Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (18 page)

While Jefferson confidently labeled enslaved Africans as inferior to Roman slaves, for Native Americans he cried that the comparison “would be unequal.” While confidently making distinctions between Blacks and Whites, Jefferson equated Native Americans and Whites. As he told François-Jean de Chastellux, who served as liaison between the French and American militaries during the Revolutionary War, Native Americans were “in body and mind equal to the whiteman.” He “supposed the blackman in his present state, might not be so”: “But it would be hazardous to affirm that, equally cultivated for a few generations, he would not become so.” For Jefferson, clarity always seemed to
be lacking when it came to racial conceptions. This note proved to be the clearest expression of his assimilationist ideas.

The reason for Native Americans having fewer children than Whites was “not in a difference of nature, but of circumstance,” Jefferson argued. For Black people, the opposite was true. “The blacks,” he said, “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.” The ambitious politician, maybe fearful of alienating potential friends, maybe torn between Enlightenment antislavery and American proslavery, maybe honestly unsure, did not pick sides between polygenesists and monogenesists, between segregationists and assimilationists, between slavery and freedom. But he did pick the side of racism.
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IN
1782,
JEFFERSON
had no plans to publish
Notes on the State of Virginia
. He was busy putting his life back together, a life torn apart by thirteen years of public service, and by months of being hunted by the British. War had shattered Jefferson’s past. Martha Jefferson’s death on September 6 of that year shattered his future. He had planned to retire and grow old as a planter and scholar in the seclusion of Monticello next to his wife. Overnight, the sanctuary of Monticello became the caged pen of Monticello, bordered by bars of wounding memories. He had to escape. His friends in Congress found a solution.
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On August 6, 1784, Jefferson arrived in Paris for a new diplomatic stint eager to take advantage of the shopping, the shows, the culture, and the trading prospects. The same week that he made contact with the French foreign minister, Jefferson sent instructions to Monticello to speed up production. He figured that his own captives, and his nation’s captives, would be tasked for the foreseeable future with producing enough tobacco for French merchants to pay back British creditors. At the same time, Jefferson was busy telling abolitionists, “Nobody wishes more ardently [than me] to see an abolition.” Jefferson loathed slavery almost as much as he feared losing American freedom to British banks, or losing his pampered lifestyle in Monticello.
He liked and disliked both freedom and slavery, and he never divorced himself from either.
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Economic diplomacy was Jefferson’s official job. His hobby was science, and he partnered with Benjamin Franklin, who was also in Paris, to defend America from French onslaughts of American inferiority. Jefferson brought his still unpublished
Notes on the State of Virginia
and “an uncommonly large panther skin” in his baggage. He had two hundred English copies of his
Notes
printed in Paris in 1785. He sent the manuscript to French intellectuals, to Benjamin Franklin, and to John Adams, James Madison, and James Monroe. A copy reached a devious printer who without Jefferson’s approval translated it into French in 1786. Jefferson arranged for an English edition to be released in London on his own terms in the summer of 1787. Thereafter,
Notes on the State of Virginia
would become the most consumed American nonfiction book until well into the mid-nineteenth century.

