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Here is a selection of passages from the secondary sources pertinent to understanding Jefferson's views on race and slavery. Jump in, jump around. The passages are meant to be browsed rather than read, and they are presented in random fashion to encourage the personal meaning-making that can occur when differently phrased, differently based, or competing ideas are unexpectedly juxtaposed.

1) This "apostle of Liberty" could never reconcile the ideals of freedom, expressed in the Declaration of Independence and his other writings, with the reality of his ownership of men and women and his leadership of a slaveholding society.
Paul Finkelman, Jefferson and Slavery 181

2) Jefferson did not see Africans as diabolic or sinful exactly. Rather they were the embodiment of animality, lacking reason, imagination, self-restraint, and the ability to make free and rational choices, that ability being the only manner of salvation allowed by his deism. Africans' "blackness without," as the historian Winthrop Jordan put it, their "monotonous veil of black," in Jefferson's words, mirrored Jefferson's own anguished "blackness within," in Jordan's phrase, his fears of his own animality. He tried to exile blacks from the promise of the new republic.
Bruce Dain 2

3) His [Thomas Jefferson] distaste for a permanent mixture of the races derived from his conviction that it would inevitably lead to genocidal violence.
Ari Helo and Peter Onuf 2

4) Turning these unfortunates free, on the other hand, would be a disaster for both the Negroes and the whites. The former race had not the moral fiber, intelligence, and industry necessary for citizenship in the society of the latter. Hostility and jealousy were bound to result from a coequal existence within the same territory, until one race must enslave or destroy the other. On the other hand, if the races should not destroy one another in civil war, the black must eventually interbreed with the white, destroying the intelligence and beauty of the superior race.
Robert McColley 118

5) Unlike John Adams, Jefferson was immediately and personally involved in the slavery problem. In 1774 his wife's inheritance added one hundred and thirty-five slaves to his own collection of fifty. The memoirs of his slave Isaac tell us that Jefferson was a "mighty good master" who offered encouragement and rewards for work well done and received the affection of his slaves in return. Despite this, however, the Negroes at Shadwell and Monticello shared some of the less pleasant aspects of slavery in common with their fellows on other plantations. Though it is hard to imagine Jefferson employing the whip, Isaac tells us that the instrument was not unknown at Monticello.
Frederick M. Binder 48-49

6) Racism in Jefferson's world . . . was about differently pigmented people who had become permanently distrustful people. A bold line separated white and black realities, rival understandings (agonizing, potentially violent understandings) of power and humanity.
Andrew Burstein 131

7) First, his belief in a single creation and in a universe governed by natural law led him inexorably toward the view that the concept of natural rights applied to Negroes by virtue of the fact that they were human beings too. Second, Jefferson also held an intuitive belief in the inferiority of the blacks, which he tried to cover up with an appeal to science, but which actually stemmed from the interaction between his own psychological makeup and the mores of the society which surrounded him.
William Cohen 505

8) Notes remains the most important and influential eighteenth-century American statement on race. During the past thirty years Jefferson has been condemned as a racist, praised as an abolitionist, and psychoanalyzed as the founding father of modern white America's racial hang-ups, guilt, and hypocrisy. A man full of contradictions and not given to revealing his intimate thoughts, he lends himself to these interpretations. His psyche has proved extraordinarily difficult to reconstruct; in matters of race and slavery the case regarding the sincerity of Notes can be made either way. Perhaps there was no essential Jefferson, and he constantly "played hide and seek with himself," as one recent biographer puts it.
Bruce Dain 5

9) For Jefferson, political equality for blacks was impossible because he thought "the real distinction that nature made" between the races went beyond color and other physical attributes. Race, more than their status as slaves, doomed blacks to permanent inequality.
Paul Finkelman, Jefferson and Slavery 184

10) To him [Jefferson], Africans constituted a single race and nation. Only the slave trade had torn them from their homeland and diffused them across an ocean in the cramped, stinking holds of slave ships. The "ten thousand recollections" of blacks, Jefferson surmised, were not of Africa but of the "injuries they have sustained," both of body and mind, at the hands of white masters on the American continent. Not only would colonization remove the threat of genocidal race war from Virginia, but it would also allow Americans and Africans to improve and refine themselves in the absence of the blot of slavery. Repatriated Africans would become a "free and independent people," Jefferson asserted in his first cogent colonization plan in 1782. Yet if black slaves belonged in a place other than America, Jefferson had to imagine them in their own "country"; he had to evaluate them on the basis of their pastâ€"and their present. Jefferson saw expatriation as a way of reuniting blacks with their true history, a history ostensibly centered in their native Africa. Yet the "degrading" outcome of generations of enslavement proved an impediment to deciphering just who slaves were, and where exactly they belonged. Jefferson saw Africans as belonging in Africa, yet none of his slaves, all of them creolized, had any memory of Africa, or demonstrated a desire to return there.
Christa Dierksheide 6

11) Jefferson instead approached the problem from the perspective of historical jurisprudence. Free Americans were dealing with an enslaved people who had been carried to America against their will. As a result, Jefferson lamented, slaves and their masters alike were victims of the institution of slavery, locked in a perpetual war that threatened to destroy both peoples.
Ari Helo and Peter Onuf 10

12) The history of Jefferson's relationship to slavery is grim and unpleasant. His words are those of a liberty loving man of the Enlightenment. His deeds are those of a self-indulgent and negrophobic Virginia planter.
Paul Finkelman, Jefferson and Slavery 210

