The True Story of the Puritans

And we returned to our American Stories. Thomas Jefferson was a man of both extraordinary words and astonishing contradictions. While he wrote the Declaration of Independence, they called all men equal. He would go to the grave without freeing his slaves. But what kind of a man would write those words in the first place? You’re to tell the story of Jefferson’s views on slavery and the equality of man is Cara Rogers Stevens, a history professor at Ashland University. Let’s get into the story.

Now, Jefferson inherited enslaved people when he was fourteen years old and his dad died. Jefferson inherited something like fifty-two enslaved human beings. And two years later, he shows up at this small, little provincial college, one of the best schools in the South, College of William and Mary, and he got there at the perfect moment. The college had been founded as a seminary, but there had been a lot of controversies between the Anglican establishment and Virginians, and at the moment that Jefferson arrived, there was a real shortage of professors. But one person had just shown up from Aberdeen, Scotland, Marshall College, a professor named William Small. And William Small had been tutored by the founders, the fathers of the Scottish Enlightenment, and he took all of these notes on their moral sense philosophy, and then he showed up in Virginia and became the primary professor for Jefferson. He taught mathematics, physics, literature, rhetoric, astronomy, meteorology. He was the first to introduce scientific experimentation and observation at the College of William and Mary, and he replaced rote memorization with the Socratic method. And so Jefferson was deeply influenced by William Small and by these ideas that he brought with him from the Scottish Enlightenment. And Jefferson wasn’t only influenced by Small. He also was taken along by Small to the governor’s mansion and he joined a small group of men who had this little musical society. Jefferson played the violin, but they would also have conversation and meals. And this little group was made up of Small, Jefferson, the governor at the time, Francis Fauquier. He was a man who was actually strongly opposed to slavery. He wrote in his will that he was deeply remorseful for having participated in the institution, and he wished he could have freed his slaves, but he could not because of the laws, so he did everything he could to provide for them. He wrote, the year that Jefferson came to Williamsburg, the governor wrote, “What men, white, red, or black, polished or unpolished, men are men?” So right away this concept of natural equality is present. The fourth member of this little group was the first law professor in America, a man named George Wythe, who’s also famously anti-slavery. He became Jefferson’s private tutor of the law, and he was hugely influential in Jefferson’s life, and Jefferson told him so over and over. So, I think that in these men and in the documents of the Enlightenment, the concepts of moral sense philosophy and natural rights that Jefferson was reading, we find this remarkable transformation that from a young man of privilege and wealth, already the owner of enslaved human beings, he is transformed into somebody who truly believes in natural equality, and who believes that slavery is wrong. As I mentioned, slavery was legal, typical, normal, accepted; and it was illegal to free individual slaves unless one petitioned the governor to get special permission. And Jefferson tried to change that. So, in seventeen sixty-nine, as a young legislator, he co-sponsored a bill to make it possible to free individual slaves, and this failed miserably. It was actually a deeply devastating defeat, and Jefferson’s older cousin, Richard Bland, was kind of excoriated by the other members of the legislature for attempting to push this forward. Jefferson, as a young lawyer, attempted six different times that we know of to get individuals freedom—so, unfree individuals who came to him—and he took on their cases pro bono and attempted to argue that under the law of nature, “all men are created free.” And as far as we know, he failed all six times to convince a court to grant these individuals freedom. Then, of course, the Declaration of Independence in seventeen seventy-six—most well-known of Jefferson’s works, the thing he wanted to be remembered for the most—he wrote in this document, you know, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” And a lot of modern readers get to that line and they say, “Well, he must have just meant all white males are created equal, because we know that those are the people who had the power.” And if he had meant anybody else, surely he would have done more to end slavery. What’s really interesting is when you look at the original rough draft of the Declaration of Independence, you discover there’s an entire paragraph that Jefferson wrote that the other members of the Congress deleted—especially the members from South Carolina, Georgia, people who are making money off of the slave trade. Jefferson, in his deleted paragraph, called slavery a war against human rights. He called out King George after all of the other bad things that King George had done, like, you know, vexation without representation and attacking the colonists and encouraging the native peoples to rise up. The final and the culmination of Jefferson’s list of King George’s offenses was that King George had carried on the slave trade and he had vetoed the colonists’ efforts to ban the slave trade, and Jefferson, in no uncertain terms, he says that slavery is, quote, “a violation of the most sacred rights of life and liberty.” And he refers to the enslaved people as “men”—capital letters, “men.” And it’s really noteworthy that he does this because Jefferson is not referring to white males when he uses the term men in that paragraph. He’s referring to