ONE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON’S most enduring legacies was a race relations effort that spanned the course of the nineteenth century. It all began in the spring of 1800 in Jefferson’s home state. Two captives, Gabriel and Nancy Prosser, were organizing a slave rebellion. Standing well over six feet tall, with dark skin, penetrating eyes, and bulging scars, the twenty-four-year-old Gabriel Prosser caught people’s attention wherever he went. He won converts by reminding them of the Haitian armies that had turned back the armies of Spain, England, and France. The Prossers planned to have hundreds of captives march on Richmond, where they would seize 4,000 unguarded muskets, arrest Governor James Monroe, hold the city until reinforcements arrived from surrounding counties, and negotiate the end of slavery and equal rights. The lives of friendly Methodists, Quakers, and French people were to be spared, but racist Blacks would be killed. Allies were to be recruited among Virginia’s poor whites and Native Americans.
The revolt failed to materialize on the planned date of Saturday, August 30, 1800. Two cynical slaves begging for their master’s favor betrayed what would have been the largest slave revolt in the history of North America, with as many as 50,000 rebels joining in from as far as Norfolk, Virginia. Given notice that afternoon, Governor James Monroe dispatched Richmond’s defenses and informed every militia commander in Virginia. Wind and rain stormed through the Virginia Tidewater. A capsized bridge halted the march of a thousand armed rebels into the city. The liberating army disbanded, dripping in disgust. The enslaving army stayed intact, over the next few weeks invading communities and arresting rebel leaders. Gabriel Prosser fled to Norfolk, where he was betrayed and captured on September 25. Dragged back to Richmond, he was hanged along with his comrades, but they appeared defiant until the end. “The accused have exhibited a spirit, which, if it becomes general, must deluge the Southern country in blood,” said an eyewitness.1
A rebellious slave was extraordinary—real, but not really representative. During the final months of 1800, enslavers blasted this racist mantra of contented slaves and then hypocritically demanded more weapons, more organization, and more sophisticated laws to restrain them. On December 31, 1800, the Virginia House of Delegates secretly instructed Governor James Monroe to correspond with the incoming President Jefferson on finding lands outside of Virginia where “persons . . . dangerous to the peace of society may be removed.” Jefferson requested clarity on their desires on November 24, 1801. He suggested colonization in the Caribbean or Africa to the Virginia delegates, expressing the improbability of securing lands within the continental United States.2
Virginia lawmakers again gathered in secret in 1802 to respond to their native son. Slavery had to continue, and its natural by-product—resistance—had to stop. So Virginia lawmen took Jefferson up on his proposal, asking him to find a foreign home for the state’s free Blacks. Jefferson went to work, inquiring through intermediaries about West Africa’s Sierra Leone, England’s colony for freed people since 1792. England spurned Jefferson, as did other European nations. Breaking the bad news to Monroe on December 27, 1804, Jefferson assured him he would “keep it under my constant attention.”3
Virginia lawmakers swore themselves to secrecy, agreeing to never reveal their maneuvers for colonization; they did not even inform the next generation of lawmakers. But in 1816, Charles Fenton Mercer, a member of the House of Delegates since 1810, learned of Jefferson’s plan. He uncovered the correspondence between Monroe and Jefferson, and he was inspired by the Jeffersonian rationale for sending Blacks abroad. Mercer was an antislavery, anti-abolitionist slaveholder like Jefferson. Although “slavery is wrong,” he later wrote, emancipation “would do more harm than good.”4
Mercer wanted to remake his region’s agrarian, slave-labor economy into a free-labor, industrial economy. He dreaded the working-class revolts that were picking up steam in Western Europe, but had faith in the ability of a public education system to placate lower- and middle-income Whites. Yet he recognized that the rampant racial discrimination in America would fashion free Blacks into a perpetually rebellious working class. He wanted to expel Blacks from the United States before it was too late.
