit the impracticability of this solution, at least in its widest sense, while reiterating his faith in an attenuated form of it. 

In 1824 Jefferson argued that there were a million and a half slaves in the nation and that no one conceived it to be "practicable for us, or expedient for them" to send all the blacks away at once. He then went on to calculate:

Their estimated value as property, in the first place, (for actual property has been lawfully vested in that form, and who can lawfully take it from the possessors?) at an average of two hundred dollars each … would amount to six hundred millions of dollars which must be paid or lost by somebody. To this add the cost of their transportation by land and sea to Mesurado [the west coast of Liberia], a year's provision of food and clothes, implements of husbandry and of their trades, which will amount to three hundred millions more … and it is impossible to look at the question a second time.

Since African colonization seemed an impossibility, Jefferson suggested a plan which entailed "emancipating the afterborn, leaving them, on due compensation, with their mothers, until their services are worth their maintenance, and putting them to industrious occupations until a proper age for deportation." The individuals who would be "freed" immediately after their birth would eventually be sent to Santo Domingo which, according to the newspapers, had recently offered to open its doors to such persons. In effect, Jefferson was proposing that the federal government buy all newborn slaves from their owners (at twelve dollars and fifty cents each) and that it pay for their "nurture with the mother [for] a few years." Beyond this, the plan would not cost the government anything, for the young blacks would then work for their maintenance until deported. Santo Domingo had offered to bear the cost of passage.

...Modern America is, and has been for more than a quarter of a century, a postracist society, juridically and institutionally and in the ethos of all its establishments: political, social, financial, academic, scientific, and—not least significant—athletic. The American civil religion, if it is to be a bonding force through the coming century, must be unequivocally multiracial. I am not sure that it is yet. The civil religion has been implicitly or explicitly a religion of white people for most of its history. I am not sure whether it has by now lived down that past. But obviously it must do so in the coming century if it is to remain a civil religion for the American people as a whole. There are—as in other Western countries—powerful racist undercurrents still around. But for both reasons, because this is officially a postracist society and because the racist undercurrents are still there, Thomas Jefferson is becoming a most unsuitable and embarrassing figure in the pantheon of the modern American civil religion. For Thomas Jefferson was demonstrably a racist, and a particularly aggressive and vindictive one at that.

I don't mean that Jefferson was a racist because he owned slaves. A person might own slaves in the conditions of the eighteenth century without being a racist. The person might simply have inherited slaves, and not quite know what to do about it. I believe that Washington, who manumitted all his slaves by his will, was in that category. (Jefferson manumitted only the five young Hemmingses, who were probably his own children, and two others.) I am not aware of any utterances of Washington’s that could reasonably be classed as racist. Washington did not, as Jefferson did (in Query XIV of Notes on the State of Virginia), go on about such topics as the supposed preference of black males for white women, as compared with the supposed preferences of orangutans for black women. Nor did Washington display, as Jefferson did (most obsessively in Query XIV), the classic racist itch to identify black characteristics that might be interpreted as indicative of genetic inferiority.

It is precisely Jefferson's status as the oracle of liberty within the American civil religion that is becoming unsustainable in a postracist America. Consider the implications of the story of Jame Hubbard. Hubbard's sole offense was to claim liberty for himself and try to win it. For that offense Jefferson had him "severely flogged in the presence of his old companions." For many Americans today (I would hope for most Americans, and most other people), the hero of liberty in that story is not the famous Thomas Jefferson but the otherwise unknown Jame Hubbard. And that perception has ominous implications for the future status of Thomas Jefferson in the civil religion of a postracist and increasingly multiracial America.

The factor, however, that is bound eventually to eliminate a personal cult of Thomas Jefferson from America's civil religion is not his record in relation to slaves and slavery but the policy laid down by him in relation to "free Negroes." Jefferson's vision of the future America—after the hypothetical abolition of slavery by the slaveowners themselves—was a lily-white one. All the ex-slaves were to be deported to Africa. In the meantime, free blacks had to be eliminated from Virginia. Jefferson's proposals for their elimination were too draconian to be stomached even by his fellow slaveowners. His proposed (and rejected) amendments to the Virginia legal code included a recommendation for penalizing what Virginia slaveowners called miscegenation, by which they always meant sexual intercourse between black men and white women, never between white men and black women—an event of frequent but unmentionable occurrence. Jefferson made provision for the case of a white woman who might bear a mulatto child. Both the mother and her child were to leave Virginia within a year of the birth. In the event of their failure to do so, mother and child were declared to be "out of the protection of the laws." In the circumstances that proposition was a license for lynching—for the physical destruction of mother and child by any Virginian who might care to do the job. Volunteers would not be lacking.

Jefferson's white contemporaries refused to accept that sinister recommendation. But later generations of southerners were to act in its spirit. It is no coincidence that Jefferson was much more popular in the South after the Civil War than he had been before. Before the war the issue had been slavery, and Jefferson was a bit unsound on that by the standards prevailing in the South in the immediate antebellum period. After the war, however, the question of the hour for white southerners was the status of free blacks. And on that Thomas Jefferson was absolutely sound.

It is true that after the war white southerners were in no position to achieve Jefferson's ideal solution: the deportation of all emancipated blacks. But they could and did act in the spirit of Jefferson's major premise in this matter: they could ensure that there would be no free blacks in the southern states. Any black who attempted to achieve real freedom was at best treated as Jefferson had treated Jame Hubbard. Penalties more drastic than flogging, however, were available against persons perceived as guilty of serious racial misconduct. Such people were "out of the protection of the laws." That is, they could be lynched with perfect impunity. And they were, regularly and in large numbers, after the end of Reconstruction and through the first two decades of the twentieth century.

For all this the enforcers of white supremacy claimed, and with justice, a mandate in Thomas Jefferson's well-known doctrine that there was no place for free blacks in American society. If blacks were emancipated and yet remained in America and in the South, then they had to be brought under restraint.

Perhaps the most vocal of the southern white supremacists in the late nineteenth century was the Populist leader Tom Watson, of Georgia. Watson's magazine The Jeffersonian propagated, according to Merrill Peterson, "sectional and racial hatred of the most vicious sort." The relation of The Jeffersonian to Jefferson's thought was similar to the relation of the Republican press in Jefferson's own time to Jefferson's thought. The Jeffersonian, like the Republican press, propagated in crude emotive forms ideas to which the master had given discreet and overtly unemotional expression. And in the southern states in the years after the Civil War the whites who most practiced what The Jeffersonian was preaching were members of the Ku Klux Klan.