As
if the practice of religion was not a controversial enough subject to attempt
to address in his draft constitution, Jefferson also made sure to reserve a
provision of the same explicitly for the purpose of placing a limit on the
continued practice of chattel slavery. There were few more delicate topics a
Virginia gentleman like Jefferson could have sought to confront, both because
he owned slaves himself and because the economy of the Southern colonies was built
upon a foundation of free labour. That being said, Jefferson’s moral objections
to the practice of slavery are well recorded, and it would have no doubt have
seemed an opportunity lost for him to have simply glossed over the continued
operation of a practice he claimed to detest while working to fundamentally
reshape the government of his beloved Virginia. The nature of his response is
consequently somewhat ambiguous, though in many ways it forms a part of a
larger program Jefferson seemed intent on setting in motion with his draft
constitution. Slavery was an institution supported by law, but whose practice
shaped the very nature of Virginia society. To alter it would potentially
transform the very culture of Virginia itself, in the long-term if not in the
short-term. Doubtless this was Jefferson’s intention, and by considering the
nature of these proposed alterations it becomes possible to gain a clearer
picture of what the Sage of Monticello believed an ideal society should have
resembled.
Some
form of involuntary servitude had existed in Virginia since the early 17th
century with the introduction of landless labourers working under contracts of
indenture. Some portion of these early indentured servants were of African
descent – records indicate that the
first shipment of Black labourers was brought to the colony in 1619 after being
intercepted aboard a Spanish vessel bound for the Caribbean or South America –
and in time colonial law began to differentiate between them and their White
fellow workers. In the 1640s the General Assembly sentenced an escaped African
servant named John Punch to a lifetime of service to his master as punishment,
and in the 1650s upheld the lifetime ownership of another African labourer
named John Casor. In 1660 a woman named Elizabeth Key, who was the child of an
African mother and an English father, sued for the freedom of herself and her
child after she had been classified as a slave during the disposition of her
late contract-holder’s estate. Key maintained that because her father had been
a free Englishman, had acknowledged her as his own, and had her baptised a
Christian that she was therefore incapable of being enslaved. In light of these
facts, and the existence of indenture contracts which made clear the limited
nature of her term of servitude, the colonial courts decreed that Key and her
son – also the child of an English father – were indeed free. In response the
House of Burgesses, intent also on countering a drop-off in European emigration
and a resulting shortage of indentured servants, passed into law in 1662 the
principle of partus sequitur ventrem
(literally, “that which is brought forth follows the womb”). Thereafter all
children born in the colony or Virginia were to inherit that legal status of
their mother, thereby ensuring that the not-infrequent liaisons between White
men and Black women (often in the context of household servitude) did not
result in the birth of free offspring.
A
stable population of slaves thus ensured, the institution grew and solidified in
the decades that followed. By the middle of the 18th century, at the
beginning of Jefferson’s own lifetime, there were approximately 300,000 slaves
resident in colonial Virginia. By comparison, Spanish-held Cuba hosted 50,000
slaves, while the exceedingly profitable sugar-plantations of French
Saint-Domingue (modern Haiti) were built upon the labour of 450,000 of the
same. In Virginia the cash-crop of choice was tobacco, a commodity that was
both labour-intensive to produce and a highly lucrative trade good. Accordingly,
the slave population in the colony increased via importation as the demand for
the processed plant grew in European markets. Jefferson was raised amidst this
competitive, profitable, and often brutal economic climate, and freely took
part in its often dehumanizing transactions in spite of his oft-declared moral
qualms. In his private life it has been recorded that he owned up to 600 slaves
personally, a sizeable portion of which he inherited from either his father or
father-in-law. He is also known to have purchased slaves to fulfill various
functions on his plantation (as household servants, farm labourers, or in his
various workshops), and sold over 100 individuals at various times, mainly out
of financial necessity. In his professional life, meanwhile, he attempted to
limit the expansion of slavery into the territories claimed by the United
States in the Great Lakes region, opposed his home state’s attempt to set aside
western land for emancipated slaves in 1802, supported limitations on the slave
trade as President in 1807, and as late as 1819 spoke out against attempts to
ban the importation of slaves into the proposed state of Missouri. Though by
all accounts he was not a cruel master, and spoke often and well of the harm
that slavery wrought against both slave and master, it’s clear enough from even
this brief accounting that Jefferson’s perspective on the “peculiar
institution” was somewhat peculiar in itself.
It
is particularly important to understand the ambivalence with which Jefferson
regarded slavery throughout his life, if for no other reason than doing so
helps to explain some of the apparent inconsistencies in his words and deeds.
