LESS THAN THIRTY years earlier, Thomas Jefferson had been anxious to leave Monticello and to be free from the sorrow of his wife’s passing. After France, three years as US secretary of state, four years as vice president, and eight years as president, he wanted to return to his home in Virginia. “Never did a prisoner, released from his chains, feel such as I shall on shaking off the shackles of power,” he informed a French businessman on March 4, 1809, days before his release from the presidency.
After rooming for years in earsplitting Washington, Jefferson longed for quiet seclusion to read, write, and think in private. “But the enormities of the times in which I have lived,” he said, “have forced me to take part in resisting them.” No foreign enormity was greater than the wars raging in the early 1800s between France and England. Jefferson kept the United States neutral, ignoring war hawks, but he could not ignore the violations on the high seas of American neutrality. He proposed (and Congress adopted) a general embargo of US trade with France and England in 1807. Congress repealed the controversial embargo during the final days of Jefferson’s presidency on March 1, 1809. Jefferson’s neutral doctrine delayed the inevitable. Three years after he had left the presidency, the United States faced off with England in the War of 1812.1
Presiding over the American Philosophical Society from 1797 to 1815, Jefferson did remain neutral in the war between monogenesis and polygenesis. He rarely even struck back at the Federalist offensive against his Notes on the State of Virginia in the presidential campaigns. In 1804, printer William Duane offered Jefferson the opportunity to respond in a new edition. Jefferson balked. He did not have time. But he did plan to revise and enlarge Notes when he left Washington in 1809.2
Weeks before leaving office, Jefferson thanked abolitionist and scientist Henri Gregoire for sending him a copy of An Enquiry Concerning the Intellectual and Moral Faculties, and Literature of Negroes on February 25. Gregoire offered travel “testimony” of glorious Black nations to refute what “Jefferson tells us, that no nation of them was ever civilized,” he wrote. “We do not pretend to place the negroes on a level” with Whites, Gregoire explained in assimilationist form, but only to challenge those who say “that the negroes are incapable of becoming partners in the store-house of human knowledge.”3
After years of apologizing for American slavery, Jefferson probably finally felt good about responding to Henri Gregoire. He was in a better position now to write to the famed abolitionist. In his Annual Message to Congress three years earlier, Jefferson had condemned the “violations of human rights” enabled by the slave trade and urged Congress to abolish it. Congress followed his lead in 1807, after a contentious debate over how illegal slave traders would be punished. Traders, they decided, would be fined under the Slave Trade Act of 1807. But Congress did nothing to ensure the act’s enforcement.
It was an empty and mostly symbolic law. The act failed to close the door on the ongoing international slave trade while flinging open the door to a domestic one. Violations of human rights continued when children were snatched from parents, and slave ships now traveled down American waters in a kind of “middle passage” from Virginia to New Orleans, which took as many days as the transatlantic “middle passage” had. Jefferson and like-minded planters of the Upper South started deliberately “breeding” captives to supply the Deep South’s demand. “I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man on the farm,” Jefferson once explained to a friend. A year after the Slave Trade Act, a South Carolina court ruled that enslaved women had no legal claims on their children. They stood “on the same footings as other animals.”4
Ending the international slave trade was in reality a boon for the largest American slave-owners, as it increased the demand and value of their captives. And so the largest slave-owners and the gradual-emancipation advocates joined hands in cheering on the legal termination of the international slave trade on January 1, 1808. Massachusetts clergyman Jedidiah Morse deemed it a victory. He spoke for most northern assimilationist evangelicals when he proclaimed that since Christianity was finally lighting up the “heathenish and Mahometan darkness” of Africa, “its natives have no need to be carried to foreign lands.” Morse believed that slavery would be gradually abolished, too.5
Thomas Jefferson must have relied on this widespread support for the Slave Trade Act when he finally replied to Henri Gregoire in stock fashion in 1809. “No person living wishes more sincerely than I do,” he said, to see racial equality proven. “On this subject [Black people] are gaining daily in the opinions of nations,” Jefferson wrote, “and hopeful advances are making towards their re-establishment of an equal footing with the other colors of the human family.”6
In fact, Black people were losing ground daily in the opinions of European nations. Not long after Gregoire and Jefferson exchanged letters, London was blitzed with a broadsheet picturing a seminude African woman standing sideways to the viewer, her oversized buttocks exposed on one side, the unseen side draped in animal skin. A headband wraps her forehead, and she holds a body-sized stick. Whitening Blacks, Black exhibits, and “converted Hottentots,” sharing their supposed journeys from savagery to civilization, were becoming less remarkable with each passing year. But Londoners were captivated by Sarah Baartman, or rather, her enormous buttocks and genitalia.