Count Constantine Volney, known in France as Herodotus’s biographer, was putting his finishing touches on
Travels in Syria and Egypt
when he read
Notes
and befriended its author. When Volney first saw the Sphinx in Egypt, he remembered Herodotus—the foremost historian in ancient Greece—describing the “black and frizzled hair” of the ancient Egyptians. Making the connection to the present, Volney mused, “To the race of negroes, at present our slaves, and the objects of our extreme contempt, we owe our arts, sciences, and even the use of speech itself.” American racists ridiculed Volney as an ignorant worshiper of Black people when he visited the United States in 1796. Not Jefferson. He invited Volney and his antiracist ideas and his history of Black ancient Egypt to Monticello. How could Jefferson—the authority of Black intellectual inferiority—look to Volney as the authority of ancient Egypt? Clearly, scientific truths were forever tugging at his self-interests.
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Thomas Jefferson visited southern France and northern Italy in February 1787. “If I should happen to die in Paris I will beg of you to send me here,” Jefferson wrote in awe of the beautiful countryside of Aix-en-Provence. When he returned to Paris in June, he may have noticed a copy of the year’s annual oration of the American
Philosophical Society (APS), which had been delivered by Princeton theologian Samuel Stanhope Smith. The annual APS oration was the most heralded scholarly lecture in the new nation, and APS members were a who’s who of American power: men like Ben Franklin of Pennsylvania, Alexander Hamilton of New York, and Virginia’s Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington. Smith’s oration before APS stood for all intents and purposes as the first great domestic challenge to Jefferson’s
Notes
.
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Smith had been pondering assimilationist climate theory for some time. He may have learned it first from Buffon, or from James Bowdoin’s opening oration of the newly established American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston on May 4, 1780. As the founder and first president of the Academy, as one of Massachusetts’ political leaders, Bowdoin’s address to some of the nation’s leading intellectuals and politicians in Boston probably circulated down to Smith’s New Jersey. If the “natural faculties” of Europeans and Africans were “unequal, as probably is the case,” Bowdoin proclaimed, then we know the reason: climate. Hot climates destroyed the mind and body. In moderate climates in northern America and Europe, humankind would be “capable of greater exertions of both mind and body.” Samuel Stanhope Smith may also have learned climate theory from John Morgan, the founder of the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school. Morgan exhibited two whitening two-year-olds to APS members in 1784. “We meet with few negroes of so beautiful a form,” Morgan said at the time.
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Samuel Stanhope Smith titled his 1787 lecture “An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species.” He described two causes of human variety: climate and state of society. Hot weather bred physical disorders—like kinky hair, which was “the farthest removed from the ordinary laws of nature.” Cold weather was “followed by a contrary effect”: it cured these ailments, Smith suggested, leaning on Buffon.

In addition to changing climate, a change in the state of society could remove the stamp of Blackness, Smith maintained. Just look at the house slaves. In their nearness to White society, they were acquiring “the agreeable and regular features” of civilized society—light
complexion, straight hair, thin lips. “Europeans, and Americans are, the most beautiful people in the world, chiefly, because their state of society is the most improved.” In the end, this assimilationist made sure to disassociate himself from Lord Kames and polygenesis. From only “one pair”—Adam and Eve in Europe—“all of the families of the earth [have] sprung,” Smith closed.
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Using European features as the standard of measurement, Smith judged light skin and thin lips on Blacks to be more beautiful than dark skin and full lips. He also distinguished between “good hair”—the straighter and longer the better—and “bad hair,” the kinkier and shorter the worse. He positioned biracial people as superior to African people.

In slavery and freedom, as usually the offspring of planters, biracial people oftentimes benefited from a higher social status than people of only African descent, and often they experienced less discrimination as well. Biracial people were probably more likely to have to perform the backbreaking tasks of the household, and they were often under closer supervision by planters than the slaves in the field, which could be just as backbreaking in a way, if not sexually abusive. Despite their elevated status, they still felt terror of the enslavers, and some antiracist biracial people partnered with Africans to resist White supremacy. Others were no different from White racists in their thinking, discriminating against dark-skinned Blacks, and rationalizing the discrimination, and their elevated status, through notions of their own superiority. In the late eighteenth century, biracial people in Charleston barred dark-skinned people from their business network, the Brown Fellowship Society. In response, the Society of Free Dark Men appeared in that South Carolina town.
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The American Philosophical Society thanked Samuel Stanhope Smith for “his ingenious and learned Oration” in the minutes. After outlining the position of climate theorists—seemingly the dominant strain of racial thought among northern elites—Smith added a long appendix to the published pamphlet attacking Lord Kames and polygenesis. Races were not fixed and “fitted for different climates,” Smith argued. “The Goths, the Mogus, the Africans have become infinitely meliorated by changing those skies, for which it is said they were
peculiarly fitted by nature.” Smith breathlessly asserted that the slave trade—the cause of millions of deaths—had substantially improved the African condition.
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Samuel Stanhope Smith joined those preeminent intellectuals in Boston’s American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Philadelphia’s American Philosophical Society in attacking polygenesists, in reviving climate theory in America. His scholarly defense of scripture was quickly printed in Philadelphia, in London, and in Lord Kames’s backyard, Edinburgh. By the time he sat down in Princeton’s presidential chair in 1795, he had amassed an international scholarly reputation.

