assigment

• “Thinking Like a Historian” — Debating Thomas Jefferson and Slavery, pages 264-267 (also provided in the assignment folder on Blackboard)

Instructions:
In this “Thinking Like a Historian” section, Shi shares with us the works of two scholars, Douglas L. Wilson and Paul Finkelman, who offer different interpretations of Thomas Jefferson’s status as a slave owner. Shi also provides us with four primary documents — all written by Thomas Jefferson — that demonstrate his views regarding slavery. Your task is to determine what, exactly, Wilson and Finkelman have to say about the topic and to begin to think about how the primary documents support or weaken their respective interpretations.

Debating Thomas Jefferson and Slavery

One of the more difficult tasks that historians face is assessing the actions of historical figures within an ethical framework. Should people in the past be assessed by the standards of their time or by those of today? Should we hold celebrated historical figures to a higher ethical standard? For Part 2, “Building a Nation,” the complex relationship of Thomas Jefferson to slavery demonstrates how historians can disagree when they evaluate historic individuals from an ethical perspective.

This exercise involves two tasks:

Part 1: Compare the two secondary sources on Thomas Jefferson and slavery.

Part 2: Using primary sources, evaluate the arguments of the two secondary sources.

Part 1: Comparing and Contrasting Secondary Sources

Below are two secondary sources focused on the question of Jefferson and his relationship with slavery. The first is from Douglas L. Wilson, professor emeritus of English and codirector of the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College; the second is written by Paul Finkelman, professor of law and public policy at the Albany Law School. In these selections, Wilson and Finkelman explore one of the great contradictions in early American history: that Thomas Jefferson, an outspoken critic of slavery, was himself a slave owner. Further complicating the matter was Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings, a slave with whom he had several children. Both passages grapple with the issue of presentism, the application of present-day ideas and beliefs onto the past.

Compare the views of these two scholars by answering the following questions. Be sure to find specific examples in the selections to support your answers.

• How does each author address the issue of presentism?
• What ethical standards do the authors use to evaluate Jefferson?
• What evidence do they offer when evaluating Jefferson?
• How does each author assess Jefferson’s ethical standards?
• What ethical standard would you use?

Secondary Source 1

Douglas L. Wilson, “Thomas Jefferson and the Character Issue” (1992)

How could the man who wrote that “All men are created equal” own slaves? This, in essence, is the question most persistently asked of those who write about Thomas Jefferson, and by all indications it is the thing that contemporary Americans find most vexing about him. . . . The question carries a silent assumption that because he practiced slave holding, Jefferson must have somehow believed in it, and must therefore have been a hypocrite. My belief is that this way of asking the question . . . reflects the pervasive presentism of our time. Consider, for example, how different the question appears when inverted and framed in more historical terms: How did a man who was born into a slave holding society, whose family and admired friends owned slaves, who inherited a fortune that was dependent on slaves and slave labor, decide at an early age that slavery was morally wrong and forcefully declare that it ought to be abolished?

But when the question is explained in this way, another invariably follows: If Jefferson came to believe that holding slaves was wrong, why did he continue to hold them? . . . Obstacles to emancipation in Jefferson’s Virginia were formidable, and the risk was demonstrably great that emancipated slaves would enjoy little, if any, real freedom and would, unless they could pass as white, be more likely to come to grief in a hostile environment. In short, the master whose concern extended beyond his own morality to the well-being of his slaves was caught on the horns of a dilemma. Thus the question of why Jefferson didn’t free his slaves only serves to illustrate how presentism involves us in mistaken assumptions about historical conditions— in this case that an eighteenth-century slave holder wanting to get out from under the moral stigma of slavery and improve the lot of his slaves had only to set them free.

Although we may find Jefferson guilty of failing to make adequate allowance for the conditions in which blacks were forced to live, Jefferson did not take the next step of concluding that blacks were fit only for slavery. This rationalization of slavery was indeed the common coin of slave holders and other whites who condoned or tolerated the “peculiar” institution, but it formed no part of Jefferson’s thinking. In fact, he took the opposite position: that having imposed the depredations of slavery on blacks, white Americans should not only emancipate them but also educate and train them to be self-sufficient, provide them with necessary materials, and establish a colony in which they could live as free and independent people.

Source: Wilson, Douglas L. “Thomas Jefferson and the Character Issue.” Atlantic Monthly November 1992, pp. 57–74.