Colonization seemed like a godsend to Mercer. It also appealed to Robert Finley, who learned about the cause from his brother-in-law, Mercer’s old friend Elias B. Caldwell, the longtime clerk of the US Supreme Court. An antislavery clergyman, Finley had already taken an interest in the plight of low-income free Blacks, and to him, colonization seemed to be the perfect solution to their problems. Mercer, Finley, and the colonizationists they inspired ended up being the ideological children of an odd couple who had disliked each other: Thomas Jefferson and Samuel Stanhope Smith. The latter endorsed the cause before his 1819 death. While Smith believed that Black people were capable of Whiteness, Jefferson insisted that they were incapable of achieving Whiteness in the United States. Colonization offered an alternative that both men could embrace.5
In 1816, Finley sat down and wrote the colonization movement’s manifesto, Thoughts on the Colonization of Free Blacks. “What shall we do with the free people of color?” he began the pamphlet. Free Blacks must be trained “for self-government” and returned to their land of origin, he wrote. For the enslaved, “the evil of slavery will be diminished, and in a way so gradual as to prepare the whites for the happy and progressive change.”6
Carrying this literary cannonball of racist ideas, Finley invaded Washington, DC, in late November 1816. He lobbied journalists, politicians, and President James Madison, whose views on Blacks mirrored Jefferson’s. Finley and his powerful associates called an organizational meeting for colonizationists on December 21, 1816. Presiding was Kentucky representative Henry Clay, whose early life had resembled Thomas Jefferson’s. Born to Virginia planters, Clay had become a lawyer, a Kentucky planter, and then a politician. He had expressed an early abolitionism that had faded with time. Clay had just finished his second stint as Speaker of the House when he presided over the colonization meeting that birthed the American Colonization Society. Slaveholder and Supreme Court Justice Bushrod Washington—the nephew of George Washington—was elected president of the society, and the vice presidents included Finley, Clay, General Andrew Jackson, and Mercer’s Princeton schoolmate Richard Rush, the son of Benjamin Rush, who had pledged his support for colonization before his death in 1813.
At the inaugural meeting, Finley’s gradual abolitionism took a back seat to the demands of the slaveholders. The society would ignore the “delicate question” of abolition and only promote the deportation of free Blacks, Henry Clay said. “Can there be a nobler cause than that which, whilst it proposed to rid our country of a useless and pernicious, if not dangerous portion of its population, contemplates the spreading of the arts of civilized life, and the possible redemption from ignorance and barbarism of a benighted quarter of the globe?” Newspapers around the nation reprinted his words.
In Philadelphia, at least 3,000 Black men packed into Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church on January 15, 1817, to discuss the ACS’s formation. Longtime colonization supporter James Forten, A.M.E. church founder Richard Allen, and two other Black ministers pledged their support for colonization and its missionary potential. Speeches concluded, Forten stepped to the pulpit to gauge the crowd. Those in favor? Forten asked. No one spoke. No one raised a hand. Nothing. All opposed? Forten nervously asked. Everything. A booming “no” rang out, shaking the walls of the church.
These Black men had walked into the church fuming. Their wives, girlfriends, sisters, and mothers were probably angry, too (but were disallowed from proclaiming it at the male-only meeting). The meeting attendees audaciously denounced the “unmerited stigma” that Henry Clay had “cast upon the reputation of the free people of color.” They did not want to go to the “savage wilds of Africa,” the attendees resolved, demonstrating that they had already consumed those racist myths. But at the same time, they were expressing their commitment to enslaved people and America and demanding recognition for their role in the nation’s growth. It was “the land of our nativity,” a land that had been “manured” by their “blood and sweat.” “We will never separate ourselves voluntarily from the slave population of this country,” they resolved.7
American-born descendants of Africa judged the continent based on the standards they had learned from the very people who were calling them inferior and trying to kick them out of the United States. Africans in America had received their knowledge of Africa and their racist ideas from White Americans. And White Americans’ racist ideas had been procured from a host of European writers—everyone from Sarah Baartman’s dissector, Georges Cuvier of France, to philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel of Germany.
