This course provides an overview of Thomas Jefferson's work and perspectives presented by the University of Virginia in partnership with Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. Together, UVA and Monticello are recognized internationally as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
A Captive Nation: Slavery as War
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Age of Jefferson
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Jefferson and Slavery
The man who wrote in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” was a lifelong slaveowner whose affluence rested on the exploitation of hundreds of African Americans. In this module, we travel to Montalto, the mountain overlooking Jefferson’s home and plantation on Monticello, to try to gain some perspective on this great tension in Jefferson’s life and thought. Our goal will be neither simply to exonerate nor to castigate Jefferson, but rather to understand how he viewed slavery and his relationship to it. Only by confronting and considering this complicated, frustrating, and tragic chapter in American history can we come to a more complete and nuanced understanding of Thomas Jefferson and his legacy. As students attending the University Jefferson founded, it is especially important to engage this topic.
Conoce a los instructores
Professor Peter S. OnufThomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor, Emeritus
Corcoran Department of History
[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]
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