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• Bibliographical Essay: Henry B. Veatch, Natural Law: Dead Or Alive?
• I: Natural Law
• “nature” and “law” In Natural Law
• The Anatomy of Natural Rights
• Egoism and Rights
• The Is/ought Chimera
• Deriving “ought” From “is”
• Facts Vs. Value-laden Whims
• Is/ought and Probable Reasons
• Does Righteous Anger Imply Rights?
• Why Be Moral?
• Truth As an Objective Value
• Was the Revolution Objectively Necessary?
• Natural Law and State of Nature
• Natural Law and the State
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• Dworkin On Rights
• Liberalism, Rights, and Abortion
• Rights and “mercy Killing”
• Rights and the “brain Drain”
• The Natural Law Right to Work
• Grotius: Contract and Natural Law
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• II: Autonomy, Privacy, and Authority
• Bureaucracy and “the Organization Man”
• Autonomy and Anarchism
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• Schooling For Conformity
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• Obedience to Authority
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• III: The Ambiguities of Liberty
• Clarifying Freedom
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• Religious Freedom
• Freedom, Existentialism, and Innocent Victims
• Does Censorship Harm Freedom?
• IV: Slavery
• Slavery, Ideology, and Subordination
• Slavery and Imperialist Ideology
• Enlightenment Liberalism Vs. Slavery
• The Anatomy of a Slave Revolt
• Colonial American Slave Law
• Jefferson On Slavery
• Slavery and the Poor
• V: Planning
• Regulation and the Warfare State
• Mail, Privacy, and Social Control
• Corporate State Capitalism: Coal
• French War “planification”: Chlorates
• Bureaucracy and British Regulation
• British Foreign Policy and Stagnation
• Political Decisions and the Economy
• Government, Labor, and Multinationals
• Black Markets Vs. Regulation
• Regulation Vs. Academic Autonomy
• Government Schools and Social Control
• The Economics of Charity
• International State Planning and Inflation
• Competition and Individual Knowledge

Jefferson on Slavery

Edmund S. Morgan

Review Article of Gary Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. New York: Doubleday, 1978. In The New York Review of Books 25 (August 17, 1978): 38–40.

Jefferson's moral and political thinking on the vital topics of the basis of social contract and his attitude toward slavery receives clarification from Gary Wills's new exegesis of the Declaration of Independence. Seeking sources beyond John Locke, Wills propounds Jefferson's intellectual indebtedness to such Scottish Enlightenment thinkers as Kames, Hume, Hutcheson, Ferguson, Reid, Dugald Steward, and Adam Smith.

In contrast to Locke's atomistic individuals, who through intellectual calculation form an artificial social contract and enter into civil society from a conjectural nonsocial “state of nature,” Hutcheson emphasized a universal, innate, and natural “moral sense” that benevolently moved mankind to live in social community. The Declaration's credo that “all men are created equal” goes beyond Lockean equal ownership of each man's person to a present social fact that all mankind equally possesses a moral sense, and derivative social rights, despite differences in talents and externals.

This Scottish theory of moral sentiments might help resolve the contradictions in Jefferson's remarks on the natural inferiority of blacks voiced in the Notes on Virginia. In that work Jefferson judged that blacks were mentally and physically inferior to whites, but endorsed their equality in possessing a common faculty of a moral sense of the “heart.” This assertion was crucial because it is this egalitarian moral sense that “gives man his unique dignity, that grounds his rights, that makes him self-governing.”

But Jefferson was no abolitionist. Because of his allegiance to white society, he favored emigration from America for freed slaves. This ambivalent attitude reveals Jefferson's dilemma as what Morgan terms a “conflict between his hatred of slavery and his devotion to a society that failed to abolish it.” Jefferson's devotion to white society surfaces in his distress over Congress's deletion of a section of his Declaration draft. Originally Jefferson had complained of King George's attempt (through Virginia's Governor Dunmore) to free any slaves who would support the loyalist cause: “he is now exciting those very people [black slaves] to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty....” Congress substituted the more ambiguous wording: “He has excited domestic insurrections among us.” The original wording contradictorily combined a condemnation of slavery and the slave trade with a condemnation of slave insurrections to gain freedom. This is a strange tension in a document justifying political insurrection. Jefferson and the supporters of the Declaration felt by their moral sentiment more loyal to the society of white Americans who “stood ready to defend against Kings, loyalists, and slaves alike.”

A similar exegesis of the “domestic insurrections” passage as a muted reference to American slave revolts also appears in Sidney Kaplan, “The ‘Domestic Insurrections’ of the Declaration of Independence.” Journal of Negro History 41 (January 1976): 243–255.