Around the time of the American Colonization Society’s founding, European nations were increasingly turning their capital and guns from the slave trade to the cause of colonizing Africa (as well as Asia). English, French, German, and Portuguese armies fought African armies throughout the nineteenth century, trying to establish colonies in order to exploit Africa’s resources and bodies more systematically and efficiently. This new racist drive required racist ideas to make sense of it, and Hegel’s pontifications about backward Africans arrived right on time. Racist ideas always seemed to arrive right on time to dress up the ugly economic and political exploitation of African people.
Ironically, back in 1807, Hegel had expressed a very antiracist idea in his classic book Phenomenology of Spirit, condemning “the overhasty judgement formed at first sight about the inner nature and character” of a person. He revolutionized European philosophy and history in many important matters in the nineteenth century. Legions of philosophy chairs across Europe became Hegelians, and the philosophers he influenced—including men like Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels—constitute a who’s who of European intellectuals. But before his death in 1831, Hegel failed to free himself and Europe from the Enlightenment era’s racist ideas. “It is . . . the concrete universal, self-determining thought, which constitutes the principle and character of Europeans,” Hegel once wrote. “God becomes man, revealing himself.” In contrast, African people, he said, were “a nation of children” in the “first stage” of human development: “The negro is an example of animal man in all his savagery and lawlessness.” They could be educated, but they would never advance on their own. Hegel’s foundational racist idea justified Europe’s ongoing colonization of Africa. European colonizers would supposedly bring progress to Africa’s residents, just as European enslavers had brought progress to Africans in the Americas.8
IN THEIR RESOLUTION against the American Colonization Society, Philadelphia Blacks noted the “unmerited stigma” that had been “cast upon the reputation of the free people of color.” The death of Robert Finley later in the year strained the ACS, and it struggled to attract federal funding and the support of slaveholders, especially in the Deep South. The slaveholders would never accept colonization unless they were convinced that it would allow slavery to endure. Free Blacks would never sign on unless emancipation was promised. Neither group was satisfied.9
Still, the society was persistent. In terms of federal funding, Charles Fenton Mercer steered the next offensive after joining the House of Representatives. On January 13, 1819, Mercer introduced the Slave Trade Act, which allocated $100,000 to send “negroes” back to Africa. Signing the bill into law was the old Virginia governor sympathetic to colonization: James Monroe, who had been elected to the US presidency weeks before the formation of the ACS. Almost immediately, debates sprang up as to whether the bill authorized Monroe to acquire land in Africa. By 1821, Monroe had dispatched US naval officer Robert Stockton, as an agent of the society, to West Africa. With a drawn pistol in one hand and a pen in the other, Stockton embezzled—some say for $300—a strip of Atlantic coastal land south of Sierra Leone from a local ruler, who probably did not hold title to his people’s land. The United States thus joined the growing band of nations seeking to colonize Africa. By 1824, American settlers had built fortifications there. They renamed the settlement “Liberia,” and its capital “Monrovia,” after the US president. Between 1820 and 1830, only 154 Black northerners out of more than 100,000 sailed to Liberia.10
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY had begun with a slave rebellion plot that had caused Virginia enslavers and President Jefferson to think seriously of sending free and enslaved Blacks back to Africa. The slave rebellions kept coming, and nothing accelerated enslavers’ support for the colonization movement more than actual or potential slave rebellions.
In 1818, a fifty-one-year-old free carpenter named Denmark Vesey started recruiting the thousands of slaves in and around Charleston that would form his army—one estimate says 9,000. Vesey was well known locally as one of the founders of Emmanuel A.M.E. Church, the first African Methodist Episcopal church in the South. Before receiving his freedom in 1800, Vesey had traveled the Atlantic with his seafaring owner, acquiring a tremendous pride in the agency, culture, and humanity of African people. He had also been inspired by the American, French, and Haitian revolutions. Vesey likely spent time teaching, motivating, and encouraging fellow enslaved Blacks and challenging the racist ideas they had consumed, perhaps regularly reciting the biblical story of the Israelites’ deliverance from Egyptian bondage. He set the revolt for July 14, 1822, the anniversary of the French Revolution. Trusted house servants were to assassinate top South Carolina officials as they slept. Six infantry and cavalry companies were to invade the city and kill every White and Black antagonist they encountered on sight. Arsonists were to burn the city to the ground. Spared captains of ships were to bring the rebels to Haiti or Africa—not as colonizers, but as immigrants.
