Thomas Jefferson and Slavery: Notes on the State of Virginia

Thomas Jefferson and Slavery: Notes on the State of Virginia

Kaylyn Elizabeth Fairchild

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Notes on the State of Virginia by Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, was completed between 1781 to 1784, after Jefferson had decided to remove himself from public life for a time (Baym and Levine 660). Jefferson was born in 1744, Shadwell, Virginia, to a mother with a distinguished family and a father who was a county official, as well as a surveyor. His father died when he was fourteen, and thus Jefferson inherited a large amount of land. He was highly educated, fluent in two languages, played an instrument, and rode horses. After graduating from the College of William and Mary, Jefferson went on to study law, and in 1769 was elected into the Virginia House of Burgesses. Notes on the State of Virginia is only one of his many written works. Jefferson, known for his skill of writing, joined the Second Continental Congress, and was soon asked to join others in drafting the Declaration of Independence, which he largely did himself; some of the statements he drafted were strongly against slavery, which were changed by Congress. In September of 1776, Jefferson retired from the Congress because he was unhappy with the changes they made to the Declaration, and he soon joined the Virginia House of Delegates. He was elected governor in 1779, then in 1781 legislator was moved to Charlottesville, where they were almost captured by the British Army. Not long after was his decision to hide from the public eye for a while, which ended in 1790 when he was made secretary of state under George Washington. In 1796, after losing to John Adams, Jefferson was made vice president, but was elected president in 1800 (Baym and Levine 659-60). When writing Notes on the State of Virginia, the political world was discussing slavery, and Jefferson shared his opinion on the subject within his writing.

          Jefferson is somewhat known for his relationship with some of his slaves, but I was never exposed to his real opinion of slavery and African-Americans in society. In Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson made it clear that he viewed slaves as people differing in too many ways, therefore saying they needed to be sent back into Africa (even though by that time, many slaves had been born into America and had never been to Africa). Jefferson explained that he thought while slaves were cosmetically different than the white colonists, the real concern in his eyes was their “intellectual differences”. Jefferson thought that slaves were less likely to put thought into their actions before making a decision; he thought that they had little to no ability to form relationships with another, besides for the exchange of sex; he also wrote of their ability to survive on less sleep than the whites; also, he believed that they didn’t have talent for poetry, or the capability to learn, etc. (even though some of these were a result of the situation they had been forced into in America) (Jefferson 669-71). Because of these differences that Jefferson claimed the slaves held, he saw it best fit to send them to Africa for them to colonize themselves because it would have difficult to near impossible for the two races to mix without having issues. Another argument for the recolonization of slaves that Jefferson claimed was that with the oppression they had faced for so long, it was inevitable that if slaves were to be emancipated, the racial tensions, along with their memories, would perhaps cause them to have many quarrels and divide them into separate parties (Jefferson 673). The overall purpose of this section of Notes on the State of Virginia was to reinforce and argue the popular idea at the time of recolonizing the slaves in Africa.

                                                    

          It is always interesting looking back onto influential figures in history to discover the true opinions that they held. While growing up we may have thought of Jefferson as one of the pioneering voices to argue the end of slavery, his opinions were not un-racist, just anti-slavery. We can take this section of Jefferson’s document and compare it to another voice in anti-slavery, J. Hector St. John De Crevecoeur. Crevecoeur wrote a letter about his thoughts on slavery in Letters from an American Farmer, which was published in 1782. Instead of arguing that slaves represented a threat to white colonists, Crevecoeur argued the inhumanity of the slave system. Crevecoeur explained that the inhabitants of Charles-Town were the happiest around—but they were only happy because of the hard labor the slaves did for them. He also argued that the white colonists had hardened themselves against the suffering of the slaves. Crevecoeur used strong language to convey the message that the slaves were suffering greatly, that the slave system was inhumane, and that every person in the world is a child of God and should not be treated in the terrible ways the slaves were (Crevecoeur 614-18). There were many different arguments on the subject of slavery in America, and I find it interesting to study the different arguments against slavery; those like Jefferson who had the racist idea that slavery should only be ended in an effort to expel African-Americans from the land, and the more emotional approach from Crevecoeur, arguing the inhumanity of such a terrible and torturous system.

Crevecoeur:

Sources:

Baym, Nina, and Robert S. Levine. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 8th ed. Vol. A.           New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013. Print.