Thomas Jefferson and slavery

[5] Thomas Jefferson was born into the planter class of a "slave society", as defined by the historian Ira Berlin, in which slavery was the main means of labor production.

[12] In 1772, Jefferson represented George Manly, the son of a free woman of color, who sued for freedom after having been held as an indentured servant three years past the expiration of his term.

(The Virginia colony at the time bound illegitimate mixed-race children of free women as indentured servants: until age 31 for males, with a shorter term for females.

[18] Dunmore's action led to a mass exodus of tens of thousands of forced laborers from plantations across the South during the war years; some of the people Jefferson held as slaves also took off as runaways.

In 1776, when Jefferson co-authored the Declaration of Independence, he referred to the Lord Governor when he wrote, "He has excited domestic insurrections among us," though the institution of slavery itself was never mentioned by name at any point in the document.

[20][21] In the original draft of the Declaration, Jefferson inserted a clause condemning King George III for forcing the slave trade onto the American colonies and inciting enslaved African Americans to "rise in arms" against their masters: He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.

Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce.

"[28] Researcher William D. Richardson proposed that Thomas Jefferson's use of "MEN" in capital letters would be a repudiation of those who may believe that the Declaration was not including slaves with the word "Mankind".

[31][32][33][34] As governor of Virginia for two years during the Revolution, Jefferson signed a bill to promote military enlistment by giving white men land, "a healthy sound Negro ... or £60 in gold or silver.

Jefferson had escaped before their arrival and gone with his family to his plantation of Poplar Forest to the southwest in Bedford County; most of those he held as slaves stayed at Monticello to help protect his valuables.

"[51] From the 1770s on, Jefferson wrote of supporting gradual emancipation, based on slaves being educated, freed after 18 for women and 21 for men (later he changed this to age 45, when their masters had a return on investment), and transported for resettlement to Africa.

The historian Peter S. Onuf suggested that, after having children with his slave Sally Hemings, Jefferson may have supported colonization because of concerns for his unacknowledged "shadow family".

"[68] By 1802, when Jefferson learned that France was planning to re-establish its empire in the western hemisphere, including taking the Louisiana territory and New Orleans from the Spanish, he declared the neutrality of the US in the Caribbean conflict.

He hoped that "Haiti would eventually demonstrate the viability of black self-government and the industriousness of African American work habits, thereby justifying freeing and deporting the slaves" to that island.

He told Congress in his 1806 annual message, such a law was needed to "withdraw the citizens of the United States from all further participation in those violations of human rights ... which the morality, the reputation, and the best interests of our country have long been eager to proscribe."

"[88] In 1798, Jefferson's friend from the Revolution, Tadeusz Kościuszko, a Polish nobleman and revolutionary, visited the United States to collect back pay from the government for his military service.

It is still in our power to direct the process of emancipation, and deportation, peaceably, and in such slow degrees, as that the evil will wear off insensibly; and their places be, pari passu, filled up by free white laborers.

[116] Since the DNA tests were made public, most biographers and historians have concluded that the widower Jefferson had a long-term relationship with Hemings,[117] and fathered at least some and probably all of her children.

[122][123] Madison Hemings, in an article titled, "Life Among the Lowly", in small Ohio newspaper called Pike County Republican, claimed that Jefferson was his father.

[128] In a letter written in 1811, Jefferson described his stress and apprehension in regard to difficulties in what he felt was his "duty" to procure specific desirable blankets for "those poor creatures" – his slaves.

[137] Henry Wiencek cited within a Smithsonian Magazine article several reports of Jefferson ordering the whipping or selling of slaves as punishments for extreme misbehavior or escape.

He stated that Blacks lacked forethought, intelligence, tenderness, grief, imagination, and beauty; that they had poor taste, smelled bad, and were incapable of producing artistry or poetry; but conceded that they were the moral equals of all others.

To justify a general conclusion, requires many observations, even where the subject may be submitted to the Anatomical knife, to Optical glasses, to analysis by fire or by solvents.

In the book, Grégoire responded to and challenged Jefferson's arguments of Black inferiority in Notes on the State of Virginia by citing the advanced civilizations Africans had developed as evidence of their intellectual competence.

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.

The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities.

And with what execration 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 of the other.According to James W. Loewen, Jefferson's character "wrestled with slavery, even though in the end he lost."

As Onuf and Helo explained, Jefferson opposed the mixing of the races not because of his belief that Blacks were inferior (although he did provisionally believe this) but because he feared that instantly freeing the slaves in white territory would trigger "genocidal violence".

"[168] According to Greg Warnusz, Jefferson held typical 19th-century beliefs that blacks were inferior to whites in terms of "potential for citizenship", and he wanted them recolonized to independent Liberia and other colonies.

In agreement with the Southern slave society, Tewell says Jefferson believed that slavery served to protect Blacks, whom he viewed as inferior or incapable of taking care of themselves.