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WHITENESS THEORY AS LENS TO VIEW TJ

WHITENESS THEORIES CAN BE USED TO ANALYZE JEFFERSON'S CLAIMS MADE IN NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA

Cheryl Harris “Whiteness as Property” http://academic.udayton.edu/race/01race/white02.htm

The legal legacy of slavery and of the seizure of land from Native American peoples is not merely a regime of property law that is (mis)informed by racist and ethnocentric themes. Rather, the law has established and protected an actual property interest in whiteness itself, which shares the critical characteristics of property and accords with the many and varied theoretical descriptions of property.

The legal legacy of slavery and of the seizure of land from Native American peoples is not merely a regime of property law that is (mis)informed by racist and ethnocentric themes. Rather, the law has established and protected an actual property interest in whiteness itself, which shares the critical characteristics of property and accords with the many and varied theoretical descriptions of property.

Although by popular usage property describes "things" owned by persons, or the rights of persons with respect to a thing, the concept of property prevalent among most theorists, even prior to the twentieth century, is that property may "consist[] of rights in 'things' that are intangible, or whose existence is a matter of legal definition." Property is thus said to be a right, not a thing, characterized as metaphysical, not physical. The theoretical bases and conceptual descriptions of property rights are varied, ranging from first possessor rules, to creation of value, to Lockean labor theory, to personality theory, to utilitarian theory. However disparate, these formulations of property clearly illustrate the extent to which property rights and interests embrace much more than land and personalty. Thus, the fact that whiteness is not a "physical" entity does not remove it from the realm of property.

Whiteness is not simply and solely a legally recognized property interest. It is simultaneously an aspect of self-identity and of personhood, and its relation to the law of property is complex. Whiteness has functioned as self- identity in the domain of the intrinsic, personal, and psychological; as reputation in the interstices between internal and external identity; and, as property in the extrinsic, public, and legal realms. According whiteness actual legal status converted an aspect of identity into an external object of property, moving whiteness from privileged identity to a vested interest. The law's construction of whiteness defined and affirmed critical aspects of identity (who is white); of privilege (what benefits accrue to that status); and, of property (what legal entitlements arise from that status). Whiteness at various times signifies and is deployed as identity, status, and property, sometimes singularly, sometimes in tandem.

1. Whiteness as a Traditional Form of Property. - Whiteness fits the broad historical concept of property described by classical theorists. In James Madison's view, for example, property "embraces every thing to which a man may attach a value and have a right," referring to all of a person's legal rights. Property as conceived in the founding era included not only external objects and people's relationships to them, but also all of those human rights, liberties, powers, and immunities that are important for human well-being, including: freedom of expression, freedom of conscience, freedom from bodily harm, and free and equal opportunities to use personal faculties.

Whiteness defined the legal status of a person as slave or free. White identity conferred tangible and economically valuable benefits and was jealously guarded as a valued possession, allowed only to those who met a strict standard of proof. Whiteness - the right to white identity as embraced by the law - is property if by property one means all of a person's legal rights. . . .

The law's interpretation of those encounters between whites and Native Americans not only inflicted vastly different results on them, but also established a pattern - a custom - of valorizing whiteness. As the forms of racialized property were perfected, the value and protection extended to whiteness increased. Regardless of which theory of property one adopts, the concept of whiteness - established by centuries of custom (illegitimate custom, but custom nonetheless) and codified by law - may be understood as a property interest.

2. Modern Views of Property as Defining Social Relations. - Although property in the classical sense refers to everything that is valued and to which a person has a right, the modern concept of property focuses on its function and the social relations reflected therein. In this sense, modern property doctrine emphasizes the more contingent nature of property and has been the basis for the argument that property rights should be expanded.

