Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (17 page)

For years, European intellectuals like France’s Buffon and England’s Samuel Johnson had projected Americans, their ways, their land, their animals, and their people as naturally inferior to everything European. Thomas Jefferson disagreed. At the beginning of the Declaration of Independence, he paraphrased the Virginia constitution, indelibly penning: “all Men are created equal.”

It is impossible to know for sure whether Jefferson meant to include his enslaved laborers (or women) in his “all Men.” Was he merely emphasizing the equality of White Americans and the English? Later in the document, he did scold the British for “exciting those very
people
to rise in arms among us”—those “people” being resisting Africans. Did Jefferson insert “
created
equal” as a nod to the swirling debate between monogenesis and polygenesis? Even if Jefferson believed all groups to be “created equal,” he never believed the antiracist creed that all human groups
are
equal. But his “all Men are created equal” was revolutionary nonetheless; it even propelled Vermont and Massachusetts to abolish slavery. To uphold polygenesis and slavery, six
southern slaveholding states inserted “All
free
men are created equal” into their constitutions.
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Continuing the Declaration, Jefferson maintained that “Men” were “endowed by their creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, & the pursuit of happiness.” As a holder of nearly two hundred people with no known plans to free them, Thomas Jefferson authored the heralded American philosophy of freedom. What did it mean for Jefferson to call “liberty” an “inalienable right” when he enslaved people? It is not hard to figure out what Native Americans, enslaved Africans, and indentured White servants meant when they demanded liberty in 1776. But what about Jefferson and other slaveholders like him, whose wealth and power were dependent upon their land and their slaves? Did they desire unbridled freedom to enslave and exploit? Did they perceive any reduction in their power to be a reduction in their freedom? For these rich men, freedom was not the power to make choices; freedom was the power to create choices. England created the choices, the policies American elites had to abide by, just as planters created choices and policies that laborers had to follow. Only power gave Jefferson and other wealthy White colonists freedom from England. For Jefferson, power came before freedom. Indeed, power creates freedom, not the other way around—as the powerless are taught.

“To secure these rights,” Jefferson continued, “it is the right of the people . . . to institute a new government . . . organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety & happiness.” As Jefferson sat forward on his Windsor chair and penned this thrilling call for revolutionary action, thousands of Africans were taking matters into their own hands, too, running away from their plantations, setting up their own governments on the frontier, or fighting with the British—all to “effect their safety & happiness.” In South Carolina, there emerged a three-sided conflict, with as many as 20,000 Africans asserting their own interests. An estimated two-thirds of enslaved Africans in Georgia ran away. According to Jefferson’s own calculations, Virginia lost as many as 30,000 enslaved Africans in a single year. Of course, racist planters could not admit that Black runaways
were self-reliant enough to effect their own safety and happiness—to be free. South Carolina planters blamed British soldiers for “stealing” Blacks or persuading them to “desert” their masters.
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Thomas Jefferson only really handed revolutionary license to his band of wealthy, White, male revolutionaries. He criminalized runaways in the Declaration of Independence, and he silenced women. Boston delegate John Adams sent a letter home to his wife, Abigail, to “laugh” at her strivings for women’s rights. White “children and Apprentices were disobedient” as a result of “our struggle,” Adams said the delegates had been told. “Indians slighted their guardians and Negroes grew insolent to their Masters.” Now she had informed him that women were also “discontented.”
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After outlining more justifications for independence in his Declaration, Jefferson listed the “long train of abuses & usurpations” by the British monopolists, like “cutting off our trade with all parts of the world.” The inability of American merchants and planters to do business with merchants and planters outside the British Empire had checked their freedoms in buying and selling African people to and from anyone, in buying cheaper or better products from non-British sources, in selling their slave-grown crops and manufactured goods outside of Britannica, and in escaping the subjugation of British merchants and banks. Jefferson and his freedom-fighting class of aspiring international free traders gained a powerful ally in 1776. Scottish philosopher Adam Smith condemned England’s trade acts for constraining the “free” market in his instant best seller,
The Wealth of Nations
. To this founding father of capitalist economics, the wealth of nations stemmed from a nation’s productive capacity, a productive capacity African nations lacked. “All the inland parts of Africa,” he scripted, “seem in all ages of the world to have been in the same barbarous and uncivilized state in which we find them at present.” Meanwhile, Smith praised Americans for “contriving a new form of government for an extensive empire, which . . . seems very likely to become, one of the greatest and most formidable that ever was in the world.” The founding fathers beamed reading Adam Smith’s prediction. Jefferson later called
Wealth of Nations
“the best book extant” on political economy.
⁵

Jefferson saved the worst of the king’s abuses for last in his Declaration. Ever the lawyer, ever the wordsmith, he fought back against Samuel Johnson’s charge of American hypocrisy. The English crown, Jefferson wrote, which had prevented Americans from abolishing slavery, was now freeing and arming enslaved Africans to maintain British enslavement over Americans, “thus paying off former crimes committed against the
LIBERTIES
of one people, with crimes which [the king] urged them to commit against the
LIVES
of another.”
⁶

Rhode Island pastor Samuel Hopkins, an antislavery Puritan, would have found Jefferson’s passage laughable. He had just sent the congress
A Dialogue concerning the Slavery of the Africans
. Americans’ so-called enslavement to the British was “lighter than a feather” compared to Africans’ enslavement to Americans, Hopkins argued. The electrifying antiracist pamphlet nearly overshadowed the Quakers’ demand in 1776 for all Friends to manumit their slaves or face banishment. “Our education has filled us with strong prejudices against them,” Hopkins professed, “and led us to consider them, not as our brethren, or in any degree on a level with us; but as quite another species of animals, made only to serve us and our children.” Hopkins became the first major Christian leader outside of the Society of Friends to forcefully oppose slavery, but he sat lonely on the pew of antislavery in 1776. Other preachers stayed away from the pew, and so did the delegates declaring independence. No one had to tell them that their revolutionary avowals were leaking in contradictions. Nothing could persuade slaveholding American patriots to put an end to their inciting proclamations of British slavery, or to their enriching enslavement of African people. Forget contradictions. Both were in their political and economic self-interest.
⁷

