Bound for Canaan Page 5

  A little before noon, Jefferson left Conrad and McMunn’s boardinghouse and, disdaining the pompous trappings of the state carriage that had been provided, democratically set out on foot toward the still-unfinished Capitol, where he was to take the oath of office. The new city, like the young nation itself, was still more an idea, more a hopeful plan than an established reality. Jefferson’s walk that morning took him through what was essentially a worksite whose grandly named avenues were still troughs of red mud cluttered with alder trees and stumps, where only a relative handful of unimposing buildings lay scattered between patches of woods and the Potomac River. Even the president’s official residence—not yet known as the White House—was still under construction. Cannon roared as Jefferson entered the north wing of the Capitol, the only concession to ceremony that the champion of the small farmers, and mechanics, and men of little property countenanced on this historic day, when power would pass, at least symbolically, into their hands and out of those of the Federalists.

  When he raised his hand to take the oath from John Marshall, his cousin and political rival, the fifty-eight-year-old Jefferson was becoming president less of a stable union sharing a deep sense of common interest, than of a political confection that resembled the tacked-together Yugoslavia of the late twentieth century, a loose agglomeration of mini-states protective of their autonomy, and suspicious of encroachment by their weak central government. It was a simple, rural nation whose population was smaller than that of Ireland. Its largest city, Philadelphia, numbered seventy thousand inhabitants, and its constituent parts were linked by roads that were little more than rambling tracks sketched through the forest. The writ of the national government barely reached beyond the Appalachians, into lands that were still inhabited by powerful Indian nations who occupied most of the territory between the mountains and the Mississippi River. Indeed, only a few years earlier, the country had suffered the worst defeat ever to befall Americans at the hands of Indians, the loss of more than eight hundred men on the banks of the Wabash River, in present-day Indiana. Spaniards governed Florida; and the French, New Orleans and most of the Mississippi Valley. It was a country in which inequalities of class, gender, and race were ingrained and largely unquestioned.

  The prospect of Jefferson’s election had thrown fear into the hearts of many Americans. During the recent campaign, he had been denounced by his opponents as a “vulgar demagogue” and a “bold atheist,” who would undertake “dangerous innovations.” He owed his very election to the disproportionate power of the slave states in the Electoral College, a fact that infuriated legislators from New England. Now, however, his gracious demeanor, his acute intelligence, and more than anything else his conciliatory words reassured even Marshall, the leader of the Federalists, who had feared that Jefferson as president might prove to be an “absolute terrorist.” When he began to speak, Jefferson’s reedy voice barely reached the ears of his audience, who strained to catch every pregnant word. What he had to say was exquisite in its eloquence, fusing soaring idealism with the hard realities of politics.

  The speech was Jefferson at his most seductive. “We are all Republicans—we are all Federalists,” he declared, directly addressing his wary, not to say vengeful, opponents in the chamber. “If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it. I know, indeed, that some honest men fear that a republican government cannot be strong; that this government is not strong enough. But would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm, on the theoretic and visionary fear that this government, the world’s best hope, may by possibility want energy to preserve itself? I trust not.” He went on to describe his glowing vision of a rising nation, spread over a wide and fruitful land, traversing the seas with the rich productions of its industry, “advancing rapidly to destinies beyond the reach of mortal eye.”

  Jefferson never mentioned slavery. But the moral freight of his words could hardly be missed by anyone—they were still few, it is true, but their numbers were growing—who believed that simple justice demanded the emancipation of those in bondage. He promised “equal and exact justice to all men,” the guarantee of equal rights for minorities, and a government “which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread that it has earned.” Jefferson did not, of course, intend his words for Josiah Henson and the 896,848 other slaves in the sixteen states of the federal union. (Vermont had become a state in 1791, Kentucky in 1792, and Tennessee in 1796.) Although he passionately hated slavery, in the abstract, Jefferson had always accommodated himself to it in practice, and he had no wish to antagonize his many slave-owning supporters. Yet his words ringingly embodied beliefs about justice and equality that underscored the terrible contradictions in a nation that proclaimed its faith in individual liberty while continuing to hold seventeen percent of its inhabitants in bondage.

  At fifty-eight, Jefferson’s body was still slim and taut, and his “mild and pleasing countenance” radiated optimism. As he stood that day before his assembled countrymen, he embodied many of the deepest contradictions of his young nation. John Quincy Adams would describe him as “a rare mixture of infidel philosophy and epicurean morals, of burning ambition and of stoical self-control, of deep duplicity and of generous sensibility.” He was an aristocrat, a product of the landed Southern gentry, who espoused a vision of the most radical democracy. An early and outspoken enemy of slavery, he was also one of the largest slave owners in Virginia. Slavery was woven inextricably into the fabric of his personal life and his political world. Like other planters, he measured his wealth largely in slaves and land. Slaves had served him since his birth. Nearly two hundred slaves tilled the fields of his estates. Slaves would attend him day in, day out in the president’s house. A man who condemned racial mixing in the harshest terms, he carried on a liaison with one of his female slaves that lasted for decades.