Secondary Source 2

Paul Finkelman, “Jefferson and Slavery” (1993)

An understanding of Jefferson’s relationship to slavery requires analysis of his statements on and beliefs about the institution and an account of his actions as a public leader and a private individual. Scrutinizing the contradictions between Jefferson’s professions and his actions does not impose twentieth-century values on an eighteenth-century man. Because he was the author of the Declaration of Independence and a leader of the American Enlightenment, the test of Jefferson’s position on slavery is not whether he was better than the worst of his generation, but whether he was the leader of the best; not whether he responded as a southerner and a planter, but whether he was able to transcend his economic interests and his sectional background to implement the ideals he articulated. Jefferson fails the test. When Jefferson wrote the Declaration, he owned over 175 slaves. While many of his contemporaries freed their slaves during and after the Revolution, Jefferson did not.

In the fifty years from 1776 until his death in 1826, a period of extraordinary public service, he did little to end slavery or to dissociate himself from his role as the master of Monticello. To the contrary, as he accumulated more slaves he worked assiduously to increase the productivity and the property values of his labor force. Nor did he encourage his countrymen to liberate their slaves, even when they sought his blessing. Even at his death Jefferson failed to fulfill the promise of his rhetoric. In his will he emancipated only five bondsmen, condemning nearly two hundred others to the auction block. . . .

. . . He knew slavery was wrong. It could not have been otherwise for an eighteenth-century natural law theorist. Many of his closest European and American friends and colleagues were leaders of the new abolition societies. Jefferson was part of a cosmopolitan “republic of letters” that was overwhelmingly hostile to slavery. But, for the most part, he suppressed his doubts, while doing virtually nothing to challenge the institution. On this issue Jefferson’s genius failed him. As David Brion Davis observes, “Jefferson had only a theoretical interest in promoting the cause of abolition.”

Jefferson could not live without slaves. They built his house, cooked his meals, and tilled his fields. In contrast to George Washington, Jefferson carelessly managed his lands and finances and lived beyond his means. Washington refused to traffic in slaves. Chronically in debt, Jefferson overcame his professed “scruples about selling negroes but for delinquency or on their own request,” selling scores of slaves in order to make ends meet. Jefferson could not maintain his extravagant life style without his slaves and, to judge from his lifelong behavior, his grand style was far more important than the natural rights of his slaves. . . .

Throughout his life, as he condemned slavery, Jefferson implied that, however bad it was for slaves, the institution was somehow worse for whites. His concerns about the institution had more to do with its effect on whites and white society than on its true victims. . . . Jefferson’s concerns were solely with the “morals and manners” of the master class. He was concerned that slavery leads to despotism by the masters; but he never expressed regret for the mistreatment of the slave. Similarly, throughout his life Jefferson expressed his fears of miscegenation and a weakening of white society through contact with blacks. He favored some form of colonization that would put blacks “beyond the reach of mixture.”

Source: Finkelman, Paul. “Jefferson and Slavery: ‘Treason against the Hopes of the World.'” In Jeffersonian Legacies, edited by Peter S. Onuf, 181–221. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993.

Part 2: Using Primary Sources to Evaluate Secondary Sources

When historians are faced with competing interpretations of the past, they often look at primary source material as part of the process of evaluating the different arguments. Below are primary source materials relating to Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with slavery. The first document is an excerpt from a draft of the Declaration of Independence largely written by Thomas Jefferson. This excerpt was removed from the final version of the declaration. The second document is a selection from Jefferson’s 1785 book on the state of Virginia, relating to slaves and slavery. The third document is a letter Jefferson wrote while serving in Paris as the U.S. minister (ambassador) to France in 1788, and the fourth is a letter from April 1820 expressing his feelings regarding the Missouri Compromise, which admitted Missouri as a slave state and created a northern boundary for slavery in the west- ern territories.

Carefully read the primary sources and answer the following questions. Decide which of the primary source documents support or refute Wilson’s and Finkelman’s arguments about Jefferson. You may find that some documents do both but for different parts of each historian’s interpretation. Be sure to identify which specific components of each historian’s argument the documents support or refute.

