[BLANK_AUDIO] All men are created equal. This is what Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence. This is the fundamental document on which our whole national history, our national experience has been based. But the man who wrote those words, words that we hoped to live by or aspire to, was the owner of human beings. More than 600 slaves. And though he wrote the Declaration in 1776 and lived another 50 years until 1826, Jefferson never did anything about ending slavery. He freed only a few of his own slaves. How do we reconcile the idea of equality foundational to democracy with Thomas Jefferson's ownership of human beings and of course Jefferson's not the only slave owner. Here at Monticello in Virginia, we have a slave-holding society. A society that simply would not exist, if it were not for slavery. So, here's the big challenge. To try to make sense, not to justify, and in the end we'll have questions, but to try to make sense of Thomas Jefferson's thinking about slavery. Let's think for just a minute about the significance of slavery for revolutionaries, generally. And we have to begin with that idea of equality that Jefferson set forth in the Declaration. Because, what the American Revolutionaries were challenging was the very idea of an hierarchical social order. The idea that a monarchical dynasty had a right to rule. That Aristocratic families could monopolize land and power across the generations. Equality was a blow against those ideas of inequality, of hierarchy. It was the claim that British subject citizens in America were equal to their British counterparts across the ocean. It was the claim ultimately, with the logic that they could not control, that all citizens, no matter what their background involved, white citizens were equal to each other, that their consent was foundational to the legitimacy of the regime. Now clearly Jefferson understood that there was a condradiction here. He believed that his enslaved African Americans did have natural rights. The problem was, those rights could not be fulfilled or enjoyed under conditions of slavery. So you have to do something about slavery when, and why did Jefferson think that some action would be necessary? Let's move forward to 1814 for a clue to this Jefferson tell us, in a letter he writes to Edward Coles, a neighbor who's interested in freeing his own slaves and proceeds to do so and moves to Illinois. Coles asks Jefferson to endorse his emancipation project and to take the lead. And, doing something about slavery, and Jefferson says no. No I'm too old for this. It's for you, the younger generation. You're going to have to carry on this good work. But he's telling Coles also, [COUGH] that we've come a long way. First he says, proudly, our generation won the Revolution. We set the stage. We made it possible for you to carry on. And think how far we came because, in colonial days before the Revolution, Virginians, Virginian masters thought of their slaves as something like livestock or as he says, horse and cattle. Of course, this is intelligent livestock and no slave owner in history has forfeited the exploitation of the intelligence of his or her slaves. There are many skilled slaves in Colonial Virginia. Of course, house servants or slaves have skills, they're able to make their masters comfortable to make life good. Without slaves, as I've suggested, there's no Virginia. But in a civic and a legal sense, in a political sense, slaves simply do not exist. They are like animals. So Jefferson tells Coles, we now understand that. And it's on the basis of that understanding of the humanity of our slaves that it is compelling that we do something about it. And he says we, in a very capacious sense, because he's including Coles and he's also, in a sense, passing the baton on to Coles. We can't do anything about it, that is my generation. It's up to your generation. Well, what is Jefferson's solution? What is the thing that Coles should be doing? The best way to understand Jefferson on slavery is to think about the time in which the revolution took place and the time in which Jefferson first thought seriously about the problem of slavery. When he realized that slaves were human. It was in the context of war. And all of Jefferson's testimony to the injustice of slavery and the need to do something about it. All of that testimony comes out of warfare. Out of Jefferson's insecurity about the future of this great Republican experiment. If there should be a war between the races. Now this fear of servile insurrection, that the slaves would rise up, is a perennial fear of slave holders throughout history, but it became intense for Jefferson in the context of what was actually going on in Virginia. The last royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, in November of 1775, had issued a proclamation inviting slaves to cross British lines and gain their freedom and fight against their masters. To be organized as a counter revolutionary force. This was not just a, a paranoid abstraction, the fear that your slaves might slaughter you. This was very real. And 30 of Jefferson's slaves did escape to British lines. He complained bitterly about this. He complained about the destruction of his Elk Hill plantation. Montichello