Notes On The State of Virginia - Jefferson and Slavery

Jefferson and Slavery

In "Laws" (Query XIV-14), Jefferson described the rise of slavery and justified it, by referring to what he called "the real distinctions which nature has made" between people of European descent and people of African descent. He later expressed his opposition to slavery in "Manners" (Query XVIII-18). In "Laws," Jefferson expressed contemporary beliefs among many Americans that Africans were inferior to Whites in terms of potential citizenship; as a result, he supported deporting them for colonization in Africa. Jefferson claimed his solution was related to the common good for both Whites and Blacks. He proposed a three-fold process of education, emancipation (after the age of 45, to repay the slaveholder's investment), and colonization of free blacks to locations in Africa. He endorsed this plan all his life but never took political action to make it happen.

Jefferson's proposal for resettling freed blacks in a colony in Africa expressed the mentality and anxieties of some American slaveholders after the American Revolutionary War; this contrasted with rising sentiment among other men to emancipate slaves based on ideals related to the colonies' struggle for independence. Numerous northern states abolished slavery all together. Several southern states, including Virginia in 1782, made manumissions easier. So many slaveholders in Virginia freed slaves following the Revolution (sometimes by will and others during their lifetime) that the number of free blacks in Virginia rose from about 1800 in 1782 to 30,466, or 7.2 percent of the black population in 1810. In the Upper South, more than 10 percent of blacks were free by 1810; in northern states, more than three-quarters of blacks were free by that date.

In "Laws", Jefferson wrote:

"It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expense of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race."

Some slave-owners feared race wars could ensue upon emancipation, due not least to natural retaliation by blacks for the injustices under long slavery. Jefferson may have thought his fears justified after the revolution in Haiti, marked by widespread violence in the mass uprising of slaves against white colonists and free people of color in their fight for independence. Thousands of white and free people of color came as refugees to the United States in the early 1800s; many brought their slaves with them. In addition, uprisings such as that of Gabriel in Richmond, Virginia, were often led by literate blacks. Jefferson and some other slaveholders embraced the idea of "colonization": arranging for transportation of free blacks to Africa, regardless of their being native-born and having lived in the United States. In 1816 the American Colonization Society was founded in a collaboration by abolitionists and slaveholders.

Jefferson said he thought Blacks were inferior to Whites in terms of beauty and reasoning intelligence. In "Manners," Jefferson wrote that slavery was demoralizing to both White and Black society and that man is an "imitative animal."