ON JUNE 7, 1776, the delegates at the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia decided to draft an independence document. The task fell to a thirty-three-year-old marginal delegate, who distinguished himself as a willing and talented writer as he carried out their instructions. The older and more distinguished delegates felt they had more important things to do: addressing the convention, drafting state constitutions, and wartime planning.1
For years, European intellectuals like France’s Buffon and England’s Samuel Johnson had projected Americans, their ways, their land, their animals, and their people as naturally inferior to everything European. Thomas Jefferson disagreed. At the beginning of the Declaration of Independence, he paraphrased the Virginia constitution, indelibly penning: “all Men are created equal.”
It is impossible to know for sure whether Jefferson meant to include his enslaved laborers (or women) in his “all Men.” Was he merely emphasizing the equality of White Americans and the English? Later in the document, he did scold the British for “exciting those very people to rise in arms among us”—those “people” being resisting Africans. Did Jefferson insert “created equal” as a nod to the swirling debate between monogenesis and polygenesis? Even if Jefferson believed all groups to be “created equal,” he never believed the antiracist creed that all human groups are equal. But his “all Men are created equal” was revolutionary nonetheless; it even propelled Vermont and Massachusetts to abolish slavery. To uphold polygenesis and slavery, six southern slaveholding states inserted “All freemen are created equal” into their constitutions.2
Continuing the Declaration, Jefferson maintained that “Men” were “endowed by their creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, & the pursuit of happiness.” As a holder of nearly two hundred people with no known plans to free them, Thomas Jefferson authored the heralded American philosophy of freedom. What did it mean for Jefferson to call “liberty” an “inalienable right” when he enslaved people? It is not hard to figure out what Native Americans, enslaved Africans, and indentured White servants meant when they demanded liberty in 1776. But what about Jefferson and other slaveholders like him, whose wealth and power were dependent upon their land and their slaves? Did they desire unbridled freedom to enslave and exploit? Did they perceive any reduction in their power to be a reduction in their freedom? For these rich men, freedom was not the power to make choices; freedom was the power to create choices. England created the choices, the policies American elites had to abide by, just as planters created choices and policies that laborers had to follow. Only power gave Jefferson and other wealthy White colonists freedom from England. For Jefferson, power came before freedom. Indeed, power creates freedom, not the other way around—as the powerless are taught.
“To secure these rights,” Jefferson continued, “it is the right of the people . . . to institute a new government . . . organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety & happiness.” As Jefferson sat forward on his Windsor chair and penned this thrilling call for revolutionary action, thousands of Africans were taking matters into their own hands, too, running away from their plantations, setting up their own governments on the frontier, or fighting with the British—all to “effect their safety & happiness.” In South Carolina, there emerged a three-sided conflict, with as many as 20,000 Africans asserting their own interests. An estimated two-thirds of enslaved Africans in Georgia ran away. According to Jefferson’s own calculations, Virginia lost as many as 30,000 enslaved Africans in a single year. Of course, racist planters could not admit that Black runaways were self-reliant enough to effect their own safety and happiness—to be free. South Carolina planters blamed British soldiers for “stealing” Blacks or persuading them to “desert” their masters.3
Thomas Jefferson only really handed revolutionary license to his band of wealthy, White, male revolutionaries. He criminalized runaways in the Declaration of Independence, and he silenced women. Boston delegate John Adams sent a letter home to his wife, Abigail, to “laugh” at her strivings for women’s rights. White “children and Apprentices were disobedient” as a result of “our struggle,” Adams said the delegates had been told. “Indians slighted their guardians and Negroes grew insolent to their Masters.” Now she had informed him that women were also “discontented.”4
