The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862

He declares that the black race is inferior to the white in mind, but not in heart. The poems of black Phillis Wheatley seem to him to prove not much; but the letters of black Ignatius Sancho he praises for depth of feeling, happy turn of thought, and ease of style, though he finds no depth of reasoning. He does not praise the mental capacity of the race, but, at last, as if conscious, that, if developed under a free system, it might be far better, he quotes the Homeric lines,—

“Jove fixed it certain that whatever dayMakes man a slave takes half his worth away.”

And shortly after, he declares it “a suspicion only that the blacks are inferior in the endowments of body or mind,”—that “in memory they are equal to the whites,”—that “in music they are more generally gifted than the whites with accurate ears for time and tune.”

But there is one statement which we especially commend to those in search of an effective military policy in the present crisis. Jefferson declares of the negroes, that they are “at least as brave as the whites, and more adventuresome.” May not this truth account for the fact that one of the most daring deeds in the present war was done by a black man?

Still later, Jefferson says,—“Whether further observation will or will not verify the conjecture that Nature has been less bountiful to them in the endowments of the head, I believe that in those of the heart she will be found to have done them justice. That disposition to theft with which they have been branded must be ascribed to their situation, and not to any depravity of the moral sense. The man in whose favor no laws of property exist probably feels himself less bound to respect those made in favor of others. When arguing for ourselves, we lay it down as fundamental, that laws, to be just, must give reciprocation of right,—that, without this, they are mere arbitrary rules of conduct, founded in force, and not in conscience; and it is a problem which I give to the master to solve, whether the religious precepts against the violation of property were not framed for him as well as his slave,—and whether the slave may not as justifiably take a little from one who has taken all from him as he may slay one who would slay him. That a change in the relations in which a man is placed should change his ideas of moral right and wrong is neither new, nor peculiar to the color of the blacks.”

Here Jefferson puts forth that very idea for which Gerrit Smith, a few years ago, was threatened with the penalties of treason.

But to quote further from the same source:—

“Notwithstanding these considerations, which must weaken their respect for the laws of property, we find among them numerous instances of the most rigid integrity, and as many as among their instructed masters, of benevolence, gratitude, and unshaken fidelity. The opinion that they are inferior in the faculties of reason and imagination must be hazarded with great diffidence.”

The old hot thought blazes forth again in the chapter on “Particular Manners and Customs.” Can men speak against the proclamations of Abolition Conventions after such fiery words from Jefferson?

“The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism, on the one part, and degrading submission on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. If a parent could find no motive either in his philanthropy or his self-love for restraining the intemperance of passion toward his slave, it should always be a sufficient one that his child is present. But generally it is not sufficient. The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose rein to the worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by its odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.” (Here fire begins to flicker up around the words.) “And with what execration should a statesman be loaded, who, permitting one half the citizens” (note the word) “to trample on the rights” (note the word) “of the other, transforms those into despots and these into enemies, destroys the morals of the one and the amor patriae of the other! And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure, when we have removed their only firm basis,—a conviction in the minds of the people that their liberties are the gifts of God, that they are not to be violated but with His wrath?” (Now bursts forth prophecy. The whole page flames in a moment.) “Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever; that, considering numbers, nature, and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of Fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events; that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.”

Well may Jefferson say, immediately after this, that “it is impossible to be temperate and to pursue this subject through the various considerations of policy, of morals, of history natural and civil.” For no Abolitionist ever branded the slave-system with words more fiery.

In 1784 Jefferson drew up the ordinance for the government of the Western Territory. One famous clause runs thus:—

“After the year 1800 of the Christian era there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the said States, otherwise than in punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been convicted to be personally guilty.”

In Randall’s “Life of Jefferson,” a work in many respects admirable, this clause is glossed with the declaration that Jefferson intended merely to prevent an immense new importation of slaves from Africa to fill the Territory; but Mr. Randall would have shown far greater insight, had he added to this half-truth, that the idea of legally grasping and strangling this curse flows from the ideas of the “Notes” as hot metal flows from fiery furnace,—that the Ordinance of 1784 was but a minting of that true metal drawn from those old glowing thoughts and words.

