from Notes on the State of Virginia (1787)
[WARNING: Jefferson makes several racially offensive remarks in the
passages below. These are presented for your historical information only.]
QUERY XIV
_The administration of justice and description of the laws?_
[Jefferson brings up the following in the context of explaining his proposed revisal of
Virginia's laws, which included a proposal for the emancipation of slaves that did not
pass.]
To emancipate all slaves born after passing the act. The bill reported by the revisors
does not itself contain this proposition; but an amendment containing it was prepared, to
be offered to the legislature whenever the bill should be taken up, and further directing,
that they should continue with their parents to a certain age, then be brought up, at the
public expence, to tillage, arts or sciences, according to their geniusses, till the
females should be eighteen, and the males twenty-one years of age, when they should be
colonized to such place as the circumstances of the time should render most proper,
sending them out with arms, implements of houshold and of the handicraft arts, feeds,
pairs of the useful domestic animals, &c. to declare them a free and independant
people, and extend to them our alliance and protection, till they shall have acquired
strength; and to send vessels at the same time to other parts of the world for an equal
number of white inhabitants; to induce whom to migrate hither, proper encouragements were
to be proposed. It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into
the state, and thus save the expence of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the
vacancies they will leave? 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.
-- To these objections, which are political, may be added others, which are physical and
moral. The first difference which strikes us is that of colour. Whether the black of the
negro resides in the reticular membrane between the skin and scarf-skin, or in the
scarf-skin itself; whether it proceeds from the colour of the blood, the colour of the
bile, or from that of some other secretion, the difference is fixed in nature, and is as
real as if its seat and cause were better known to us. And is this difference of no
importance? Is it not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty in the two
races? Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, 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? Add to these, flowing hair, a more elegant symmetry of form,
their own judgment in favour of the whites, declared by their preference of them, as
uniformly as is the preference of the Oranootan for the black women over those of his own
species. The circumstance of superior beauty, is thought worthy attention in the
propagation of our horses, dogs, and other domestic animals; why not in that of man?
Besides those of colour, figure, and hair, there are other physical distinctions proving a
difference of race. They have less hair on the face and body. They secrete less by the
kidnies, and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and
disagreeable odour. This greater degree of transpiration renders them more tolerant of
heat, and less so of cold, than the whites. Perhaps too a difference of structure in the
pulmonary apparatus, which a late ingenious (* 1) experimentalist has discovered to be the
principal regulator of animal heat, may have disabled them from extricating, in the act of
inspiration, so much of that fluid from the outer air, or obliged them in expiration, to
part with more of it. They seem to require less sleep. A black, after hard labour through
the day, will be induced by the slightest amusements to sit up till midnight, or later,
though knowing he must be out with the first dawn of the morning. They are at least as
brave, and more adventuresome. But this may perhaps proceed from a want of forethought,
which prevents their seeing a danger till it be present. When present, they do not go
through it with more coolness or steadiness than the whites. They are more ardent after
their female: but love seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate
mixture of sentiment and sensation. Their griefs are transient. Those numberless
afflictions, which render it doubtful whether heaven has given life to us in mercy or in
wrath, are less felt, and sooner forgotten with them. In general, their existence appears
to participate more of sensation than reflection. To this must be ascribed their
disposition to sleep when abstracted from their diversions, and unemployed in labour. An
animal whose body is at rest, and who does not reflect, must be disposed to sleep of
course. Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears
to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think
one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of
Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous. It would be
unfair to follow them to Africa for this investigation. We will consider them here, on the
same stage with the whites, and where the facts are not apocryphal on which a judgment is
to be formed. It will be right to make great allowances for the difference of condition,
of education, of conversation, of the sphere in which they move. Many millions of them
have been brought to, and born in America. Most of them indeed have been confined to
tillage, to their own homes, and their own society: yet many have been so situated, that
they might have availed themselves of the conversation of their masters; many have been
brought up to the handicraft arts, and from that circumstance have always been associated
with the whites. Some have been liberally educated, and all have lived in countries where
the arts and sciences are cultivated to a considerable degree, and have had before their
eyes samples of the best works from abroad. The Indians, with no advantages of this kind,
will often carve figures on their pipes not destitute of design and merit. They will
crayon out an animal, a plant, or a country, so as to prove the existence of a germ in
their minds which only wants cultivation. They 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 music they are more generally gifted than the whites with accurate ears for tune and
time, and they have been found capable of imagining a small catch (* 2). Whether they will
be equal to the composition of a more extensive run of melody, or of complicated harmony,
is yet to be proved. Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry.
-- Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry. Love is the peculiar
;oestrum of the poet. Their love is ardent, but it kindles the senses only, not the
imagination. Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Whately; but it could not produce a
poet. The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism. The
heroes of the Dunciad are to her, as Hercules to the author of that poem. Ignatius Sancho
has approached nearer to merit in composition; yet his letters do more honour to the heart
than the head. They breathe the purest effusions of friendship and general philanthropy,
and shew how great a degree of the latter may be compounded with strong religious zeal. He
is often happy in the turn of his compliments, and his stile is easy and familiar, except
when he affects a Shandean fabrication of words. But his imagination is wild and
extravagant, escapes incessantly from every restraint of reason and taste, and, in the
course of its vagaries, leaves a tract of thought as incoherent and eccentric, as is the
course of a meteor through the sky. His subjects should often have led him to a process of
sober reasoning: yet we find him always substituting sentiment for demonstration. Upon the
whole, though we admit him to the first place among those of his own colour who have
presented themselves to the public judgment, yet when we compare him with the writers of
the race among whom he lived, and particularly with the epistolary class, in which he has
taken his own stand, we are compelled to enroll him at the bottom of the column. This
criticism supposes the letters published under his name to be genuine, and to have
received amendment from no other hand; points which would not be of easy investigation.