black men, black women, black children—mankind. That Jefferson is very clear that it’s not just white males who have these unalienable natural rights; it’s everybody. Now that paragraph was removed, but Jefferson still was very clear in the Declaration. He didn’t say, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all white men, that all males are created equal.” He left it as broad as possible: “all men are created equal.” Around the same time as he was working on the Declaration, Jefferson was working on a revision in Virginia’s legal code, and we know that Jefferson and his law professor, mentor George Wythe, wrote an anti-slavery amendment for Virginia. They never brought it forward, but Jefferson later described it, and in it he and George Wythe had devised this plan to free everybody born after a certain day, educate them at the expense of the state, and then expatriate them, send them to another location where they could govern themselves. And a state, according to Jefferson, should pay these individuals and take care of them, make sure that they had the supplies that they needed until they could be a successful, self-governing republic. Now, obviously this plan would have cost a lot of money, and perhaps that explains why it never found widespread political support. But it’s informative that that’s how Jefferson was thinking about the justice of fixing the wrong of slavery. In seventeen eighty-four, Jefferson took a step in writing the Northwest Ordinance. Jefferson wrote the first version, and in it he included a proviso that would have abolished slavery and prevented slavery from getting set up in any new federal territory after the year eighteen hundred. It failed by one vote. One guy from New Jersey was sick that day and he didn’t show up, and so the final version—the version that we might be familiar with—banned slavery north of the Ohio River. But Jefferson’s original version was even more capacious.

And you’ve been listening to Cara Rogers Stevens tell the story of Thomas Jefferson and his views on slavery and the equality of man. And you’re hearing one complicated story about a man who was born to wealth and privilege, inherits fifty-plus human beings, to begin his life in Virginia. The oldest public university in this country, by the way. It informs so much of his life about what would be considered nature’s equality or natural equality. And then, of course, the work he did to get the Northwest Ordinance passed and ultimately, in a second try, banned slavery north of the Ohio River. When we come back, more of the complicated story of Jefferson on slavery here on our American Stories. And we continue with our American Stories and the story of Thomas Jefferson’s views on slavery and the equality of man with Ashland University’s Cara Rogers Stevens. Let’s return to the story.

So, if you read Notes on the State of Virginia, you’ll discover Jefferson talking about all different facets of the state: from its geography to its climate, to its population, to its politics. And he talks about slavery in a few different places. There’s an entire chapter called ‘Manners’ that is devoted to the culture of Virginia, and in that chapter Jefferson entirely focuses on the negative impact of slavery on Virginia’s culture and details all the ways that Virginia really can’t be a republic if it continues to be a slaveholding state, because owning slaves turns people into tyrants. That’s basically his argument. But Jefferson also spent quite a bit of time discussing race and racial classifications. Jefferson was reading and responding to the typical Enlightenment European scientist’s position on race. And in one part, he is trying to defend America against the charge that America’s climate, and therefore its people, are inferior to Europe. In another part, he deals with the charge that there is something inferior about Africans and African-descended peoples, and Jefferson, like most European scientists, believed that the white race was superior. He was questioning whether or not African peoples were permanently different and inferior, or merely temporarily different and perhaps not inferior. When we read this section of his book today, we find it deeply disturbing. The language is very troubling. But what I found most interesting is that Jefferson sent a draft of this book to a friend of his, Charles Thomson, Secretary of the Congress, and asked Thomson to send feedback. And Thomson wrote back, and he said, “I’m going to read a quote. Though I am much pleased with the dissertation on the difference between the whites and blacks, and am inclined to think the latter a race lower in the scale of being, yet for that very reason, and because such an opinion might seem to justify slavery, I should be inclined to leave it out.” So Thomson says, “Love what you’ve done, dude. But what you said about black people and their inferiority, it might seem to justify slavery. Why don’t you just delete the whole section?” Jefferson did not take Thomson’s advice. He left the section in. But what Jefferson did do is he altered it. He softened it. He added phrases like, “It’s a suspicion only that there is inferiority on the part of Africans.” And he emphasized the need for further scientific research. And he also emphasized that it didn’t matter whether or not there was any racial superiority, inferiority, or difference. Rights are the same for all peoples. And then Jefferson doubled in length his section on anti-slavery, and he added, “This is one of the most famous Jefferson quotes against slavery.” I believe it’s in his memorial in Washington, D.C. He said, “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 these liberties are of the gift of God, that they are not to be violated but with His wrath?” “Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever.” And Jefferson went on to basically predict that there would at some point be a slave