But Jefferson’s hatred of slavery is not less fierce in his letters.

Dr. Price writes a pamphlet in England against slavery, and straightway Jefferson seizes his pen to urge him to write more, and more clearly for America, and more directly at American young men, saying, in encouragement,—“Northward of the Chesapeake you may find, here and there, an opponent to your doctrine, as you may find, here and there, a murderer.” He speaks hopefully of the disposition in Virginia to “redress this enormity,”—calls the fight against slavery “the interesting spectacle of justice in conflict with avarice and oppression,”—speaks of the side hostile to slavery as “the sacred side.” The date is 1785.

This welcome to Dr. Price’s onslaught will serve as antidote to Mr. Randall’s poisonous declaration, that Jefferson was opposed to interference with slave institutions by those living outside of Slave States.

In 1786 Jefferson wrote to correct M. de Meusnier’s statement of the efforts already made for emancipation; and, referring to the holding of slaves by a people who had clamored loudly and fought bravely for freedom, he says,—

“What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man,—who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment, and death itself, in vindication of his own liberty, and, in the next moment, be deaf to all those motives whose power supported him through his trial, and inflict on his fellow-men a bondage one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose!”

Here, in Jefferson himself, then, is the source of that venom with which earnest men, throughout the land, are stinging to death the organization which stole his name to destroy his ideas.

In 1788, Jefferson, being Minister at Paris, receives a note from M. de Warville tendering him membership in the Society for the Abolition of the Slave-Trade. Jefferson is forced by his peculiar position to decline, but he takes pains to say,—“You know that nobody wishes more ardently to see an abolition not only of the trade, but of the condition of slavery.”

Here is no non-committalism, no wistful casting about for loop-holes, no sly putting out of hooks to catch backers, not the feeblest germ of quibble or lie. The man answers more than he is asked. Is there not, in the present dearth, something refreshing in this old candor?

But some have thought Jefferson’s later expressions against slavery wanting in heartiness. Let us examine.

The whole world knows, that, when a wrong stings a man, making him fierce and loud, his direct expressions have often small value; but that his parenthetical expressions often have great value. This is one of the simplest principles in homely every-day criticism, serving truth-seekers, wherever wordy war rages, whether among statesmen or hackmen.

Now, in Jefferson’s letter to Dr. Gordon,—written in 1788,—he is greatly stirred by his own recital of the shameful ravages on his property by the British army. Just at the moment when his indignation was at the hottest, there shot out of his heart, and off his pen, one of these side-thoughts, one of these fragments of the man’s ground-idea, which, at such moments, truth-seekers always watch for. Jefferson says of Cornwallis,—

“He destroyed all my growing crops of corn and tobacco; he burned all my barns containing the same articles of the last year, having first taken what corn he wanted; he used, as was to be expected, all my stock of cattle, sheep, and hogs, for the sustenance of his army, and carried off all the horses capable of service,—of those too young for service he cut the throats; and he burned all the fences in the plantation, so as to make it an absolute waste. He carried off also about thirty slaves. Had this been to give them their freedom, he would have done right.”

But we turn to a seeming discrepancy between these thousand earnest declarations of Jefferson the private citizen, and the cold, formal tone of Jefferson the Secretary of State. In this high office he reclaims slaves from the Spanish power in Florida, and demands compensation for slaves carried off by the British at the evacuation of New York. For a moment that transition from personal warmth to diplomatic coolness is as the Russian plunge from steam-bath to snow-heap.

