AS FREED PEOPLE in Haiti were warring against French re-enslavers, a prominent free Black man in Maryland sat down to write to Thomas Jefferson. The man’s grandmother, Mary Welsh, had come to Maryland in the 1680s as an indentured servant. After finishing her indenture, she acquired some land and two Black captives, freed them, and married one, named Bannaka. This interracial family defied White males’ insistence that White women not marry Black men. Their biracial daughter, Mary, married an enslaved man named Robert. Mary and Robert birthed a free son in 1731 and named him Benjamin. As Benjamin came of age, “all he liked was to dive into books,” remembered an observer. Friendly White neighbors were constantly loaning him books. Proceeds from growing tobacco on his inherited farm—he was as adept a farmer as anything else—gave Benjamin Banneker the time to read and think and write.1
Few free Blacks had the leisure time to read and write in Banneker’s day. As soon as they shook off slavery’s shackles, the shackles of discrimination clamped down on them. Northern states, in gradually eliminating slave labor during the Revolutionary era, made almost no moves—gradual or otherwise—to end racial discrimination and thereby racist ideas. Proposals to ensure the manageability of African people by former masters, as if they were more naturally slave than free, shadowed abolition proposals. Discriminatory policies were a feature of almost every emancipation law.2
Debates about the future of slavery and the characteristics of enslaved Blacks, both in Congress and between prominent intellectuals, only reinforced the climate of racism and discrimination that plagued free Blacks like Banneker. Benjamin Franklin, who had become head of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, spent some of his last days trying to resolve the world’s greatest political contradiction: America’s freedom and slavery. In early 1790, the eighty-four-year-old trudged before Congress to give what one narrator called “a memorial.” Christianity and the “political creed of Americans” demand the removal of this “inconsistency from the land of liberty,” Franklin implored. He conceded that Blacks too often fell below “the common standard of the human species,” but he urged his peers to “step to the very verge of the power vested in you.”
Franklin’s speech and a torrent of Quaker emancipation petitions aroused a bitter boxing match over slavery in the First US Congress. It carried on for months after Franklin’s death on April 17, 1790. Black people were “indolent, improvident, averse to labor; when emancipated, they would either starve or plunder,” one congressman argued, defending the interests of southern planters who were dependent on slave labor. Blacks were “an inferior race even to the Indians,” another insisted. A northern congressman held that southerners would never submit to a general emancipation without civil war. As they argued over slavery, congressmen paused to unite for the first Naturalization Act on March 26, 1790, which limited citizenship to “free white persons” of “good character.”3
The congressional slavery debate dribbled into the rest of society. Assimilationists challenged segregationists, stressing Black capability for equality if Blacks were not under the imbruting boot of slavery. Critiquing David Hume, citing Samuel Stanhope Smith, and parading out a line of Black exhibits, from Sancho to Phillis Wheatley, Pennsylvania abolitionist Charles Crawford asserted that the “Negro is in every respect similar to us.” In 1791, Quaker Moses Brown pointed to Black exhibits from his Providence school as proof of “their being Men capable of Every Improvement with ourselves where they [are] under the Same Advantages.” Benjamin Rush, perhaps the nation’s leading abolitionist after Franklin’s death, presented adult exhibits: New Orleans physician James Derham and Thomas “Negro Calculator” Fuller of Maryland. Legend has it that it took Fuller only a few minutes to calculate the number of seconds a man aged seventy years, seventeen days, and twelve hours had lived. But these remarkable exhibits of remarkable Black adults and children did little to sway the proslavery mind. Enslavers probably knew more than anyone about Black capabilities in freedom. But they only cared about Black capabilities to make them money.4
As quite possibly the most remarkable exhibit of them all, Benjamin Banneker was literally in the middle of these debates between assimilationist abolitionists and segregationist enslavers. And so was Thomas Jefferson, agreeing and disagreeing with both sides. Early in 1791, months before writing to Jefferson, Banneker had helped survey the nation’s new capital, Washington, DC.