Baartman’s Khoi people of southern Africa had been classified as the lowest Africans, the closest to animals, for more than a century. Baartman’s buttocks and genitals were irregularly large among her fellow Khoi women, not to mention African women across the continent, or across the Atlantic on Jefferson’s plantation. And yet Baartman’s enormous buttocks and genitals were presented as regular and authentically African. She was billed on stage in the fashionable West End of London as the “Hottentot Venus,” which tightened the bolt on the racist stereotype linking Black women to big buttocks. Polygenesist Charles White had already tightened the bolt linking Black men with big genitalia.
Retiring colonial official Alexander Dunlop and Baartman’s South African master Hendrik Cesars brought Baartman to London in July 1810. Upon Dunlop’s death in 1814, exhibiter Henry Taylor brought the thirty-six or thirty-seven-year-old Baartman to Paris for another round of shows. Papers rejoiced over her arrival. She appeared in the grand Palais-Royal, the centerfold of Parisian debauchery, where prostitutes mixed with printers, restaurants with gambling houses, coffee gossipers with drunk dancers, beggars with elites. On November 19, 1814, Parisians strolled into the Vaudeville Theater across from the Palais-Royal to view the opening of La Venus Hottentote, ou Haine aux Francais (or the Hatred of French Women). In the opera’s plot, a young Frenchman does not find his suitor sufficiently exotic. When she appears disguised as the “Hottentot Venus,” he falls in love. Secure in his attraction, she drops the disguise. The Frenchman drops the ridiculous attraction to the Hottentot Venus, comes to his senses, and the couple marries. The opera revealed Europeans’ ideas about Black women. After all, when Frenchmen are seduced by the Hottentot Venus, they are acting like animals. When Frenchmen are attracted to Frenchwomen, they are acting rationally. While hypersexual Black women are worthy of sexual attraction, asexual Frenchwomen are worthy of love and marriage.
In January 1815, animal showman S. Reaux obtained Baartman from Henry Taylor. Reaux paraded her, sometimes with a collar around her neck, at cafés, at restaurants, and in soirées for Parisian elites—wherever there was money. One day in March 1815, Reaux shepherded Baartman to the Museum of Natural History in Paris, which housed the world’s greatest collection of natural objects. They had a meeting with Europe’s most distinguished intellectual, the comparative anatomist Georges Cuvier.
That rare segregationist who rejected polygenesis, Cuvier believed that all humans descended from Europe’s Garden of Eden. A catastrophic event 5,000 years earlier had sent the survivors fleeing to Asia and Africa; three races had emerged and had started passing on unchangeable hereditary traits. “The white race” was the “most beautiful of all” and was “superior,” according to Cuvier. The African’s physical features “approximate[d] it to the monkey tribe.”
In his lab, Cuvier asked Baartman to take off her long skirt and shawl, which she had worn to ward off the March wind. Baartman refused. Startled, Cuvier did all he could to document her with her clothes on over the next three days, measuring and drawing her body.
Sometime in late December 1815, Baartman died, perhaps of pneumonia. No Black woman was the subject of more obituaries in Parisian newspapers in the nineteenth century than Sarah Baartman. Cuvier secured her corpse and brought her to his laboratory. He removed her clothes, cracked open her chest wall, removed and studied all of her major organs. Cuvier spread her legs, studied her buttocks, and cut out her genitals, setting them aside for preservation. After Cuvier and his team of scientists finished their scientific rape, they boiled off the rest of Baartman’s flesh. They reassembled the bones into a skeleton. Cuvier then added her remains to his world-famous collection. In his report, he claimed to have “never seen a human head more resembling a monkey’s than hers.” The Khoi people of South Africa, he concluded, were more closely related to the ape than to the human.7
Parisians displayed Baartman’s skeleton, genitals, and brain until 1974. When President Nelson Mandela took office in 1994, he renewed South Africans’ calls for Baartman’s return home. France returned her remains to her homeland in 2002. After a life and afterlife of unceasing exhibitions, Baartman finally rested in peace.8
Baartman’s fate was particularly horrific in the early 1810s, and Cuvier’s conclusions about Black bodies were consumed with little hesitation by those seeking evidence of Black inferiority to justify their commerce on both sides of the Atlantic, a commerce taking root in the wombs of Black women.
