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| Topic Started: Oct 25 2011, 02:00 PM (281 Views) | |
| JBK | Oct 25 2011, 02:00 PM Post #1 |
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Hello all, I am working on an essay on the American Revolution & War of Independance and am stuck with this one man. Jefferson clearly was someone who was enlightened, and most of the books I have read agree that he was against slavery. He wanted to condemn it in the constitution and the Northwest Ordenance, forbidding it in the area coverd by the Ordenance was made by a comitee chaired by Jefferson. However, there is one part in Reynolds book which seems to kill everything I have read on Jefferson. Reynolds, D. America: Empire of Liberty. Penguin, London 2010 (2009) p. 109 He also was a slave owner himself. So my question is, was Jefferson against slavery, or for it, or did he have some kind of motive to condemn it but keep his own slaves (besides economic oppertunity)? Any Thoughts? Edited by JBK, Oct 25 2011, 02:02 PM.
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| Basil Fawlty | Oct 25 2011, 04:27 PM Post #2 |
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Post Tenebras Lux
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Jefferson was certainly a man of opposites. But in this case, his thinking was not far from many southerners' beliefs about slavery. The important thing to remember is that there were several distinct stages in the development of attitudes toward slavery. In the 1770's and 80's there was a growing recognition of its inherent evil. Abolitionist societies began to spring up, southerners began slowly manumitting some of their slaves, and influential politicians -- Jefferson among them -- began openly speaking of it as a regrettable institution. It was something incompatible with liberty, they recognized, but it was so deeply ingrained in society that it was not possible to get rid of it quickly without major economic disruption. What Jefferson and many others hoped for was a gradual, "imperceptible" transition in the first decades of the 19th Century such that at some far off future date, there would be no slaves. In the meantime, it was a necessary evil to be suffered, but an evil that was clearly on its way out. There were good reasons for believing this at the time. Cotton was not yet a major cash crop, and the demand for slaves was dying in most of the settled South. The mounting push to ban the transatlantic slave trade also meant that, soon, there would be no further influx of Africans into America, and their numbers relative to the white population would naturally decline. (No other society in the Americas at that point had a self-sustaining slave population. That is why Brazil, for example, had to continue importing slaves well into the 1800's.) And of course, the attitudes of slave-owners themselves seemed to be going the right way. Two major ideological changes took place by 1800. Gordon Wood describes the first this way:
Wood is going a bit far there, for there surely were racist sentiments well before that era; however, his main thrust is right. The more that the ideal of equality took root, the more that advocates of slavery had to resort to raw biological arguments. And if there was an inherent biological reason for blacks' inferiority, it would not disappear with emancipation. Indeed, many southerners came to believe that freedom would only unleash the worst of blacks' animal impulses, for they would no longer be restrained by the hand (or whip) of their former masters. In any case, their lack of intelligence would preclude full membership in a virtuous, democratic society, with its emphasis on individual learning, public discourse, and reason. The second major influence was the revolution in Haiti during the 1790's, which terrified many southerners because it showed them just what they could expect if there ever was a successful slave rebellion in America. The repeated attempts at slave insurrections in the South from the 1790's onward further heightened their insecurity. This was a theme echoed right up until the Civil War, and is hinted at in many of the secession documents -- fears of a race war, violence on an unprecedented scale. Taken together, these conclusions led Jefferson and many other southerners to believe, by the early 1800s, that a biracial society could never work even if it consisted totally of free blacks:
To be fair, there was some truth to the claim about memory. It has certainly been a major thorn in race relations for the past 200 years. But in effect, Jeffersonians were caught between two evils: slavery and debasement of humanity on the one hand, or what they believed would be a quite literal debasement of society by "amalgamation" or race war. They had a tiger by the tail and could neither hold on nor let go. Their solution was to reject both options. Like many of Jefferson's schemes, it was impractical, but it was philosophically coherent. This logic is why there were attempts at Liberian colonization in the 1820's. Since it was impossible to live side by side, the only recourse was separating the races. Ironically, those failed in part because Jeffersonians were so reluctant to involve the federal government, which probably was the only entity with enough resources to carry out a serious effort. So to answer your question directly, he was against slavery, but that did not mean he automatically embraced equality. That is more a 20th Century outlook. However, Jefferson's beliefs did evolve over time, and his opinions need to be read in that context. |
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| JBK | Oct 25 2011, 04:55 PM Post #3 |
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Thanks a million Augustus! I might have some more questions later on but this certainly is very helpfull for the moment. |
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| Basil Fawlty | Oct 25 2011, 07:55 PM Post #4 |
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Post Tenebras Lux
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No trouble at all. As you can tell from the length of my response, there is quite a bit to this topic.
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2:40 PM Jul 11