House slave Peter Prioleau betrayed the plot in late May; he received a reward of freedom and later became a slaveholder himself. Prioleau had no desire to abolish slavery, and he probably did not question the racist ideas behind it. In four long years of recruiting thousands of rebels, no mistakes had been made by Vesey’s lieutenants; no one betrayed the plot—an amazing organizational feat—until Prioleau opened his mouth. By late June, South Carolina authorities had destroyed Vesey’s army, banished thirty-four of Vesey’s soldiers, and hanged thirty-five men, including Denmark Vesey himself, who was defiant to the very end.11
The vast Vesey conspiracy provoked fear in Charleston and beyond. Slaveholders began to contemplate the end of slavery, and ejecting the Black people seemed like an attractive option. In the words of one writer, “the whole United States [should] join in a Colonization Society.” Another Charleston essayist who endorsed colonization pledged that he was ready to help “free the country of so unwelcome a burden.” Instead, new laws tightening the noose on enslaved Blacks soothed the raw fear. Officials stipulated that enslaved Blacks should only wear “negro cloth,” a cheap, coarse cotton sometimes mixed with wool. “Every distinction should be created between the whites and the negroes,” a jurist said, “ . . . to make the latter feel the superiority of the former.”12
Until 1822—until Denmark Vesey—northerners had produced most of the racist books and tracts defending slavery. Writers like Charles Jared Ingersoll, James Kirke Paulding, and Robert Walsh—all from the North—defended slavery from British onslaughts in the 1810s. On October 29, 1822, Charleston Times editor Edwin Clifford Holland released the first proslavery treatise by a native southerner. Enslaved Africans, he said, could never “affect any revolution” because of “their general inferiority in the gifts of nature.” He was trying to calm his worried fellows. But they could disrupt society, he said, and Whites should always be on guard. “Let it never be forgotten, that our NEGROES . . . are the anarchists and the domestic enemy; the common enemy of civilized society, and the barbarians who would, IF THEY COULD, become DESTROYERS OF OUR RACE.” Holland did not include the “industrious, sober, hardworking,” and free biracial people in this denunciation. In the event of a rebellion, Holland believed they would form “a barrier between our own color and that of the black,” because they were “more likely to enlist themselves under the banners of the whites.”13
THOMAS JEFFERSON PROBABLY expected rebellions like Denmark Vesey’s, and he probably expected grandiose betrayals like Peter Prioleau’s. He did not expect the Missouri Question. Weeks after Charles Fenton Mercer introduced the Slave Trade Act, which led to America’s first colony in Africa, his New York colleague James Tallmadge Jr. tacked an amendment onto a bill admitting Missouri to the Union that would have barred the admission of enslaved Africans into the new state. The Tallmadge Amendment sparked a smoldering fire of debate that burned for two years. Ultimately, it was tempered—but not extinguished—by the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Congress agreed to admit Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state, and to prohibit the introduction of slavery in the northern section of the vast Louisiana Territory, which Jefferson had purchased from France.
Thomas Jefferson did not make much of the early Missouri Question debate. He expected it to pass “like waves in a storm pass under the ship.” When the storm did not pass, he became worried, and he soon described the storm as “the most portentous one which ever yet threatened our Union.” By 1820, he was warning of a civil war that could become a racial war, and that could then develop into “a war of extermination toward the African in our land.”