NO MATTER WHAT Thomas Jefferson said to Henri Gregoire in 1809, Black people were not gaining daily in the opinions of those Choctaws and Chickasaws who started acquiring them (or were re-enslaving runaways). While these indigenous southern slaveholders rejected ideas of White superiority and Native American inferiority, they embraced associations of Blackness with slavery. Enslaved Africans in Jefferson’s Louisiana Territory were not gaining daily in the opinions of their French and American masters, either. And these captives refused to wait until their French and American masters gained an emancipatory opinion of them, knowing they could be waiting forever for their freedom. On January 8, 1811, about fifteen captives on a sugar plantation in an area known as the German Coast wounded a planter, Major Manuel Andry, and killed his son. Bearing military uniforms and guns, cane knives, and axes while beating drums and waving flags, they started marching from plantation to plantation, swelling their numbers and the dead bodies of enslavers. In time, between two hundred and five hundred biracial and African people had joined the thirty-five-mile freedom march to invade New Orleans. Led by Asante warriors Quamana and Kook, along with biracial men Harry Kenner and Charles Deslondes—and inspired by the Haitian Revolution—these revolutionaries waged the largest slave revolt in the history of the United States.9
On January 10, 1811, the poorly armed band of freed people was defeated by a well-armed band of four hundred militiamen and sixty US army troops. In the end, almost one hundred former captives were killed or executed. Louisiana provided reparations for the planters—$300 (about $4,200 in 2014) for each captive killed. Authorities whacked off their heads and strung them up for all to see at intervals from New Orleans to Andry’s plantation.”10
Hoping for assurances of federal protection in case of future rebellions, Louisiana sugar planters voted to join the union in 1812. With the addition of Louisiana, another slave state, it became clear that slavery was expanding, not contracting, as Jefferson left office. The number of enslaved Africans swelled 70 percent in twenty years, increasing from 697,897 in the first federal census of 1790 to 1,191,354 in 1810, before tripling over the next fifty years. The escalation of slavery and the need to defend it against anti-American abolitionists in Europe generated one of the first waves of proslavery thought after the Revolution. Even northerners, or native northerners living in the South, defended it. In 1810, future Pennsylvania congressman Charles Jared Ingersoll released Inchiquin, the Jesuit’s Letters, refuting the aspersions cast upon slavery “by former residents and tourists.” A few years later, New York antislavery novelist James Kirke Paulding tried to defend his nation and the slow pace of change. Freeing happy Africans could endanger the community, undermine property rights, and render them “more wretched” than they already were, Paulding wrote.11
Philadelphia Federalist Robert Walsh published An Appeal from the Judgments of Great Britain Respecting the United States of America in 1819. “Your work will furnish the first volume of every future American history,” Thomas Jefferson accurately predicted. Though Walsh blamed the British for slavery, he said the institution endeared masters with “sensibility, justice and steadfastness.” For the African, whose “colour is a perpetual momento of their servile origin,” their enslavement is “positively good.” The slave was “exempt from those racking anxieties” experienced by the English.12
If Jefferson truly desired to see a refutation of his racist ideas in Notes, as he told Gregoire, then he had made no moves in that direction during his presidency, neither politically nor in print. His most pressing personal concern in 1809 was moving back home, to the comfort of Monticello and Sally Hemings, and away from the ongoing political parade in Washington.
Jefferson left Washington a week after his close friend and mentee James Madison was installed as the fourth president of the United States on March 4, 1809. Jefferson’s presidential reign did not end with his departure from Washington. Until 1841, a series of self-described disciples of Jefferson served as US presidents, the lone exception being John Quincy Adams in the late 1820s.13
In 1809, Jefferson estimated his net worth to be $225,000 (roughly $3.3 million in 2014) based on 10,000 acres of land, a manufacturing mill, 200 slaves, and a mountain of debt. Whether he was proslavery or antislavery, Jefferson needed slavery in 1809 to maintain his financial solvency and life of luxury. In the initial years of his retirement, Jefferson finally finished his 11,000-square-foot, 33-room mansion displaying all the things he had collected: the animal specimens and Native American objects, the medals and maps, the portraits and sculptures of Jesus, Benjamin Franklin, John Locke, Sir Isaac Newton, Christopher Columbus, and Voltaire, and the painting of himself, drawn by Boston painter Mather Brown, a descendant of Cotton Mather.14
Loving retirement, Jefferson placed books on top of newspapers. He did not have to leave Monticello, and he rarely did. He had a plantation to run, which relied on slave labor to pay off his debts, or rather, pay for the luxuries he loved. He put science, not politics, at the center of his affairs, emerging as America’s celebrity scholar in the 1810s. The requests for advice and data and the reviewing of manuscripts seemed endless. “From sunrise to one or two o’clock, and often from dinner to dark, I am drudging at the writing table,” Jefferson complained to John Adams. He was not updating Notes, though. By 1813, he had lost all drive to reproduce his ideas.15
Jefferson had also lost all drive to support the cause of antislavery. In 1814, Edward Coles, the personal secretary of President James Madison, asked Jefferson to arouse public sentiment against slavery. Jefferson balked, using the excuse of old age. The seventy-one-year-old advised Coles to reconcile himself with enslavement and only promote emancipation in a way that did not offend anyone.16 Ironically, the inoffensive solution that Jefferson offered in Notes, and that he tried to execute once as president, was about be adopted by a new generation.