He was an opponent of slavery, or so he no doubt would have stated if asked his
opinion on the matter. But there could be no denying all the same that the
lifestyle he and his fellow planters enjoyed – replete with manor houses, fine
food, expensive clothes, and fast horses – would not have been possible without
the cheap and readily-available labour that chattel slavery provided. As much
as the Sage of Monticello might have liked, in his heart of hearts, to do away
with the institution and its corrupting influences altogether, he showed
himself to be all too conscious of how instrumental the base and cruel
ownership of human beings had become to the economy of Virginia and its fellow
Southern colonies. When he thus saw fit to include in his proposed constitution
for Virginia a clause which stated, “No person hereafter coming into this
country shall be held within the same in slavery under any pretext whatever,”
it was almost certainly with mixed intentions.
Plainly read, this single sentence
would not have abolished slavery in Virginia. It would not have discouraged the
ownership of slaves, penalized their masters, or offered incentives for their
emancipation. What it would have done, admitting of little ambiguity, was make
it unconstitutional for slaves to be imported into the state. This may seem
like something of a half-measure, and with good reason considering the ability
of the slave population to sustain itself via natural reproduction. But it
still ought to be understood as a substantially radical measure for its time,
and one which might not have been expected from a man of Jefferson’s
background. Compared to the manner in which the United States Constitution
addressed the institution of slavery, for instance, Jefferson’s draft
constitution appears downright candid. In the former document, written in 1787,
slavery is not even named explicitly. Article I, Section 2, which outlines the
manner by which Representatives are to be apportioned, refers to slaves rather
obscurely as, “All other Persons [,]” after having described, “free Persons,”
“Those bound to Service for a Term of Years,” and, “Indians not taxed [.]” The
only other reference to the institution, similarly arcane, is found in Article
I, Section 9. “The Migration or Importation,” it reads,
Of such
Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall
not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred
and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding
ten dollars for each Person.
Jefferson no doubt agreed with the
sentiment behind this clause, which essentially admitted that the United States
Congress possessed the authority to limit or abolish the slave trade after the
year 1808, though he perhaps might have found fault with its manner of approach.
It
is noteworthy, for instance, that Jefferson referred to slavery in his draft
constitution for Virginia – written a full 11 years before the comparatively
equivocatory U.S. Constitution – as just that. The fact that he did not dance
around the term, speaking instead of “involuntary servitude,” is accordingly a
credit to his frankness, if one of somewhat dubious merit. An early draft of
the Declaration of Independence seems to corroborate the Sage of Monticello’s
desire at this early period in his public career to cut through the ambivalence
that pervaded discussions of slavery in 18th century America. Among
the list of grievances Jefferson intended to lay before George III in said document, one which did not survive the editing process was the accusation that
the king,
Has waged
cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of
life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him,
captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemispere, or to incure miserable
death in their transportation hither.
In light of the support the
Declaration needed to garner from the Southern as well as Northern colonies if
independence were survive the tumult to come, it perhaps comes as little
surprise that Jefferson was forced to excise any mention of the institution to
which the greater portion of the Southern political class owed their wealth.
That being said, it seems fair to conclude that his need to speak openly – and
indeed quite negatively – about the nature of slavery in 18th
century America was both unusual and unwelcome.
The
brief clause which addressed slavery in Jefferson’s draft constitution for
Virginia nonetheless seemed to follow in this mold. Without equivocating,
fumbling with terminology, or attempting to gloss over the true nature of the
topic at hand, the Sage of Monticello plainly declared that no person entering
Virginia after 1776 was to be held in a state of slavery. One is tempted, perhaps, to ascribe this desire for plain
speaking to Jefferson’s commonly-expressed aspiration to promote what he
described as “republican simplicity” in American manners and culture. Then
again, it may have been alternatively a function of his personal ambivalence;
if he was unwilling or unable to come down definitively in favor of or in
opposition to the institution of slavery, he could at the very least speak of
it candidly. Perhaps neither of these represents a satisfactory explanation, it
being essentially impossible to prove or disprove one or the other. All the
same, these scenarios are at least worth contemplating. Jefferson’s
relationship with slavery was complex, and often grated against his republican
philosophical convictions. Exploring the tension between these elements of his
personality represents a potentially fruitful avenue of exploration into how
and why certain elements of American political culture are what they are. The
substance of the aforesaid constitutional clause is highly indicative of
exactly this tension.
As
radical as Jefferson and his convictions often presented, there were few
opportunities over the course of his life that allowed him to give full and
unlimited effect to his more controversial philosophical impulses. What he
desired, in short, was ever circumscribed by what was possible. His presidency
stands as a monument to this axiom, rife as it was with bold gestures and
bitter compromises. Jefferson’s attempt to draft a constitution for his home
state of Virginia in 1776 was no less marked by the clash of ideal and reality.