After outlining more justifications for independence in his Declaration, Jefferson listed the “long train of abuses & usurpations” by the British monopolists, like “cutting off our trade with all parts of the world.” The inability of American merchants and planters to do business with merchants and planters outside the British Empire had checked their freedoms in buying and selling African people to and from anyone, in buying cheaper or better products from non-British sources, in selling their slave-grown crops and manufactured goods outside of Britannica, and in escaping the subjugation of British merchants and banks. Jefferson and his freedom-fighting class of aspiring international free traders gained a powerful ally in 1776. Scottish philosopher Adam Smith condemned England’s trade acts for constraining the “free” market in his instant best seller, The Wealth of Nations. To this founding father of capitalist economics, the wealth of nations stemmed from a nation’s productive capacity, a productive capacity African nations lacked. “All the inland parts of Africa,” he scripted, “seem in all ages of the world to have been in the same barbarous and uncivilized state in which we find them at present.” Meanwhile, Smith praised Americans for “contriving a new form of government for an extensive empire, which . . . seems very likely to become, one of the greatest and most formidable that ever was in the world.” The founding fathers beamed reading Adam Smith’s prediction. Jefferson later called Wealth of Nations “the best book extant” on political economy.5
Jefferson saved the worst of the king’s abuses for last in his Declaration. Ever the lawyer, ever the wordsmith, he fought back against Samuel Johnson’s charge of American hypocrisy. The English crown, Jefferson wrote, which had prevented Americans from abolishing slavery, was now freeing and arming enslaved Africans to maintain British enslavement over Americans, “thus paying off former crimes committed against the LIBERTIES of one people, with crimes which [the king] urged them to commit against the LIVES of another.”6
Rhode Island pastor Samuel Hopkins, an antislavery Puritan, would have found Jefferson’s passage laughable. He had just sent the congress A Dialogue concerning the Slavery of the Africans. Americans’ so-called enslavement to the British was “lighter than a feather” compared to Africans’ enslavement to Americans, Hopkins argued. The electrifying antiracist pamphlet nearly overshadowed the Quakers’ demand in 1776 for all Friends to manumit their slaves or face banishment. “Our education has filled us with strong prejudices against them,” Hopkins professed, “and led us to consider them, not as our brethren, or in any degree on a level with us; but as quite another species of animals, made only to serve us and our children.” Hopkins became the first major Christian leader outside of the Society of Friends to forcefully oppose slavery, but he sat lonely on the pew of antislavery in 1776. Other preachers stayed away from the pew, and so did the delegates declaring independence. No one had to tell them that their revolutionary avowals were leaking in contradictions. Nothing could persuade slaveholding American patriots to put an end to their inciting proclamations of British slavery, or to their enriching enslavement of African people. Forget contradictions. Both were in their political and economic self-interest.7
By July 2, 1776, the resolution to declare independence had passed. The delegates then peered over Jefferson’s draft like barbers over a head of hair. Every time they trimmed, changed, or added something, the hypersensitive Jefferson sank deeper into his chair. Benjamin Franklin, sitting next to him, failed to cheer him up. The delegates cut Jefferson’s long passage calling the English hypocrites. Apparently, delegates from South Carolina and Georgia disliked Jefferson’s characterization of slavery as a “cruel war against human nature”; that language threatened the foundation of their vast estates. The delegates finished making their revisions of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.8
OVER THE NEXT five years, the fighting remained pitched. But the British failed to crush the revolt. On January 5, 1781, in one of their last-ditch efforts, the Redcoats reached the outskirts of Richmond. British soldiers were hunting Virginia’s governor as if he were a runaway. With 10,000 acres of land in his possession to choose from, Governor Thomas Jefferson hid his family on an inherited property about ninety miles southwest of Monticello. There, in hiding, Jefferson finally found the time to answer the twenty-three “Queries” that French diplomat François Barbé-Marbois had sent to the thirteen American governors in 1780.
The Frenchman asked for information on each colony’s history, government, natural resources, geography, and population. Only a few responded, none as comprehensively as Thomas Jefferson. A new member of Philadelphia’s American Philosophical Society, Jefferson had collected thousands of books for his Monticello library and enjoyed a scholarly challenge. He titled his book of answers Notes on the State of Virginia. He wrote for French diplomats and intellectuals as well as close friends in America. He sent Barbé-Marbois the manuscript by the end of 1781.
