NOTHING FAZED HIM. He carried tired mules. He pressed on while companions fainted. He cut down predators as calmly as he rested in trees at night. Peter Jefferson had a job to do in 1747: he was surveying land never before seen by White settlers, in order to continue the boundary-line between Virginia and North Carolina across the dangerous Blue Ridge Mountains. He had been commissioned to certify that colonial America’s westernmost point had not become like Jamaica’s Blue Mountains, a haven for runaways.1
In time, Peter Jefferson’s mesmerizing stamina, strength, and courage on surveying trips became transfixed in family lore. Among the first to hear the stories was four-year-old Thomas, overjoyed when his father finally came home at the end of 1747. Thomas was Peter’s oldest son, born on April 13 during the memorable year of 1743. Cotton Mather’s missionary counterpart in Virginia, James Blair, died sixteen days after Thomas’s birth, marking the end of an era when theologians almost completely dominated the racial discourse in America. The year also marked the birth of a new intellectual era. “Enlightened” thinkers started secularizing and expanding the racist discourse throughout the colonies, tutoring future antislavery, anti-abolitionist, and anti-royal revolutionaries in Thomas Jefferson’s generation. And Cotton Mather’s greatest secular disciple led the way.
“THE FIRST DRUDGERY of settling new colonies is now pretty well over,” Benjamin Franklin observed in 1743, “and there are many in every province in circumstances that set them at ease, and afford leisure to cultivate the finer arts, and improve the common stock of knowledge.” At thirty-seven, Franklin’s circumstances certainly set him at ease. Since fleeing Boston, he had built an empire of stores, almanacs, and newspapers in Philadelphia. For men like him, who leisured about as their capital literally or figuratively worked for them, his observations about living at ease were no doubt true. Franklin founded the American Philosophical Society (APS) in 1743 in Philadelphia. Modeled after the Royal Society, the APS became the colonies’ first formal association of scholars since the Mathers’ Boston Society in the 1680s. Franklin’s scholarly baby died in infancy, but it was revived in 1767 with a commitment to “all philosophical Experiments that let Light into the Nature of Things.”2
THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION of the 1600s had given way to a greater intellectual movement in the 1700s. Secular knowledge, and notions of the propensity for universal human progress, had long been distrusted in Christian Europe. That changed with the dawn of an age that came to be known as les Lumières in France, Aufklärung in Germany, Illuminismo in Italy, and the Enlightenment in Great Britain and America.
For Enlightenment intellectuals, the metaphor of light typically had a double meaning. Europeans had rediscovered learning after a thousand years in religious darkness, and their bright continental beacon of insight existed in the midst of a “dark” world not yet touched by light. Light, then, became a metaphor for Europeanness, and therefore Whiteness, a notion that Benjamin Franklin and his philosophical society eagerly embraced and imported to the colonies. White colonists, Franklin alleged in Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind (1751), were “making this side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light.” Let us bar uneconomical slavery and Black people, Franklin suggested. “But perhaps,” he thought, “I am partial to the complexion of my Country, for such kind of partiality is natural to Mankind.” Enlightenment ideas gave legitimacy to this long-held racist “partiality,” the connection between lightness and Whiteness and reason, on the one hand, and between darkness and Blackness and ignorance, on the other.3
These Enlightenment counterpoints arose, conveniently, at a time when Western Europe’s triangular transatlantic trade was flourishing. Great Britain, France, and colonial America principally furnished ships and manufactured goods. The ships sailed to West Africa, and traders exchanged these goods, at a profit, for human merchandise. Manufactured cloth became the most sought-after item in eighteenth-century Africa for the same reason that cloth was coveted in Europe—nearly everyone in Africa (as in Europe) wore clothes, and nearly everyone in Africa (as in Europe) desired better clothes. Only the poorest of African people did not wear an upper garment, but this small number became representative in the European mind. It was the irony of the age: slave traders knew that cloth was the most desired commodity in both places, but at the same time some of them were producing the racist idea that Africans walked around naked like animals. Producers of this racist idea had to know their tales were false. But they went on producing them anyway to justify their lucrative commerce in human beings.4
The slave ships traveled from Africa to the Americas, where dealers exchanged at another profit the newly enslaved Africans for raw materials that had been produced by the long-enslaved Africans. The ships and traders returned home and began the process anew, providing a “triple stimulus” for European commerce (and a triple exploitation of African people). Practically all the coastal manufacturing and trading towns in the Western world developed an enriching connection to the transatlantic trade during the eighteenth century. Profits exploded with the growth and prosperity of the slave trade in Britain’s principal port, Richard Mather’s old preaching ground, Liverpool. The principal American slave-trading port was Newport, Rhode Island, and the proceeds produced mammoth fortunes that can be seen in the mansions still dotting the town’s historic waterfront.