13) In Notes, virtually every description of black difference and inferiority to whites manifests uneasy signs of unwriting, as if the immutable border Jefferson anxiously tries to erect between the two races begins to crumble before the ink is even dry.
Helena Holgersson-Shorter 53

14) While the depth of emotional intensity underlying his thinking abut the Negro seems sufficiently evident, the sources of his feelings remain obscured by his unsurprising failure to articulate emotional patterns and processes of which he was unaware. As has often been remarked about him, few men have written so much yet revealed so little of themselves.
Winthrop D. Jordan 461

15) The hallmark of Jefferson's proposals to end slavery was delay and avoidance. He often spoke of the need for abolition, but asserted that the time was not right. "Not here" and "not now" was his philosophy.
Paul Finkelman, Jefferson and Slavery 207

16) The only solution was to eliminate the institution of slavery and remove the former slaves to some distant location so that white Virginians could fulfill their moral potential as a civilized community.
Ari Helo and Peter Onuf 12

17) But even if the average planter held views on the Negro question identical to those of Thomas Jefferson, slavery would have remained fixed in Virginia, for the most liberal of all Virginia statesmen was himself unable to find a practical means to dismantle the institution he freely acknowledged as a curse. He was effectively prevented from doing so because, on the one hand, he shared too many of the traditional southern ideas about the character and potentialities of the Negro, and, on the other hand, he was unwilling to risk the certain loss of political influence that outspoken opposition to slavery must have caused.
Robert McColley 124

18) He could have freed the slaves he brought to Europe and the North. There were no bars to manumission when he lived in or visited Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New York, the District of Columbia, Great Britain, and France. But Jefferson did not free Sally or James Hemings while they were in France. . . . On the contrary, he carefully avoided any unpleasant encounter with French law that might have led these slaves to claim their liberty.
Paul Finkelman, Jefferson and Slavery 203

19) It was precisely Jefferson's hopeful "innocence," as Woods puts it, that led him to believe that the majority of people in his beloved Virginia and in the whole of the United Sates would eventually embrace abolition. But, until then, respect for the laws, embodying the ideas of constitutionalism and republican government, had to be preeminent.
Mark D. McGarvie 170

20) The sturdy conviction that slavery was doomed despite considerable evidence that it was alive, well, and flourishing, accounts for Jefferson's ability to make with clear conscience his resounding pronouncements about the rights of man, the Laws of Nature, and the role of the United States as a moral leader of the world. It is as though when Jefferson wrote and spoke about these high matters, he experienced a convenient defect of vision which prevented him from seeing black.
John Chester Miller 96

21) The traditional image of Jefferson is of a slaveholder valiantly trying to come to terms with the inherent contradictions between slavery and the philosophy of the American Revolution. This image will not hold up under careful scrutiny. It will not do to defend Jefferson on the ground that he was a southerner, a slaveowner, and a man of his times. We must compare him to his peers--the intellectual, political, and cultural leaders of his generation--and not to his neighbors.
Paul Finkelman, Jefferson and Slavery 186

22) Jefferson's contemporaneous political concerns were clear in the Sparks letter. Yet for him the issue of colonization was inextricably entangled with race-mixing, a theme of compelling personal interest.
Peter Onuf, Generation 154

23) His opposition to slavery is as fierce here [Notes on Virginia] as of old, but it takes various phases, -sometimes sweeping against the hated system with a torrent of facts, -- sometimes battering it with a hard, cold logic, -- sometimes piercing it with deadly queries and suggestions, -- and sometimes his blazing hate of all oppression, biting and burning through every pro-slavery theory.
A. D. White 33

24) A poem ["Inscription For an African Slave"] written into his copy of the Virginia Almanack for 1771 indicates that by this time Jefferson's sympathy for the Negro had been firmly established: "Shores there are, bless'd shores for us remain, / And favor'd isles with golden fruitage crowns / Where tufted flow'rets paint the verdant plain, / Where ev'ry breeze shall med'cine every wound, / There the stern tyrant that embitters life, / Shall vainly suppliant spread his asking hand, / There shall we view the billow's raging strife, / And the kind breast, and waft his boat to land."
Frederick M. Binder 51

25) Jefferson opposed the circulation of his Notes on Virginia in part because his comments on slavery might "produce an irritation." Together with David Brion Davis, we might well ask "how he expected to encourage the cause of emancipation without producing irritation."
Paul Finkelman, Jefferson and Slavery 182-83

26) Jefferson's silence preserved the myth of his white family's perfect happiness. Colonization would do the same thing for Virginia. The costs of this massive deportation would not be charged against the estates of particular, guilty families, but rather to the state or even the union as a whole.
Peter Onuf, Generation 169-70

27) Jefferson's political identity could not be separated from his desire to protect and sustain the cultural and economic power of the South. Just as he could not extinguish his personal debt, he could not extricate himself from slave owning without abandoning Virginia, as he knew it.
Andrew Burstein 129

28) Clearly aware of the environmentalist argument, he earnestly expressed the wish that future evidence might prove that the Negroes' inferiority was the result of their condition rather than their nature. Nevertheless, he did not seem to have much hope that this would be the case.
William Cohen 513