Modern theories of property reject the assumption that property is "objectively definable or identifiable, apart from social context.". . . Property in this broader sense encompassed jobs, entitlements, occupational licenses, contracts, subsidies, and indeed a whole host of intangibles that are the product of labor, time, and creativity, such as intellectual property, business goodwill, and enhanced earning potential from graduate degrees. Notwithstanding the dilution of new property since Goldberg v. Kelly and its progeny as well as continued attacks on the concept, the legacy of new property infuses the concept of property with questions of power, selection, and allocation. Reich's argument that property is not a natural right but a construction by society resonates in current theories of property that describe the allocation of property rights as a series of choices. This construction directs attention toward issues of relative power and social relations inherent in any definition of property.

3. Property and Expectations. - "Property is nothing but the basis of expectation," according to Bentham, "consist[ing] in an established expectation, in the persuasion of being able to draw such and such advantage from the thing possessed." The relationship between expectations and property remains highly significant, as the law "has recognized and protected even the expectation of rights as actual legal property." This theory does not suggest that all value or all expectations give rise to property, but those expectations in tangible or intangible things that are valued and protected by the law are property.. . .

In a society structured on racial subordination, white privilege became an expectation and, to apply Margaret Radin's concept, whiteness became the quintessential property for personhood. The law constructed "whiteness" as an objective fact, although in reality it is an ideological proposition imposed through subordination. This move is the central feature of "reification": "Its basis is that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a 'phantom objectivity,' an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people." Whiteness was an "object" over which continued control was - and is - expected. The protection of these expectations is central because, as Radin notes: "If an object you now control is bound up in your future plans or in your anticipation of your future self, and it is partly these plans for your own continuity that make you a person, then your personhood depends on the realization of these expectations."

Because the law recognized and protected expectations grounded in white privilege (albeit not explicitly in all instances), these expectations became tantamount to property that could not permissibly be intruded upon without consent. As the law explicitly ratified those expectations in continued privilege or extended ongoing protection to those illegitimate expectations by failing to expose or to radically disturb them, the dominant and subordinate positions within the racial hierarchy were reified in law. When the law recognizes, either implicitly or explicitly, the settled expectations of whites built on the privileges and benefits produced by white supremacy, it acknowledges and reinforces a property interest in whiteness that reproduces Black subordination.

4. The Property Functions of Whiteness. - In addition to the theoretical descriptions of property, whiteness also meets the functional criteria of property. Specifically, the law has accorded "holders" of whiteness the same privileges and benefits accorded holders of other types of property. The liberal view of property is that it includes the exclusive rights of possession, use, and disposition. Its attributes are the right to transfer or alienability, the right to use and enjoyment, and the right to exclude others. Even when examined against this limited view, whiteness conforms to the general contours of property. It may be a "bad" form of property, but it is property nonetheless.

(a) Rights of Disposition. - Property rights are traditionally described as fully alienable. Because fundamental personal rights are commonly understood to be inalienable, it is problematic to view them as property interests. However, as Margaret Radin notes, "inalienability" is not a transparent term; it has multiple meanings that refer to interests that are non-salable, non-transferable, or non-market-alienable. The common core of inalienability is the negation of the possibility of separation of an entitlement, right, or attribute from its holder.

Classical theories of property identified alienability as a requisite aspect of property; thus, that which is inalienable cannot be property. As the major exponent of this view, Mill argued that public offices, monopoly privileges, and human beings - all of which were or should have been inalienable - should not be considered property at all. Under this account, if inalienability inheres in the concept of property, then whiteness, incapable of being transferred or alienated either inside or outside the market, would fail to meet a criterion of property.

As Radin notes, however, even under the classical view, alienability of certain property was limited. Mill also advocated certain restraints on alienation in connection with property rights in land and probably other natural resources. In fact, the law has recognized various kinds of inalienable property. For example, entitlements of the regulatory and welfare states, such as transfer payments and government licenses, are inalienable; yet they have been conceptualized and treated as property by law. Although this "new property" has been criticized as being improper - that is, not appropriately cast as property - the principal objection has been based on its alleged lack of productive capacity, not its inalienability.