In his 1745 book endorsing the slave-trading Royal African Company, famous economics writer Malachy Postlethwayt defined the British Empire as “a magnificent superstructure of American commerce and naval power, on an African foundation.” But another foundation lay beneath that foundation: those all-important producers of racist ideas, who ensured that this magnificent superstructure would continue to seem normal to potential resisters. Enlightenment intellectuals produced the racist idea that the growing socioeconomic inequities between England and Senegambia, Europe and Africa, the enslavers and enslaved, had to be God’s or nature’s or nurture’s will. Racist ideas clouded the discrimination, rationalized the racial disparities, defined the enslaved, as opposed to the enslavers, as the problem people. Antiracist ideas hardly made the dictionary of racial thought during the Enlightenment.5
Carl Linnaeus, the progenitor of Sweden’s Enlightenment, followed in the footsteps of François Bernier and took the lead classifying humanity into a racial hierarchy for the new intellectual and commercial age. In Systema Naturae, first published in 1735, Linnaeus placed humans at the pinnacle of the animal kingdom. He sliced the genus Homo into Homo sapiens (humans) and Homo troglodytes (ape), and so on, and further divided the single Homo sapiens species into four varieties. At the pinnacle of his human kingdom reigned H. sapiens europaeus: “Very smart, inventive. Covered by tight clothing. Ruled by law.” Then came H. sapiens americanus (“Ruled by custom”) and H. sapiens asiaticus (“Ruled by opinion”). He relegated humanity’s nadir, H. sapiens afer, to the bottom, calling this group “sluggish, lazy . . . [c]rafty, slow, careless. Covered by grease. Ruled by caprice,” describing, in particular, the “females with genital flap and elongated breasts.”6
Carl Linnaeus created a hierarchy within the animal kingdom and a hierarchy within the human kingdom, and this human hierarchy was based on race. His “enlightened” peers were also creating human hierarchies; within the European kingdom, they placed Irish people, Jews, Romani, and southern and eastern Europeans at the bottom. Enslavers and slave traders were creating similar ethnic hierarchies within the African kingdom. Enslaved Africans in North America were coming mainly from seven cultural-geopolitical regions: Angola (26 percent), Senegambia (20 percent), Nigeria (17 percent), Sierra Leone (11 percent), Ghana (11 percent), Ivory Coast (6 percent), and Benin (3 percent). Since the hierarchies were usually based on which ancestral groups were thought to make the best slaves, or whose ways most resembled those of Europeans, different enslavers with different needs and different cultures had different hierarchies. Generally, Angolans were classed as the most inferior Africans, since they were priced so cheaply in slave markets (due to their greater supply). Linnaeus classed the Khoi (or Hottentot) of South Africa as a divergent branch of humanity, Homo monstrosis monorchidei. Since the late seventeenth century, the Khoi people had been deemed “the missing link between human and ape species.”7
Making hierarchies of Black ethnic groups within the African kingdom can be termed ethnic racism, because it is at the intersection of ethnocentric and racist ideas, while making hierarchies pitting all Europeans over all Africans was simply racism. In the end, both classified a Black ethnic group as inferior. Standards of measurement for the ethnic groups within the African hierarchies were based on European cultural values and traits, and hierarchy-making was wielded in the service of a political project: enslavement. Senegambians were deemed superior to Angolans because they supposedly made better slaves, and because supposedly their ways were closer to European ways. Imported Africans in the Americas no doubt recognized the hierarchy of African peoples as quickly as imported White servants recognized the broader racial hierarchy. When and if Senegambians cast themselves as superior to Angolans to justify any relative privileges they received, Senegambians were espousing ethnically racist ideas, just like those Whites who used racist ideas to justify their White privileges. Whenever a Black person or group used White people as a standard of measurement, and cast another Black person or group as inferior, it was another instance of racism. Carl Linnaeus and company crafted one massive hierarchy of races and of ethnic groups within the races. The entire ladder and all of its steps—from the Greeks or Brits at the very top down to the Angolans and Hottentots at the bottom—everything bespoke ethnic racism. Some “superior” Africans agreed with the collection of ethnocentric steps for Africans, but rejected the racist ladder that deemed them inferior to White people. They smacked the racist chicken and enjoyed its racist eggs.8
Every traded African ethnic group was like a product, and slave traders seemed to be valuing and devaluing these ethnic products based on the laws of supply and demand. Linnaeus did not seem to be part of a grandiose scheme to force-feed ethnic racism to enslaved peoples to divide and conquer them. But whenever ethnic racism did set the natural allies on American plantations apart, in the manner that racism set the natural allies in American poverty apart, enslavers hardly minded. They were usually willing to deploy any tool—intellectual or otherwise—to suppress slave resistance and ensure returns on their investments.