With no intention to publish, Jefferson unabashedly expressed his views on Black people, and in particular on potentially freed Black people. “Incorporating the [freed] blacks into the state” was out of the question, he declared. “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.” This hodgepodge of thoughts was classic Jefferson, classically both antislavery and anti-abolition—with a segregationist dose of nature’s distinctions, and an antiracist dose acknowledging White prejudice and discrimination.9
Revolutionary War general George Washington had a different take on the prejudices. When asked to join an antislavery petition campaign in 1785, he did not think the time was right. “It would be dangerous to make a frontal attack on a prejudice which is beginning to decrease,” Washington advised. Prejudice beginning to decrease in 1785? However General Washington came to this conclusion, the soon-to-be first president sounded one of the first drumbeats of supposed racial progress to drown out the passionate arguments of antiracism.10
Thomas Jefferson did propose a frontal attack on slavery in Notes on the State of Virginia, a plan he would endorse for the rest of his life: the mass schooling, emancipation, and colonization of Africans back to Africa. Jefferson, who enslaved Blacks at Monticello, listed “the real distinctions which nature has made,” that is, those traits that he believed made free Black incorporation into the new nation impossible. Whites were more beautiful, he wrote, as shown by Blacks’ “preference of them.” He was paraphrasing Edward Long (and John Locke) in the passage—but it was still ironic that the observation came from the pen of a man who may have already preferred a Black woman.11
Black people had a memory on par with Whites, Jefferson continued, but “in reason [were] much inferior.” He then paused to mask his racist ideas in scientific neutrality: “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.” On this “same stage,” he could “never . . . find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never saw an elementary trait of painting or sculpture.” “Religion,” he said, “indeed has produced a Phyllis Wheatley; but it could not produce a poet.”12
With Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson emerged as the preeminent American authority on Black intellectual inferiority. This status would persist over the next fifty years. Jefferson did not mention the innumerable enslaved Africans who learned to be highly intelligent blacksmiths, shoemakers, bricklayers, coopers, carpenters, engineers, manufacturers, artisans, musicians, farmers, midwives, physicians, overseers, house managers, cooks, and bi- and trilingual translators—all of the workers who made his Virginia plantation and many others almost entirely self-sufficient. Jefferson had to ignore his own advertisements for skilled runaways and the many advertisements from other planters calling for the return of their valuable skilled captives, who were “remarkably smart and sensible,” and “very ingenious at any work.” One wonders whether Jefferson really believed his own words. Did Jefferson really believe Black people were smart in slavery and stupid in freedom?13
Notes on the State of Virginia was replete with other contradictory ideas about Black people. “They are at least as brave, and more adventuresome” than Whites, because they lacked the forethought to see “danger till it be present,” Jefferson wrote. Africans felt love more, but they felt pain less, he said, and “their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection.” That is why they were disposed “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.” But on the previous page, Jefferson cast Blacks as requiring “less sleep. A black, after hard labour through the day, will be induced by the slightest amusements to sit up till midnight.” In Jefferson’s vivid imagination, lazy Blacks desired to sleep more than Whites, but, as physical savants, they required less sleep.14
While Jefferson confidently labeled enslaved Africans as inferior to Roman slaves, for Native Americans he cried that the comparison “would be unequal.” While confidently making distinctions between Blacks and Whites, Jefferson equated Native Americans and Whites. As he told François-Jean de Chastellux, who served as liaison between the French and American militaries during the Revolutionary War, Native Americans were “in body and mind equal to the whiteman.” He “supposed the blackman in his present state, might not be so”: “But it would be hazardous to affirm that, equally cultivated for a few generations, he would not become so.” For Jefferson, clarity always seemed to be lacking when it came to racial conceptions. This note proved to be the clearest expression of his assimilationist ideas.