  Jefferson’s enemies accused him of maintaining a sexual relationship with Sally Hemings, a light-skinned slave twenty-seven years his junior, the half-sister of his deceased wife, and said that he had fathered children by her. Jefferson vigorously denied the charge, although such relationships were extremely common. Gossip nonetheless took wing in the form of slanderous doggerel: “Of all the damsels on the green / On mountain or in valley / A lass so luscious ne’er was seen / As Montecellan Sally.” Down to the present day, Hemings’s descendants cited family tradition as evidence that the relationship had in fact existed, even as Jefferson’s defenders dismissed such assertions as baseless, pointing to Jefferson’s deep devotion to the memory of his wife, and to his oft expressed hatred of miscegenation to contradict them. Recent genetic research, though imperfect, has strengthened the Hemings claim and has gradually won over most modern scholars of Jefferson. Such a relationship, supremely private though it was, and ultimately as mysterious as any of the vagaries of the human heart, only deepens the profound ambiguity of Jefferson’s professed, and deeply contradictory, attitudes about race.

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  Jefferson’s racial dilemma, in all its dimensions—moral, psychological, emotional, political—was very much that of the nation itself in the early years of the nineteenth century. No American of his time examined his own ideas with more seriousness than Jefferson, a process that has been recounted with thoroughness by John Chester Miller, in The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery. In his struggle, and ultimate failure, to find a resolution to the problem of slavery, the uncertainties of the young nation can be seen as in no other single mind. From the grinding stress of that ambivalence would grow the inspiration for the abolitionist movement, and its activist cutting edge, the Underground Railroad, as well as the most bigoted d
efense of slavery, and the political philosophy of states’ rights.

  Jefferson embodied the very best in a nation that was increasingly struggling to find a painless way to end slavery, an effort that was doomed to failure from the start. He had, as much as any man living, created the United States, crafted the principles by which it strove to live, and been a part of the compromises that had been necessary to bring the country into being. More than most, he believed that slavery was morally incompatible with white men’s freedom, and ultimately a reef upon which the nation might someday founder. In later years, his idealism, like that of many of his generation, would atrophy. Despite protestations to the contrary, he would eventually slip uncomfortably close to the camp of those who embraced slavery and states’ rights as pillars of American stability. Yet his clarion appeals for liberty, which are most memorably enshrined in the immortal words of the Declaration of Independence, would have an impact far beyond his own ultimately class-bound intentions.

  Jefferson held no illusions about the inherent cruelty of slavery: a “hideous evil,” he called it. Intellectually, at least, he pitied the suffering of its victims. He also had little patience with the hypocrisy of the patriot “who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment, or death itself in vindication of his own liberty,” but who could still wreak upon others a form of oppression “one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose.” Perhaps most of all, he saw that its corrupting influence on those who owned slaves undermined the hardy self-reliance that he felt was crucial to the survival of democratic institutions. “The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other,” he wrote in “Notes on the State of Virginia,” the fullest expression of his views on the subject. “Our children see this, and learn to imitate it…The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious particularity.” He also feared that the continuation of slavery would inevitably lead to bloody rebellion and race war.

  Coupled to Jefferson’s hatred of slavery as an institution, however, was an ingrained repugnance toward blacks as human beings. He did not doubt that they were inferior to whites in both body and mind, and considered it to be at least possible that they were “different species of the same genus.” He thought that it would be impossible for the races to live together in freedom, and miscegenation appalled him. As governor of Virginia, he had proposed a bill requiring a white woman who had given birth to a mulatto child to leave the state. Later, as part of a proposed plan for the emancipation of slaves, he suggested that black children be removed from their parents and reared at public expense, and trained either in farming or other trades, girls until the age of eighteen and boys to twenty-one, and then “colonized to such place as the circumstances of the time should render most proper.” It was absolutely essential that they “be removed beyond the reach of mixture.” Their parents, meanwhile, inured to the dependency of slavery, would eventually die off, and white immigrants would be invited to repopulate the land. For such a supremely rational man, it was a bizarre scheme, and would have required (he calculated) fifty ships per year to deport just the sixty thousand additional blacks who were born annually. “Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expense of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave?” he asked, and then answered his own question: “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.”

  Blacks, Jefferson was convinced, were “in reason much inferior” to whites, being congenitally incapable of achievement in mathematics, arts, or science, and in their imagination “dull, tasteless and anomalous.” He also found blacks physically repellent. They suffered from “a strong and disagreeable odor,” while whites were endowed with “a more elegant symmetry of form,” which kindled in blacks a sexual desire “as uniformly as is the preference of the Oranootan [Orangutan] for the black women over those of his own species.” Even their emotions were inferior. They felt griefs less profoundly, and although they were “more ardent after their female,” their love lacked the subtlety of expression that characterized romance among whites.