The Missouri Question had roused Jefferson “like a fire bell in the night,” as he told Massachusetts congressman John Holmes on April 22, 1820. “I considered it at once,” he wrote, “the knell of the union.” He gave Holmes his stump speech on emancipation: no man wanted it more than him, but no workable plan for compensating owners and colonizing the freed had been put forth. “As it is,” he said, “we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.” What could be done? “Justice is in one scale and self-preservation in the other.”
Jefferson, the nation’s most famous antislavery anti-abolitionist, longed for the Louisiana Territory, which he purchased in 1803, to become the republic’s hospital, the place where the illnesses of the original states could be cured—most notably, the illness of slavery. Enslaved Africans would be spread out in the vast Louisiana Territory (if not sent to Africa). The “diffusion [of enslaved Africans] over a greater surface would make them individually happier, and proportionally facilitate the accomplishment of their emancipation, by dividing the burden on a great number of coadjutors.” Jefferson dreamed that the vast Louisiana Territory could swallow slavery. Spread enslaved Africans out, and they will go away?14
Jefferson adamantly came to believe that Black freedom should not be discussed in the White halls of Congress, and that southerners should be left alone to solve the problem of slavery at their own pace, in their own way. In his younger years, he had considered gradual emancipation and colonization to be the solution. His gradualism turned into procrastination. In his final years, Jefferson said that “on the subject of emancipation I have ceased to think because [it is] not to be the work of my day.” Slavery had become too lucrative, to too many slaveholders, for emancipation to be Jefferson’s work of those days.15
For Jefferson, the Missouri Question was personal. If slavery could not continue its western expansion, his finances might be affected by the decreased demand for enslaved Africans in the domestic slave trade. As he agonized over the future livelihood of the United States and his own economic prospects, Jefferson could not have helped but think of the nation’s past and his own past—and how both had reached this point of no return. Seventy-seven years old in 1821, Jefferson decided to “state some recollections of dates and facts concerning myself.” The Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson runs less than one hundred pages and ends when he becomes US secretary of state in 1790. In this work, Jefferson attempted once again to secure his antislavery credentials, after training for a lifetime as a slaveholder: “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free,” he wrote. “Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.” In forty years, nothing had diminished his need to produce racist ideas—not the Black exhibits, uplift suasion, letters from abolitionists, Sally Hemings, or the loyalty or the resistance of enslaved Africans. Jefferson shared the same view in his Autobiography in 1821 that he had in Notes in 1781. He promoted the colonization idea, that freed Blacks be hauled away to Africa in the same manner that enslaved Blacks had been hauled to America.16
IN THE 1820S, the American Colonization Society grew into the preeminent race-relations reform organization in the United States. Jefferson was again endorsing colonization, and calculating segregationists were beginning to see it as a solution to Black resistance. Altruistic assimilationists figured that it was a way to develop Black people in both America and Africa. In 1825, a twenty-eight-year-old Yale alumnus, Ralph Gurley, became the new ACS secretary. He held the position until his death in 1872, while also serving twice as the chaplain of the House of Representatives. Gurley had a vision: he believed that to win the minds and souls of Americans to the colonization cause, it had to be linked to the Protestant movement. His timing was good, because the Second Great Awakening was at hand as he began his ACS post.