29) His slaves, and those of America, may have been endowed with a right to "liberty," but Jefferson had done nothing to secure that right for them.
Paul Finkelman, Jefferson and Slavery 182

30) The common ground for Jefferson's ideas about both race and slavery is his understanding of American and African national identities. Jefferson could not offer a conclusive judgment on the mental and physical capabilities of his slaves; but he did know, with as much certainty as his own experience and observation could authorize, that African-American slaves constituted a distinct nation.
Peter Onuf, Empire 147

31) By the same token, because Jefferson in Notes followed Linnaeus and repudiated Buffon, natural history in the United States has typically been read as a superficial taxonomic business that, with respect to race, merely codified white narcissism and perception born of slavery. Jefferson was not so simple, however, and neither was Linnaeus. Linnaeus did not enlist rationalism, a new sense of language, and the insights born of exploration and colonialism in the service of any version of "all men are created equal." Instead he tried to preserve what he regarded as the hallowed, timeless, natural social hierarchies of his own Sweden.
Bruce Dain 16

32) For him [Jefferson], abolishing the slave trade meant an end to a barbaric form of commerce foisted on British American colonists by the British king. Abolition of such a reprehensible form of trade would allow newly vindicated Americans to replace a foreign trade with a domestic one, to supplant the traffic in human flesh with a trade in crops, livestock, and other material goods. This free commercial system would resemble that of Europe.
Christa Dierksheide 9

33) 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.
Paul Finkelman, Jefferson and Slavery 185

34) But when Jefferson presents the facts behind his theory of black inferiority, he succumbs to a bizarre and ambiguous discourse that strays from its central, intended meaning. As he strives to establish blacks' essential difference from whites along a dichotomy of black sentiment and passion versus white reason, his discourse self-consciously fights its own tendency to "substitute sentiment for demonstration." It is a struggle in which he frequently and tellingly loses control.
Helena Holgersson-Shorter 53

35) Jefferson's confusion at times became monumental. On the one hand he had intellectually derived his belief in human equality from the existence of an orderly creation which had shaped every natural species to its own mold; and on the other he possessed a larger unquestioning faith, strengthened by his political experience, which predisposed him toward equality. The problem of the Negro's intellect stripped these approaches of their apparent congruity. For he could not rid himself of the suspicion that the negro was naturally inferior. If this were in fact the case, then it was axiomatic that the Creator had so created the Negro and no amount of education or freedom or any other tinkering could undo the facts of nature. Thus Jefferson suspected that the creator might have in fact created men unequal; and he could not say this without giving his assertion exactly the same logical force as his famous statement to the contrary.
Winthrop D. Jordan 453

36) Over the last half a century, many Americans have come to believe that our nation's democratic promise will not be fulfilled until we have overcome the legacies of slavery, segregation, and racism. Jefferson embodies this dilemma. The ringing phrases of his Declaration of Independence--"all men are created equal"â€"constitute our national creed, a promissory note that we have not yet fully honored. Jefferson defaulted on his own promise as the visionary professions of the democratic philosopher gave way to the prudent calculations of the slave-owning planter. When we learn that he freed only a handful of the many hundreds of enslaved African Americans he owned and that those fewâ€"including his children with Sally Hemingsâ€"had such strong personal claims on his solicitude, we begin to suspect that Jefferson himself is the problem. . . . If Jefferson did not mean what he said, if those ringing phrases ring hollow, where does that leave us as people? We define Democracy as inclusion. Jefferson defined slaves as aliens with no claim to membership in the new American nation. If his Declaration calls on free people to burst the chains of despotism, his Notes tells black people that they will have to pursue their happiness elsewhere, anywhere but here.
Peter Onuf, Race 205-6

37) Yet if Jefferson condemned slavery, he was far more concerned about what slavery did to whites than about what it did to blacks. He was fearful of miscegenation, the enslavement of whites, and violent conflict between the races. . . . There is little substance to the antislavery Jefferson.
Paul Finkelman, Jefferson and Slavery 188

38) Most of the genuine abolitionists of the nineteenth century, and the late eighteenth as well, were concerned with the condition of the Negro and the means of improving it, but Jefferson was most concerned with the evil effect of slavery on white Virginians. He wrote eloquently but abstractly about the injustice of slavery for the Negro. On the subject of the white slaveholder, however, his views were penetrating and sympathetic.
Robert McColley 128

39) A colony of free blacks on the west coast of Africa might, he said, "introduce among the aborigines the art of cultivated life and the blessings of civilization and science." Moreover, since Liberia lay in the heart of the region that had supplied slaves for the American market, it could, Jefferson thought, be regarded as small compensation for the injuries white men had inflicted upon the Africans over the course of modern history.
John Chester Miller 265

40) This combination of a fervent desire to see the slaves freed along with the belief that the Negro was a member of an inferior race remained the basis of Jefferson's life-long pronouncements advocating emancipation followed by expatriation.
Frederick M. Binder 58

41) Jefferson's objectionable pseudoscience rightly diminishes him in the eyes of history for one inescapable reason: He did not grow over time. We can see that in spite of moral protestations -- in adjudging slavery a crime against humanity -- a thinker who conveyed the views he did in Notes was unlikely to take meaningful steps toward enacting racial justice, even on a scale within the reach of his generation, unless he questioned his original assumptions with respect to blacks' physical attributes or their capacity to acquire taste and express love. But Jefferson did not doubt himself on this score, nor on the impossibility of an integrated society.
Andrew Burstein 125