VOLTAIRE, FRANCE’S ENLIGHTENMENT GURU, used Linnaeus’s racist ladder in the book of additions that supplemented his half-million-word Essay on Universal History in 1756. He agreed there was a permanent natural order of the species. He asked, “Were the flowers, fruits, trees, and animals with which nature covers the face of the earth, planted by her at first only in one spot, in order that they might be spread over the rest of the world?” No, he boldly declared. “The negro race is a species of men as different from ours as the breed of spaniels is from that of greyhound. . . . If their understanding is not of a different nature from ours it is at least greatly inferior.” The African people were like animals, he added, merely living to satisfy “bodily wants.” However, as a “warlike, hardy, and cruel people,” they were “superior” soldiers.9
With the publication of Essay on Universal History, Voltaire became the first prominent writer in almost a century daring enough to suggest polygenesis. The theory of separately created races was a contrast to the assimilationist idea of monogenesis, that is, of all humans as descendants of a White Adam and Eve. Voltaire emerged as the eighteenth century’s chief arbiter of segregationist thought, promoting the idea that the races were fundamentally separate, that the separation was immutable, and that the inferior Black race had no capability to assimilate, to be normal, or to be civilized and White. The Enlightenment shift to secular thought had thus opened the door to the production of more segregationist ideas. And segregationist ideas of permanent Black inferiority appealed to enslavers, because they bolstered their defense of the permanent enslavement of Black people.
Voltaire was intellectually at odds with naturalist Georges Louis Leclerc, who adopted the name Buffon. Buffon headed the moderate mainstream of the French Enlightenment through his encyclopedic Histoire naturelle (Natural history), which appeared in forty-five volumes over fifty-five years beginning in 1749. Nearly every European intellectual read them. And while Voltaire promoted segregationist thinking, Buffon remained committed to assimilationist ideas.
The argument over Voltaire’s multiple human species versus Buffon’s single human species was one aspect of a larger scientific divide during the Enlightenment era. Their beloved Sir Isaac Newton envisioned the natural world as an assembled machine running on “natural laws.” Newton did not explain how it was assembled. That was fine for Voltaire, who believed the natural world—including the races—to be unchangeable, even from God’s power. Buffon instead beheld an ever-changing world. Buffon and Voltaire did agree on one thing: they both opposed slavery. Actually, most of the leading Enlightenment intellectuals were producers of racist ideas and abolitionist thought.10
Buffon defined a species as “a constant succession of similar individuals that can reproduce together.” And since different races could reproduce together, they must be of the same species, he argued. Buffon was responding to some of the first segregationist denigrations of biracial people. Polygenesists were questioning or rejecting the reproductive capability of biracial people in order to substantiate their arguments for racial groups being separate species. If Blacks and Whites were separate species, then their offspring would be infertile. And so the word mulatto, which came from “mule,” came into being, because mules were the infertile offspring of horses and donkeys. In the eighteenth century, the adage “black as the devil” battled for popularity in the English-speaking world with “God made the white man, the devil made the mulatto.”11
Buffon distinguished six races or varieties of a single human species (and the Khoi people of South Africa he placed with monkeys). He positioned Africans “between the extremes of barbarism and of civilization.” They had “little knowledge” of the “arts and sciences,” and their language was “without rules,” said Buffon. As a climate theorist and monogenesist, Buffon did not believe these qualities were fixed in stone. If Africans were imported to Europe, then their color would gradually change and become “perhaps as white as the natives” of Europe. It was in Europe where “we behold the human form in its greatest perfection,” and where “we ought to form our ideas of the real and natural colour of man.” Buffon sounded like the foundational thinker of modern European art history, Johann Joachim Winckelmann of Germany. “A beautiful body will be all the more beautiful the whiter it is,” Winckelmann said in his disciplinary classic, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (History of the Art of Antiquity) in 1764. These were the “enlightened” ideas on race that Benjamin Franklin’s American Philosophical Society and a young Thomas Jefferson were consuming and importing to America on the eve of the American Revolution.12
PETER JEFFERSON ACQUIRED around twelve hundred acres in Virginia’s Albemarle County and went on to represent the county in the House of Burgesses, Virginia’s legislative body. Shadwell, his tobacco plantation, sat about five miles east of the current center of Charlottesville. The Jefferson home was a popular rest stop for nearby Cherokees and Catawbas on their regular diplomatic journeys to Williamsburg. The young Thomas Jefferson “acquired impressions of attachment and commiseration for them which have never been obliterated,” he reminisced years later.13
While Thomas was raised on the common sight of distinguished Native American visitors, he commonly saw African people as house workers tending to his every need as well as field workers tending to tobacco. In 1745, someone brought a two-year-old Thomas Jefferson out of Shadwell’s big house. Thomas was held up to a woman on horseback who placed him on a pillow secured to the horse. The rider, who was a slave, took the boy for a ride to a relative’s plantation. This was Thomas Jefferson’s earliest childhood memory. It associated slavery with comfort. The slave was entrusted with looking after him, and on his soft saddle he felt safe and secure, later recalling the woman as “kind and gentle.”14
When he played with African boys years later, Thomas learned more about slaveholding. As he recalled, “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 passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities.”15
In his home, no one around him saw anything wrong with the tyranny. Slavery was as customary as prisons are today. Few could imagine an ordered world without them. Peter Jefferson had accumulated almost sixty captives by the 1750s, which made him the second-largest slaveholder in Albemarle County. Peter preached to his children the importance of self-reliance—oblivious of the contradiction—to which he credited his own success.
