Jefferson on Equality, Race, and Slavery in the Declaration and Notes on Virginia

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Jefferson on Equality, Race, and Slavery (in the
Declaration and Notes on Virginia
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Taking Our Heroes/Icons Off the Pedestal

• Possible Flaws1.) Personal scandal (affairs,
  plagiarism, corruption)Franklin, FDR, JFK, MLK
  Jr.
• 2.) Reprehensible ideas (Wagner, Henry Ford,
  Charles Lindbergh)
• 3.) Backward/outdated ideas (practically every
  historical figure) although you can always find
  those ahead of their time

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Off the Pedestal contd

• Whats the impact?
• ---make us feel better about ourselvesor does it
  encourage bad behavior?--make their
  accomplishments even more impressive?
• ---does it increase cynicism?---undercut support
  for the good ideas they represent?
• When/how to do it?
• --What age/grade level?---Build em up, then
  tear em down?---Tear em down as you build em
  up?---Just build em up?

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Larger QuestionImportance of Myths and
Mythmaking in American Political Culture
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Digression 1 Political Science and Political
Theory

• If you love Plato, Jefferson, Locke, Tocqueville,
  Mill, Marx, A. Smith, youll love political
  theory (Drs. Miller and McKnight)
• Philosophy and history are OK, too
• Political theory tends to emphasize normative
  issues and qualitative methods political
  science is more empirical and quantitative

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Political Theory contd

• Writing about The Canon
• Four views
• --Continuing debate about timeless issues
• --Understanding the influence of historical and
  social context on canon works
• --Using canon (which everyones read) to
  introduce new ideas
• --Canon is an abitrary construction, too confining

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Background on Notes on Virginia

• I had always made it a practice whenever an
  opportunity occurred of obtaining any information
  of our countryto commit it to writing. These
  memoranda were on loose papers, bundled up
  without orderI thought this a good occasion to
  embody their substance, which I did in the order
  of Marbois queries, so as to answer his wish and
  arrange them for my own use.
• -Autobiography, 1821

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Background on Notes on Virginia

• I had received a letter from deMarboisinforming
  me he had been instructed by his govt. to obtain
  statistical accounts of the different states of
  our Union, as might be useful for their
  information and addressing to me a number of
  such queries relative to the state of Virginia.

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Complete Contents of NOV

• Header
• Front Matter
• Query 1 "Boundaries of Virginia" An exact
  description of the limits and boundaries of the
  state of Virginia. Limits
• Query 2 "Rivers" A notice of its rivers,
  rivulets, and how far they are navigable? Rivers
  and Navigation
• Query 3 "Sea Ports" A notice of the best
  sea-ports of the state, and how big are the
  vessels they can receive?
• Query 4 "Mountains" A notice on its Mountains?
• Query 5 "Cascades"Its Cascades and Caverns?
• Query 6 "Productions mineral, vegetable and
  animal" A notice of the mines and other
  subterraneous riches its trees, plants, fruits,
  c.
• Section Minerals
• Chart "A comparative View of the Quadrupeds of
  Europe and of America."
• Query 7 "Climate" A notice of all what can
  increase the progress of human knowledge?
• Query 8 "Population" The number of its
  inhabitants?
• Query 9 "Military force" The number and condition
  of the militia and regular troops, and their pay?
  Military
• Query 10 "Marine force" The marine?
• Query 11 "Aborigines" A description of the
  Indians established in that state?
• Query 12 "Counties and towns" A notice of the
  counties, cities, townships, and villages?
• Query 13 "Constitution" The constitution of the
  state, and its several charters? Constitution
• Section
• Insertion

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Proposition 1 Jefferson excluded blacks from
the men in all men are created equal

• (The King) has waged cruel war against human
  nature itself, violating its most sacred rights
  of life and liberty in the persons of a distant
  people who never offended him, captivating and
  carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere,
  or to incur miserable death in their
  transportation thither. This piratical warfare,
  the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare
  of the Christian king of Great Britain.

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Proposition 1 Are blacks not men?

• Determined to keep open a market where MEN should
  be bought and sold, he has prostituted his
  negative for suppressing every legislative
  attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable
  commerce.he is now exciting those very people to
  rise in arms among us, and to purchase that
  liberty of which he has deprived them, by
  murdering the people upon whom he obtruded them
  thus paying off former crimes committed against
  the liberties of one people, with crimes which he
  urges them to commit against the lives of
  another.
• --Original draft of Declaration of Independence,
  omitted by Continental Congress

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Proposition 2 the Declaration was political
rhetoric, NOV was an attempt at objective
science

• To justify a general conclusion, requires many
  observations, even where the subject may be
  submitted to the anatomical knife, to optical
  glasses, to analysis by fire, or by solvents.
  How much more then where it is a faculty, not a
  substance, we are examining where it eludes the
  research of all the senses

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Proposition 2 Rhetoric vs. science

