Thomas Jefferson’s Dying Words on Slavery: The Story of America Series [Ep. 20]

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. Up next, another installment of our series about Us: The Story of America series, with Professor Bill McLay, author of the terrific book Land of Hope, and a professor at Hillsdale College. By the time 1820 rolled around, America was a nation on the move. Trains, canals, and steamboats all moving westward, and New York becoming our largest city. Our way of life was changing, but our original sin remained: slavery. Let’s get into the story. Take it away, Bill.

It was not just canals being built. The first railways were being built in the 1820s, and they would we turned Western towns like Chicago into commerce powerhouses. There was Samuel Slater, whose factory innovations and systems changed textile manufacturer. Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, which made short staple cotton into a commercially viable product, and would make Cotton King in the South. John Finch and Robert Fulton’s in innovations in steam technology and other inventions like that would usher in an era of economic growth unrivaled in American history, but there were still important, unresolved problems. One of them a huge unresolved issue: slavery. By 1818, there was a balance between free as slave states, eleven of each, which made for a stalemate in the Senate. The balance wasn’t a solution to a problem; it was merely a delay of a solution. It was a truce, a cease-fire in place of an actual treaty of settlement. In 1819, the first of the Louisiana Territories applied for statehood, Missouri, and there was little doubt it would seek to be admitted as a slave state, and that would disturb the equilibrium. A fierce debate ensued in Congress because, more than any previous time in American history when the subject of slavery had come up, there was greater commitment economically to the institution in the Southern States, and there was greater opposition morally in otherwise in the Northern States.

So any debate that would occur was going to be more ferocious.

Than debates that had been seen before, and this one was extremely fiery.

A compromise finally averted an all-out disaster. Maine would be admitted as a free state, thus maintaining the balance between slave and pre states. Math—Maine really just separated off from Massachusetts. More importantly, slavery would be exclusive henceforth from the remaining parts.

Of the Louisiana Territory that were north of Missouri’s southern border, that is, the 36-30 latitude extended westward. Again, a problem delayed is not a problem solved. And the hope that many of the actual Framers of the Constitution had sincerely held that slavery was an institution on its way out and it would die out of its own inanition, this was a hope that was dying itself. No one understood the nature of the aryl, the depth of the issue, the depth of the problem, better than Jefferson himself. He wrote the following words to John Holmes, the U.S. representative from Massachusetts, in one of the earliest supporters of the Missouri Compromise. Holmes had mailed a letter to Jefferson with a copy of a pamphlet he published for the citizens of Maine. Jefferson, in retirement at Monticello, spotted to Holmes shortly after the passage of the Missouri copy. Here’s what he said: “I thank you, dear sir, for the copy you have been so kind to to send me of the letter to your constituents on the Missouri question.

“It is a perfect justification to them. I had for a long time ceased to read newspapers or

“Pay any attention to public affairs, confident they were in good hans and contend to be a passenger in our bark to the shore from which I am not distant.

“But this momentous question,

“Like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union.

“It is hushed, indeed for the moment.

“But this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence, a geographical line coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political. Once conceived and held up, the angry passions of men will ever be obliterated, and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper.

“I can say with conscious truth that

“There is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would to relieve us from this heavy reproach in any practicable way.” It’s a remarkable letter in its substance and its towne. Let me repeat two lines of it, because they may are repeating. “This momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it as once as the.”

“Knell of the Union.” The word “knell,”

It means the slow, repeated, solemn ringing of a bell for a death or funeral. Then came this evocative and disturbing line from his letter to Holmes. “But as it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation

“In the other.”

So Jefferson doesn’t see a way out, doesn’t see a way out of slavery, and this doesn’t only disturb him, it haunts him. Here’s how he closes things out in his letters. “I regret that I am now to die in the belief that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776 to acquire self-government and happiness to their

“Country is to be thrown away for the unwise

“And unworthy passions of their sons. And my only consolation is to be that I live not to weep bore it if they would, but dispassionately weigh the blessings they will throw away against an abstract principle more likely to be affected by Union

“Than by scission.”

They would pause before they would perpetrate this act of suicide on themselves, and of treason against the hopes of the world. These are words, powerful words that resound and echoed down through the ages, down through the years, and I think they echo to the present day, the present, any present, our present, to the presence of the past. It’s never been immune to the possibility of being coming full of itself and its passions.

But it should never be allowed to fail to.

Honor the sacrifices of the past and the blessings we owe to it. That was the bitter prospect that Jefferson was facing as he faced death after a long, indistinguished career, the possibility that it might all have been pronounced.

A terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Monty Montgomery, himself a Hillsdale College graduate, and a special thanks to Professor Bill McLay, who teaches at Hillsdale College. All of the work we do here in Our American Stories, all the history stories are brought to us by the great folks at Hillsdale. Well, you can go to learn all the beautiful and important things in life. And if you can’t get to Hillsdale College, Hillsdale will come to you with their free and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale.edu. That’s Hillsdale.edu. The Story of Us with Professor Bill McClay here on Our American Stories.