The reason for Native Americans having fewer children than Whites was “not in a difference of nature, but of circumstance,” Jefferson argued. For Black people, the opposite was true. “The blacks,” he said, “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.” The ambitious politician, maybe fearful of alienating potential friends, maybe torn between Enlightenment antislavery and American proslavery, maybe honestly unsure, did not pick sides between polygenesists and monogenesists, between segregationists and assimilationists, between slavery and freedom. But he did pick the side of racism.15
IN 1782, JEFFERSON had no plans to publish Notes on the State of Virginia. He was busy putting his life back together, a life torn apart by thirteen years of public service, and by months of being hunted by the British. War had shattered Jefferson’s past. Martha Jefferson’s death on September 6 of that year shattered his future. He had planned to retire and grow old as a planter and scholar in the seclusion of Monticello next to his wife. Overnight, the sanctuary of Monticello became the caged pen of Monticello, bordered by bars of wounding memories. He had to escape. His friends in Congress found a solution.16
On August 6, 1784, Jefferson arrived in Paris for a new diplomatic stint eager to take advantage of the shopping, the shows, the culture, and the trading prospects. The same week that he made contact with the French foreign minister, Jefferson sent instructions to Monticello to speed up production. He figured that his own captives, and his nation’s captives, would be tasked for the foreseeable future with producing enough tobacco for French merchants to pay back British creditors. At the same time, Jefferson was busy telling abolitionists, “Nobody wishes more ardently [than me] to see an abolition.” Jefferson loathed slavery almost as much as he feared losing American freedom to British banks, or losing his pampered lifestyle in Monticello. He liked and disliked both freedom and slavery, and he never divorced himself from either.17
Economic diplomacy was Jefferson’s official job. His hobby was science, and he partnered with Benjamin Franklin, who was also in Paris, to defend America from French onslaughts of American inferiority. Jefferson brought his still unpublished Notes on the State of Virginia and “an uncommonly large panther skin” in his baggage. He had two hundred English copies of his Notes printed in Paris in 1785. He sent the manuscript to French intellectuals, to Benjamin Franklin, and to John Adams, James Madison, and James Monroe. A copy reached a devious printer who without Jefferson’s approval translated it into French in 1786. Jefferson arranged for an English edition to be released in London on his own terms in the summer of 1787. Thereafter, Notes on the State of Virginia would become the most consumed American nonfiction book until well into the mid-nineteenth century.
Count Constantine Volney, known in France as Herodotus’s biographer, was putting his finishing touches on Travels in Syria and Egypt when he read Notes and befriended its author. When Volney first saw the Sphinx in Egypt, he remembered Herodotus—the foremost historian in ancient Greece—describing the “black and frizzled hair” of the ancient Egyptians. Making the connection to the present, Volney mused, “To the race of negroes, at present our slaves, and the objects of our extreme contempt, we owe our arts, sciences, and even the use of speech itself.” American racists ridiculed Volney as an ignorant worshiper of Black people when he visited the United States in 1796. Not Jefferson. He invited Volney and his antiracist ideas and his history of Black ancient Egypt to Monticello. How could Jefferson—the authority of Black intellectual inferiority—look to Volney as the authority of ancient Egypt? Clearly, scientific truths were forever tugging at his self-interests.18
Thomas Jefferson visited southern France and northern Italy in February 1787. “If I should happen to die in Paris I will beg of you to send me here,” Jefferson wrote in awe of the beautiful countryside of Aix-en-Provence. When he returned to Paris in June, he may have noticed a copy of the year’s annual oration of the American Philosophical Society (APS), which had been delivered by Princeton theologian Samuel Stanhope Smith. The annual APS oration was the most heralded scholarly lecture in the new nation, and APS members were a who’s who of American power: men like Ben Franklin of Pennsylvania, Alexander Hamilton of New York, and Virginia’s Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington. Smith’s oration before APS stood for all intents and purposes as the first great domestic challenge to Jefferson’s Notes.19