Peter did not, however, preach to his son the importance of religion. In fact, when Virginia’s First Great Awakening reached the area, it bypassed the Shadwell plantation. Peter did not allow Samuel Davies, who almost single-handedly brought the Awakening to Virginia, to minister to his children or his captives. It is likely that Peter believed—like many of his slaveholding peers—“that Christianizing the Negroes makes them proud and saucy, and tempts them to imagine themselves upon an equality with the white people,” as Davies reported in his most celebrated sermon in 1757. Some American planters had been sold on Davies’s viewpoint that “some should be Masters and some Servants,” and more were open to converting their captives than ever before. But not enough of them to satisfy Cotton Mather’s likeminded missionaries, who agreed with Davies that “a good Christian will always be a good Servant.” Enslavers commonly “let [slaves] live on in their Pagan darkness,” fearing Christianity would incite their resistance, observed a visiting Swede, Peter Kalm, in the late 1740s. Twenty years later, irritable Virginia planter Landon Carter fumed about Blacks being “devils,” adding, “to make them otherwise than slaves will be to set devils free.”16
Not all Christian missionaries were protecting slavery by preaching Christian submission in the mid-eighteenth century. In 1742, New Jersey native John Woolman, a store clerk, was asked to write a bill of sale for an unnamed African woman. He began to question the institution and soon kicked off what became a legendary traveling ministry, spreading Quakerism and antislavery. After his first Quaker mission in the harrowing slaveholding South in 1746, Woolman jotted down Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes.17
“We are in a high Station, and enjoy greater Favours than they,” Woolman theorized. God had endowed White Christians with “distinguished Gifts.” By sanctioning slavery, America was “misusing his Gifts.” Woolman planted his groundbreaking abolitionist tree in the same racist soil that proslavery theologians like Cotton Mather—preaching divine slavery—had used a century ago. Their divergences over slavery itself obscured their parallel political racism that denied Black people self-determination. Mather’s proslavery theological treatises proclaimed masters divinely charged to care for the degraded race of natural servants. Woolman’s antislavery treatise proclaimed Christians to be divinely charged with “greater Favours” to emancipate, Christianize, and care for the degraded slaves. But whether they were to be given eternal slavery or eventual emancipation, enslaved Africans would be acted upon as dependent children reliant on White enslavers or abolitionists for their fate.18
John Woolman bided his time before submitting his essay to the press of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. Woolman knew the history of Quakers quarreling over slavery, of abolitionists disrupting meetings and being banished. He cared just as much about his Quaker ministry and Quaker unity as he did antislavery. In 1752, when abolitionist Anthony Benezet was elected to the press’s editorial board, Woolman knew the time was right to publish his eight-year-old essay. By early 1754, Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette was advertising the new publication of Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes.