42) For modern readers, however, Jefferson's antislavery credentials are seriously compromised by the racist sentiments elaborated elsewhere in the Notes. In Query XIV, Jefferson offered the "opinion" and betrayed the "suspicion" that blacks "are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind." Offered in the properly philosophic spirit to Jefferson's enlightened European readers, these observations were tentative and circumspect: in subsequent correspondence he expressed his fervent "wish" that these speculations were mistaken. But the testimony on the evil of slavery and the imperative of emancipation was unqualified and absolute, thus presumably expressing a deeper level of conviction. In this testimony we can find a principled and passionate Jefferson who earns our respect -- all the more so, perhaps, because he was unable to transcend the prejudices of his day.
Peter Onuf, Empire 147-48

43) He vigorously sought to recover his slaves [during the Revolutionary War]. Had Jefferson done this to give them freedom, then Jefferson "would have done right." But Jefferson chased down his slaves to consign them to lifetime bondage
Paul Finkelman, Jefferson and Slavery 193

44) Despite these actions, the dominant theme of Jefferson's administration on the subject of slavery was a discreet silence. When citizens in the Indiana Territory were demanding that slavery be permitted throughout the Northwest Territory, the President made no comment. Although Jefferson privately continued to represent himself as a foe of human bondage and on rare occasions during his presidency voiced such sentiments in letters to men who shared his views, he was exceedingly careful to keep these thoughts from reaching the public.
William Cohen 522

45) Jefferson's solution to the slavery problem was to institute a program of gradual emancipation, separate slave children from their parents in order to prepare them for freedom, send them to their own country -- perhaps on the west coast of Africa -- and "declare them a free and independent people."
Ari Helo and Peter Onuf 1

46) Though Jefferson reassuringly insists that all of the albinos in question are "born of parents who had no mixture of white blood," his introduction of this subject, as well as his treatise on the dangers of mixing blackness and whiteness elsewhere in Notes, begs the question of under what "rare instances" black Africans in America might produce white children (Notes, 70). . . . Blacks, on the other hand, lack the necessary mental faculties to be shrewd and quick. As implied by his seemingly unintentional praise for the "white" blacks or albinos, he later confirms that a dose of whiteness is all that is needed to bring blacks up from their base condition: "The improvement of the blacks in body and mind, in the first instance of their mixture with the whites, has been observed by everyone" (Notes, 141).
Helena Holgersson-Shorter 55

47) Yet both slavery and miscegenation rested, in the final analysis, upon a perception of difference between the races, a perception founded on physiognomic fact. When Jefferson, for example, set out to prove that emancipated Negroes must be removed from white society he predicated "the real distinction nature has made" moved immediately into a discussion of appearance, and only then went on to less tangible differences in temperament and intellect. Underlying his discussion of the negro, and everyone else's, was an axiomatic separation of negroes from white men based on appearance.
Winthrop D. Jordan 475

48) Among the eminent Virginians of the time, only George Wythe seemed to take the position that Negroes held the full attributes of humanity, and therefore possessed rights which were anterior to any claims that white men might have. Like the Quakers, Wythe entertained a direct concern for the Negroes which took precedence over the safety, convenience, or profit of their masters. Just before he died in 1806, Wythe submitted, in one of his legal opinions, that "whenever one person claims to hold another in slavery, the onus probandi lies on the claimant." In other words, he held that the Negro must be considered free until proven a slave. He derived this position from the general proposition, contained in the Virginia Bill of Rights, that the birthright of every human being is freedom. It was ironic that Wythe died of arsenic poisoning, administered by a wastrel grandnephew who was jealous of sharing the old man's legacy with free Negro servants, and who was acquitted of murder because these Negroes were prevented by law from testifying against him.
Robert McColley 136

49) By 1824 Jefferson had little good advice to offer colonizationists, but his letter to Sparks provides a commentary on the circumstances of his mixed-race children as they embarked on their own internal colonization.
Peter Onuf, Generation 165

50) Even if all whites could somehow remain politically and legally equal without slavery, race presented an insurmountable barrier to emancipation for Jefferson, who could not accept blacks as his equals. He believed blacks were swayed by emotion, lacked intellectual abilities, and were not equipped to participate in a free republican society. As historian John Hope Franklin insightfully notes, "It would seem hardly likely that anyone with such pronounced views on the inferiority of blacks who, at the same time, believed blacks and whites could not live together as free persons could entertain a deeply serious belief that slaves should be emancipated."
Paul Finkelman, Slavery I 108

51) His hatred of slavery was bitter. But there was such a press of other work during this founding period that this hatred took shape not so much in a steady siege as in a series of pitched battles.
A. D. White 31

52) Concern for the moral, political, and economic welfare of his state, section, and nation, and concern for the purity of his race undoubtedly affected and took precedence over his desire to see the Negro freed.
Frederick M. Binder 71

53) Even if he had put his financial house in order and been able to extricate himself from his role as master and slave owner, a general emancipation posed other problems for Jefferson. Who would replace the slaves in the fields and in other menial positions? A permanent lower class of free, poor whites would threaten republican society.
Paul Finkelman, Jefferson and Slavery 183

54) In 1769, during his first term in the House of Burgesses, he seconded a motion for the adoption of a law which would permit masters to manumit their slaves, but it did not pass. When such a law was adopted in 1782, Jefferson failed to free his own bondsmen.
William Cohen 508