Smith had been pondering assimilationist climate theory for some time. He may have learned it first from Buffon, or from James Bowdoin’s opening oration of the newly established American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston on May 4, 1780. As the founder and first president of the Academy, as one of Massachusetts’ political leaders, Bowdoin’s address to some of the nation’s leading intellectuals and politicians in Boston probably circulated down to Smith’s New Jersey. If the “natural faculties” of Europeans and Africans were “unequal, as probably is the case,” Bowdoin proclaimed, then we know the reason: climate. Hot climates destroyed the mind and body. In moderate climates in northern America and Europe, humankind would be “capable of greater exertions of both mind and body.” Samuel Stanhope Smith may also have learned climate theory from John Morgan, the founder of the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school. Morgan exhibited two whitening two-year-olds to APS members in 1784. “We meet with few negroes of so beautiful a form,” Morgan said at the time.20
Samuel Stanhope Smith titled his 1787 lecture “An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species.” He described two causes of human variety: climate and state of society. Hot weather bred physical disorders—like kinky hair, which was “the farthest removed from the ordinary laws of nature.” Cold weather was “followed by a contrary effect”: it cured these ailments, Smith suggested, leaning on Buffon.
In addition to changing climate, a change in the state of society could remove the stamp of Blackness, Smith maintained. Just look at the house slaves. In their nearness to White society, they were acquiring “the agreeable and regular features” of civilized society—light complexion, straight hair, thin lips. “Europeans, and Americans are, the most beautiful people in the world, chiefly, because their state of society is the most improved.” In the end, this assimilationist made sure to disassociate himself from Lord Kames and polygenesis. From only “one pair”—Adam and Eve in Europe—“all of the families of the earth [have] sprung,” Smith closed.21
Using European features as the standard of measurement, Smith judged light skin and thin lips on Blacks to be more beautiful than dark skin and full lips. He also distinguished between “good hair”—the straighter and longer the better—and “bad hair,” the kinkier and shorter the worse. He positioned biracial people as superior to African people.
In slavery and freedom, as usually the offspring of planters, biracial people oftentimes benefited from a higher social status than people of only African descent, and often they experienced less discrimination as well. Biracial people were probably more likely to have to perform the backbreaking tasks of the household, and they were often under closer supervision by planters than the slaves in the field, which could be just as backbreaking in a way, if not sexually abusive. Despite their elevated status, they still felt terror of the enslavers, and some antiracist biracial people partnered with Africans to resist White supremacy. Others were no different from White racists in their thinking, discriminating against dark-skinned Blacks, and rationalizing the discrimination, and their elevated status, through notions of their own superiority. In the late eighteenth century, biracial people in Charleston barred dark-skinned people from their business network, the Brown Fellowship Society. In response, the Society of Free Dark Men appeared in that South Carolina town.22
The American Philosophical Society thanked Samuel Stanhope Smith for “his ingenious and learned Oration” in the minutes. After outlining the position of climate theorists—seemingly the dominant strain of racial thought among northern elites—Smith added a long appendix to the published pamphlet attacking Lord Kames and polygenesis. Races were not fixed and “fitted for different climates,” Smith argued. “The Goths, the Mogus, the Africans have become infinitely meliorated by changing those skies, for which it is said they were peculiarly fitted by nature.” Smith breathlessly asserted that the slave trade—the cause of millions of deaths—had substantially improved the African condition.23
Samuel Stanhope Smith joined those preeminent intellectuals in Boston’s American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Philadelphia’s American Philosophical Society in attacking polygenesists, in reviving climate theory in America. His scholarly defense of scripture was quickly printed in Philadelphia, in London, and in Lord Kames’s backyard, Edinburgh. By the time he sat down in Princeton’s presidential chair in 1795, he had amassed an international scholarly reputation.