The law has also acknowledged forms of inalienable property derived from nongovernmental sources. In the context of divorce, courts have held that professional degrees or licenses held by one party and financed by the labor of the other is marital property whose value is subject to allocation by the court. A medical or law degree is not alienable either in the market or by voluntary transfer. Nevertheless, it is included as property when dissolving a legal relationship.

Indeed, Radin argues that, as a deterrent to the dehumanization of universal commodification, market-inalienability may be justified to protect property important to the person and to safeguard human flourishing. She suggests that non-commodification or market-inalienability of personal property or those things essential to human flourishing is necessary to guard against the objectification of human beings. To avoid that danger, "we must cease thinking that market alienability is inherent in the concept of property." Following this logic, then, the inalienability of whiteness should not preclude the consideration of whiteness as property. Paradoxically, its inalienability may be more indicative of its perceived enhanced value, rather than its disqualification as property.

(b) Right to Use and Enjoyment. - Possession of property includes the rights of use and enjoyment. If these rights are essential aspects of property, it is because "the problem of property in political philosophy dissolves into ... questions of the will and the way in which we use the things of this world." As whiteness is simultaneously an aspect of identity and a property interest, it is something that can both be experienced and deployed as a resource. Whiteness can move from being a passive characteristic as an aspect of identity to an active entity that - like other types of property - is used to fulfill the will and to exercise power. The state's official recognition of a racial identity that subordinated Blacks and of privileged rights in property based on race elevated whiteness from a passive attribute to an object of law and a resource deployable at the social, political, and institutional level to maintain control. Thus, a white person "used and enjoyed" whiteness whenever she took advantage of the privileges accorded white people simply by virtue of their whiteness - when she exercised any number of rights reserved for the holders of whiteness. Whiteness as the embodiment of white privilege transcended mere belief or preference; it became usable property, the subject of the law's regard and protection. In this respect whiteness, as an active property, has been used and enjoyed.

(c) Reputation and Status Property. - In constructing whiteness as property, the ideological move was to conceptualize white racial identity as an external thing in a constitutive sense - an "object[] or resource[] necessary to be a person." This move was accomplished in large measure by recognizing the reputational interest in being regarded as white as a thing of significant value, which like other reputational interests, was intrinsically bound up with identity and personhood. The reputation of being white was treated as a species of property, or something in which a property interest could be asserted. In this context, whiteness was a form of status property.

The conception of reputation as property found its origins in early concepts of property that encompassed things (such as land and personalty), income (such as revenues from leases, mortgages, and patent monopolies), and one's life, liberty, and labor. Thus, Locke's famous pronouncement, "every man has a 'property' in his own 'person,"' undergirded the assertion that one's physical self was one's property. From this premise, one's labor, "the work of his hands," combined with those things found in the common to form property over which one could exercise ownership, control, and dominion. The idea of self-ownership, then, was particularly fertile ground for the idea that reputation, as an aspect of identity earned through effort, was similarly property. Moreover, the loss of reputation was capable of being valued in the market.

The direct manifestation of the law's legitimation of whiteness as reputation is revealed in the well-established doctrine that to call a white person "Black" is to defame her. Although many of the cases were decided in an era when the social and legal stratification of whites and Blacks was more absolute, as late as 1957 the principle was reaffirmed, notwithstanding significant changes in the legal and political status of Blacks. As one court noted, "there is still to be considered the social distinction existing between the races," and the allegation was likely to cause injury. A Black person, however, could not sue for defamation if she was called "white." Because the law expressed and reinforced the social hierarchy as it existed, it was presumed that no harm could flow from such a reversal.

Private identity based on racial hierarchy was legitimated as public identity in law, even after the end of slavery and the formal end of legal race segregation. Whiteness as interpersonal hierarchy was recognized externally as race reputation. Thus, whiteness as public reputation and personal property was affirmed.