55) Yet Jefferson could not ignore what he perceived to be an improved relationship between masters and their slaves. As a result, enslaved men and women seemed to be marrying each other, having children, working the same farm or plantation their whole lives. They seemed to have developed loyalties and attachments that Jefferson, at least in the abstract, had not thought possible. For here were slaves who seemed content to labor in the Virginia landscape, here were slaves who seemed as nonviolent and malleable as children. Moreover, many slaveholders, himself included, appeared to have developed particular attachments to particular slaves. For Jefferson, this bond of fealty, of reciprocal obligation, constituted the core of morality. "I consider our relations with others as constituting the boundaries of morality," he told Thomas Law, with "self-love" being "the sole antagonist of virtue." Indeed, "nature hath implanted in our breasts a love of others, a sense of duty to them, a moral instinct . . . which prompts us to feel and to succor their distresses." This "sense of duty" introduced a level of morality into a system that had theretofore been considered entirely immoral.
Christa Dierksheide 13

56) But "nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free," he wrote in 1821; "nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them."
Peter Onuf, Empire 151

57) He trembled at the thought that God's "justice cannot sleep for ever," but he trembled more at the immediate prospect of free blacks in his community. He thought it was "impossible to be temperate" in discussing solutions to slavery, so he offered none at all: "We must be contented to hope they will force their way into every one's mind."
Paul Finkelman, Jefferson and Slavery 208

58) He was quite as bound to slavery in his private life as he was obliged to be publicly. The labor of his slaves created and sustained the modest splendors of Monticello, and the crops they grew purchased (though they never quite covered the cost) the fine wines and books that made his life at home seem so attractive . . . . George Washington, a much more acute business manager than Jefferson, and a man with no direct heirs, helped his various relations in Virginia develop fine estates in their own names, and was still able to relieve his conscience and embellish his reputation by freeing those slaves he owned in his own right. But apart from freeing a couple of typical old "faithful retainers," Jefferson was obliged by his own way of life to leave his Negroes indefinitely bound to servitude.
Robert McColley 132

59) The forced emigration of blacks, while it seemed a hardship at the time, would later, he predicted, be accounted a blessing in disguise for it gave enslaved and oppressed people an opportunity to make a fresh start as a "separate, free and independent people."
John Chester Miller 272

60) He declares that the black race is inferior to the white in mind, but not in heart.
A. D. White 34

61) If Jefferson was inconsistent on slavery restriction, he consistently promoted what he considered best for white southerners.
Paul Finkelman, Jefferson and Slavery 200

62) The Threat of race war, of armed black slaves fighting against their white masters, was so visceral, so proximate, that Jefferson believed no slave owner would free his slave within the bounds of Virginia. Emancipation, he thought, did not mean the liberty of one race, but rather the demise of one.
Christa Dierksheide 174

63) Jefferson remained adamantly opposed to slavery: the very existence of the institution embroiled his beloved commonwealth in a perpetual war that was degrading and demoralizing -- and that Virginia ultimately might lose. Yet Jefferson was equally adamantly anti-slave, and his loathing of the black enemy was only exacerbated by the apparent futility of efforts to seek peace through "a general emancipation and expatriation." The intensity of this loathing became an increasingly formidable obstacle to even imagining, much less fulfilling, the original promise of colonization: the creation of a "free and independent" black nation. If they stayed in Virginia, freed people would use the "dagger" against their former masters, for whatever else they were by "nature" these black people were natural enemies. In the end, it did not matter where former slaves were sent, for the enmity of the black nation was as indelibly "fixed" as the skin color of it people.
Peter Onuf, Declare 16

64) The realization that his views on slavery might turn a large segment of mature public opinion against him caused Jefferson to take great pains to insure that the printed copes of his "Notes" got into the hands of only those who would appreciate and sympathize with them.
Frederick M. Binder 59

65) Of the total of seven slaves that he freed, at least five were members of a mulatto family named Hemings; and it seems well established that these favored individuals were directly descended from Jefferson's father-in-law.
William Cohen 519

66) In the company of liberal intellectuals abroad, Jefferson freely expressed, in the 1780's, the antislavery thoughts that he had developed in association with his former teacher, George Wythe, before the American Revolution. This was so well known that certain Federalists in South Carolina tried to ruin Jefferson's reputation in the South by urging their countrymen to believe that Jefferson was, in fact, committed to an early and complete emancipation. They also pointed to Jefferson's letter to Benjamin Bannaker, a free Negro who had an unusual gift for mathematics and worked out the astronomical predictions for a popular almanac. But this letter, written when Jefferson was Secretary of State under Washington, was his last public gesture of any kind on behalf of the Negroes of America.
Robert McColley 125-26

67) He was, in William Freehling's words, a "Conditional Terminator," never able to argue for an end to slavery without conditions that were always impossible to meet. For Jefferson any cost in ending slavery, however low, was too high.
Paul Finkelman, Jefferson and Slavery 183

68) Only the means were at question: white men must liberate Negroes in justice, or Negroes would liberate themselves in blood.
Winthrop D. Jordan 434

69) It is true that in this case [of Samuel Howell] Jefferson articulated the notion that "under law of nature... we are all born free." But the key issue in this case--- as in so many of Jefferson's writing on slavery, race, and liberty --- hinges on what Jefferson meant by the term "we."
Paul Finkelman, Jefferson and Slavery 190