FROM HIS HOME in Paris, Jefferson was closely following—but not closely influencing—the events of the Constitutional Convention. It had begun in Philadelphia on May 25, 1787, months after Samuel Stanhope Smith had addressed some of the delegates on race. Jefferson’s powerful Declaration of Independence had resulted in years of violent struggle against the British, and then in a weak and powerless Confederation of states. Faced with an empty national treasury, erratic trade policies, international disrespect, and fears of the union falling apart, American leaders returned to the nation-building table. If it was left up to the delegates, some of whom were APS members, Smith’s annual oration would have been the Philadelphia convention’s only serious discussion of race and slavery that year.
In fact, delegates made it clear that slavery would be left out of the conversation. Antislavery discussions were disallowed in drawing up what the writers were pegging as humankind’s ultimate constitution of freedom. It only took a few weeks, though, for slavery and its baggage to creep into the constitutional deliberations. Once opened, the question of slavery never left.
The constitutional debate centered on the issue of the states’ representation in the federal legislature. On a scorching hot June 11, 1787, South Carolina delegate John Rutledge rose at Independence Hall. The former South Carolina governor and future chief justice of the US Supreme Court motioned once again for representation based on taxes (since slaveholding states paid disproportionately high taxes, and thus would monopolize political power). Rutledge was seconded once more by fellow South Carolinian Major Pierce Butler, owner of five hundred people by 1793. Pennsylvania’s James Wilson, another future Supreme Court justice, practically forecasted Rutledge’s motion and had a plan. Rutledge may have been in on that plan.
Wilson offered an alternative: “representation in proportion to the whole number of white & other free Citizens & inhabitants . . . and three-fifths of all other persons not comprehended in the foregoing description, except Indians not paying taxes.” The only delegate who pounced on the three-fifths “compromise” was Massachusetts abolitionist and future vice president Elbridge Gerry. “Blacks are property, and are used [in the South] . . . as horses and cattle are [in the North],” Gerry stammered out. So “why should their representation be increased to the southward on account of the number of slaves, [rather] than [on the basis of] horses or oxen to the north?”
Gerry looked around. Silence looked back. No one was prepared to answer the unanswerable. A vote sprung from the quietness: 9–2 in favor of the three-fifths clause. A deadlocked Massachusetts abstained. Only New Jersey and Delaware voted against Wilson’s compromise.24
Equating enslaved Blacks to three-fifths of all other (White) persons matched the ideology of racists on both sides of the aisle. Both assimilationists and segregationists argued, yet with different premises and conclusions, that Black people were simultaneously human and subhuman. Assimilationists stridently declared the capability of sub-White, sub-human Blacks to become whole, five-fifths, White, one day. For segregationists, three-fifths offered a mathematical approximation of inherent and permanent Black inferiority. They may have disagreed on the rationale and the question of permanence, but seemingly all embraced Black inferiority—and in the process enshrined the power of slaveholders and racist ideas in the nation’s founding document.
