Both Wheatley and Jefferson Tried to Liberate America

   

Angel Parham makes an important point regarding Phillis Wheatley’s role in “reinforcing the foundations of the American project and its defense of freedom.” Wheatley’s poetry was a literary adjunct to the petitions and speeches of other black Americans, free and enslaved, who took seriously the liberating politics (and religion) of the new nation.[1] Her most famous poem, “On Being Brought from Africa to America” (1773), pricks the conscience of her white readers with a concise challenge to both their religious and political convictions:

Written when Wheatley was only fourteen, the poem invites white American readers to think through the implications of any claim that forcibly transplanting Africans to American soil was an unmitigated improvement in their condition.[2] It gets those readers to agree almost too quickly with its premises in order to move them to conclusions they have yet to act fully upon. To agree with the poem is to leave them to reconcile American principles—religious and political—with American practice toward the now American African.

For example, in what way could surviving the harrowing Middle Passage be an act of “mercy”? Why is Christian America better than “Pagan” Africa? If salvation applies to Wheatley’s “benighted soul,” how ought American “Christians” treat their African sister in Christ? Her final ironic challenge, juxtaposing the black “colour” of “Negros” to the black soul of Cain, puts an exclamation point on the underlying message of equality that Wheatley understands even better than most white American Christians. In short, do Americans really believe in America, not to mention the gospel?

Now, Thomas Jefferson may have given short shrift to Wheatley’s poetry, but he deserves everlasting credit for (1) what he does not say about racial inequality and (2) what he does say about human equality. In the first place, although he freed only ten of the more than six hundred slaves he legally owned over his lifetime (most through inheritance or natural increase),[3] he never “justified the degraded status of Africans” as Parham claims in any public or private document. Despite the insulting depiction of blacks in Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson qualifies his observations: “The opinion, that they are inferior in the faculties of reason and imagination, must be hazarded with great diffidence.” He continues, “I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.” Without question, his examination of black people as if they were subjects in an experiment belies the claim in the Declaration of Independence that human equality is a “self-evident” truth.[4] However, his observations are intended to explore the political implications of a race of people whom white Virginians have chiefly associated with slavery. Jefferson is candid about the impediments to an emancipation he consistently acknowledged they deserved but was unlikely given the opposing sentiments of black and white Virginians.

For example, he points out that the “unfortunate difference of colour, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.” Regardless of the accuracy of his observations about their mental aptitude, Jefferson suggests that the widespread association of enslavement with the African race makes white Americans hesitant about immediate, mass emancipation. He reinforces this point by posing a question: “Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state?” His answer: “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.” During the crisis over the admission of Missouri as a slave state, Jefferson declared in an April 22, 1820 letter to John Holmes that “we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”[5] He put the matter starkly in a January 22, 1821 letter to John Adams, discussing whether Congress possessed the power to regulate slavery in the states: “Are our slaves to be presented with freedom and a dagger?” Fear of a race war, Jefferson observed, was a significant reason that white Virginians hesitated to free their slaves and incorporate them into their political community.

Perhaps most importantly, in February 1809, Jefferson shared with Henri Grégoire, a French abolitionist bishop, that his “doubts were the result of personal observation on the limited sphere of my own State, where the opportunities for the development of their genius were not favorable, and those of exercising it still less so. I expressed them therefore with great hesitation.”[6] He then added, “but whatever be their degree of talent it is no measure of their rights. Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others” (emphasis mine). Even in the worst case scenario—namely, that Jefferson’s “doubts” about “the grade of understanding allotted to them by nature” proved true—he insisted that black people possessed rights regardless of their mental or physical endowments vis-à-vis white people. He opined that “on this subject they are gaining daily in the Opinions of nations, & hopeful advances are making towards their reestablishment on an equal footing with the other colours of the human family.” As the evidence of their natural capacity on par with whites became more widespread, he concluded hopefully that it “cannot fail to have effect in hastening the day of their relief.” Jefferson believed that the political consequence of white prejudice against black people, whether ill-founded or not, could not be ignored.

At bottom, Jefferson always maintained that slavery was unjust. In his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, he condemned King George III for waging “cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s [sic] most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.”[7] Describing the transatlantic slave trade as “execrable commerce” and the product of “piratical warfare,” Jefferson was repeating a criticism of the king he had made in 1774 in his “Summary View of the Rights of British America.” He noted that colonial efforts to ban the importation of slaves as the first step towards “the infranchisement [i.e., emancipation] of the slaves we have” were repeatedly “defeated by his majesty’s negative.”[8] By “preferring the immediate advantages of a few African corsairs to the lasting interests of the American states, and to the rights of human nature, deeply wounded by this infamous practice,” King George III had abused his veto power to the detriment of both blacks and whites in America.

By affirming that black people possessed “sacred rights” and “the rights of human nature,” Jefferson makes it difficult—though not impossible—to deny that he, along with the founding generation, understood persons of every race to share a common humanity. Unfortunately, as Abraham Lincoln once lamented, “The plainest print cannot be read through a gold eagle.”[9] One cannot forget that Jefferson’s public concern to avoid a race war joined a personal concern to continue a life of ease. His failure to emancipate most of his slaves, a failure shared by most slaveowners of his generation, occluded the clear promise of an America devoted to securing individual rights. Still, we can be thankful that the gap between America profession and practice has narrowed over time precisely because Americans of all races have found no clearer guide to progress in closing that gap than the words of founders like Jefferson, echoed by those of Wheatley, Frederick  Douglass, Lincoln, and other patriotic Americans through our present day.

[1] Two recent publications demonstrate the various ways blacks in the early American republic spoke and wrote about the full implications of the principles of the American founding. See David Hackett Fisher, African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2022), and James G. Basker with Nicole Seary, ed., Black Writers of the Founding Era: A Library of America Anthology (New York, NY: Penguin Random House, 2023).

[2] For an account of Wheatley’s struggle to make poetry her livelihood amidst an American people unbelieving in more ways than one, see Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America’s First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers (New York, NY: Basic Civitas Books, 2003).

[3] “Slavery FAQs—Property,” Monticello, https://www.monticello.org/slavery/slavery-faqs/property/ (accessed July 26, 2024).

[4] Jefferson originally wrote, “We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal & independant” [sic]. “Jefferson’s ‘original Rough draught’ of the Declaration of Independence,” “Declaring Independence: Drafting the Documents,” Library of Congress, from The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 1, 1760-1776, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), 243, https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/declara/ruffdrft.html (accessed July 26, 2024).

[5] To John Holmes (April 22, 1820), The Portable Thomas Jefferson, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1977), 568.

[6] To Henri Grégoire (February 25, 1809), Portable Thomas Jefferson, 517. Grégoire had sent Jefferson a copy of his book, On the Cultural Achievements of Negroes (1808), in response to his disparaging comments about black people in Notes on the State of Virginia. For a recent book that examines Jefferson’s composition of Notes on the State of Virginia and argues that it was part of broader project of Jefferson’s to convince younger slaveowners to adopt emancipation, see Cara Rogers Stevens, Thomas Jefferson and the Fight against Slavery (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2024).

[7] Ibid 4

[8] Thomas Jefferson, “A Summary View of the Rights of British America” (July 1774), Portable Thomas Jefferson, 14, 15.

[9] Abraham Lincoln, “The Dred Scott Decision: Speech at Springfield, Illinois” (June 26, 1857), ed. Roy P. Basler, Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings (New York, NY: Da Capo Press, 1990; orig. publ.: Cleveland, OH: World Pub. Co. 1946), 365.