Thomas Jefferson: Notes on the State of Virginia

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

Jefferson’s enthusiasm for studying and learning are fully displayed in the Notes, which underwent a series of revisions as Jefferson sought to increase his knowledge about natural science and edit his work based on the information of more accomplished scientists. There was a theory, popularized by French naturalists, that animal life in the New World had degenerated from that in Europe, and Jefferson wanted to correct this notion; his response to this subject forms the largest section of the Notes. In addition to natural science, Jefferson answered queries about Virginia’s manners, laws, population, institutions, religion, commerce, and other subjects. Although slaves are referred to in several sections of the Notes, Jefferson confines the majority of his musings on African Americans and slavery to two sections: that on Virginia’s laws (Query XIV) and that on Virginians’ manners (Query XVIII).

“Laws”

Jefferson had serious moral reservations about slavery and expressed them in the “Manners” section of the Notes (Query XVIII). Nevertheless, his discussion of African Americans in “Laws” strikes a different tone. Jefferson here describes a proposed amendment to Virginia’s legal code that called for the emancipation of “all slaves born after passing the act.” The amendment would have slave children remain with their parents and be trained at public expense “according to their geniuses” in various trades. When male slaves reached the age of twenty-one and females eighteen, they were to be sent away from America. Jefferson does not specify where he thought the young people should be sent, merely that they should be “colonized to such place as the circumstances of the time should render most proper.”

In order to help the newly colonized young people, the amendment proposed that they be given supplies, the support of Virginia, and the protection of the United States until they had established themselves as an independent entity. The amendment further proposed that white Europeans be enticed to come to the United States to replace the labor of those who had been removed. In this way and over a period of years, African Americans would disappear from America as the older slaves stopped producing children and died off.

Jefferson anticipates a question from his audience when he writes, “Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expense of supplying … the vacancies they will leave?” The answer to this question, Jefferson believes, is that inherent evolutionary differences between African Americans and white Americans as well as the strain of slavery on both groups have made it impossible for them to live together harmoniously. Jefferson cites political, physical, and moral incompatibilities between the groups. “Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites,” Jefferson claims, “ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained … the real distinctions nature has made … will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.”

Jefferson devotes a considerable amount of space to a list of the real and perceived differences between African Americans and Caucasians. The first difference is color. Here Jefferson’s tone clearly expresses his personal bias. “Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of colour of the one, preferable to that eternal monotony, … that immoveable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race?” He goes on to cite slaves’ “own judgment in favour of the whites, declared by their preference of them.” Jefferson was referring to a popularly held belief that white beauty was superior to black beauty to the point that slaves themselves preferred white to black. He further poses this question: “The circumstance of superior beauty, is thought worthy of attention in the propagation of our horses, dogs, and other domestic animals; why not in that of man?” Clearly Jefferson believed it was.

In addition to a deficit of physical beauty compared with whites, African Americans, Jefferson believed, suffered from other deficiencies. Intellectual aptitude was extremely important to Jefferson the lifelong student, and it was his observation that African Americans lacked the intellect of Caucasians or Native Americans. As evidence to support his assertions, Jefferson offers the following: “Those numberless afflictions, which render it doubtful whether heaven has given life to us in mercy or in wrath, are less felt [by African Americans], and sooner forgotten by them. In general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection.” Jefferson carries his argument further, writing that “comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to whites; in reason much inferior … and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.”

It is at this point that Jefferson unfavorably compares African Americans with Native Americans. Jefferson believed that slaves, some of whom had “been liberally educated … and lived in countries where the arts and sciences are cultivated to a considerable degree, and have had before their eyes samples of the best works from abroad” had not taken the full cultural advantage of their association with whites. The Indians, on the other hand, “with no advantages of this kind … astonish you with strokes of the most sublime oratory; such as prove their reason and sentiment strong, their imagination glowing and elevated. But never yet could I find a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration.”

Jefferson’s interest in natural history reasserts itself after his lengthy recitation of the perceived deficiencies of African Americans. “To our reproach it must be said,” he writes, “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.” He is willing to admit that the inferiority of African Americans might be suspicion rather than fact, but regardless, the “unfortunate difference of colour, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.”

In addition to comparing African American slaves with Native Americans on racial terms, Jefferson also compared African American slaves to Roman slaves based on their shared condition of servitude. Once again, Jefferson finds the comparison to disfavor African Americans. Jefferson notes that Roman slaves, who were typically white, “might mix with, without staining the blood of his master.” African Americans, however, “when freed,” must be “removed beyond the reach of mixture.” He meant that blacks and whites were to be separated so that there would be no possibility that they would produce mixed-race offspring. Given Jefferson’s belief that the mixing of the races would “[stain] the blood of the master” and the proposal to remove African Americans from America altogether by colonizing and gradual emancipation, it is perhaps logical that the penalty for slave criminals included in the Notes is that they be “transported to Africa, or elsewhere, as the circumstances of the time admit, there to be continued in slavery.” Of course, later historians have found this belief highly ironic, for it is widely accepted (through DNA evidence) that Jefferson himself fathered children with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings, a woman believed to have been a half-sister of his wife, Martha.

Manners

In “Manners,” Jefferson begins by noting that it is difficult for a citizen of a country to comment on its manners, for such a person has been habituated to the surrounding society. Nevertheless, he uses discussion of American manners to lament the “unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us.” Further, he laments that children, by observing the behavior of adults, can grow to treat slaves with cruelty, simply because they do not know any better and they have learned to do so from their elders. He recognizes the discordance between the institution of slavery and the nation’s belief in a republican form of government in which all men are created equal. “With what execration,” Jefferson asks rhetorically, “should the statesman be loaded, who permitting one half the citizens thus to trample on the rights of the other, transforms those into despots, and these into enemies, destroys the morals of the one part, and the amor patriae [patriotism] of the other.” Here he adopts language that reflects the principles he espoused in the Declaration of Independence.

Jefferson expresses sympathy for the slave, recognizing that the slave labors for others who themselves do not perform labor, and he wonders why a slave would even want to live in the United States. He goes further when he suggests that slavery destroys the moral fiber of the nation, for the presence of slaves strips their owners of any desire to perform useful labor. Jefferson expresses fear of divine retribution for America’s use of slaves: “Indeed I tremble for my country when reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever … the spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust.” As a whole, the section reflects Jefferson’s own ambivalence about slavery.