By September 17, 1787, delegates in Philadelphia had extracted “slave” and “slavery” from the signed US Constitution to hide their racist enslavement policies. These policies hardly fit with securing “the Blessing of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Then again, for the delegates, slavery brought freedom. And other policies of the US Constitution, such as empowering federal troops to suppress slave revolts and deliver up runaways like “criminals,” ensured slavery’s continuance. The language was taken from the Northwest Ordinance, which had been issued earlier in the year. It forbade Blacks, slave or free, in territories north of Ohio and east of Mississippi. After a bitter debate, the delegates in Philadelphia put in place provisions for eliminating the slave trade in twenty years, a small triumph, since only Georgia and North Carolina allowed slave imports in the summer of 1787.25
ON JULY 15, 1787, eight-year-old Polly Jefferson and fourteen-year-old Sally Hemings reached Jefferson’s Paris doorstep. Sally Hemings had come to Monticello as an infant in 1773 as part of Martha Jefferson’s inheritance from her father. John Wayles had fathered six children with his biracial captive Elizabeth Hemings. Sally was the youngest. By 1787, she was reportedly “very handsome, [with] long straight hair down her back,” and she accompanied Polly to Paris instead of an “old nurse.”26
As his peers penned the US Constitution, Jefferson began a sexual relationship with Sally Hemings. Her older brother James, meanwhile, was training as a chef in Paris to satisfy Jefferson’s gustatory desires. Hemings was more or less forced to settle for the overtures of a sexually aggressive forty-four-year-old (Jefferson also pursued a married local Frenchwoman at the time). Jefferson pursued Hemings as he arranged for the publication of Notes in London. He did not revise his previously stated opinions about Blacks; nor did he remove the passage about Whites being more beautiful than Blacks.27
Jefferson had always assailed interracial relationships between White women and Black or biracial men. Before arriving in Paris, he had lobbied, unsuccessfully, for Virginia’s White women to be banished (instead of merely fined) for bearing the child of a Black or biracial man. Even after his measure was defeated, even after his relations with Hemings began, and even after the relations matured and he had time to reflect on his own hypocrisy, Jefferson did not stop proclaiming his public position. “Amalgamation with the other color, produces degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence in the human character, can innocently consent,” he wrote in 1814, after he had fathered several biracial children. Like so many men who spoke out against “amalgamation” in public, and who degraded Black or biracial women’s beauty in public, Jefferson hid his actual views in the privacy of his mind and bedroom.28
In 1789, Jefferson had a front-row seat to the anti-royal unrest in Paris that launched the French Revolution. He assisted his friend the Marquis de Lafayette in writing the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, adopted in August, weeks before his departure. But while putting the starting touches on the French Revolution and the finishing touches on the American Revolution, Jefferson had to deal with a revolt from sixteen-year-old Sally Hemings. She was pregnant with his child, refused to return to slavery, and planned to petition French officials for her freedom. Jefferson did the only thing he could do: “He promised her extraordinary privileges, and made a solemn pledge that her children should be freed,” according to an account Hemings told their son Madison. “In consequence of his promise, on which she implicitly relied, she returned with him to Virginia,” Madison wrote in his diary. Hemings gave birth to at least five and possibly as many as seven children from Jefferson, a paternity confirmed by DNA tests and documents proving they were together nine months prior to the birth of each of Sally’s children. Some of the children died young, but Jefferson kept his word and freed their remaining children when they reached adulthood.29
Upon his return from Paris, Jefferson agreed, after some wavering, to become the first US secretary of state in George Washington’s inaugural administration. Beginning his tenure on March 22, 1790, Jefferson quickly felt uncomfortable surrounded by all those aristocratic, anti-republican cabinet members in America’s first political party, the Federalists. Vice President John Adams was questioning the effectiveness of “equal laws.” Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton was quietly calling for a monarchy; he wanted to hand control of the economy over to financiers, and he pushed for close (or, in Jefferson’s conception, subordinate) economic ties to Britain. Jefferson took solace watching the French Revolution. That is, until it spilled over into Haiti. In 1790, Haiti’s enslavers saw the Declaration of the Rights of Man (Article 1: “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights”) as a green light for their independence drive and for their demands for new trade relations to increase their wealth. Free and affluent biracial activists numbering almost 30,000 (slightly less than the White population) started driving for their civil rights. Close to half a million enslaved Africans, who were producing about half the world’s sugar and coffee in the most profitable European colony in the world, heard these curious cries for rights and liberty among the island’s free people. On August 22, 1791, enslaved Africans revolted, inspired in more ways than one by Vodou priest Dutty Boukman. They emerged as the fourth faction in the civil war between White royalists, White independence seekers, and free biracial activists.30
It was a civil war that no slaveholder, including Thomas Jefferson, wanted enslaved Africans to win. If these Black freedom fighters could declare their independence and win it on the richest soil of the Americas, then their nation would become the hemispheric symbol of freedom, not Jefferson’s United States. Enslaved peoples everywhere would be inspired by that symbol and fight for their freedom, and there was nothing that racist ideas could do anymore to stop them.