The American Bible Society, the American Sunday School Union, and the American Tract Society were all established in this period, and they each used the printing press to besiege the nation with Bibles, tracts, pictures, and picture cards that would help to create a strong, unified, Jesus-centered national identity. A good tract “should be entertaining”, announced the American Tract Society in 1824. “There must be something to allure the listless to read.” Allurement—those pictures of holy figures—had long been considered a sinful trick of Satan and “devilish” Catholics. No more. Protestant organizations started mass-producing, mass-marketing, and mass-distributing images of Jesus, who was always depicted as White. Protestants saw all the aspirations of the new American identity in the White Jesus—a racist idea that proved to be in their cultural self-interest. As pictures of this White Jesus started to appear, Blacks and Whites started to make connections, consciously and unconsciously, between the White God the Father, his White son Jesus, and the power and perfection of White people. “I really believed my old master was almighty God,” runaway Henry Brown admitted, “and that his son, my young master, was Jesus Christ.”17
As the revived Protestant movement ignited the enthusiasm of students, professors, clergymen, merchants, and legislators in New England, the American Colonization Society drew more people into its fold. While southern colonizationists sought to remove free Blacks, northerners sought to remove all Blacks, enslaved and freed. Northern race relations had grown progressively worse since the 1790s, defying uplift suasion. Each uplifting step of Black people stoked animosity, and runaways stoked further animosity. Race riots embroiled New York City, New Haven, Boston, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh in the 1820s. As racial tensions accumulated, the ACS continued to gain adherents to the cause. Its agents argued forcefully that White prejudice and Black slavery would be eternal, and that freed Blacks must use the talents they had acquired from Whites to go back and redeem unenlightened Africa. By 1832, every northern state legislature had passed resolutions of endorsement for the colonization idea.18
Free Blacks remained overwhelmingly against colonization. Their resistance to the concept partly accounted for the identifier “Negro” replacing “African” in common usage in the 1820s. Free Blacks theorized that if they called themselves “African,” they would be giving credence to the notion that they should be sent back to Africa. Their own racist ideas were also behind the shift in terminology. They considered Africa and its cultural practices to be backward, having accepted racist notions of the continent. Some light-skinned Blacks preferred “colored,” to separate themselves from dark-skinned Negroes or Africans.19
For many, the colonization movement gave a new urgency to the idea of uplift suasion. Racist free Blacks thought uplift suasion offered Black people a way to prove their worthiness to White elites. In 1828, Boston preacher Hosea Easton urged a Thanksgiving Day crowd of Rhode Island Black folk to “come out of this degrading course of life.” By uplifting themselves, they would “demand respect from those who exalt themselves above you.”20
As part of the renewed effort to promote uplift suasion, a group of free Blacks established the nation’s first Black newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, with its headquarters in New York City. The two editors were both biracial: Samuel Cornish, a Presbyterian preacher, and John Russwurm, the third African American college graduate in the United States. Their mission was to chronicle the uplift of the North’s 500,000 free Blacks in order to reduce prejudice. “The further decrease of prejudice, and the amelioration of the condition of thousands of our brethren who are yet in bondage greatly depend on our conduct,” the Freedom’s Journal said in its opening editorial on March 16, 1827. “It is for us to convince the world by uniform propriety of conduct, industry and economy, that we are worthy of esteem and patronage.”21
The editors and the elite Blacks they represented often focused, however, on the conduct of the “lower classes of our people,” whom they blamed for bringing the race down. Class racism dotted the pages of the Freedom’s Journal, with articles pitting lower-income Blacks against upper-income Blacks, and the former being portrayed as inferior to the latter. Cornish and Russwurm did sometimes defend low-income Blacks. As New York planned to emancipate its remaining captives on July 4, 1827, the mainstream newspapers announced their disapproval. Freed Africans would “increase” the city’s “criminal calendar, pauper list and dandy register,” stammered the Morning Chronicle. Cornish and Russwurm admonished the newspaper for its “vulgar” attack while agreeing with much of the reasoning behind it. The Africans about to be freed were “an injured people,” the editors pleaded, “and we think it beneath the character of a public Editor, to add insult to injury.”22