revolt and that when that happened, God would not be on the side of the white people. He would be on the side of the enslaved, and that he might even supernaturally interfere to cause such a thing to happen. And this is unusual for a man like Jefferson—Mr. Enlightenment Rationality—to be talking about divine interference in human events. But it’s a sentiment that he seems to have echoed a couple times through his life: this idea that slavery was so unjust that America would be punished if they did not find a way to get rid of it as quickly as possible. Jefferson didn’t want to actually widely publish his book. He several times mentioned being concerned that Virginia’s ruling class would react negatively, and that they might even make restrictions on the lives of free black people. And that’s not an outlandish concern. There were reactionary movements in Virginia’s ruling class against emancipation. But he did want to send private copies to the College of William and Mary. And I think it’s because Jefferson himself became anti-slavery at that college. And he said several times to different correspondents, although he had given up hope for his own generation to fully live out the principles of equality, young men who had been brought up in this atmosphere of freedom and revolution and liberty. He was certain that they would be the ones that could be persuaded to end slavery. So Jefferson sent copies of his book to the College of William and Mary, and in eighteen sixty-four, the General Winfield Scott, who was an important Union general, actually published his memoirs. And in his memoirs he said, “In boyhood at William and Mary College, and in common with most, if not all, of my companions, I became deeply impressed with the views given by Mr. Jefferson in his Notes on Virginia in favor of gradual emancipation of slaves.” And I found a few other people who specifically called out Jefferson in his book at the college as the reason that they became anti-slavery. So Jefferson’s strategy was partially successful. He moved the needle, obviously not enough to stop Virginians from supporting slavery in the Civil War, but enough to convince some important individuals to oppose slavery. Now, after Jefferson got swept up in national politics as Secretary of State, Vice President, and President. He really didn’t do as much. But in eighteen fourteen, he got a letter from a young man named Edward Coles, a young Virginian. Edward Coles had decided to free his own slaves by taking them out of Virginia, taking them to Illinois, and freeing them there. And he wrote to Jefferson and basically begged Jefferson to speak out once more against slavery. Jefferson wrote back, and I think his reply is often misunderstood. Jefferson wrote back and said, “No.” But Jefferson, essentially what he said is, “I’m old, and I’ve already tried everything I can.” The public already knows my views on this issue. But Jefferson repeated exactly what he had been saying since the seventeen-eighties. The young generation, the generation now coming up into political power, must be the one to make this decision, must be the one to be persuaded of the immorality of slavery. So Jefferson urged Edward Coles to become the leader of the anti-slavery movement, and Coles didn’t take his advice. He took his slaves and left Virginia; freedom went to Illinois. But he did become the anti-slavery governor of Illinois. He actually ran for governor specifically to stop Illinois from passing a pro-slavery constitution, and later on supported Lincoln when Lincoln was elected President from Illinois. Now, on a personal level, Jefferson struggled with this issue of slavery. He never freed the majority of his own enslaved workers, and one important reason is because he was deeply in debt at the time that he died. Unlike George Washington, who could free all of his slaves in his will, Jefferson, by the time he passed away, there was a law saying, “If you are in debt, you cannot free your slaves because they aren’t collateral for your debts.” And Jefferson died about a million dollars in today’s money in debt, so even if he had wanted to, he couldn’t have. But we know that his son-in-law, Thomas Mann Randolph, tried to get an anti-slavery bill passed when he was governor of Virginia in eighteen twenty, and Jefferson said, “Bravo! Way to go!” “Oh, it failed.” And then we know that in eighteen thirty-one, Jefferson had died, and his grandson had now become a member of the Virginia Legislature. Nat Turner’s Rebellion happened, and the Virginia Legislature debated ending slavery, and Thomas Jefferson’s grandson stood up and said, “My grandfather always wanted us to end slavery. He would want us to do it now. Let’s abolish slavery.” That didn’t work. Edward Coles, by the way, he was cheering Thomas Jefferson Randolph and saying, “Yes, your grandfather would have wanted you to do this.” So there’s an interesting generational legacy to Jefferson’s anti-slavery efforts. On the one hand, in many ways Jefferson failed. On the other hand, he moved the needle. He saw a future for America where slavery could be over, and all, and truly could be free and equal. He wasn’t quite sure how we were going to get there, but he kept on encouraging younger people to change their worlds, to disentangle themselves from their prejudice, and to make the sacrifices needed. Perhaps the question that we should begin with is: how is it that a man who was born into a slaveholding society where it was illegal even to free slaves without getting special permission from the governor? Where slavery was accepted. There were no anti-slavery societies; there was no anti-slavery movement. Slavery was the normal state of affairs in the entire New World, as well as in Africa and Asia, parts of Europe. How is it that he was able to somehow become free enough in his own mind to realize the equality of mankind and to support anti-slavery? And a.