Yet, if truth-seekers do not stop to moan, they may easily find a complete explanation. As private citizen, in a State, dealing with his home Government, Jefferson had the right to move heaven and earth against slavery, and bravely he did it; but, as public servant of the nation, dealing with foreign Governments, his rights and duties were different, and his tone must be different. As a private person, writing for man as man, Jefferson forgot readily enough all differences of nation. He wrote as readily and fully of the hideousness of slavery to Meusnier and Warville in France, or to Price and Priestley in England, as to any of his neighbors; but, as public servant of the nation, writing to Hammond or Viar, representatives of foreign powers, he made no apology for our miseries. England might be ready enough to act the part of Dives, but Jefferson was not the statesman to put America in the attitude of Lazarus,—begging, and showing sores.

But we have to note yet another change in Jefferson’s modes of work and warfare.

As he wrought and fought in this second period, which, for easy reference, we call the building period, he was forced into new methods. In the former period we saw him thinking and speaking and working against every effort to found pro-slavery theories or practices. Eagerness was then the best quality for work, and quickness the best quality for fight. But now the case was different. An institution which Jefferson hated had, in spite of his struggles, been firmly founded. The land was full of the towers of the slave aristocracy. He saw that his mode of warfare must be changed. His old way did well in the earlier days, for tower-builders may be driven from their work by a sweeping charge or sudden volley; but towers, when built, must be treated with steady battering and skilful mining.

In 1797, Jefferson, writing to St. George Tucker, speaks of the only possible emancipation as “a compromise between the passions, prejudices, and real difficulties, which will each have their weight in the operation.” Afterwards, in his letters to Monroe and Rufus King, he advocates a scheme of colonization to some point not too distant. But let no man, on this account, claim Jefferson as a supporter of the do-nothing school of Northern demagogues, or of the mad school of Southern fanatics who proclaim this ulcerous mass a beauty, and who howl at all who refuse its infection. For, note, in that same letter to St. George Tucker, the fervor of the Jeffersonian theory: bitter as Tucker’s pamphlet against slavery was, he says,—“You know my subscription to its doctrines.” Note also the vigor of the Jeffersonian practice: speaking of emancipation, he says,—“The sooner we put some plan under way, the greater hope there is that it may be permitted to proceed peaceably to its ultimate effect.” And now bursts forth prophecy again. “But if something is not done, and soon done, we shall be the murderers of our own children.” “If we had begun sooner, we might probably have been allowed a lengthier operation to clear ourselves; but every day’s delay lessens the time we may take for emancipation.”

Here is no trace of the theory inflicting a present certain evil on a great white population in order to do a future doubtful good to a smaller black population. And this has been nowhere better understood than among the slave oligarchs of his own time. Note one marked example.

In 1801, Jefferson was elected to the Presidency on the thirty-sixth ballot. Thirty-five times Delaware, Maryland, and South Carolina voted against him. The following year Mr. Rutledge of South Carolina, feeling an itching to specify to Congress his interests in Buncombe and his relations to the universe, palavered in the usual style, but let out one truth, for which, as truth-searchers, we thank him. He said,—

“Permit me to state, that, beside the objections common to my friend from Delaware and myself, there was a strong one which I felt with peculiar force. It resulted from a firm belief that the gentleman in question [Jefferson] held opinions respecting a certain description of property in my State which, should they obtain generally, would endanger it.”4

We come now to Jefferson’s Presidency. In this there was no great chance to deal an effective blow at slavery; but some have grown bitter over a story that he favored the schemes to break the slavery-limitation in Ohio. Such writers have not stopped to consider that it is more probable that a few Southern members, eager to drum in recruits, falsely claimed the favor of the President, than that Jefferson broke the slavery-limitation which he himself planned. Then, too, came the petitions of the abolition societies against slavery in Louisiana; and Hildreth blames Jefferson for his slowness to assist; but ought we not here to take some account of the difficulties of the situation? Ought not some weight to be given to Jefferson’s declaration to Kerchival, that in his administration his “efforts in relation to peace, slavery, and religious freedom were all in accordance with Quakerism”?

We pass now to the third great period, in which, as thinker and writer, he did so much to brace the Republic.