By July 2, 1776, the resolution to declare independence had passed. The delegates then peered over Jefferson’s draft like barbers over a head of hair. Every time they trimmed, changed, or added something, the hypersensitive Jefferson sank deeper into his chair. Benjamin Franklin, sitting next to him, failed to cheer him up. The delegates cut Jefferson’s long passage calling the English hypocrites. Apparently, delegates from South Carolina and Georgia disliked
Jefferson’s characterization of slavery as a “cruel war against human nature”; that language threatened the foundation of their vast estates. The delegates finished making their revisions of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.
⁸

OVER THE NEXT
five years, the fighting remained pitched. But the British failed to crush the revolt. On January 5, 1781, in one of their last-ditch efforts, the Redcoats reached the outskirts of Richmond. British soldiers were hunting Virginia’s governor as if he were a runaway. With 10,000 acres of land in his possession to choose from, Governor Thomas Jefferson hid his family on an inherited property about ninety miles southwest of Monticello. There, in hiding, Jefferson finally found the time to answer the twenty-three “Queries” that French diplomat François Barbé-Marbois had sent to the thirteen American governors in 1780.

The Frenchman asked for information on each colony’s history, government, natural resources, geography, and population. Only a few responded, none as comprehensively as Thomas Jefferson. A new member of Philadelphia’s American Philosophical Society, Jefferson had collected thousands of books for his Monticello library and enjoyed a scholarly challenge. He titled his book of answers
Notes on the State of Virginia
. He wrote for French diplomats and intellectuals as well as close friends in America. He sent Barbé-Marbois the manuscript by the end of 1781.

With no intention to publish, Jefferson unabashedly expressed his views on Black people, and in particular on potentially freed Black people. “Incorporating the [freed] blacks into the state” was out of the question, he declared. “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.” This hodgepodge of thoughts was classic Jefferson, classically both antislavery and
anti-abolition—with a segregationist dose of nature’s distinctions, and an antiracist dose acknowledging White prejudice and discrimination.
⁹

Revolutionary War general George Washington had a different take on the prejudices. When asked to join an antislavery petition campaign in 1785, he did not think the time was right. “It would be dangerous to make a frontal attack on a prejudice which is beginning to decrease,” Washington advised. Prejudice beginning to decrease in 1785? However General Washington came to this conclusion, the soon-to-be first president sounded one of the first drumbeats of supposed racial progress to drown out the passionate arguments of antiracism.
¹⁰

Thomas Jefferson did propose a frontal attack on slavery in
Notes on the State of Virginia
, a plan he would endorse for the rest of his life: the mass schooling, emancipation, and colonization of Africans back to Africa. Jefferson, who enslaved Blacks at Monticello, listed “the real distinctions which nature has made,” that is, those traits that he believed made free Black incorporation into the new nation impossible. Whites were more beautiful, he wrote, as shown by Blacks’ “preference of them.” He was paraphrasing Edward Long (and John Locke) in the passage—but it was still ironic that the observation came from the pen of a man who may have already preferred a Black woman.
¹¹

Black people had a memory on par with Whites, Jefferson continued, but “in reason [were] much inferior.” He then paused to mask his racist ideas in scientific neutrality: “It would be unfair to follow them to Africa for this investigation. We will consider them here, on the same stage with the whites, and where the facts are not apocryphal on which a judgment is to be formed.” On this “same stage,” he could “never . . . find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never saw an elementary trait of painting or sculpture.” “Religion,” he said, “indeed has produced a Phyllis Wheatley; but it could not produce a poet.”
¹²

With
Notes on the State of Virginia
, Thomas Jefferson emerged as the preeminent American authority on Black intellectual inferiority. This status would persist over the next fifty years. Jefferson did not mention the innumerable enslaved Africans who learned to be highly
intelligent blacksmiths, shoemakers, bricklayers, coopers, carpenters, engineers, manufacturers, artisans, musicians, farmers, midwives, physicians, overseers, house managers, cooks, and bi- and trilingual translators—all of the workers who made his Virginia plantation and many others almost entirely self-sufficient. Jefferson had to ignore his own advertisements for skilled runaways and the many advertisements from other planters calling for the return of their valuable skilled captives, who were “remarkably smart and sensible,” and “very ingenious at any work.” One wonders whether Jefferson really believed his own words. Did Jefferson really believe Black people were smart in slavery and stupid in freedom?
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Notes on the State of Virginia
was replete with other contradictory ideas about Black people. “They are at least as brave, and more adventuresome” than Whites, because they lacked the forethought to see “danger till it be present,” Jefferson wrote. Africans felt love more, but they felt pain less, he said, and “their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection.” That is why they were disposed “to sleep when abstracted from their diversions, and unemployed in labour. An animal whose body is at rest, and who does not reflect, must be disposed to sleep of course.” But on the previous page, Jefferson cast Blacks as requiring “less sleep. A black, after hard labour through the day, will be induced by the slightest amusements to sit up till midnight.” In Jefferson’s vivid imagination, lazy Blacks
desired
to sleep more than Whites, but, as physical savants, they
required
less sleep.
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