(d) The Absolute Right to Exclude. - Many theorists have traditionally conceptualized property to include the exclusive rights of use, disposition, and possession, with possession embracing the absolute right to exclude. The right to exclude was the central principle, too, of whiteness as identity, for mainly whiteness has been characterized, not by an inherent unifying characteristic, but by the exclusion of others deemed to be "not white." The possessors of whiteness were granted the legal right to exclude others from the privileges inhering in whiteness; whiteness became an exclusive club whose membership was closely and grudgingly guarded. The courts played an active role in enforcing this right to exclude - determining who was or was not white enough to enjoy the privileges accompanying whiteness. In that sense, the courts protected whiteness as any other form of property.

Moreover, as it emerged, the concept of whiteness was premised on white supremacy rather than mere difference. "White" was defined and constructed in ways that increased its value by reinforcing its exclusivity. Indeed, just as whiteness as property embraced the right to exclude, whiteness as a theoretical construct evolved for the very purpose of racial exclusion. Thus, the concept of whiteness is built on both exclusion and racial subjugation. This fact was particularly evident during the period of the most rigid racial exclusion, as whiteness signified racial privilege and took the form of status property.

At the individual level, recognizing oneself as "white" necessarily assumes premises based on white supremacy: It assumes that Black ancestry in any degree, extending to generations far removed, automatically disqualifies claims to white identity, thereby privileging "white" as unadulterated, exclusive, and rare. Inherent in the concept of "being white" was the right to own or hold whiteness to the exclusion and subordination of Blacks. Because "[i]dentity is ... continuously being constituted through social interactions," the assigned political, economic, and social inferiority of Blacks necessarily shaped white identity. In the commonly held popular view, the presence of Black "blood" - including the infamous "one-drop" - consigned a person to being "Black" and evoked the "metaphor ... of purity and contamination" in which Black blood is a contaminant and white racial identity is pure. Recognizing or identifying oneself as white is thus a claim of racial purity, an assertion that one is free of any taint of Black blood. The law has played a critical role in legitimating this claim.

more critical commentary on TJ

Thomas Jefferson on Race, Revolution, and Morality - History Revisited and Revised
By Edwin S. Gaustad

• Three Areas:
  • Jefferson and race, or more narrowly, Jefferson and slavery
  • His attitude toward the revolution that erupted in France in 1789
  • Jefferson and morality and his alleged affair
• Let us revisit each item.
  • On slavery and race
  • On Jefferson’s fanatical defense of the French Revolution
  • Was Jefferson a moral man, or a hypocritical lecher and consummate deceiver?

Dr. Edwin S. Gaustad is Professor Emeritus, The University of California, Riverside. A graduate of Baylor University, 1947, and Brown University, Ph.D. in 1951, he is the author of a dozen books in America’s religious history, the latest of which is Sworn on the Altar of God: A Religious Biography of Thomas Jefferson published by Eerdmans in 1996 for $15. He is the recipient of Baylor’s Distinguished Alumnus Award.

The textbook Thomas Jefferson lingers in our minds: author of the Declaration of Independence, third president of the United States, and a man of wide-ranging scientific and architectural interests. If the textbook writer still had a few lines to spare, one might learn something of Jefferson’s strong dedication to religious freedom: on his tombstone he ranked his writing of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom with his composition of the Declaration of Independence. And that’s about all that the textbooks told us; we perhaps feel lucky to remember that much as we wander around the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D. C.

But historians have been busy of late, re-examining many facets of Jefferson’s life and suggesting that major re-evaluations are in order. Some have even gone so far as to argue that the Jefferson Memorial is a mistake and the profile on Mount Rushmore an embarrassment. Other historians strongly disagree, and so the books, articles, talk shows, and PBS specials pour forth. So, what is the fuss all about? Contention has been largely concentrated in three areas, each of which will be examined in turn.

