Thomas Jefferson and Haitian Emigration - Views On Slavery and Race - Evaluations By Historians

Evaluations By Historians

"Of all the Founding Fathers, it was Thomas Jefferson for whom the issue of race loomed largest. In the roles of slaveholder, public official and family man, the relationship between blacks and whites was something he thought about, wrote about and grappled with from his cradle to his grave."

Important 20th-century Jefferson biographers including Merrill Peterson support the view of Jefferson as a man strongly opposed to slavery; Peterson said that Jefferson's ownership of slaves "all his adult life has placed him at odds with his moral and political principles. Yet there can be no question of his genuine hatred of slavery or, indeed, of the efforts he made to curb and eliminate it." Peter Onuf stated Jefferson was well known for his "opposition to slavery, most famously expressed in his ... Notes on the State of Virginia." The biographer John Ferling said that Thomas Jefferson was "zealously committed to slavery's abolition."

Starting in the early 1960s, some academics began to challenge the Jefferson's position as they assessed his actions rather than his words. Paul Finkelman wrote in 1994 that earlier scholars, particularly Peterson, Dumas Malone, and Willard Randall, engaged in "exaggeration or misrepresentation" to advance their argument of Jefferson's anti-slavery position, saying "they ignore contrary evidence" and "paint a false picture" to protect Jefferson's image on slavery. Academics including William Freehling, Winthrop Jordan and David Brion Davis have criticized Jefferson for his lack of action in trying to end slavery in the United States, including not freeing his own slaves, rather than for his views. Davis noted that although Jefferson was a proponent of equality in earlier years, after 1789 and his return to the US from France (when he is believed to have started a relationship with his slave Sally Hemings), he was notable for his "immense silence" on the topic of slavery. He did support prohibition of the importing of slaves into the United States, but took no actions related to the domestic institution. At the time, the internal slave trade was growing dramatically and would move one million people in forced migrations from the East Coast and Upper South to the Deep South, breaking up numerous slave families.

In his Notes on Virginia, Jefferson supported the concept of gradual emancipation if based on deportation of freed blacks, as he feared their presence in the slave society would contribute to a slave revolt.

He took no political action to achieve this.

Jefferson may have borrowed from Suetonius, a Roman biographer, the phrase "wolf by the ears", as he held a book of his works. Jefferson characterized slavery as a dangerous animal (the wolf) that could not be contained or freed. He believed that attempts to end slavery would lead to violence.

According to Greg Warnusz, Jefferson held contemporary 19th-century beliefs that blacks were inferior to whites in terms of "potential for citizenship," and he wanted them deported. His views of a democratic society were based on a homogeneity of men. He claimed to be interested in helping both races in his proposal. His later views proposed gradually freeing slaves after the age of 45 (when they would have repaid their owner's investment) and resettling them in Africa. (This proposal did not acknowledge how difficult it would be for freedmen to be settled in another country and environment after age 45.) Jefferson's plan envisioned a whites-only society without any blacks.

While privately proposing an end of slavery, Jefferson was a slaveholder and officially advocated slavery's expansion. According to James W. Loewen, Jefferson's character "wrestled with slavery, even though in the end he lost." Loewen says that understanding Jefferson's role with slavery is significant in understanding current American social problems.

In an 1814 letter to Edmund Cole titled "Slavery and the Younger Generation", Jefferson put forth some of his views on slaves and the institution of slavery. Discussing gradual emancipation with forced deportation he said:

"...the hour of emancipation is advancing, in the march of time. It will come; and whether brought on by the generous energy of our own minds; or by the bloody process of St Domingo, excited and conducted by the power of our present enemy, if once stationed permanently within our Country, and offering asylum & arms to the oppressed, is a leaf of our history not yet turned over."

He stated his views of freed African Americans:

"For men probably of any color, but of this color we know, brought from their infancy without necessity for thought or forecast, are by their habits rendered as incapable as children of taking care of themselves, and are extinguished promptly wherever industry is necessary for raising young. In the mean time they are pests in society by their idleness, and the depredations to which this leads them."

Paul Finkelman states that Jefferson believed that Blacks lacked basic human emotions.

Jefferson wrote about mixed-race marriages (miscegenation) between whites and blacks: "Their amalgamation with the other color produces a degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence in the human character can innocently consent." His last page, acknowledging his advancing age, states that younger people will have to work to abolish slavery:

"I have overlived the generation with which mutual labors & perils begat mutual confidence and influence. This enterprise is for the young; for those who can follow it up, and bear it through to its consummation. It shall have all my prayers, & these are the only weapons of an old man."

Dumas Malone explained Jefferson's racism expressed in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) as the "tentative judgements of a kindly and scientifically minded man". Malone lightly covered Jefferson's view that African Americans were inferior to whites. Merrill Peterson claimed that Jefferson's racial bias towards African Americans was "a product of frivolous and tortuous reasoning...and bewildering confusion of principles." Peterson called Jefferson's derogatory racial views on African Americans "folk belief". Peterson did not apply the same scrutiny to Jefferson's miscegenation beliefs.