• Let me add too, as a circumstance of great
  tenderness, where our conclusion would degrade a
  whole race of men, from the rank in the scale of
  beings which their Creator may perhaps have given
  them.
• ---Jefferson, NOV, Query XIV
• In Notes on Virginia, Jefferson was
  participating in a cosmopolitan discourse on the
  nature of man and society. This text represents
  his attempt to bring the scientific method of his
  great heroes---Newton, Bacon, and Locke---to bear
  on the central issues concerning his state and
  new nation.
• --Alexander Boulton, The American Paradox
  Jeffersonian Equality and Racial Science,
  American Quartelry, 9/95

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Political Rhetoric vs. Science

• POLITICAL RHETORIC had to be consensual,
  stirring to action
• SCIENCE clinical, cold-blooded, objective
• 1.) Need for careful, direct observation, not
  hearsay
• 2.) Need to control to control confounding
  variables
• What about blacks in Africa? conflict between
  two scientific principles

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Proposition 3 In the one realm that really
countsthe moral sense---Jefferson considered
blacks to be equal, and therefore deserving of
equal rights

• We find among them numerous instances of the
  most rigid inegrity, and as many as among their
  better instructed masters, of benevolence,
  gratitude, and unshaken fidelity. NOV
• Whatever (blacks) degree of talent, it is no
  measure of their rights. Because Sir Isaac
  Newton was superior to others in understanding he
  was not therefore lord of the person and property
  of others-
• Jefferson, letter to Bishop Henri Gregoire

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Proposition 4 Jefferson changed his mind
and/or really wasnt all that sure

• Other instances of Jefferson changing his mind
• Did Jefferson become less idealistic, less
  progressive?
• No one wishes more than I do to see such proofs
  as you exhibit, that nature has given to our
  black brethren, talents equal to those of the
  other colors of men, and that the appearance of
  the want of them is owing merely to the degraded
  condition of their existence
• --Jefferson, Letter to Benjamin Banneker, after
  receiving Bannekers almanac
• I have a long letter from Bannkeker, which shows
  him to have a mind of very common stature
  indeedit was impossible for doubt to have been
  more tenderly or hesitatingly expressed than that
  was in the NOV, and nothing was or is farther
  from my intentions, than to enlist myself as a
  champion of a fixed opinion, where I myself
  expressed only a doubt--Jefferson, Letter to
  Joel Barlo

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Digression 2 Phyllis Wheatley

• Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan
  land,Taught my benighted soul to understandThat
  there's a God, that there's a Saviour tooOnce I
  redemption neither sought nor knew,Some view our
  sable race with scornful eye,"Their colour is a
  diabolic die."Remember, Christians, Negroes,
  black as Cain,May be refin'd, and join th'
  angelic train. 

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Digression 3 Ignatius Sancho

• For the GENERAL ADVERTISER.
• April 29, 1780.
• -The vast bounties offered for able-bodied men
  sheweth the zeal and liberality of our wise
  lawgivers--yet indicateth a scarcity of men. Now,
  they seem to me to have overlooked one resource
  (which appears obvious) a resource which would
  greatly benefit the people at large (by being
  more usefully employed), and which are happily
  half-trained already for the service of their
  country--by being--powder proof--light, active,
  young fellows--I dare say you have anticipated
  my scheme, which is to form ten companies at
  least, out of the very numerous body of
  hair-dressers--they are, for the most part,
  clean, clever, young men--and, as observed above,
  the utility would be immense--the ladies, by
  once more getting the management of their heads
  into their own hands, might possibly regain their
  native reason and oeconomy--and the gentlemen
  might be induced by mere necessity to comb and
  care for their own heads--those (I mean) who have
  heads to care for.--If the above scheme should
  happily take place, among the many advantages too
  numerous to particularize, which would of course
  result from it--one not of the least magnitude
  would be a prodigious saving in the great
  momentous article of time--people of the ton of
  both sexes (to speak within probability) usually
  losing between two or three hours daily on that
  important business.--My plan, Mr. Editor, I have
  the comfort to think, is replete with good--it
  tends to serve my king and country in the first
  instance-- and to cleanse, settle, and emancipate
  from the cruel bondage of French, as well as
  native frizeurs, the heads of my fellow-subjects.
• Yours, c.
• AFRICANUS

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• Proposition 5 Jeffersons anti-Buffon New
  World-centrism got the better of him

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• Proposition 6 Jefferson was caught up in the
  prevalent struggle (in science, religion, and
  politics) between order/stability and
  freedom/revolution

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For more reading

• Richardson, William D. 1984. Thomas Jefferson
  Race The Declaration and Notes on the State of
  Virginia Polity (3) 446-466.
• Yarbrough, Jean. 1991. Race and the Moral
  Foundation of the American Republic Another
  Look at the Declaration and the Notes on
  Virginia. Journal of Politics, 53 (February)
  90-105.
• Boulton, Alexander. 1995. The American Paradox
  Jeffersonian Equality and Racial Science.
  American Quarterly, 47 (September) 467-491.