1. First, Jefferson and race, or more narrowly, Jefferson and slavery. That Jefferson was, along with his Virginia land-owning neighbors, a slaveholder has long been duly acknowledged. But especially in the last two decades, far more attention has been given to this fact and to the inconsistencies or contradictions in the Jeffersonian character suggested by this circumstance, along with several others that are closely related. For example, Jefferson (unlike Washington) did not free most of his slaves during his lifetime, nor in his will did he provide for any general emancipation. Moreover, while he condemned slavery as a brutal and inhumane institution, he did little, particularly in his later years, to threaten or overturn the system. And finally, in his Notes on the State of Virginia (published in 1787), Jefferson on the basis of limited observation advanced the notion, “as a suspicion only, that the blacks...are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.” This moved Jefferson beyond the status of just a slaveholder to that of a racist.

In 1977 John Chester Miller published The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery; here he recounted with both fairness and thoroughness the racist assumptions of the Anglo-Saxon society of which Jefferson was all too much a part. Even other Enlightenment figures (David Hume, for example) made presumably “scientific” observations regarding the denizens of tropical climes as opposed to those who lived in the temperate zones. And, as Miller notes, only by thinking of blacks as inherently inferior could Jefferson soften the haunting guilt with which the institution of slavery filled him. Since 1977, several other historians have gone beyond Miller in finding little if anything to redeem Jefferson from the stigma of slaveholder and racist. In the words of Paul Finkelman, while Jefferson spoke as “a liberty-loving man of the Enlightenment,” he acted as “a self-indulgent and negrophobic Virginia planter.”

2. Revisions regarding Jefferson and revolution concern not his activity in the American Revolution but his attitude toward the revolution that erupted in France in 1789. The major reviser here is Conor Cruise O’Brien who in a recent book (The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, published in 1996) sees Jefferson’s dedication to liberty as being one without rational limits or sensible discriminations. Jefferson, O’Brien writes, would continue to have faith in the French Revolution, no matter what atrocities had been or would be committed. For this revolution had become, for Jefferson, not an historical movement to weigh and analyze, but a mystical article of faith impervious to actual events.

Because Jefferson’s support of France did not waver in the early 1790s, O’Brien is willing to see him as even the patron saint of terrorism in general. The author takes as his sacred text a portion of a letter that Jefferson wrote in 1793 to his sometime private secretary, William Short, regarding the excesses of the French Revolution: “My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated.” O’Brien’s entire book can be understood as a thundering exposition of that text. And in his Epilogue he concluded that Jefferson embraced “a wild liberty, absolute, untrammeled, universal.” Since any violence committed in the name of liberty is justifiable, O’Brien asserts, “We cannot even say categorically that Jefferson would have condemned the bombing of the Federal building in Oklahoma City and the destruction of its occupants.” Here history may not be revisited, but it is certainly revised.

3. Any attention to the subject of Jefferson and morality leads, sooner or later, to a consideration of the alleged affair between Jefferson and Sally Hemings, his slave and house servant both in Paris and back in Monticello. In 1802, a political operative named James Callender produced a campaign document designed to advance the fortunes of John Adams’s Federalist Party and dash the prospects of Thomas Jefferson’s Republican Party. The Sally Hemings story was tailored and designed to do the trick. And so, by means of tabloid journalism, “Black Sally” entered into the pages of American history, kept alive through the election of Jefferson to a second term as president in 1804, but largely dropped from view thereafter.

Then in 1974, Fawn Brodie published Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, the centerpiece of which was a more sustained effort to elevate the Hemings affair to the level of historical truth. Brodie’s technique drew much from the psychohistorical methods current at the time. And though she adduced no new historical data regarding “Black Sally,” she wrote well and her book proved to be enormously popular. So popular, in fact, that a leading author and newspaper editor, Virginius Dabney, took up the implied challenge to the third president’s honor by writing in 1981 The Jefferson Scandals: A Rebuttal. Dabney considered Brodie’s central thesis to be “unproved and unprovable,” a position that he defended at some length. And there, one might be tempted to say, the matter rests. But, in fact, this titillating matter does not rest, as every new biography must deal in some way with the alleged affair. Most recently, Annette Gordon-Read has written Thomas Jefferson and Sallv Hemings: An American Controversy (1997), offering further proof, should any be needed, that the story stays alive.