By the end of the year, some Quakers had started to move like never before against slavery, pushed by Benezet and Woolman and the contradictions of Christian slavery. Benezet had edited Woolman’s essay. If Woolman thrived in privacy, Benezet thrived in public, and the two reformers made a dynamic duo of antislavery activists. In September 1754, the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting approved for publication the Epistle of Caution and Advice Concerning the Buying and Keeping of Slaves. In the Epistle, antislavery reformers struck a compromise, urging Quakers to buy no more slaves. The writers evoked the Golden Law on the sixty-sixth uncelebrated anniversary of the Germantown Petition. Benezet initiated the writing of the Epistle and incorporated input from Woolman. Hundreds of copies were shipped to the quarterly meetings in the Delaware Valley. The front door of American Quakerism had officially been opened to antislavery. But Quaker masters quickly slammed the doors to their separate rooms. Seventy percent refused to free their captives. Woolman learned firsthand of their dogged refusal when he ventured into Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina in 1757.19
Slavery’s defenders spewed many racist ideas, ranging from Blacks being a backward people, to them living better in America than in Africa, to the curse of Ham. It “troubled” Woolman “to perceive the darkness of their imagination.” He never faltered in shooting back, in his calm, compassionate way. No one is inferior in God’s eyes, he stressed. They had not imported Africans for their own good, as demonstrated by their constant abuse, overwork, starvation, and scarce clothing.20
In 1760, Woolman traveled to the Rhode Island homes of some of colonial America’s wealthiest slave-traders. Their “smooth conduct” and “superficial friendship” nearly lured him away from antislavery. He ventured back home to New Jersey as he had done from the South years earlier—dragging a heavy bag of thoughts. In arguing against slavery over the years, he found himself arguing against African inferiority, and thus arguing against himself. He had to rethink whether White people were in fact bestowed a “high Station.” In 1762, he updated Considerations on Keeping Negroes.21
We must speak out against slavery “from a love of equity,” Woolman avowed in the second part of the pamphlet. He dropped the rhetoric of greater “Favours” in a racial sense, although it remained in a religious sense. His antiracism shined. “Placing on Men the ignominious Title SLAVE, dressing them in uncomely Garments, keeping them to servile Labour . . . tends gradually to fix a Nation in the mind, that they are a Sort of People below us in Nature,” stated Woolman. But Whites should not connect slavery “with the Black Colour, and Liberty with the White,” because “where false Ideas are twisted into our Minds, it is with Difficulty we get fair disentangled.” In matters of right and equity, “the Colour of a Man avails nothing.”22
Woolman’s antiracism was ahead of its time, like his passionate sermons against poverty, animal cruelty, military conscription, and war. But Woolman’s antislavery in the 1750s and 1760s was right on time for the American Revolution, a political upheaval that forced freedom fighters of Thomas Jefferson’s generation to address their relationships with slavery.23
DR. THOMAS WALKER’S remedies did not work, and when his patient, the forty-nine-year-old father of Thomas Jefferson, died on August 17, 1757, it was an unbelievable sight for all who had heard the family lore of Peter Jefferson’s strength. The fourteen-year-old Thomas had to run his own life. As the oldest male, he now headed the household, according to Virginia’s patriarchal creed. But by all accounts, the thirty-seven-year-old Jane Randolph Jefferson did not look to her fourteen-year-old son for guidance, or to Dr. Walker, the estate’s overseer. She became the manager of eight children, sixty-six enslaved people, and at least 2,750 acres. Jane Jefferson was sociable, fond of luxury, and meticulous about keeping the plantation’s records—traits she bestowed upon Thomas.24
In 1760, Thomas Jefferson enrolled in the College of William & Mary, where he thoroughly immersed himself in Enlightenment thought, including its antislavery ideas. He studied under the newly hired twenty-six-year-old Enlightenment intellectual William Small of Scotland, who taught that reason, not religion, should command human affairs, a lesson that would inform Jefferson’s views about government. Jefferson also read Buffon’s Natural History, and he studied Francis Bacon, John Locke, and Isaac Newton, a trio he later called “the three greatest men the world has ever produced.”
When Jefferson graduated in 1762, he entered the informal law school of Virginia’s leading lawyer, George Wythe, well known for his legal mind and taste for luxury. Admitted to the bar at twenty-four years old in 1767, Jefferson stepped into the political whirlwind of the House of Burgesses, representing Albemarle County like his father had. The Burgesses protested England’s latest imposition of taxes, prompting Virginia’s royal governor to close their doors on May 17, 1769. Jefferson had been seated all of ten days.25
Even after he lost his seat, Jefferson actively participated in the growing hostilities to England and to slavery. He took the freedom suit of twenty-seven-year-old fugitive Samuel Howell. Virginia law prescribed thirty years of servitude for first-generation biracial children of free parents “to prevent that abominable mixture of white man or women with negroes or mulattoes.” Howell was second generation, and Jefferson told the court that it was wicked to extend slavery, because “under the law of nature, all men are born free.” Wythe, the opposing attorney, stood up to start his rejoinder. The judge ordered Wythe back down and ruled against Jefferson. The law in the colonies was still staunchly proslavery, and racial laws were becoming staunchly segregationist. But then, suddenly, a Boston panel of judges reversed the ideological trend.26