First of all, in this period we see him revising the translation and arranging the publication of De Tracy’s “Commentaire sur l’Esprit des Lois.” He takes endless pains to make its hold firm on America; engages his old companion in abolitionism, St. George Tucker, to circulate it; makes it a text-book in the University of Virginia; tells his friend Cabell to read it, for it is “the best book on government in the world.” Now this “best book on government” is killing to every form of tyranny or slavery; its arguments pierce all their fallacies and crush all their sophistries. That famous plea which makes Alison love Austria and Palmer love Louisiana—the plea that a people can be best educated for freedom and religion by dwarfing their minds and tying their hands—is, in this book, shivered by argument and burnt by invective.

As we approach the last years of Jefferson’s life we find several letters of his on slavery. Some have thought them mere heaps of ashes,—poor remains of the flaming thoughts and words of earlier years. This mistake is great. Touch the seeming heap of ashes, and those thoughts and words dart forth, fiery as of old.

In 1814, Edward Coles attacks slavery vigorously, and calls on the great Democrat to destroy it. Jefferson’s approving reply is the complete summary of his matured views on slavery. Take a few declarations as specimens.5

“The sentiments breathed through the whole do honor both to the head and heart of the writer. Mine, on the subject of the slavery of negroes, have long since been in possession of the public, and time has only served to give them stronger proof. The love of justice and the love of country plead equally the cause of these people, and it is a mortal reproach to us that they should have pleaded so long in vain.”

“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 … is a leaf of our history not yet turned over.”

“As to the method by which this difficult work is to be effected, if permitted to be done by ourselves, I have seen no proposition so expedient, on the whole, as that of emancipation of those born after a given day.”

“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.”

No wonder that this letter of Jefferson to Coles seems to have been carefully suppressed by Southern editors of the Jeffersonian writings.

Take also the letters to Mr. Barrows and to Dr. Humphreys of 1815-17. Disappointment is expressed at the want of a more general anti-slavery feeling among the young men; hope is expressed that “time will soften down the master and educate the slave”; faith is expressed that slavery will yield, “because we are not in a world ungoverned by the laws and power of a Supreme Agent.”

Entering now the stormy period of the Missouri Debate, we have one declaration from Jefferson which, at first, surprises and pains us,—the opinion given in a letter to Lafayette, that spreading slavery will “dilute the evil everywhere, and facilitate the means of getting rid of it.” The mistake is gross indeed. To all of us, with the political knowledge forced upon us by events since Jefferson’s death, it seems atrocious. But unpardonable as such a theory is now, was it so then?

Jefferson had not before him the experience of these last forty years of weakness and poverty and barbarism in our new Slave States,—and of that tenacity of life which slavery shares with so many other noxious growths. Hastily, then, he broached this opinion. Let it stand; and let the remark on “geographical lines,” and the two or three severe criticisms of Northern men, wrested from him in the excitement of the Missouri struggle, be tied to it and given to the Oligarchs. These expressions were drawn from him in his old age,—in his vexation at unfair attacks,—in his depression at the approach of poverty,—in his suffering under the encroachments of disease. Any one of those bold declarations in the vigor of his manhood will forever efface all memory of them.

The opinion expressed by Jefferson, at the same period, that “the General Government cannot interfere with slavery in the States,” all our parties now accept—as a peace policy; but if we are forced into an opposite war policy, let our generals remember Jefferson’s declaration as to the taking of his slaves by Cornwallis: “Had this been to give them their freedom, he would have done right.”

But there is one letter which all Northern statesmen should ponder. It warns them solemnly, for it was written a very short time before Jefferson’s death;—it warns them sharply, for it struck one whom the North has especially honored. This son of the North had made a well-known unfortunate speech in Congress, and had sent it to Jefferson. In his answer the old statesman declares,—

“On the question of the lawfulness of slavery, that is, of the right of one man to appropriate to himself the faculties of another without his consent, I certainly retain my early opinions. On that, however, of third persons to interfere between the parties, and the effect of Constitutional modifications of that pretension, we are probably nearer together.”

