1 Introduction
Notes on the State of Virginia (1801–05) is Jefferson’s answer, as governor of Virgina, to a questionnaire circulated to all US colonies by a French civil servant seeking information about their geographical, legal, political, and other circumstances. The excerpt we’re looking at is from Jefferson’s notes on its legal framework.
Jefferson describes the basic rules of procedure (pp. 202–204), and then the content of the law, beginning with the history of the adoption of the laws of England (pp. 204–210). Then Jefferson describes the fact that “the laws which were in force during the monarchy”—that is, before the American Revolution—were seen as “relative merely to that form of government, or inculcating principles inconsistent with republicanism” (p. 209). And as a result, notes Jefferson, a committee was put together “to revise the whole code” (ibid.).
2 Revisions to the law
The proposed changes include, Jefferson notes:
- Changing “the rules of descent, so as that the lands of any person dying intestate shall be divisible equally among all his children or other representatives in equal degree” and
- Making slaves “distributable among the next of kin, as other moveables” (p. 210).
And he adds a provision of which, as the editor explains, there doesn’t appear to be a record other than Jefferson’s Notes, namely a proposal “to emancipate all slaves born after passing the [this] act” (p. 210). Jefferson goes on to describe not only emancipating them but also raising them and then exiling them abroad (p. 211). Note that Jefferson’s (quiet to the point of being completely unknown) emancipatory vision very specifically does not involve integration. See p. 211.
Jefferson poses a question to himself: Why exile black slaves? Why not integrate them into Virgina society? His answer is, in so many words, that it is owing to cultural prejudice. See p. 211 green. Perhaps, to put it one way, we could distinguish between slavery as a moral proposition and slavery as a political institution. Jefferson seems to be proposing that the political institution creates a distinctive sort of moral problem, independent of the moral question of slavery—namely the problem of how to wind slavery down where it exists, where winding it down means unleashing deap-seated resentments and prejudices fomented by the institution.
And then, as a sort of supplement to this justification for exiling emancipated slaves, Jefferson launches on a protracted racist screed of the strangest sort.
3 The racist screed
One reason it is ‘of the strangest sort’ is related to something we’ve seen here and elsewhere (in the first draft of the “Declaration,” in Query XVIII of the Notes on Virgina): Jefferson has, in some convoluted but precise sense, an abolitionist streak in him. He clearly objects to the institution of the slave trade, and its wrong of having stolen people from their homes. But he isn’t—certainly not in his person—obviously opposed to the institution of slavery in the United States.
It is also strange because it’s unclear how it’s related to the point Jefferson is trying to make. Jefferson’s going to argue, in so many words, that Africans and their descendants are incapable of a certain aesthetic sensibility. Now here is a natural objection: Most people are incapable of that sensibility. Most people’s version of ‘culture’ is reality TV and Facebook, YouTube shorts and Instagram. Should they be exiled, too? Who would be left? How would the line get determined? Does the fact that Shakespeare and Melville once existed forever stamp ‘white people’ with a cultural pass?
Jefferson begins by claiming there must be some natural difference owing to the difference in skin color, and he wonders: “Is this difference of no importance? Is it not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty in the two races?” (211; my emphasis). What’s structurally significant about this claim is the inferential relation between nature and aesthetics. Jefferson is claiming that a difference in skin color implies a difference not only in appearance but in beauty, and that this beauty is a manifestation of some deeper more significant difference. Two things must be true in order for all of that to go through. One is that standards of beauty must be objective. Another is that standards of beauty must be expressive of some morally and politically significant difference. For recall that the point of all this is to defend the proposition that emancipated slaves should be exiled. Jefferson is arguing now, not only that, as a result of the history of the institution of slavery, resentment will make emancipated slaves incompatible as fellow citizens, but that nature has made them incapable of that. The fact not only that African descendants lack “forethought,” and “are more ardent after their female,” and that “their griefs are transient,” but also that they sweat differently and sleep more, is all intended to explain their incapacity for citizenship in the United States.
In Jefferson you find a circular argument pattern familiar throughout the period: Africans have been enslaved, and thus deprived of education; they show no signs of having an education; therefore they couldn’t receive one. See p. 214.
- Jefferson begins by making “allowances for the difference of condition” between black and white (and American Indians, he’ll mention in a moment). Stated plainly: Some are free, others are slaves.
- He then claims some slaves “might have availed themselves of the conversation of their masters.” In other words, they might have learned a little math and composition between chopping wood and picking cotton.
- He notes “some have been liberally educated,” too.
But (p. 215):
- Slaves have not produced significant art.
For context, it’s worth noting that Africans are not only enslaved (so don’t have a ton of time for education and the arts), but the colonies at the time have about 4,000,000 people in them and ‘only’ about 700,000 of them are enslaved. Aside from the constitutive difference of enslavement and non-enslavement, that means the non-enslaved Americans have six times as many ‘shots’ as producing ‘great art’ as the enslaved Americans do. Now, although Jefferson here says, in so many words, it isn’t worth reading African-American poetry, when he writes a fifteen-year-old Peter Carr to tell him what is worth reading, Jefferson doesn’t mention a single American. It’s all Ancient Greek and Roman authors and more recent European literature. (Side note, in case we’re feeling like laughing a little at Jefferson’s underwhelming classical chops: He misquotes Cato, and misplaces a verb from a precedent sentence, so that his Latin reads “Sell \(x\), \(y\),\(z\) sell” on p. 219. ) So it isn’t just Africans in the Americas who aren’t producing, to Jefferson’s mind, literature worth reading; it’s everyone in the Americas, whatsoever. To Jefferson’s way of thinking about art, the comparison between African and non-African in the Americas should be a wash: There isn’t any good art in the Americas at all.
Jefferson is nevertheless sensitive to the effects of circumstance on character. Consider the passage highlighted on pp. 220–21. And he then qualifies his claim by saying it should be taken as a mere hypothesis; that he “advances it therefore as a suspicion only.” See pp. 221–222.