• Which of the two historians’ arguments is best supported by the primary source documents? If you find that both arguments are well supported by the evidence, why do you think the two historians had such different interpretations about Jefferson?
• Based on the ethical standard you choose in Part I and these documents, how would you assess Jefferson’s relationship with slavery? You may consider how Jefferson’s views change over time.
• What has using primary sources to evaluate the Wilson and Finkelman arguments taught you about making ethical assessments of historical figures?

Primary Source 1

Thomas Jefferson, a draft section omitted from the Declaration of Independence (1776)

He [King George III] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people [Africans] who never offended him, captivating & 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. Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable [disgusting] commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also 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.

Source: Jefferson, Thomas. “Thomas Jefferson, June 1776, Rough Draft of the Declaration of Independence,” 1776. The Thomas Jefferson Papers Series 1. General Correspondence. 1651–1827. American Memory, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Primary Source 2

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1787)

It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the Blacks into the State [after emancipation], and thus save the expense of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave? Deep-rooted prejudices entertained by the Whites; ten thousand recollections by the Blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions, which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race. To these objections, which are political, may be added others, which are physical and moral. . . . Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the Whites; in reason much inferior, . . . and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless and anomalous. . . .

To our reproach it must be said, that though for a century and a half we have had under our eyes the races of Black and of Red men, they have never yet been viewed by us as subjects of natural history. I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the Blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the Whites in the endowments both of body and mind. It is not against experience to suppose, that different species of the same genus, or varieties of the same species, may possess different qualifications. Will not a lover of natural history then, one who views the gradations in all the races of animals with the eye of philosophy, excuse an effort to keep those in the department of man as distinct as nature has formed them? This unfortunate difference of colour, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people. Many of their advocates, while they wish to vindicate the liberty of human nature, are anxious also to preserve its dignity and beauty. Some of these, embarrassed by the question ‘What further is to be done with them?’ join themselves in opposition with those who are actuated by sordid avarice [greed] only. Among the Romans emancipation required but one effort. The slave, when made free, might mix with, without staining the blood of his master. But with us a second is necessary, unknown to history. When freed, he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture. . . . There must, doubtless, be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people, produced by the existence of slavery among us. 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. . . . For if a slave can have a country in this world, it must be any other in preference to that in which he is born to live and labor for another.

Source: Jefferson, Thomas. “Laws, Query XIV.” Notes on the State of Virginia. London: Printed for John Stockdale, Opposite Burlington- House, Piccadilly, 1787. 229–271.

Primary Source 3

Thomas Jefferson, Letter to M. Warville [a Frenchman] (February 11, 1788)

Sir,

I am very sensible of the honor you propose to me, of becoming a member of the society for the abolition of the slave-trade. You know that nobody wishes more ardently, to see an abolition, not only of the trade, but of the condition of slavery: and certainly nobody will be more willing to encounter every sacrifice for that object. But the influence and information of the friends to this proposition in France will be far above the need of my association. I am here as a public servant, and those whom I serve, having never yet been able to give their voice against the practice, it is decent for me to avoid too public a demonstration of my wishes to see it abolished. Without serving the cause here, it might render me less able to serve it beyond the water. I trust you will be sensible of the prudence of those motives, therefore, which govern my conduct on this occasion, and be assured of my wishes for the success of your undertaking, and the sentiments of esteem and respect, with which I have the honor to be, Sir, your most obedient, humble servant,

Th: Jefferson.

Source: Jefferson, Thomas. “Jean Plumard Brissot de Warville to Thomas Jefferson, February 11, 1788,” 1788. The Thomas Jefferson Papers. Series 1: General Correspondence, 1651–1827. American Memory, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Primary Source 4

Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Holmes (April 22, 1820)

I thank you, dear Sir, for the copy you have been so kind as to send me of the letter to your constituents on the Missouri question [the admission of Missouri as slave state]. . . . The cession of that kind of property [slaves] (for so it is misnamed) . . . would not cost me a second thought, if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected: and, gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might be. But as it is, we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other. Of one thing I am certain, that as the passage of slaves from one State to another, would not make a slave of a single human being who would not be so without it, so their diffusion over a greater surface would make them individually happier, and proportionally facilitate the accomplishment of their emancipation. . . .

Th: Jefferson.

Source: Jefferson, Thomas. “Thomas Jefferson to John Holmes, April 22, 1820,” 1820. The Thomas Jefferson Papers, Series 1: General Correspondence, 1651–1827. American Memory, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.