There was a blow well dealt,—though at one now greatly honored. We may refuse the subordinate idea in the letter, but we will glory in that main confession of political faith, in the last year of Jefferson’s life; and we will not forget that the last of his letters on slavery chastised the worst sin of Northern statesmanship.

Jefferson, then, in dealing with slavery, was a real political seer and giver of oracles,—always sure to say something; whereas the “leading men” who in these latter days have usurped his name are neither political seers nor givers of oracles, but mere political fakirs,—striving, their lives long, to enter political blessedness by solemnly doing and seeing and saying—nothing.

Jefferson was a true political warrior, and his battle for human rights compares with the Oligarchist battle against them as the warfare of Cortés compares with Aztec warfare. He is the man full of strong thought backed by civilization: they, the men trying to keep up their faith in idols, trying to scare with war-paint, trying to startle with war-whoop, trying to vex with showers of poor Aztec arrows.

Jefferson was an orator,—not in that he fed petty assemblages with narcotic words to stupefy conscience, or corrosive words to kill conscience, but in that he gave to the world those decisive, true words which shall yet pierce all tyranny and slavery.

Jefferson was the founder of a democratic system, strong and full-orbed: “leading men” have fastened his name to an aristocratic system with mobocratic cries.

This great tree of Liberty which we are all trying to plant will, of course, not grow as we will, but as God and Nature will. Some branches will be exuberant through too great wealth of sunshine,—others gnarled and awry through too great fury of storms. We need find no fault with any growth, but we may admire some branches and prize some fruits more than others. Some grafts set by noblest hands have often blossomed in bad temper and borne fruit bitter and sour. Some fruitage has been of that poor Dead-Sea sort,—splendid in coating, but inwardly ashes,—wretched “protective” schemes and the like. The world may yet see that the limbs of toughest fibre and fruit of richest flavor have come from grafts set by just such strong men in theory and in practice as Thomas Jefferson.

A STORY OF TO-DAY

PART IV

An hour after, the evening came on sultry, the air murky, opaque, with yellow trails of color dragging in the west: a sullen stillness in the woods and farms; only, in fact, that dark, inexplicable hush that precedes a storm. But Lois, coming down the hill-road, singing to herself, and keeping time with her whip-end on the wooden measure, stopped when she grew conscious of it. It seemed to her blurred fancy more than a deadening sky: a something solemn and unknown, hinting of evil to come. The dwarf-pines on the road-side scowled weakly at her through the gray; the very silver minnows in the pools she passed flashed frightened away, and darkened into the muddy niches. There was a vague dread in the sudden silence. She called to the old donkey, and went faster down the hill, as if escaping from some overhanging peril, unseen. She saw Margaret coming up the road. There was a phaëton behind her, and some horsemen: she jolted the cart off into the stones to let them pass, seeing Mr. Holmes’s face in the carriage as she did so. He did not look at her; had his head turned towards the gray distance. Lois’s vivid eye caught the full meaning of the woman beside him. The face hurt her: not fair, as Polston called it: vapid and cruel. She was dressed in yellow: the color seemed jeering and mocking to the girl’s sensitive instinct, keenly alive to every trifle. She did not know that it is the color of shams, and that women like this are the most deadly of shams. As the phaëton went slowly down, Margaret came nearer, meeting it on the road-side, the dust from the wheels stifling the air. Lois saw her look up, and then suddenly stand still, holding to the fence, as they met her. Holmes’s cold, wandering eye turned on the little dusty figure standing there, poor and despised. Polston called his eyes hungry: it was a savage hunger that sprang into them now; a gray shadow creeping over his set face, as he looked at her, in that flashing moment. The phaëton was gone in an instant, leaving her alone in the muddy road. One of the men looked back, and then whispered something to the lady with a laugh. She turned to Holmes, when he had finished, fixing her light, confusing eyes on his face, and softening her voice.