survived a British raid but barely. The revolution was a very real thing for Jefferson and it was very much about slavery. So what do you do about slavery? Here's the basic thought. Jefferson understood slavery as an injustice. An injustice to a whole people, to a whole people. He is thinking of enslaved Africans on his plantation and on all plantations as a captive nation held unjustly in bondage. Let's think back for a minute to what patriots were telling the British in the run up to the revolution. They were claiming that British tax policies were going to reduce them to a condition of slavery This binary opposition of slavery and freedom is, is foundational to the whole American revolutionary experiment. If we don't have free will and independence, if we do not have control over our own property. If the British parliament can simply decide unilaterally what taxes we will pay, we might as well be the lowliest field hand on our plantations, because we have been denied our rights and our autonomy as British subjects and citizens. So this fundamental opposition between slavery and freedom is the opposition between Britain and American, but it's also the opposition between white Virginians and the captive nation of enslaved Virginians Think about that for a moment, what are the implications? Well, we have a state of war. Slavery is an institutionalized state of war. It's a cold war to be sure, in which the subject nation is being kept by force from wreaking vengeance. But what if the cold war turned hot. In one of his most famous statements on slavery, Jefferson suggests that one day, if we don't do something about slavery, the wheel of fortune will turn. And think of a turning wheel as revolving. It is a revolution. Now we live in a world of white over black, of white Virginians controlling enslaved Africans. But, with a turn of the wheel of fortune, it could be the other way. And here is one of the few references that Jefferson ever makes to a divine intervention in the affairs of man. And, of course, in such a war, God would take the side of the slaves against whom great injustices have been committed. It's a powerful statement. But it's about the whole nation, the whole captive nation of enslaved Africans. It seemed so urgent during a period of warfare like the American Revolution or possibly in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution, San Domain and the french sugar island. Which was the first great massive slave insurrection in the new world and one that led to the creation of the first black republic in 1804. Would the Haitian Revolution spread to the mainland? Would ideas from France, where American notions of natural rights took on a new energy, a new power in the French Revolution. Would those ideas sweep across the Atlantic and make it into the quarters? Would there be more invitations to slaves like, Lord Dunmore's, come to us and be free. Well, it did happen again. It happened in the war of 1812. When some 3,000 Chesapeake slaves fled to British ships and organized as a marine corp and helped fight the war against the Americans. A war that was almost disastrous with the burning of Washington in August of 1814. Remember, it's just about this time, that Jefferson's writing to Edward Coles. And he's telling Coles, yes, something must be done. And it's at moments like this, moments of collective insecurity, that Jefferson feels the urgency of doing something about slavery. But it can't be to just free a few slaves. It can't be to create a small class, and even a growing class of free Blacks. Would those free Blacks enjoy the full privileges of citizenship? Was that possible? Wouldn't they seek vengeance for all the wrongs that were done to them. But if they weren't given full rights, of course, they would instigate rebellion. Or, perhaps they would identify with family members, fellow former slaves, and seek a massive liberation of those still in chains. For Jefferson and many other Southerners in slave societies, freed Blacks were like pests, a potential contagion, a disease that could spread to the quarters. What Jefferson desperately wanted was to avoid a racial bloodbath initiated by servile insurrection, he feared, though God would be on the side of the slaves, that perhaps the guns would be on the side of the masters. 40% of the population of Virginia was enslaved. But 60%, and a well armed 60%, presumed they could mobilize, as they had against the British, to destroy the threat of slave insurrection and eliminate that threat by a genocidal massacre. This has to be avoided. So Jefferson's solution. And a solution he tells us in 1826 in one of his last letters to a man named James Heaton, Jefferson says, I proposed in my notes on the state of Virginia in the early 1780s, that this was the solution. We must emancipate our slaves, they are being held unjustly in bondage. But emancipation has to be followed by expatriation. This is one of the most fascinating ideas that Jefferson and fellow colonizationists articulate. And I think it sheds light on Jefferson's thinking about the problem of slavery. And you'll find it in his notes on the state of Virginia in a query, query 14 of chapter 14, called laws. And in this query, Jefferson talks about his plan for emancipation