The improvement of the blacks in body and mind, in the first instance of their mixture
with the whites, has been observed by every one, and proves that their inferiority is not
the effect merely of their condition of life.
[I have omitted a long passage here in which Jefferson argues that the Greek and Roman
slaves had it much worse than American blacks did. He then uses this as further
"proof" of black inferiority:]
Yet notwithstanding these and other discouraging circumstances among the Romans, their
slaves were often their rarest artists. They excelled too in science, insomuch as to be
usually employed as tutors to their master's children. Epictetus, Terence, and Phaedrus,
were slaves. But they were of the race of whites. It is not their condition then, but
nature, which has produced the distinction. -- Whether further observation will or will
not verify the conjecture, that nature has been less bountiful to them in the endowments
of the head, I believe that in those of the heart she will be found to have done them
justice. That disposition to theft with which they have been branded, must be ascribed to
their situation, and not to any depravity of the moral sense. The man, in whose favour no
laws of property exist, probably feels himself less bound to respect those made in favour
of others. When arguing for ourselves, we lay it down as a fundamental, that laws, to be
just, must give a reciprocation of right: that, without this, they are mere arbitrary
rules of conduct, founded in force, and not in conscience: and it is a problem which I
give to the master to solve, whether the religious precepts against the violation of
property were not framed for him as well as his slave? And whether the slave may not as
justifiably take a little from one, who has taken all from him, as he may slay one who
would slay him? That a change in the relations in which a man is placed should change his
ideas of moral right and wrong, is neither new, nor peculiar to the colour of the blacks.
Homer tells us it was so 2600 years ago.
"Jove fix'd it certain, that whatever day
Makes man a slave, takes half his worth away."
But the slaves of which Homer speaks were whites. Notwithstanding these considerations
which must weaken their respect for the laws of property, we find among them numerous
instances of the most rigid integrity, and as many as among their better instructed
masters, of benevolence, gratitude, and unshaken fidelity. -- The opinion, that they are
inferior in the faculties of reason and imagination, must be hazarded with great
diffidence. 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. How much more then where it is a faculty, not a substance, we are
examining; where it eludes the research of all the senses; where the conditions of its
existence are various and variously combined; where the effects of those which are present
or absent bid defiance to calculation; let me add too, as a circumstance of great
tenderness, where our conclusion would degrade a whole race of men from the rank in the
scale of beings which their Creator may perhaps have given them. To our reproach it must
be said, that though for a century and a half we have had under our eyes the races of
black and of red men, they have never yet been viewed by us as subjects of natural
history. I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, 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. It is not against experience to suppose, that
different species of the same genus, or varieties of the same species, may possess
different qualifications. Will not a lover of natural history then, one who views the
gradations in all the races of animals with the eye of philosophy, excuse an effort to
keep those in the department of man as distinct as nature has formed them? This
unfortunate difference of colour, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the
emancipation of these people. Many of their advocates, while they wish to vindicate the
liberty of human nature, are anxious also to preserve its dignity and beauty. Some of
these, embarrassed by the question `What further is to be done with them?' join themselves
in opposition with those who are actuated by sordid avarice only. Among the Romans
emancipation required but one effort. The slave, when made free, might mix with, without
staining the blood of his master. But with us a second is necessary, unknown to history.
When freed, he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture.
QUERY XVIII
_The particular customs and manners that may happen to be received in that state?_
Manners
It is difficult to determine on the standard by which the manners of a nation may be
tried, whether _catholic_, or _particular_. It is more difficult for a native to bring to
that standard the manners of his own nation, familiarized to him by habit. There must
doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence
of slavery among us. 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. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for
man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his
cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do. If a parent could find no
motive either in his philanthropy or his self-love, for restraining the intemperance of
passion towards his slave, it should always be a sufficient one that his child is present.
But generally it is not sufficient. 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. The man must be a prodigy who can
retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances. 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. For if a slave can have a
country in this world, it must be any other in preference to that in which he is born to
live and labour for another: in which he must lock up the faculties of his nature,
contribute as far as depends on his individual endeavours to the evanishment of the human
race, or entail his own miserable condition on the endless generations proceeding from
him. With the morals of the people, their industry also is destroyed. For in a warm
climate, no man will labour for himself who can make another labour for him. This is so
true, that of the proprietors of slaves a very small proportion indeed are ever seen to
labour. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their
only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the
gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my
country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever: that
considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune,
an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by
supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in
such a contest. -- But it is impossible to be temperate and to pursue this subject through
the various considerations of policy, of morals, of history natural and civil. We must be
contented to hope they will force their way into every one's mind. I think a change
already perceptible, since the origin of the present revolution. The spirit of the master
is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust, his condition mollifying, the way I
hope preparing, under the auspices of heaven, for a total emancipation, and that this is
disposed, in the order of events, to be with the consent of the masters, rather than by
their extirpation.
Selected Letters on Slavery
