1 Splitting the Jeffersonian hair
If I suggest you begin here this week, it’s because the argument is familiar to you: Slavery is bad. You’ve probably heard this a thousand times, you’re probably familiar with the idea that Thomas Jefferson held this view, to some extent. You may even be aware that Jefferson, in drafting the “Declaration of Independence,” included a passage excoriating the evils of slavery. In his original draft, Jefferson wrote:
He [King George] 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. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. 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. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.
And sometime between Jefferson’s drafting and the signing of the “Declaration,” this passage was removed. According to Jefferson later in life, it was in deference to Southern colonies that they left it out.
Now, I think it is worth rereading that passage above and wondering whether it would be fair to say it is a criticism of slavery, and then in what respect. And here’s what I mean: I think you and I probably agree that slavery is bad because enslaving people is bad. Does Jefferson?
In many respects, it seems he does. He leads with the idea that the king of England has “[violated] the most sacred rights of life and liberty” by “captivating & carrying them [Africans into slavery.” He calls the slave trade a “piratical warfare.” He refers to “a market where Men should be bought & sold,” presumably, as a bad thing. All of this falls under the heading of a simple and to us entirely obvious criticism of slavery. To put it in a Jeffersonian way: Slavery is a violation of one’s natural right to liberty. That’s just a first pass. I want to return to this in a moment.
There are two interesting cross-currents here. One is a cultural one. I have in mind two lines, both of which are, interestingly, sarcastic. The king who has prevented legislation curbing the slave trade is a “Christian King.” And the “warfare” of the slave trade is one that even “infidel powers” shun. The implication—the complex one, since Jefferson himself was a slaveowner for his entire life; but I want to come back to this—is that good Christians don’t engage in the slave trade, and that this is hardly even a moral difficulty; even the non-believers pass this moral test.
The other cross-current, which bears immediately on Query XVIII of Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, is one of the central worries about enslavement and the slave trade: that it is bad for the enslavers. Here it appears vividly: He accuses the king of England with “exciting those very people to rise in arms among us.”
Sometimes passages like this are cited and then provoke chin-scratching about how someone like Jefferson could own slaves. Now, maybe this will sound like hair-splitting, but I want to recommend you reread that passage above and ask yourself this question: Does Jefferson describe anything wrong with owning slaves? Aside from the suggestion that slavery is bad for the enslavers (here in the rather literal form of a possible revolt of the slaves), the passage attacks the king, not for enslaving anyone, but for having promoted and resisted limits to the slave trade: taking people from their homes in Africa. That, and not enslavement of Africans, is the violation of natural right Jefferson refers to.
That is one, but an incomplete, way to understand what could otherwise be totally confusing: how Jefferson slept at night. He sleeps like a baby, it turns out, because, the slave trade is awful in his view, but is perhaps only indirectly related to his enslavement of their descendants, and the immorality of the first may thus have no immediate relation to the second.
2 Query XVIII
I’ll say something in relation to the next ‘Query’ about the Notes on the State of Virgina. Right now let’s just get into the material here.
Here you get the moral complement to the anxiety of a slave revolt. For Jefferson, enslaving is bad on the enslavers. See the yellow passage. Enslavement produces a morally degenerate atmosphere, and children brought up in that culture will learn to imitate it. See the green passage.
But Jefferson seems to go further here. Not only is enslaving bad for the enslaver, but the enslaved seem not to be having a terribly good time either. See the blue passage, and note the editor’s point from just above it that Jefferson refers to slaves, remarkably enough, as “citizens.” He then argues that the “nation” should, like him, be anxious about the fact that “God is just.” See the pink passage. Here the view seems to be that some wrong (I don’t know that we can say for certain which slavery-associated wrong it is) committed in general by the “nation” is deserving of God’s vengeance.
The purple passage then goes way out on a limb and describes Jefferson’s hope for “total emancipation.” But, to go just by what’s said in the passage as a whole, I think the specific worry is that slavery as an institution has poisoned the moral well, as it were, of the United States, and that it should be eradicated because (to quote from the beginning) “The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.”
And while all of that is remarkable or whatever, nevertheless, for Jefferson, slavery is bad for a reason quite different from the reason you and I think it’s bad. You (I hope) and I think believe that imposing the suffering of enslavement on others is unfathomably evil. Jefferson thinks slavery is bad owing to its distorting effects on the moral character of enslaver and enslaved.