Thomas Jefferson: Notes on the State of Virginia

Impact

Assessing the impact of Jefferson’s Notes is problematic, mainly in light of subsequent events and particularly those events having a bearing on slavery, emancipation, and race relations. On the one hand, Thomas Jefferson is an icon of American democracy, one of the most revered Founding Fathers. He was a man of widespread erudition and towering intellect, prompting President John F. Kennedy to remark to a gathering of forty-nine Nobel Prize winners in 1962, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent and of human knowledge that has ever been gathered together at the White House—with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” He wrote the stirring words of the Declaration of Independence, and he is regarded as the fountainhead of the separation of church and state, religious freedom, limited government, and defense of civil liberties.

Nevertheless, Jefferson owned slaves. He called for separation of the races, yet he fathered children by one of his slaves. And in Notes he expresses views about African Americans that were probably widely held at the time but that are considered repugnant today. In the minds of some Americans, Jefferson was guilty of enormous hypocrisy by stating, in the Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal” while being a slaveholder. Still, although Jefferson owned slaves, he long advocated their emancipation or at least the elimination of the slave trade; an early draft of the Declaration of Independence contained a clause condemning the British Crown for supporting the slave trade, but the clause was deleted during debates on the Declaration’s wording. Jefferson clearly was often troubled by his conscience. On the one hand, he recognized the evils of slavery, which he enumerates in “Manners,” but on the other he had to contend with nearly lifelong extensive personal debt, and he recognized that the economic viability of much of the South depended on slave labor. He further believed that habit and custom would make it impossible for slaves to live as free men and women, but he later repudiated this belief. In sum, he hoped to see the eradication of the slave trade and, in future years, the abolition of the institution of slavery itself.

Jefferson’s Notes became a popular work because of its detailed nature. Indeed, the Notes were greeted enthusiastically by certain liberal Europeans, such as the English philosopher and preacher Dr. Richard Price, a supporter of the American Revolution; an activist in republican, liberal, and even radical causes; and an advocate of Jefferson’s vision of limited government. Thus, abolitionists such as Price would have welcomed Jefferson’s proposal in Query XIV for gradual emancipation. The Notes have remained popular with scholars because they encapsulate the thoughts and opinions of one of America’s most prominent Founding Fathers. Jefferson’s biographer Dumas Malone wrote that “nobody had ever before given such a description of an American state … the most important scientific work that had yet been compiled in America.” Malone went further when he described the Notes as Jefferson’s “most memorable personal contribution in the name of his country to the enlightenment of Europe.”

Prominent African Americans at the time responded to Jefferson’s Notes. Among them was Benjamin Banneker, whose 1791 Letter to Thomas Jefferson included an almanac that Banneker prepared—with a view perhaps to countering Jefferson’s view that African Americans were people of lesser intellect. In 1794 Richard Allen delivered his “Address to Those Who Keep Slaves and Uphold the Practice,” refuting Jefferson’s view that slavery was a necessary evil and urging slave owners to abandon the practice. In 1829 David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World was in large part a response, again, to the view that African Americans were intellectually inferior to whites. Each of these writers took up strains from Jefferson’s Notes and attempted to rebut them, suggesting the widespread impact that Jefferson’s book had.