  Jefferson was by no means alone in his prejudices. The eminent Philadelphia doctor Benjamin Rush, an early and sincere advocate of emancipation, wondered seriously if black skin might be a form of leprosy; once a cure for leprosy had been found, blackness would disappear, he reasoned. The intellectual ferment of the European Enlightenment that gave birth to liberating ideas about human rights also spawned a pseudo-scientific approach to differences among the races that lent the authority of some of the most eminent thinkers to age-old bigotry. “The Negro exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state,” asserted Friedrich Hegel. “We must lay aside all thought of reverence and morality—all that we call feeling—if we would rightly comprehend him; there is nothing harmonious with humanity to be found in this type of character.” David Hume, the leading figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, declared, “There never was a civilized nation of any other com plexion than white, or even any individual eminent either in action or speculation.” Even John Locke, who formulated the theory of natural liberty, and who more than any other single individual provided the intellectual underpinnings of the American Revolution, was a staunch defender of slavery, not to mention an investor in the Royal African Company, which enjoyed the British monopoly of the African slave trade. In “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,” Locke wrote that “the child can demonstrate to you that a negro is not a man, because white colour was one of the constant simple ideas of the complex idea he calls man: and therefore he can demonstrate, by the principle, it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be, that a negro is not a man.”

  What was remarkable about Jefferson and so many of the best men of his time was not that they held the prejudices they did, but that they managed to rise so far beyond them. Their reading of Locke, Rousseau, and other thinkers taught them that human beings were born with natural rights, which entailed inherent civil rights such as political liberty, freedom of religion, equality before the law, and the right to live one’s life as one saw fit. Similarly, if human beings and societies alike were capable of limitless progress, to inhibit it was to commit a crime against Nature, if not against God. Such egalitarian ideas posed a problem for those who would defend slavery: if all men were created equal, how could some hold others in bondage? If all men were born free by law of nature, the Boston radical James Otis argued, “Does it follow that ’tis right to enslave a man because he is black? Will short curled hair like wool instead of Christian hair…help the argument? Can any logical inference in favor of slavery be drawn from a flat nose, a long or short face?” Tom Paine wrote that “every history of the creation” agreed on one point, “the unity of man; by which I mean that all men are of one degree, and consequently that all men are born equal, and with equal natural right, in the same manner as if posterity had been continued by creation rather than generation…and consequently, every child born into the world must be considered as deriving its existence from God.” Alexander Hamilton, who as an officer during the Revolution saw black troops fight bravely on the battlefield, and knew their abilities, asserted, “Their natural faculties are as good as ours…The contempt we have been taught to entertain for the blacks, makes us fancy many things that are founded neither in reason nor in experience.”

  Americans’ discomfort with slavery had a history.
From the earliest days of settlement, at least some colonists had equivocal feelings about slavery. In 1641 Massachusetts forbade slavery in the colony “unless it be lawful Captives taken in just Warres, and such strangers as willingly sell themselves or are sold to us.” By the eighteenth century, Quakers were beginning to argue that spiritual principles required Christians to take a personal stand against slaveholding. But thoughtful men of Jefferson’s generation were more directly influenced by the movement toward emancipation in England. In 1772 Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, after determining that there was no law that stipulated that slavery existed in England, declared that slavery was so “odious” that no law could reasonably exist to support it. In effect, this meant that any slave who set foot on English soil became free. In 1787 British abolitionists, with strong support from the evangelicals and Quakers, including the famed potter Josiah Wedgwood, founded the Committee for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. The committee’s most dynamic figure, Thomas Clarkson, memorably declaimed to the House of Commons that “this execrable traffic was as opposite to expediency as it was to the dictates of mercy, of religion, of equity, and of every principle that should actuate the breast.” Even slaveholding Americans shared some of these sentiments. Patrick Henry regarded slavery as an “abominable practice,” and Richard Henry Lee, an ancestor of Robert E. Lee, speaking in the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1772, condemned the slave trade as crueler than “the savage barbarity of a Saracen.”

  No man had been more consistent in arguing on behalf of individual rights than Jefferson. On the eve of the revolution, he had taken on the case of a mulatto who was suing for his freedom, arguing in a Virginia court that “under the law of nature, all men are born free, and everyone comes into the world with a right to his own person, which includes the liberty of moving and using it at his own will.” And in a section of the Declaration of Independence that was deleted in deference to slave owners, he explicitly attacked the slave trade, asserting that King George III had “waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating the most sacred right of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into distant slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.” His Preamble, however, would be quoted in almost every important manifesto of the abolitionist movement, and cited countless times by the stationmasters and conductors of the Underground Railroad as an inspiration for the risks they undertook to help fugitive slaves on their way north: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” From now on, as long as slavery lasted, the burden of proof would lie upon slaveholders to show why the blunt declaration that “all men are created equal” did not mean precisely what it said.