After much revisiting and revising, where do we stand on these three issues in Jefferson’s life and thought? Let us revisit each item.

1. On slavery and race, it must certainly be acknowledged that the consciousness of historians in general has been markedly raised (though not very generally raised with respect to Jefferson and feminism). One cannot and must not gloss over either his words or his deeds with respect to African Americans and to slavery. Nor, on the other hand, should one forget that his words in his draft of the Declaration of Independence condemning the slave trade were too strong for the Continental Congress to accept. Thus, they were deleted. Also, his draft of the Northwest Ordinance called for the exclusion of slavery in lands both north and south of the Ohio River. His proscription on territory south of the Ohio was deleted. And as president in his second term, Jefferson moved to abolish the slave trade on January 1, 1808, the earliest date that the Constitution allowed. He thought—or allowed himself to hope—that abolition of the slave trade would gradually lead to the abolition of slavery itself, a hope that tragically proved to be in vain.

It is true that in his later years, Jefferson pulled back from some of his more radical, abolition-sounding rhetoric with respect to slavery. And in 1820 he sadly wrote that “We have the wolf by the ears: and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.” The wonder is not that slavery and racism had its defenders in late 18th or early 19th century America, and that Jefferson is among them. The more startling wonder is that at the end of the 20th century, racism still pervades the American scene. Something about beams and motes comes to mind.

2. On Jefferson’s fanatical defense of the French Revolution, O’Brien appears to be engaging in that bit of revisionism largely alone. Jefferson did feel strongly about liberty, a fact for which most Americans are profoundly grateful. He did shock both Abigail and John Adams when he took Shays’s Rebellion in Massachusetts in 1786 more calmly than they. He even justified the behavior of the rebels, noting that no country preserves its liberties unless rulers are warned “from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance.” To Abigail Adams he wrote in 1787 that “The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all.” Then he added, “I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere.”

That kind of talk surely unsettled Conor Cruise O’Brien, and it may unsettle many others as well. In any political campaign where the sides arrayed against each other are “law and order” on the one hand versus “freedom and reform” on the other, one need not doubt where Jefferson would stand. But to equate his love of liberty and of popular democracy with mindless acts of terrorism and destruction is itself a mindless act. Jefferson believed in human possibilities, in civilization’s steady advance, and in an “empire of liberty.” To him, the obstacles to such a progression were kings, priests, and nobles: that is, a state and a society where resistance was never possible, where freedom was always treasonable. “A little rebellion now and then” could remind Americans of their roots in revolution, even as it could remind them of democracy’s ugly alternative.

3. Was Jefferson a moral man, or a hypocritical lecher and consummate deceiver? First, let it be noted that Jefferson took moral matters very seriously. His so-called “Bible” consisted chiefly in the ethical teachings of Jesus; cutting away all miracle and metaphysical subtlety, the pure “diamonds” of moral instruction and inspiration remained. Denominations disagreed and fought over dogma—not over morality, Jefferson observed. And for him religion’s moral dimension was what mattered; all rational human beings, whatever denomination, could unite on these essential precepts. God has implanted a sure moral instinct into every human breast, Jefferson argued, even as He has granted the ability to hear, taste, smell, and see. To encounter the occasional moral midget or moral deviant no more disproved nature’s prevailing gifts than encountering a blind man suggested that God withheld the blessings of sight from humanity at large.