He may indeed have hated slavery as passionately as he often described. And it
may have been his genuine hope to do away with the institution entirely, thus
purging his beloved home state of the corrosive influence which he ascribed to
the ownership of human lives. Yet he seemed to believe, as evidenced by his
attempted prohibition of the slave trade alone, that total abolition and
emancipation was simply not possible at that moment in Virginia’s history. This
realization was almost certainly due to concerns both personal and public. Accepting,
of course, that the wealth and privilege Jefferson enjoyed were due almost
entirely to his status as slave-owner, and that he thus stood to lose a great
deal in the event of the institution’s disintegration, there were also concerns
of a more abstract nature relating to slavery that troubled the Sage of
Monticello, and likely led him to support the half-measure of slave trade
prohibition.
In
spite of his stated belief in the universal application of certain basic human
liberties (“all Men are created equal [and] they are endowed by their Creator
with certain unalienable Rights”), Jefferson did not necessarily hold that all of
humankind was of quite the same quality. A man’s (or a woman’s) inherent
spiritual or moral worth – sacred, untouchable, worthy of protection – was one
thing, but it was plain enough to the Sage of Monticello, as it was to many in
the 18th century who concerned themselves with the study of human
nature and human society, that not all people were as intelligent, as talented,
as strong, or as competent as one another. Based on his own personal study, and
likely on whatever scholarship then existed on the subject of “racial taxonomy,”
Jefferson accordingly concluded that people of African descent were not as
intelligent as people of European extraction, or as beautiful or emotionally
complex. This opinion he plainly expressed in his Notes on the State of Virginia, a kind of book-length survey of his
home state published in 1781 and updated in 1782 and 1783. “Are not the fine
mixtures of red and white,” he wrote of the beauty he found in his own race, “The
expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of colour in the
one, preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances,
that immoveable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race?”
He went on to compare the mental and creative capacities of Native Americans
and African Americans, finding that the former,
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 that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration;
never see even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture.
In spite of these declarations – no
doubt distressing to a modern audience – Jefferson nonetheless remained adamant
in the conviction that the inherent deficiencies he perceived in the “Black
race” did not rob them of their inherent rights. His observations did, however,
give him cause for concern, in as much as they seemed to indicate that
emancipated former slaves might find themselves at a disadvantage in an
American society dominated by their intellectual betters.
Worse yet, he went on to argue, the
appearance of a large population (upwards of 500,000 in the late 18th
century) of former slaves in America would result in competition between the
two, followed inevitably by bloody racial conflict. The reasons for such a
conflagration were, in his opinion, many, and owed both to perceived physical
differences and acrimony on both sides resulting from past grievances. “Deep
rooted prejudices entertained by the whites [,]” he specified, along with,
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.
It was clear enough in Jefferson’s
opinion that even if emancipation were possible it would not have been
desirable. This dour conclusion was no doubt the reason he came to support
“colonization” – the resettling of free Blacks in privately funded communities
in Africa – as the best possible solution for the racial quagmire that slavery
in American represented. Eliminating the slave trade represented the other half
of the equation; if slaves were no longer being imported at the same time those
already present were slowly freed and relocated to another continent entirely,
the moral qualms of men like Jefferson could be alleviated at the same time
that social harmony could be maintained. Doubtless this is not a solution that
most people at the dawn of the 21st century would find satisfying,
and for good reason. Banning the slave trade in Virginia would certainly have
exerted significant downward pressure on the growing slave population. However,
the resulting relative scarcity of those still held in servitude may perhaps
have resulting in slave-owners adopting such measures as to perpetuate a stable
body of free labour, in effect making it even less likely than before that
slavery would gradually fade away.
This
kind of public reaction to any attempt at regulating slavery was no doubt the
other major factor that regulated Jefferson’s approach to the same in his draft
constitution for Virginia. As mentioned above, slavery had existed in a form
recognizable to the average plantation owner for over a
century by the 1770s. The colonial economy had come to depend on the presence
of a massive pool of free labour, and the social elite in particular could
locate the source of almost all of their substantial wealth in the continued
purchase and ownership of human beings. Bringing an end to slavery, as one
might accordingly conclude, did not represent a significant cultural priority
for the people of Virginia at the dawn of the American Revolution. Even on the
level of individual planters, manumission – the voluntary emancipation of
slaves by their master, often as a part of the latter’s will – was quite rare
until the later decades of the 18th century. In 1782, for example,
there were only 1,800 free people of color in Virginia, out of a total population
of just over 500,000. This number expanded significantly over the course of the
1790s and the first decade of the 19th century, so that by 1810 the
free Black population numbered over 30,000 (7.2% of the overall population).
The cause of this explosion in the
number of free people of color living in Virginia was almost certainly twofold.