and this is the way he describes it. We will emancipate our slaves and then declare them a free and independent people and send them someplace else. Where would that be? Well perhaps West Africa ultimately. The colony of Liberia an American protector, perhaps to send the men to Haiti where the revolution was taking place and led to Haitian independence in 1804 in the future. Some place not here. Because, if a slave can have a country, it can't be this one. Because the claim that white Virginians are making, is a claim familiar to students of Jefferson. It's a claim to the land. It's the land that's the source of virtue. The source of patriotism, patriotism is all about the love of the land. But white Virginians had been working the land through the tool, through the instrumentality of their slaves. We'd have to have a complete separation between the races before there could be peace. Jefferson's plan of colonization, of creating an independent Black Republic, is going to create a peace that would enable blacks and whites to not live together, but to live peacefully apart and then even to enter into dealings with each other. I mentioned that in Jefferson's Virginia in the early United States, African Americans, as slaves or free people, couldn't have the full panoply of civil rights. They couldn't really be part of the body politic. And that's another way of saying that even as Jefferson recognized the humanity of his slaves and recognized the existence of what he described as a black nation that is collectively all slaves are members of this nation. At the same time, Jefferson is claiming rights for his own nation. A nation that he is defining in racial terms. In the years leading up to the American revolution, Americans, American patriots, they claimed to be part of a greater British nation. One nation. When that nation was ruptured by the revolutionary break, when we had two nations, then a third nation came into view. And it's that triangulation, that existence of three nations, British, white American and enslaved African American, it's in that triangulation that we see the great dilemma that Jefferson faces in time of war. And that is, if slavery is a viable institution and can maintain racial order, a kind of cold war that works to the benefit of the master class, as it had done and as it would do, that dynamic is going to be destroyed if there's a third power in play, that is if slaves have help from an outside source. And this idea that outsiders are fermenting servile insurrection becomes a chronic concern for slave owners throughout the rest of the antebellum years. First it's the British and it was the British in the war of 1812, as war, as well as the American Revolution It might be French emigres. It might be, it might be British abolitionists, later on it would be Yankee abolitionists interfering with slavery. That outside force could tip the balance of power and destroy the institution of slavery. That's why we need to do something. And that's why we need to do something to and for our slaves before they rise up and assert their claims, their natural rights claims against us. And that's the curious passivity of this notion of declaring them a free and independent people, because white Americans had declared themselves a free and independent people. So in this primal act of nation making, white Americans would take the initiative for blacks as well as for themselves. Now, what was wrong with slavery? And, what are the deeper concerns that Jefferson has? Well, first as we've suggested, it's the incompatibility of any notion of natural rights and equality with the existence of of slavery. And, Jefferson liked to think that the institution of slavery was itself a legacy of the British Aubergine. That King George the Third and his predecessors had favored the slave trade and promoted the interests of slave traders to impose the institution on America. There's almost a wistfulness in Jefferson's discussions of land ownership and wide distribution of land, family farms. This is what he's famous for. It's what I describe as a kind of of Pennsylvania envy. Because in this prosperous agricultural region, just to the north, dominated by grain production, it was families that supplied their own labor. It wasn't an enslaved class. The question is, what does slavery do to families? And there are a couple of things I'd like to emphasize to white Virginian families. One, I think most deeply troubling to Jefferson, is that by not working their own land, by exploiting a class of people to work the land for them, Virginians did not have that direct connection to their own country that was so important to him. But there's another concern and that is, in short, slavery is a school for despots. If you grow up on a slave plantation, you will learn all about mastery. You will learn all about white privilege and supremacy. A small, white child has almost unlimited power over a black adult. This is not the lesson that Jefferson would teach Republican children, because family is crucially important to his understanding of the white Republic. Family is the foundation of a just and equal society. Think of a republic as a family of families. But black families don't figure in this account, they can't. [MUSIC]