Banneker began his letter “freely and cheerfully” acknowledging that he was “of the African race.” If Jefferson was flexible in his sentiments of nature, friendly to Black people, and willing to aid in their relief, Banneker wrote, then “I apprehend you will embrace every opportunity, to eradicate that train of absurd and false ideas and opinions.” Jefferson and his slaveholding countrymen who were “detaining by fraud and violence so numerous a part of my brethren,” but who assailed against British oppression, were walking, talking contradictions. Banneker closed the letter by introducing his enclosed unpublished almanac, “in my own hand writing.” Banneker’s letter was staunchly antiracist, a direct confrontation to the young country’s leading disseminator of racist ideas.5
Nearly two weeks later, on August 30, 1791, Thomas Jefferson sent Banneker his standard reply to antislavery and antiracist letters. “No body wishes more than I,” he said, to see the end of prejudice and slavery. He informed Banneker that he had sent the almanac to Monsieur de Condorcet, the secretary of the Academy of Science in Paris, because “your whole colour had a right for their justification against the doubts which have been entertained of them.” Jefferson sidestepped his contradiction. But what could he say? In his letter to Condorcet, Jefferson called Banneker a “very respectable mathematician.” In Notes, he claimed that Black people did not think “above the level of plain narration.” Did Banneker change Jefferson’s mind? Yes and no. Jefferson branded Banneker an extraordinary Negro. “I shall be delighted to see these instances of moral eminence so multiplied,” he told Condorcet.6
FROM THE PERSPECTIVE of the enslaved, the most profound instance of moral eminence was evolving in Haiti. Jefferson learned of the Black revolt on September 8, 1791. Within two months, a force of 100,000 African freedom-fighters had killed more than 4,000 enslavers, destroyed almost 200 plantations, and gained control of the entire Northern Province. As historian C. L. R. James explained in the 1930s, “they were seeking their salvation in the most obvious way, the destruction of what they knew was the cause of their sufferings; and if they destroyed much it was because they had suffered much.”7
What Jefferson and every other holder of African people had long feared had come to pass. In response, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, bestowing on slaveholders the right and legal apparatus to recover escaped Africans and criminalize those who harbored them. Thomas Jefferson, for one, did not view the Haitian Revolution in the same guise as the American or French Revolutions. “Never was so deep a tragedy presented to the feelings of man,” he wrote in July 1793. To Jefferson, the slave revolt against the enslavers was more evil and tragic to the feelings of man than the millions of African people who died on American plantations. Jefferson would soon call General Toussaint L’Ouverture and other Haitian leaders “Cannibals of the terrible Republic.”8
That year, Jefferson’s troubles over revolting Haitians also hit closer to home. A ship or two of distressed masters and slaves from Haiti arrived in Philadelphia in late July. Philadelphians started dying a week later. By August 20, 1793, Benjamin Rush had fatefully noticed the pattern of the contagion of yellow fever. But it was not yet an epidemic, so Rush had time in the late summer to attend to other matters. He possibly sent off letters to abolitionists around the nation. The next year, he welcomed to Philadelphia twenty-two delegates from abolitionist societies across the United States as they arrived for the “American Convention for promoting the Abolition of Slavery and Improving the Condition of the African Race.” The convention met over the next few years and then sporadically over the next three decades, pressing for gradual emancipation, anti-kidnapping legislation, and civil rights for alleged runaways.
As freed Blacks proliferated in the 1790s and the number of enslaved Blacks began to decline in the North, the racial discourse shifted from the problems of enslavement to the condition and capabilities of free Blacks. The American Convention delegates believed that the future advance of abolitionism depended on how Black people used their freedom. Periodically, the convention published and circulated advice tracts for free Blacks. Abolitionists urged free Blacks to attend church regularly, acquire English literacy, learn math, adopt trades, avoid vice, legally marry and maintain marriages, evade lawsuits, avoid expensive delights, abstain from noisy and disorderly conduct, always act in a civil and respectable manner, and develop habits of industry, sobriety, and frugality. If Black people behaved admirably, abolitionists reasoned, they would be undermining justifications for slavery and proving that notions of their inferiority were wrong.9
This strategy of what can be termed uplift suasion was based on the idea that White people could be persuaded away from their racist ideas if they saw Black people improving their behavior, uplifting themselves from their low station in American society. The burden of race relations was placed squarely on the shoulders of Black Americans. Positive Black behavior, abolitionist strategists held, undermined racist ideas, and negative Black behavior confirmed them.
Uplift suasion was not conceived by the abolitionists meeting in Philadelphia in 1794. It lurked behind the craze to exhibit Phillis Wheatley and Francis Williams and other “extraordinary” Black people. So the American Convention, raising the stakes, asked every free Black person to serve as a Black exhibit. In every state, abolitionists publicly and privately drilled this theory into the minds of African people as they entered the ranks of freedom in the 1790s and beyond.