Evangelical preachers, free to spread their interpretation of the Gospel after
the passage of Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Freedom in 1786, doubtless
made significant inroads (as they had across the colonies since the 1730s) in
convincing slave-owners of the peculiar institution’s incompatibility with
Christian moral doctrine. At the same time, the rhetoric of the Revolution –
liberty, justice, inalienable rights, and the equality of mankind – exerted a
powerful effect on the social and cultural assumptions of people across
the United States. Made to confront the inconsistencies between their own
actions and deeds, many Americans in the 1780s and 1790s came to regard slavery
as incompatible with the basic philosophical and moral tenants for with they
had so recently been willing to lay down their lives. Widespread manumissions
followed, along with campaigns of emancipation mandated by state governments in
the North whose economies were not dependent on slave labour to function.
In 1776, however, most Virginians
had yet little reason to question the morality or philosophical consistency of
perpetuating slavery. As noted previously, Jefferson’s attempt to decry the
institution in his original draft of the Declaration of Independence met with
resistance enough in the summer of the same year – doubtless chiefly from among
his Southern planter colleagues – to have the passage entirely expunged from
the final copy. Having composed his draft constitution for Virginia at
essentially the same time such objections were being raised, Jefferson no doubt
developed an acute understanding of what his fellow Americans were willing to
tolerate. And no doubt he considered his attempt to craft a new government for
his home state to be an important work. More than a piece of legislation
applicable to this or that issue, it represented an opportunity to reshape an
entire culture by altering the manner in which it was governed. It stands to
reason, then, that the Sage of Monticello would have wanted to give his draft
constitution the best possible chance of being ratified by his fellow
Virginians. To that end, even if Jefferson had wanted to pursue the elimination
of slavery in Virginia (forgetting for a moment his various personal
reservations), such a course of action would doubtless have appeared entirely
counterintuitive. In 1776, the high-minded ideals of the Revolution still
confined to the debating chambers and pamphlets of the social and political
elite, Virginia simply wasn’t ready to countenance substantial interference
with one of their most significant economic institutions.
To place matters in some degree of
perspective, the constitution for Virginia proposed by George Mason and
ultimately adopted in June, 1776 made no mention whatsoever of “slavery,”
“slaves,” “the slave trade,” or even “those held in involuntary servitude.”
Under the government it erected slavery was to be left untouched, or at least
reserved for the General Assembly to regulate as its members deemed fit. The
constitution adopted in 1778 by Virginia’s fellow Southern colony North
Carolina (Black population in 1780: 90,000) was similarly close-lipped on the
subject of slavery, using the term itself only to refer to the state to which British
actions had reduced the American colonies. Neither South Carolina’s (Black
population in 1780: 97,000) 1776 constitution nor its 1778 constitution made
any greater effort to address the state of the peculiar institution, and
Georgia’s 1777 constitution followed suit. In fairness, the first constitutions
of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, all Northern states with relatively
small slave populations, were no better in this regard. Indeed, it was not until
the adoption of the United States Constitution in 1788 that any
post-Revolutionary American governing charter even acknowledged the existence
of slavery, and even that document did so in an exceedingly circumspect manner (as
noted above). That this first American constitutional reference to slavery
occurred only in the context of allowing limitations to be placed upon the
slave trade once 25 years had elapsed from the time of its coming into force
seems to speak quite powerfully to the unwillingness of 18th century
Americans to even address slavery in a public context.
It is consequently
quite remarkable that Jefferson, in spite of his personal qualms and the frigid
public climate, attempted even to limit the operation of the slave trade in his
draft constitution for Virginia. His views on the institution were, as noted,
distinctly ambiguous, and the consensus among a great many of his colleagues
across the colonies/states seemed to be that slavery was best avoided in any
public discussions of the moral or legal ideals of the Revolution and their
practical application. If, in short, Jefferson had simply declined to mention
slavery in his draft constitution for Virginia, likely no one would have
questioned its absence or attempted to hold the Sage of Monticello to account.
It is for that reason rather remarkable that he felt compelled to include the
clause quoted above. Attempting to place limitations on the slave trade hardly
represented a complete and unambiguous denunciation of the institution of slavery,
but it at least spoke to a core intention. Erecting a legal barrier against the
importation of slaves into a given territory effectively acknowledged that the
presence of greater numbers of slaves in said territory represented a negative
outcome. It was a value judgement, albeit a rather muted one, yet it all the
same called into question the notion that Virginia had a compelling public
interest in allowing the slave population to expand exponentially. Recalling that
this same clause was put forward by Jefferson a decade before the far more
diffident language contained within the United States Constitution even nodded
in the same direction, it becomes clearer still what an unusual thing it was
for him to have even attempted at such an early period in America’s
revolutionary transformation.
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