The Monster of Monticello
By PAUL FINKELMAN
Published: November 30, 2012
Durham, N.C.
THOMAS JEFFERSON is in the news again, nearly 200 years
after his death — alongside a high-profile biography by the journalist Jon
Meacham comes a damning portrait of the third president by the independent
scholar Henry Wiencek.
We are endlessly fascinated with Jefferson, in part because
we seem unable to reconcile the rhetoric of liberty in his writing with the
reality of his slave owning and his lifetime support for slavery. Time and
again, we play down the latter in favor of the former, or write off the paradox
as somehow indicative of his complex depths.
Neither Mr. Meacham, who mostly ignores Jefferson’s slave
ownership, nor Mr. Wiencek, who sees him as a sort of fallen angel who comes to
slavery only after discovering how profitable it could be, seem willing to
confront the ugly truth: the third president was a creepy, brutal hypocrite.
Contrary to Mr. Wiencek’s depiction, Jefferson was always
deeply committed to slavery, and even more deeply hostile to the welfare of
blacks, slave or free. His proslavery views were shaped not only by money and
status but also by his deeply racist views, which he tried to justify through
pseudoscience.
There is, it is true, a compelling paradox about Jefferson:
when he wrote the Declaration of Independence, announcing the “self-evident”
truth that all men are “created equal,” he owned some 175 slaves. Too often,
scholars and readers use those facts as a crutch, to write off Jefferson’s
inconvenient views as products of the time and the complexities of the human
condition.
But while many of his contemporaries, including George
Washington, freed their slaves during and after the revolution — inspired,
perhaps, by the words of the Declaration — Jefferson did not. Over the
subsequent 50 years, a period of extraordinary public service, Jefferson
remained the master of Monticello, and a buyer and seller of human beings.
Rather than encouraging his countrymen to liberate their
slaves, he opposed both private manumission and public emancipation. Even at
his death, Jefferson failed to fulfill the promise of his rhetoric: his will
emancipated only five slaves, all relatives of his mistress Sally Hemings, and
condemned nearly 200 others to the auction block. Even Hemings remained a
slave, though her children by Jefferson went free.
Nor was Jefferson a particularly kind master. He sometimes
punished slaves by selling them away from their families and friends, a
retaliation that was incomprehensibly cruel even at the time. A proponent of
humane criminal codes for whites, he advocated harsh, almost barbaric,
punishments for slaves and free blacks. Known for expansive views of citizenship,
he proposed legislation to make emancipated blacks “outlaws” in America, the
land of their birth. Opposed to the idea of royal or noble blood, he proposed
expelling from Virginia the children of white women and black men.
Jefferson also dodged opportunities to undermine slavery or
promote racial equality. As a state legislator he blocked consideration of a
law that might have eventually ended slavery in the state.
As president he acquired the Louisiana Territory but did
nothing to stop the spread of slavery into that vast “empire of liberty.”
Jefferson told his neighbor Edward Coles not to emancipate his own slaves,
because free blacks were “pests in society” who were “as incapable as children
of taking care of themselves.” And while he wrote a friend that he sold slaves
only as punishment or to unite families, he sold at least 85 humans in a
10-year period to raise cash to buy wine, art and other luxury goods.
Destroying families didn’t bother Jefferson, because he
believed blacks lacked basic human emotions. “Their griefs are transient,” he
wrote, and their love lacked “a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and
sensation.”
Jefferson claimed he had “never seen an elementary trait of
painting or sculpture” or poetry among blacks and argued that blacks’ ability
to “reason” was “much inferior” to whites’, while “in imagination they are
dull, tasteless, and anomalous.” He conceded that blacks were brave, but this
was because of “a want of fore-thought, which prevents their seeing a danger
till it be present.”
A scientist, Jefferson nevertheless speculated that
blackness might come “from the color of the blood” and concluded that blacks
were “inferior to the whites in the endowments of body and mind.”
Jefferson did worry about the future of slavery, but not out
of moral qualms. After reading about the slave revolts in Haiti, Jefferson
wrote to a friend that “if something is not done and soon done, we shall be the
murderers of our own children.” But he never said what that “something” should
be.
In 1820 Jefferson was shocked by the heated arguments over
slavery during the debate over the Missouri Compromise. He believed that by
opposing the spread of slavery in the West, the children of the revolution were
about to “perpetrate” an “act of suicide on themselves, and of treason against
the hopes of the world.”
If there was “treason against the hopes of the world,” it
was perpetrated by the founding generation, which failed to place the nation on
the road to liberty for all. No one bore a greater responsibility for that
failure than the master of Monticello.
Paul Finkelman, a visiting professor in legal history at
Duke Law School, is a professor at Albany Law School and the author of “Slavery
and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson.”
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