FROM HIS HOME
in Paris, Jefferson was closely following—but not closely influencing—the events of the Constitutional Convention. It had begun in Philadelphia on May 25, 1787, months after Samuel Stanhope Smith had addressed some of the delegates on race. Jefferson’s powerful Declaration of Independence had resulted in years of violent struggle against the British, and then in a weak and powerless Confederation of states. Faced with an empty national treasury, erratic trade policies, international disrespect, and fears of the union falling apart, American leaders returned to the nation-building table. If it was left up to the delegates, some of whom were APS members, Smith’s annual oration would have been the Philadelphia convention’s only serious discussion of race and slavery that year.

In fact, delegates made it clear that slavery would be left out of the conversation. Antislavery discussions were disallowed in drawing up what the writers were pegging as humankind’s ultimate constitution of freedom. It only took a few weeks, though, for slavery and its baggage to creep into the constitutional deliberations. Once opened, the question of slavery never left.

The constitutional debate centered on the issue of the states’ representation in the federal legislature. On a scorching hot June 11, 1787, South Carolina delegate John Rutledge rose at Independence Hall. The former South Carolina governor and future chief justice of the US Supreme Court motioned once again for representation based on
taxes (since slaveholding states paid disproportionately high taxes, and thus would monopolize political power). Rutledge was seconded once more by fellow South Carolinian Major Pierce Butler, owner of five hundred people by 1793. Pennsylvania’s James Wilson, another future Supreme Court justice, practically forecasted Rutledge’s motion and had a plan. Rutledge may have been in on that plan.

Wilson offered an alternative: “representation in proportion to the whole number of white & other free Citizens & inhabitants . . . and three-fifths of all other persons not comprehended in the foregoing description, except Indians not paying taxes.” The only delegate who pounced on the three-fifths “compromise” was Massachusetts abolitionist and future vice president Elbridge Gerry. “Blacks are property, and are used [in the South] . . . as horses and cattle are [in the North],” Gerry stammered out. So “why should their representation be increased to the southward on account of the number of slaves, [rather] than [on the basis of] horses or oxen to the north?”

Gerry looked around. Silence looked back. No one was prepared to answer the unanswerable. A vote sprung from the quietness: 9–2 in favor of the three-fifths clause. A deadlocked Massachusetts abstained. Only New Jersey and Delaware voted against Wilson’s compromise.
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Equating enslaved Blacks to three-fifths of all other (White) persons matched the ideology of racists on both sides of the aisle. Both assimilationists and segregationists argued, yet with different premises and conclusions, that Black people were simultaneously human and subhuman. Assimilationists stridently declared the capability of sub-White, sub-human Blacks to become whole, five-fifths, White, one day. For segregationists, three-fifths offered a mathematical approximation of inherent and permanent Black inferiority. They may have disagreed on the rationale and the question of permanence, but seemingly all embraced Black inferiority—and in the process enshrined the power of slaveholders and racist ideas in the nation’s founding document.

By September 17, 1787, delegates in Philadelphia had extracted “slave” and “slavery” from the signed US Constitution to hide their racist enslavement policies. These policies hardly fit with securing “the Blessing of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Then again, for the
delegates, slavery brought freedom. And other policies of the US Constitution, such as empowering federal troops to suppress slave revolts and deliver up runaways like “criminals,” ensured slavery’s continuance. The language was taken from the Northwest Ordinance, which had been issued earlier in the year. It forbade Blacks, slave or free, in territories north of Ohio and east of Mississippi. After a bitter debate, the delegates in Philadelphia put in place provisions for eliminating the slave trade in twenty years, a small triumph, since only Georgia and North Carolina allowed slave imports in the summer of 1787.
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