With respect more specifically to the alleged liaison with Sally Hemings which resulted, according to the true believers, in five children born of this union, one need recall that Jefferson had a horror of miscegenation. As he wrote to his neighbor Edward Coles in 1814, “The amalgamation of white with blacks produces a degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence in the human character, can innocently consent.” If and when blacks were to be freed, they needed to construct their own society somewhere else, perhaps in the Caribbean or in Africa. In addition to the moral question of an illicit relationship with a slave, one can add the political question of the ultimate fate of a nation where miscegenation routinely prevailed.

So what is the historical evidence for a sexual relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings? Simply put, history cannot answer this question. One must answer it on other grounds: the character of Thomas Jefferson (about which we know a great deal), the character of Sally Hemings (about which we know virtually nothing), the logical probabilities of the circumstances, and the political realities of the time. In this welter of uncertainties, I find the most helpful resolution to lie in the character of Jefferson himself. A man of great discipline and self-restraint, he was not a member of the “if it feels good, do it” school of thoughtless action. He calculated carefully the paths ahead, measuring his behavior almost as precisely as he measured the rooms of the Governor’s Palace in Williamsburg. Furthermore, Jefferson in this realm was, if anything, a prude. He advised married women against dancing because of the possible “ambiguity of issue” that might result. He advised young men not to go to Paris until at least thirty years of age, lest their morals be corrupted. This is the man who supposedly had a thirty-eight-year relationship with his enslaved concubine? It boggles the mind.

Finally, in all the revisiting and revising of Jeffersonian scholarship, it is certainly not the case that we are left right back where we started from. Far from it. Rather, we are left with a Jefferson far more complex and nuanced, far more human and fallible, than we would have ever suspected from the text book accounts. Neither saint nor sinner, Jefferson—like the rest of us—is a puzzling and paradoxical mixture of the two.

Edwin S. Gaustad, author of Sworn on the Altar of God: A Religious Biography of Thomas Jefferson, Eerdmans, 1996

Updated Tuesday, April 17, 2001

critical commentary on TJ from Encyclodpedia Brittanica

Thomas Jefferson
Slavery and racism

Encyclopædia Britannica Article

			Page 5 of 20

Slavery and racism

Even before his departure from France, Jefferson had overseen the publication of Notes on the State of Virginia. This book, the only one Jefferson ever published, was part travel guide, part scientific treatise, and part philosophical meditation. Jefferson had written it in the fall of 1781 and had agreed to a French edition only after learning that an unauthorized version was already in press. Notes contained an extensive discussion of slavery, including a graphic description of its horrific effects on both blacks and whites, a strong assertion that it violated the principles on which the American Revolution was based, and an apocalyptic prediction that failure to end slavery would lead to “convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of one or the other race.” It also contained the most explicit assessment that Jefferson ever wrote of what he believed were the biological differences between blacks and whites, an assessment that exposed the deep-rooted racism that he, like most Americans and almost all Virginians of his day, harboured throughout his life.

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To his critics in later generations, Jefferson's views on race seemed particularly virulent because of his purported relationship with Sally Hemings, who bore several children obviously fathered by a white man and some of whom had features resembling those of Jefferson. The public assertion of this relationship was originally made in 1802 by a disreputable journalist interested in injuring Jefferson's political career. His claim was corroborated, however, by one of Hemings's children in an 1873 newspaper interview and then again in a 1968 book by Winthrop Jordan revealing that Hemings became pregnant only when Jefferson was present at Monticello. Finally, in 1998, DNA samples were gathered from living descendants of Jefferson and Hemings. Tests revealed that Jefferson was almost certainly the father of some of Hemings's children. What remained unclear was the character of the relationship—consensual or coercive, a matter of love or rape, or a mutually satisfactory arrangement. Jefferson's admirers preferred to consider it a love affair and to see Jefferson and Hemings as America's preeminent biracial couple. His critics, on the other hand, considered Jefferson a sexual predator whose eloquent statements about human freedom and equality were hypocritical.