This strategy to undermine racist ideas was actually based on a racist idea: “negative” Black behavior, said that idea, was partially or totally responsible for the existence and persistence of racist ideas. To believe that the negative ways of Black people were responsible for racist ideas was to believe that there was some truth in notions of Black inferiority. To believe that there was some truth in notions of Black inferiority was to hold racist ideas.
From the beginning, uplift suasion was not only racist, it was also impossible for Blacks to execute. Free Blacks were unable to always display positive characteristics for the same reasons poor immigrants and rich planters were unable to do so: free Blacks were human and humanly flawed. Uplift suasion assumed, moreover, that racist ideas were sensible and could be undone by appealing to sensibilities. But the common political desire to justify racial inequities produced racist ideas, not logic. Uplift suasion also failed to account for the widespread belief in the extraordinary Negro, which had dominated assimilationist and abolitionist thinking in America for a century. Upwardly mobile Blacks were regularly cast aside as unique and as different from ordinary, inferior Black people.
Still, from the perspective of White and Black abolitionists alike, uplift suasion seemed to be working in the 1790s. It would always seem to be working. Consumers of racist ideas sometimes changed their viewpoints when exposed to Black people defying stereotypes (and then sometimes changed back when exposed to someone confirming the stereotypes). Then again, upwardly mobile Blacks seemed as likely to produce resentment as admiration. “If you were well dressed they would insult you for that, and if you were ragged you would surely be insulted for being so,” one Black Rhode Island resident complained in his memoir in the early 1800s. It was the cruel illogic of racism. When Black people rose, racists either violently knocked them down or ignored them as extraordinary. When Black people were down, racists called it their natural or nurtured place, and denied any role in knocking them down in the first place.10
UPLIFT SUASION MOVED neither segregationist enslavers nor assimilationist abolitionists away from their racist ideas. Not even Benjamin Rush, the scion of abolitionism, could be moved. By the end of August 1793, he was up to his neck in yellow fever cases and using racist ideas to solicit assistance. Rush inserted a note in Philadelphia’s American Daily Advertiser in September telling Black people they had immunity to yellow fever, a conclusion he had reached based on his belief in their animal-like physical superiority. Quite a few Black nurses suffered horribly before Rush realized his gross error. In all, 5,000 people perished before the epidemic subsided in November and federal officials returned to the city.11
Thomas Jefferson used his time away from Philadelphia during the epidemic to spend money on scientific devices that he planned to use in retirement. His agony over Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton’s wheeling toward monarchy and financial speculation had set him to packing. We are “daily pitted in the Cabinet like two cocks,” Jefferson sobbed. In one of his last days as secretary of state, Jefferson received a patent application from Eli Whitney, a Yale-educated Massachusetts native looking for his fortune in Georgia. Whitney had invented a high-quality cotton gin that quickly separated cotton fibers from their seeds. Jefferson knew about the growing demand for American cotton abroad and the costly, labor-intensive process of manually removing the seeds. The introduction of steam power in England and waterpower in the northeastern United States drastically lowered the cost of making cotton into yarn and making yarn into fabric. Forward us a model of the gin and you will receive your patent “immediately,” Jefferson wrote to Whitney. Jefferson had retired by the time Whitney received his patent in 1794.12
Enthroning King Cotton, the cotton gin made the value of southern lands skyrocket and quickly dethroned rice and tobacco. King Cotton incessantly demanded more and more to stabilize its reign: more enslaved Africans, more land, more violence, and more racist ideas. Annual cotton production slammed through the ceiling of about 3,000 bales in 1790, reaching 178,000 bales in 1810 and more than 4 million bales on the eve of the Civil War. Cotton became America’s leading export, exceeding in dollar value all exports, helping to free Americans from British banks, helping to expand the factory system in the North, and helping to power the Industrial Revolution in the United States. Cotton—more than anyone or anything else—economically freed American enslavers from England and tightened the chains of African people in American slavery. Uplift suasion had no chance of dethroning King Cotton.13
IN 1796, BEFORE the cotton gin had taken hold—feeding cotton production and the demand for more enslaved Africans—Benjamin Rush thought he had found the ultimate abolitionist cure. The good doctor believed he had found a way to cure captives of their abnormal Blackness. The two presidential candidates—Thomas Jefferson and incumbent vice president John Adams—shared the Philadelphia sunlight that summer with a free “white black man.” Henry Moss, unbeknownst to Americans, was suffering from vitiligo, a skin disease that causes the loss of skin color, making one’s dark skin lighten. Moss exhibited his forty-two-year-old whitened body in Philadelphia taverns and before members of the American Philosophical Society. Long before “Black-faced” White entertainers enthralled Americans, “White-faced” Blacks enthralled American believers and skeptics of the theory that Black skin could change to White. Moss became “almost as familiar to the readers of newspapers and other periodicals . . . as . . . John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, or Madison,” according to one observer. Like John “Primrose” Boby, who showcased his whitening body in the United Kingdom around the same time, Moss was a freak to some, but to others, such as Benjamin Rush, he was the future of racial progress. After 1796, history loses Henry Moss until 1803, when Providence abolitionist Moses Brown carefully examined him and saw “evidence of the sameness of human nature.” In 1814, Moss resurfaced again in the New England Journal of Medicine and Surgery, where he is described as a Black man “whose skin has nearly lost its native colour and become perfectly white.”14