70) Jefferson submitted in his Notes that the humane remedy, the only nonviolent solution to America's race problem, was to re-colonize blacks elsewhere. They were, he felt, a people without a country, because they had been kidnapped and taken from their homeland -- unlike the European Americans, they had not come voluntarily. . . . Subordinated blacks had built up too much legitimate hostility over the generations, whereas whites' supposedly higher reasoning faculty should have made them, as well, loath to accept the evolutionary debasement that racial "amalgamation" implied. These are rather stark terms, but they decisively sum up Jefferson's theory.
Andrew Burstein 129

71) Here was Jefferson's dilemma: to remove slaves for the national good even when slave owners had little consciousness of that national good
Christa Dierksheide 182

72) Jefferson could not accept blacks as his equals. He believed blacks were swayed by emotion, lacked intellectual abilities, and were not equipped to participate in a free republican society
Paul Finkelman, Jefferson and Slavery 184

73) He wrote at length on a matter upon which Virginians generally were silent, but he may well have been speaking for many of them.
Winthrop D. Jordan 455

74) Annette Gordon-Reed claims, "There is no reason to believe that the question of Sally Hemings could ever overshadow Jefferson's legacy to this country." Yet judging from the ongoing nature of the controversy, the "issue" of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson is his legacy to this country. The wealth of contradictions involving race, miscegenation, and representation surrounding Jefferson are part of the framework that constitute the unheimliche heim of Monticello, his discourse, and his actual legacy.
Helena Holgersson-Shorter 64

75) Jefferson could encourage that change first in the minds of his fellow citizens and then through proposals to revise its laws; but he could not dictate it.
Mark D. McGarvie 162

76) Defining of slavery as a state of war, Jefferson could only conceive of its abolition in terms of a peace that would secure the independence and integrity of two distinct nations, each with its own "country."
Peter Onuf, Empire 149

77) Jefferson's negrophobia was profound. A scientist and naturalist, he nevertheless accepted and repeated absurdly unscientific and illogical arguments about the racial characteristics of blacks, speculating that blackness might come "from the colour of the blood" or that blacks might breed with the "Oran-ootan." His assertion that black men preferred white women was empirically insupportable. And, as he surely knew, many white men, including his late father-in-law, maintained sexual liaisons with their female slaves
Paul Finkelman, Slavery I 109

78) Jefferson was thoroughly aware that the environmentalist argument could serve (and actually had) to make a case for negro equality, and hence he went to great lengths to prove that the Negroes' lack of talent did not stem from their condition.
Winthrop D. Jordan 438

79) Jefferson's clear dilemma in confronting the race issue was tied to his identification with a class of men. These were the neighbors he grew up admiring, the friends he made in college and afterward, and the political allies who could acknowledge, along with him, the South's distinctive character.
Andrew Burstein 128-29

80) In death, as in life, Jefferson wanted to be remembered for his words, even while failing to act on them with respect to his slaves. We honor him for the words of the Declaration, even as we remember his lifelong failure to implement liberty at the most personal level.
Paul Finkelman, Jefferson and Slavery 207

81) Jefferson lived long enough for his racial thinking to evolve. It didn't. . . . Jefferson's commitment to racial separation was fundamental not provisional: it was inextricably linked to his conception of American nationhood.
Peter Onuf, Race 208

82) Jefferson's practical involvement with the system of black bondage indicates that, while his racist beliefs were generally congruent with his actions, his libertarian views about slavery tended to be mere intellectual abstractions.
William Cohen 506

83) According to Onuf's Jefferson, blacks hated and suffered too much to become citizens of the republic: they were a separate, implacably inimical people in their own right. Emancipation hence had to be followed by transportation to some land that they could call their own, where, he wrote in Notes, they could become a nation in themselves. Virginia might send them out "with arms, implements of household and of the handicraft arts, seeds, pairs of the useful domestic animals, &c. to declare them a free and independent people, and extend to them our alliance and protection, till they shall have acquired strength." Jefferson's discussion of blacks' (to him mostly inferior) characteristics followed this passage, as an explanation for why blacks could never be assimilated into Virginia.
Bruce Dain 20

84) Like so many of Jefferson's writings on slavery, his draft of the Declaration reveals his self-deluding inability to see African-Americans as human beings. They are mere objects, in this case to be used in the propaganda war against the King. Not a few Englishmen read the Declaration and wondered, as did Samuel Johnson, "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?" Few of the revolutionaries yelped louder, or with more eloquence, than the master of Monticello; few owned so many Negroes.
Paul Finkelman, Jefferson and Slavery 192

85) It's not just that Jefferson was simply "a man of his times" and could not rise above the customs and prejudices of his slaveholding class. Jefferson did not simply discover racial boundaries already inscribed and fixed in nature: he helped construct them, contributing significantly to the racial "science" that would in subsequent decades naturalize racial hierarchy. Jefferson was a nation maker who helped revolutionaries see themselves as great people with an important role to play in world history. But he was also a race maker who defined enslaved Americans as a captive nation, an alien people who must be blotted from the face of the American earth.
Peter Onuf, Race 211