Cornish and Russwurm eventually split on colonization, prompting Cornish’s resignation. Russwurm decided to endorse the American Colonization Society in 1829, dooming his newspaper in anti-colonizationist Black America. After putting the first Black newspaper to bed, Russwurm departed for Liberia, convinced that he had given his all, but he nevertheless had lost the battle against America’s racist ideas. He failed to realize that he had contributed to the racist ideas. He had used the first African American periodical to circulate the ideas of class racism. He had said that lower-income Blacks had an inferior work ethic, inferior intelligence, and inferior morality compared to White people and Black elites like him. One reason poor Blacks were discriminated against, he expressed, was that they were inferior. Russwurm had used his paper to circulate the enslaving strategy of uplift suasion, a strategy that compelled free Blacks to worry about their every action in front of White people, just as their enslaved brethren worried about their every action in front of their enslavers.23
THE AGENTS OF the American Colonization Society practically ignored the ire of most free Blacks, and they could afford to do so. Donations streamed into the national office. The society’s annual income leaped from $778 in 1825 (about $16,000 in 2014) to $40,000 a decade later (about $904,000 in 2014). State colonization societies sprang up in nearly every western and northern state. But the ACS never attracted its greatest patron saint: Thomas Jefferson. The former president only tracked the development of the ACS from afar. He was suspicious of the organization because he could not stand the Federalists and the Presbyterians behind it.24
Jefferson may not have supported the ACS, but he never wavered in his support for the colonizationist idea during his final years. Establishing a colony in Africa “may introduce among the aborigines the arts of cultivated life, and the blessing of civilization and science,” he wrote to historian and future Harvard president Jared Sparks on February 4, 1824. Apparently, Black Americans would civilize the continent under the tutelage of those White Americans who had civilized them. It would compensate for “the long course of injuries” they had endured, Jefferson said, such that in the end, America “[would] have rendered them perhaps more good than evil.”25
A string of illnesses slowed Jefferson down in 1825. He still read, and he may have perused the first issue of the society’s African Repository and Colonial Journal in March. The issue opened with a history of the ACS, which gave a nod to Jefferson, and ended by speaking of the four hundred settlers in Liberia “standing in lonely beauty.” In another piece, entitled “Observations on the Early History of the Negro Race,” a writer identified as “T.R.” took aim at polygenesists who spoke of Black people as a separate species, incapable of civilization, or “the connecting link between men and monkies.” The polygenesists must not know, T.R. wrote, “that the people who they traduce, were for more than a thousand years . . . the most enlightened on the globe.”
T.R. cited Jefferson’s old friend Count Constantine Volney, the French historian who forty years earlier had said the ancient Egyptians were of African descent. After several pages passionately demonstrating that the ancient Egyptians were African, T.R. declared that America should “carry back by colonies to Africa, now in barbarism, the blessings which . . . were received from her.” Civilization was supposedly exhausted in Africa, but awakened in Europe, T.R. stated. But how did the originators of civilization produce such a region of ignorance and barbarism? How did they forget the arts and sciences? These questions were not asked, and they went unanswered. As assimilationists, the only point colonizationists like T.R. tried to make was that since Africans had been civilized in an earlier time, they could be civilized once again.26
By the time the ACS released the second volume of its periodical in the spring of 1826, Jefferson’s health had deteriorated to the point that he could not leave home. By June, he could not leave his bed. Late that month, writer Henry Lee IV—known to Jefferson as the grandson of a Revolutionary War hero—desired a meeting with him. When the bedridden Jefferson learned of Lee’s presence, he demanded to see him. The half-brother of future Confederate general Robert E. Lee was Jefferson’s last visitor.
Jefferson had to decline an invitation to Washington to attend the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. He sent a celebratory statement to Washington instead, saying: “The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.” His last public words—so sweet to every free person, so bitter to the enslaved.27
Aside from his Hemings children (and Sally Hemings), Jefferson did not free any of the other enslaved people at Monticello. One historian estimated that Jefferson had owned more than six hundred slaves over the course of his lifetime. In 1826, he held around two hundred people as property and he was about $100,000 in debt (about $2 million in 2014), an amount so staggering that he knew that once he died, everything—and everyone—would be sold.
On July 2, 1826, Jefferson seemed to be fighting to stay alive. The eighty-three-year-old awoke before dawn on July 4 and beckoned his enslaved house servants. The Black faces gathered around his bed. They were probably his final sight, and he gave them his final words. He had come full circle. In his earliest childhood memory and in his final lucid moment, Jefferson rested in the comfort of slavery.28