President George Washington, Samuel Stanhope Smith, Benjamin Rush, and other dignitaries viewed Moss in the summer of 1796. “The parts that were covered and sweated advanced most rapidly in whiteness, his face slowest,” Rush jotted down in his notes. “His skin was exactly like a white man. No rubbing accelerated it. The black skin did not come off, but changed.” Thomas Jefferson, apparently, did not see Moss. Jefferson did own a few “white Negroes,” and he called them an “anomaly of nature” in Notes on the State of Virginia. They were all “born of parents who had no mixture of white blood,” Jefferson wrote, careful to exonerate his peers and uphold his false stand against interracial sex. Jefferson probably knew the term “albino” came from the Latin albus, meaning an animal, plant, or person lacking pigment. But their skin color—“a pallid cadaverous white”—was different, Jefferson wrote, and their “curled” hair was “that of the negro.” No wonder Jefferson never took aim at physical assimilationists. He did not even concede the color change from Black to White.15
To Jefferson’s dismay, other American intellectuals did take whitening Blacks very seriously. On February 4, 1797, Benjamin Rush, the APS’s vice president, informed Jefferson that he was “preparing a paper in which I have attempted to prove that the black color . . . of the Negroes is the effect of a disease in the skin.” Rush gave the paper at a special APS meeting on July 14, 1797. He praised the “elegant and ingenious Essay” of fellow assimilationist Samuel Stanhope Smith, given a decade prior. Rush, however, disagreed with Smith on how to make Black people White again. He rejected climate theory and proclaimed that all Africans were suffering from leprosy. This skin disease explained why they all had ugly Black skin, Rush told APS members. And the whiter their skins became, the healthier they became.16
This skin disease was brought on by poor diet, he theorized, along with “greater heat, more savage manners, and bilious fevers.” He then listed other side effects of the skin disease: Blacks’ physical superiority, their “wooly heads,” their laziness, their hypersexuality, and their insensitivity to pain. “They bear surgical operations much better than white people,” Rush quoted a doctor as saying. “I have amputated the legs of many negroes, who have held the upper part of the limb themselves.”
Benjamin Rush projected himself as a friend of the Philadelphia Negro, a racial egalitarian, and an abolitionist. He attempted to uphold his persona at the end of his address. “All the claims of superiority of the whites over the blacks, on account of their color, are founded alike in ignorance and inhumanity,” he stressed. “If the color of the negroes be the effect of a disease, instead of inviting us to tyrannise over them, it should entitle them to a double portion of our humanity.” Rush was upbeat about Black capability, about the future, and about potential remedies: Nature had begun to cure Black people. The famous assimilationist mentioned Henry Moss and his glorious “change from black to a natural white flesh color.” His “wool,” Rush announced with satisfaction, “has been changed into hair.”17
Benjamin Rush’s leprosy theory and Samuel Stanhope Smith’s climate theory were as popular among northern assimilationists and abolitionists as Thomas Jefferson was unpopular. Jefferson had lost the presidential election to Adams in 1796, but ran for president again in 1800. Federalist operatives and journalists tried to convince voters of Jefferson’s atheism and anti-Black views, using his Notes as evidence, just as they had done during the previous election. “You have degraded the blacks from the rank which God hath given them in the scale of being!” wrote one Federalist pamphleteer. Some of Jefferson’s defenders during the campaign were jailed by the Adams administration under the 1798 Sedition Act—namely, James Callender. Pardoned by Jefferson when he won the presidency in 1800, Callender apparently requested patronage as retribution for his services. President Jefferson refused. Incensed, Callender exposed Jefferson’s secret.18
On September 1, 1802, Richmond’s Recorder readers learned about the relationship between President Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. “By this wench Sally, our president has had several children,” Callender wrote. The arrangement had begun in France, “when he endeavored so much to belittle the African race.” (Callender, ironically, belittled the African race too. “Wench” oftentimes meant a promiscuous woman, connoting the common idea that African women pursued White men.)19
If Callender thought his series of articles would destroy Jefferson’s political fortunes, then he was wrong. Callender’s reports did not surprise many White male voters, either in Virginia or around the nation. If anything, Callender upset them, because some of them were having their own secretive affairs with Black women—or raping them—and they did not want such things publicly aired. Nationally, White male voters bolstered Jefferson’s party in Congress in the 1802 midterm elections, and they overwhelmingly supported his presidential reelection in 1804.