86) This is why we need to recognize that as deficient as he was, Jefferson never set out wanting to represent, above all others in his generation, the common white belief in black inferiority. We magnify his limits as a political actor by forcing his racism to define him. We would probably contextualize his racism better if racial injustice did not still blatantly manifest itself in our lifetime.
Andrew Burstein 133

87) Jefferson could not maintain his extravagant life style without his slaves and, to judge from his lifelong behavior, his grand style of living was more important than the natural rights of his slaves.
Paul Finkelman, Jefferson and Slavery 183

88) Hence Jefferson never for a moment considered the possibility that they might rightfully be enslaved. He felt the personal guilt of slaveholding deeply, for he was daily depriving other men of their rightful liberty.
Winthrop D. Jordan 432

89) Genuine opponents of slavery would recognize that even the slightest imputation of slaveholder guilt would rip the union apart and fasten the shackles of bondage still more tightly on the captive nation. It was therefore imperative that slaveowners not be blamed for slavery.
Peter Onuf, Generation 165

90) He took consolation in the reflection that the Creator had given Americans a clear option: they could wait until the 'god of justice,' in response to the please of the slaves, unleashed his "exterminating thunder," or they could abolish slavery peacefully, gradually, and with a minimum of inconvenience to themselves.
John Chester Miller 45

91) Jefferson could assert the equality of mankind only by excluding blacks. . . . Jefferson's negrophobia was profound.
Paul Finkelman, Jefferson and Slavery 185

92) Jefferson's solution to the slavery problem proceeded from this diagnosis. The captive nation must be liberated, "colonized" in some new country that they could claim as their own, and thus be declared and recognized as "a free and independent people" . . . . But if they could not return to their homeland (and this would be impossible without the assistance of their former masters), blacks could only hope to achieve nationhood by destroying the whites and making Virginia their own country.
Peter Onuf, Empire 150

93) But must we judge Thomas Jefferson entirely on whether he was, ultimately, as munificent as the most susceptible, most compassionate southerner? Must he be all racist or all liberator? That seems too dismissive. His pseudoscience mirrored that of others, equally well educated, who measured skulls to determine the relationship between race and intelligence. And why should we expect him to be any less likely to dismiss black prospects for social equality than the apparent majority of northerners?
Andrew Burstein 124

94) Because he was the author of the Declaration of Independence and a leader of the American Enlightenment, the test of Jefferson's position on slavery is not whether he was better than the worst of his generation, but whether he was the leader of the best; not whether he responded as a southerner and a planter, but whether he was able to transcend his economic interests and his sectional background to implement the ideals he articulated. Jefferson fails this test.
Paul Finkelman, Jefferson and Slavery 181

95) Of course, Jefferson also was convinced that emancipation efforts, no matter how small in scale, were unrealistic. Because Africans had been so "degraded" by enslavement, they were ill-equipped to be successful freemen on Virginia soil. As Jefferson wrote to Edward Bancroft, "to give liberty to" slaves is much "like abandoning children." Jefferson noted that several of his Quaker neighbors had "seated their slaves on their lands as tenants," only to find themselves "obliged to plan their crops for them, to direct all their operations during every season." But "what is more afflicting," Jefferson believed, was that the Quakers were "obliged to watch them daily and almost constantly to make them work, and even to whip them." These black tenants often "chose to steal from their neighbors rather than work" and became "public nuisances" who were "in most instances reduced to slavery again." For Jefferson, black Africans could embrace liberty only in their homeland, not in America. Generations of enslavement had forced Africans to be "brought from their infancy without necessity for thought or forecast," their "habits rendered as incapable as children of taking care of themselves." And free blacks, lacking in morality and manners, "are pests in society by their idleness," Jefferson thought. Only an improved slave system would protect and benefit enslaved Africans, none of whom seemed to grasp principles of liberty, virtue, or morality. Benevolent slaveholders, charged with the improvement of their bondsmen, would be responsible for the industry and well-being of the slaves they owned. And in some future time, when every Virginian consented to the repatriation of African slaves, the newly freed blacks would not be idle and licentious, but rather improved laborers already instructed in industry and manners.
Christa Dierksheide 8-9

96) Jefferson thought racial differences were fixed in nature, whatever their source and however they might be assessed. His comparative method focused on and therefore exaggerated racial differences. . . . Jefferson's approach worked in the opposite direction as "time and circumstances" conspired with nature to produce a natural racial hierarchy. Philanthropy thus decreed separation. . . . Jefferson's defenders cannot say that he did not say these awful things. But they insist that his "racism" should not be allowed to overshadow his fundamental commitment to human rights and his great contributions to the history of freedom in the modern world. They have a point. Jefferson was certainly a great exponent of natural rights; his testimony against the injustice of slavery remains compelling, particularly in view of his ‘suspicions' about black inferiority. a later generation of proslavery ideologues would justify the institution as the most humane and civilized means of sustaining the racial order that Jefferson described in his Notes. But Jefferson was moving in the other direction, from the notion that slaves were subhuman and therefore as much "subjects of property as . . . horses and cattle" to the recognition of their fundamental, irreducible rights as fellow human beings.
Peter Onuf, Race 207

97) Jefferson went through life classifying the world's peoples according to a moral anthropology that is foreign to us. This explains why subsequent generations have found it increasingly difficult to pin him down on the question of race.
Andrew Burstein 120

98) Historian Edmund Morgan agrees: "Aristocrats could more safely preach equality in a slave society than a free one. Slaves did not become leveling mobs." The liberty of the white masses rested on the slavery of the black masses.
Paul Finkelman, Jefferson and Slavery 184