In any case, coming as it did at the midpoint of Jefferson's career, the publication of Notes affords the opportunity to review Jefferson's previous and subsequent positions on the most volatile and therefore most forbidden topic in the revolutionary era (see primary source document: On Accommodating African Americans). Early in his career Jefferson had taken a leadership role in pushing slavery onto the political agenda in the Virginia assembly and the federal Congress. In the 1760s and '70s, like most Virginia planters, he endorsed the end of the slave trade. (Virginia's plantations were already well stocked with slaves, so ending the slave trade posed no economic threat and even enhanced the value of the existent slave population.) In his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, he included a passage, subsequently deleted by the Continental Congress, blaming both the slave trade and slavery itself on George III. Unlike most of his fellow Virginians, Jefferson was prepared to acknowledge that slavery was an anomaly in the American republic established in 1776. His two most practical proposals came in the early 1780s: a gradual emancipation scheme by which all slaves born after 1800 would be freed and their owners compensated, and a prohibition of slavery in all the territories of the West as a condition for admission to the Union. By the time of the publication of Notes, then, Jefferson's record on slavery placed him among the most progressive elements of southern society. Rather than ask how he could possibly tolerate the persistence of slavery, it is more historically correct to wonder how this member of Virginia's planter class had managed to develop such liberal convictions.

Dating the onset of a long silence is inevitably an imprecise business, but by the time of his return to the United States in 1789 Jefferson had backed away from a leadership position on slavery. The ringing denunciations of slavery presented in Notes had generated controversy, especially within the planter class of Virginia, and Jefferson's deep aversion to controversy made him withdraw from the cutting edge of the antislavery movement once he experienced the sharp feelings it aroused. Moreover, the very logic of his argument in Notes exposed the inherent intractability of his position. Although he believed that slavery was a gross violation of the principles celebrated in the Declaration of Independence, he also believed that people of African descent were biologically inferior to whites and could never live alongside whites in peace and harmony. They would have to be transported elsewhere, back to Africa or perhaps the Caribbean, after emancipation. Because such a massive deportation was a logistical and economic impossibility, the unavoidable conclusion was that, though slavery was wrong, ending it, at least at present, was inconceivable. That became Jefferson's public position throughout the remainder of his life.

It also shaped his personal posture as a slave owner. Jefferson owned, on average, about 200 slaves at any point in time, and slightly over 600 over his lifetime. To protect himself from facing the reality of his problematic status as plantation master, he constructed a paternalistic self-image as a benevolent father caring for what he called “my family.” Believing that he and his slaves were the victims of history's failure to proceed along the enlightened path, he saw himself as the steward for those entrusted to his care until a better future arrived for them all. In the meantime, his own lavish lifestyle and all the incessant and expensive renovations of his Monticello mansion were wholly dependent on slave labour. Whatever silent thoughts he might have harboured about freeing his slaves never found their way into the record. (He freed only five slaves, all members of the Hemings family.) His mounting indebtedness rendered all such thoughts superfluous toward the end, because his slaves, like all his possessions, were mortgaged to his creditors and therefore not really his to free.

A guide to making sense of this mess!!

WHAT DO THOMAS JEFFERSON AND FRANK HAVE IN COMMON? WHY IS FRANK OBSESSED WITH THOMAS JEFFERSON?

ALSO, THE NEWEST LINKS ARE: 1) LINKS ABOUT TJ; 2) A STORY I WROTE AND USED IN A CREATIVE WRITING CLASS THAT COULD SHED LIGHT ON MY CONNECTION TO TJ; 3) SOME LINKS ABOUT MOVIES AND MUSIC.

START POSTING AND I'LL PUT YOU IN YOUR PLACE! HA!!! FRANK

Welcome back Frank

I'm back!!! I haven't posted on this blog in over 8 months, but I'm gonna try to amp it back up. Let me know how I can improve it, or simply critique it. thanks, Frank