When Jefferson’s daughter Patsy showed him Callender’s article, Jefferson laughed. No words came from his lips to give the matter any credence. John Adams privately called it a “blot on his character” and the “natural and almost unavoidable consequence of that foul contagion in the human character, Negro slavery.” Jefferson may have privately justified his relations with Sally Hemings by reminding himself that everyone did it, or tried to do it. From teens ending their (and their victims’) virginity, to married men sneaking around, to single and widowed men having their longtime liaisons—master/slave rape or intercourse seemed “natural,” and enslaving one’s children seemed normal in slaveholding America.
Even Jefferson’s old law teacher, his “earliest and best friend,” engaged in an interracial liaison. Widower George Wythe had lived for some time in Williamsburg with the young, biracial Michael Brown and a Black “housekeeper,” Lydia Broadnax. Wythe willed his house to Broadnax, and he asked Jefferson to oversee Brown’s education. Perhaps angry about this arrangement, Wythe’s White grandnephew, George Sweeney, probably poisoned Wythe, Broadnax, and Brown one day in 1806. Only Broadnax survived. In his second presidential term, Jefferson publicly avoided the Wythe scandal, trying to create as much “imaginative distance,” to use his biographer’s term, as possible.20
Master/slave sex fundamentally acknowledged the humanity of Black and biracial women, but it simultaneously reduced that humanity to their sexuality. In the Christian world, sexuality was believed to be the animal trait of humans. Fast becoming the iconic image of a Black woman at this time was the 1800 Portrait d’une negresse (Portrait of a Negress) by French painter Marie-Guillemine Benoist. An African woman sits staring at the viewer with her head wrapped and breast exposed. The white cloth wrapping her head and lower body contrasts vividly with the darkness of her skin. The portrait is thought to be the first painting of a Black woman by a European woman.21
It is not surprising that Jefferson’s career survived Callender’s scandalous revelation. During his presidency, many Americans came to understand slavery (and its sexual politics) as an immutable fact of their lives and their economy. The nation that Jefferson had called “the world’s best hope” and “the strongest government on earth” in his First Inaugural Address in 1801 was not hopefully anticipating the end of slavery. The antislavery refrains first heard from the mouths of the Germantown Petitioners reached a crescendo during the American Revolution, but then started to trail off. And the remaining abolitionists, such as Benjamin Rush and company, who were urging uplift suasion hardly had as large an audience as John Woolman and Samuel Hopkins had enjoyed a generation prior. King Cotton was on the march. And the slaveholding producers of racist ideas had convinced legions of Americans to see slavery as a necessary evil to pay off their debts and build their nation. Besides, it seemed better than the supposed horrific barbarism bound to arise, they argued, from Black freedom.22
More than anything else, the Haitian Revolution and the slave rebellions it inspired across the Americas made White Americans fearful of race war and, even more worrying, a potential Black victory. Southern congressmen and newspaper editors did what they could to silence dissent and stoke White fears, claiming that public discussion of slavery and the presence of free Blacks were inciting slaves to rebel. And there were more free Blacks than ever before, because of wartime runaways and the outbreak of manumissions following the Revolution. The free Black population in Virginia, for instance, leaped from 1,800 in 1782 to 12,766 in 1790 and then to 30,570 in 1810.23
Then there was the sudden expansion of the cotton kingdom. Napoleon’s defeat at the hands of Haitian revolutionaries—free Black Haiti declared independence in 1804—required him to reimagine the French Empire. Holding and defending faraway colonies had become too costly and too bothersome. The vast Louisiana Territory did not fit in his new leaner, stronger empire. “I renounce Louisiana,” Napoleon said on April 11, 1803. By April 30, the Jefferson administration had purchased the territory from France for $15 million, or three cents per acre. Jefferson learned of the purchase on the eve of Independence Day. “It is something larger than the whole U.S.,” he wrote with happiness.