99) Jefferson's solution to the slavery problem proceeded from this diagnosis. Members of the captive nation must be liberated, "colonized" in some new country that they could claim as their own, and thus be declared and recognized as "a free and independent people."
Peter Onuf, Declare 2

100) Jefferson's views on slavery and race suggest that his libertarian sentiments were more than counterbalanced by his conviction that Negroes were members of a race so alien and inferior that there was no hope that whites and blacks could coexist side by side on terms of equality. Jefferson's libertarian views, however, had virtually no impact upon his actions after 1784, and his belief in the inferiority of the slaves was completely congruent with his behavior as both a planter and a politician>
William Cohen 514

101) Jefferson's attitude toward slavery and his lack of any serious commitment to emancipation reflects his upbringing, class origins, and lifelong status as a wealthy landowner, slaveowner, and southern aristocrat.
Paul Finkelman, Jefferson and Slavery 186

102) His [Thomas Jefferson] primary goal was not to free black people but to free white people from the moral evil of being slaveholders.
Ari Helo and Peter Onuf 11

103) Jefferson tried to persuade himself that race was a crucial determinant in explaining the degraded condition of Virginia's slaves. Yet, as Jefferson well knew, differences rooted in nature could never adequately explain or justify the deleterious effects of conquest, captivity, and exploitation on the African nation.
Peter Onuf, Declare 9

104) Jefferson held that blacks did not equal whites in mind or body. Thus, class background or regional identity was not the only determinant of Jefferson's racism; his attachment to the books in his library mattered, too, for they -- especially natural history and medical science -- led him to his characterizations and conclusions as much as economic self-interest did.
Andrew Burstein 118

105) Jefferson's private actions regarding his own slaves' attempts to gain freedom further undermine his antislavery reputation for this early period. . . . Jefferson chased after his slaves even as he urged the legislature to allow other masters to free theirs.
Paul Finkelman, Jefferson and Slavery 190

106) Fawn Brodie writes, "Jefferson had planned an impressive central house with forty-eight-foot wings containing the service quarters. But these quarters . . . were to be covered with terraces and open outward in one direction so that they remained largely unseen. Here he followed the architect Palladio, who suggested that a house, like a man's body, should be partially hidden" (Brodie, 87-88). Just what was Monticello designed to display and to hide? The house servants of Monticello were the Hemings -- Sally Hemings, along with her mother, brothers, sisters, and eventually her children, in addition to Martha Wayles Jefferson's own illegitimate, quadroon siblings whom she inherited from her father.
Helena Holgersson-Shorter 62

107) But Jefferson's main concern in these passages was to define and secure national identities; having conceptualized masters and slaves as two nations in a state of war, his proposal for African expatriation and colonization constituted a peace plan, the only way the two nations could recognize each other's equality and independence.
Peter Onuf, Declare 6

108) It will be easiest to start with Jefferson's central dilemma. He hated slavery but thought Negroes inferior to white men.
Winthrop D. Jordan 429

109) A legion of general historians and biographers have endowed Jefferson with the most exalted reputation in American history among intellectuals. Reflecting on Jefferson's experience with and attitudes toward slavery, they have cited Jefferson's attacks on the institution with commendable thoroughness, but have been much less conscientious both in tracing his provincial views of the character and capacity of the Negro and in acknowledging the degree to which Jeffersonian politics tended to promote and extend the planting interests of the South. They have suggested that, considering his birth and upbringing in a slaveholding society, his opinions were still surprisingly liberal and in advance of his times.
Robert McColley 131

110) Jefferson put the best possible construction on the condition of his slaves, defining his role as a benevolent slaveholder as "watch[ing] for the happiness of those who labor for mine." Jefferson thus reversed the classic formulation of his Declaration, with "happiness" here defined as a passive condition dependent on the will of another, not as the object of an active "pursuit." The allusion to the Declaration was probably unintended, though it perfectly parallels Jefferson's surely self-conscious reference in the Notes, when he proposed "to declare them a free and independent people." In both cases the contrast between the activity of free Americans and the passivity of enslaved Africans is absolute. It was the difference between a people having a country within which to pursue happiness . . . and a people without a country.
Peter Onuf, Empire 163

111) Many Virginians opposed the trade for "selfish considerations" . . . Jefferson certainly fit this class of Virginians. Throughout his life Jefferson sold slaves: the African trade diminished the value of his slaves. Jefferson also always argued for curbs on the growth of America's black population. He almost always tied any discussion of manumission or emancipation to colonization or "expatriation" . . . . Thus, the attack on the king dovetailed with Jefferson's negrophobia and his interests as a Virginia slaveowner and did not necessarily indicate opposition to slavery itself.
Paul Finkelman, Slavery I 116

112) Fortunately Jefferson went to his grave convinced that slavery was a blight on the white community. With slavery's effect on black men he simply was not concerned.
Winthrop D. Jordan 433

113) Jefferson identified only one "difference . . . fixed in nature" between the races -- that of color. And while he derived from that difference some aesthetic conclusions, he did not find color to render blacks any less entitled to recognition of their natural rights than whites . . . in any case, political equality was never dependent upon faculties but rather on a natural liberty. Jefferson never doubted the humanity of the slaves.
Mark D. McGarvie 157