Thomas Jefferson · Politics
The author of human equality owned hundreds of enslaved people and freed almost none. Jefferson’s tortured, contradictory relationship with slavery is the deepest fault line in the American founding.
No fact about Thomas Jefferson is more important, or more disturbing, than this: the man who wrote that all men are created equal and endowed with an unalienable right to liberty owned, over his lifetime, more than six hundred human beings, held as many as two hundred at once, worked them on his plantations, bought and sold them, pursued those who escaped, and freed only a handful - five in his will, and a few others - at his death. He lived his entire adult life in the most intimate dependence on slavery: it built Monticello, served his table, and funded the leisure in which he wrote of freedom. The contradiction is not a footnote to Jefferson’s greatness; it is the deepest fault line in his life and in the American founding itself, and no honest understanding of him can look away from it.
What makes Jefferson’s case so agonizing - and so revealing - is that he was not a man untroubled by slavery. Unlike many slaveholders who defended the institution as a positive good, Jefferson condemned it, repeatedly and in the strongest terms, as a moral evil, a violation of the natural rights he had proclaimed, a corrupting influence on masters and a crime against the enslaved that he feared would bring divine judgment on his country. He knew it was wrong. He said it was wrong. And he kept his slaves, and helped build a republic that protected slavery, and grew ever more passive about ending it as he aged. He was not a hypocrite who didn’t see the contradiction; he was something harder to face - a man who saw the evil clearly and could not, or would not, act to end it. His failure is therefore not the failure of a blind man but of a seeing one, which is why it haunts the American conscience more than the failures of those who never knew better.
Jefferson did not merely dislike slavery; he feared it would destroy the nation, and some of his most powerful writing is a series of prophecies of the catastrophe to come. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, he wrote that he ‘trembled for his country’ when he reflected that God is just and that His justice could not sleep forever - that a just God would not side with the masters in a contest between them and their slaves, and that a day of reckoning, perhaps a violent one, was coming. He saw slavery corrupting the morals of the slaveholding class, teaching their children tyranny and destroying the very industry and self-reliance his republic depended on. And in 1820, hearing of the bitter congressional fight over slavery in Missouri, he wrote that the news came to him ‘like a fire bell in the night,’ filling him with terror as the ‘knell of the Union’ - a prophecy of the sectional conflict that would, forty years later, erupt in the Civil War.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Jefferson called slavery a moral evil yet held people in bondage all his life. In your own words, what did he mean by holding ‘the wolf by the ears’?
Leads to Frederick Douglass.
Begin this lesson →epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.