Over the next few decades, slaveholders marched their captives onto the new western lands, terrorizing them into planting new cotton and sugar fields, sending the crops to northern and British factories, and powering the Industrial Revolution. Southern planters and northern investors grew rich. With so much money to make, antislavery and antiracist ideas were whipped to the side like antislavery, antiracist Africans.24
THE NEW LIFE and lands of slavery, and the new crops and cash from slavery, sucked the life out of the antislavery movement during Jefferson’s presidency in the early 1800s. Assimilationist ideas, especially monogenesis, also faded. Theologians like Princeton’s president, Samuel Stanhope Smith, the most eminent scholar on race in the United States in that era, seeing the loss of their cultural power, grew to hate Jefferson’s disregard for religious authority. Jefferson questioned the orthodox Christian belief that all humans descended from Adam and Eve, and articulators of separately created human species nagged Smith like an incessantly barking dog.25
English physician Charles White, the well-known author of a treatise on midwifery, entered the debate over species in 1799. Unlike Scotland’s Lord Kames, White circled around religion and employed a new method of proving the existence of separate race species—comparative anatomy. He did not want the conclusions in his Account on the Regular Gradation in Man to “be construed so as to give the smallest countenance to the pernicious practice of enslaving mankind.” His only objective was “to investigate the truth.” White disputed Buffon’s legendary contention that since interracial unions were fertile, the races had to be of the same species. Actually, orangutans had been “known to carry off negro-boys, girls, and even women,” he said, sometimes enslaving them for “brutal passion.” On the natural scale, Europeans were the highest and Africans the lowest, approaching “nearer to the brute creation than any other of the human species.” Blacks were superior in areas where apes were superior to humans—seeing, hearing, smelling, memorizing things, and chewing food. “The PENIS of an African is larger than that of an European,” White told his readers. Most anatomical museums in Europe preserved Black penises, and, he noted, “I have one in mine.”26
Science had been too religious in the days of Voltaire for discussions of separate species to catch on. Too much freedom and Revolutionary rhetoric clouded the words of Edward Long and Lord Kames. By the period of Charles White’s publication, the debate was on. In 1808, New York physician John Augustine Smith, a disciple of Charles White, rebuked Samuel Stanhope Smith as a minister dabbling in science. “I hold it my duty to lay before you all the facts which are relevant,” John Augustine Smith announced in his circulated lecture. The principal fact was that the “anatomical structure” of the European was “superior” to that of the other races. As different species, Blacks and Whites had been “placed at the opposite extremes of the scale.” The polygenesis lecture launched Smith’s academic career: he became editor of the Medical and Physiological Journal, tenth president of the College of William & Mary, and president of the New York College of Physicians and Surgeons.27
The advance of slavery, possibly more than the persuasive arguments of Lord Kames, Charles White, and John Augustine Smith, caused intellectuals long committed to monogenesis to start changing their views. Watching the Christian world unravel, Samuel Stanhope Smith made one last intellectual stand for theology, for assimilationists, and for monogenesis. He released an “enlarged and improved” second edition of Essay on the Causes of Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species in 1810, pledging to appeal “to the evidence of facts.” Nothing in the past twenty years had changed his position: racial difference resulted from climate and the state of a society. If anything, Smith asserted it more forcefully. And he introduced “another fact” in the climate section: Henry Moss’s skin had changed, and his new “fine, straight hair” had replaced “the wooly substance.” In a hard-hitting appendix, Smith responded to “certain strictures made on the first edition of this essay,” the polygenesis of Charles White, Thomas Jefferson, and John Augustine Smith. “Let infidels appear in their true form,” Smith roared in closing. “If they seek the combat, we only pray, like Ajax, to see the enemy in open day.”28
Thomas Jefferson did not publicly respond to Samuel Stanhope Smith in 1810. He refused to come out into open day altogether. He had retired from public life.