Jefferson in Time: Perspectives through His Eyes

Perhaps the single greatest obstacle to understanding Thomas Jefferson today is a lack of context. Jefferson has always been complex and difficult to fathom, always been fiercely—even irrationally—loved (or hated) by those who read his words and study his politics, and who find him hypocritical, dangerous, or inspirational. But as time marches on, and American society undergoes sweeping changes, it becomes increasingly difficult to discuss Jefferson’s more controversial actions and opinions, because we lack historical literacy regarding the sorts of cultural and political obstacles Jefferson was up against in his quests for liberty in his own time. It is almost impossible to evaluate Jefferson fairly, in other words, without immersing oneself within the culture of 18th and 19th century Virginia—a place almost as foreign to modern Americans as Mars.

Nowhere is this more evident than the current emphasis on Jefferson’s identity as a slaveholder. Visitors to Monticello today may hear more about the enslaved workforce, and Jefferson’s role in their enslavement, than about Jefferson’s work to free individuals in Virginia, first through private legal aid and then through legislative efforts, an emancipation amendment, a new state constitution, a book published in part to influence college students to oppose slavery, and finally a detailed freedom-through-tenant-farming plan that never came to fruition.

Modern audiences will likely not hear about these antislavery measures partly because most of them failed, and partly because they are not well known even among scholars. But another reason for the lack of discussion about Jefferson’s antislavery beliefs is that the mental gymnastics involved in reconciling these antislavery measures with Jefferson’s well-known ownership of human beings demand of contemporary Americans that we try to put ourselves into Jefferson’s own shoes and see matters from his perspective. There are few harder tasks, even for historians, to undertake. There are also few more worthwhile, for only by seeking to understand others within the context of their own times and circumstances can we hope to truly understand the possibilities, and the limits, of human action. Indeed, we cannot hope to truly understand ourselves, let alone our neighbors, without developing the ability to see life through other people’s eyes.

Thomas Jefferson was born in the backwoods of Virginia in 1743. When young Thomas was fourteen years old, his father died. As the eldest son, the gangly, redhaired teenager inherited hundreds of acres of land—and several dozen enslaved human beings.[1] At the time, much of the world accepted slavery as part of the human condition: it existed, in varying forms, from Asia to eastern Europe to Africa to the indigenous peoples of the Americas. (For that matter, slavery is still a massive global problem, though it is technically illegal.[2]) In 1743, no organized antislavery society yet existed; no plans for large-scale emancipation had yet been proposed.

Although western Europeans had stopped enslaving one another, primarily due to Christianity’s influence, their use of enslaved Native and African workers in the New World was accepted as one among many societal inequalities, a seemingly natural consequence of life in an empire in which the king sat atop a pyramid of hierarchical relationships. Nor were the English colonies unique; English planters borrowed elements of their race-based system of chattel slavery from earlier models developed by Spanish and Portuguese slave societies in the New World. For their part, the Iberian enslavers borrowed elements of racial justification from the Islamic societies who utilized African enslaved laborers during the Middle Ages.[3] It was only in the 18th century that certain western European philosophers and religious groups began to question racialized human bondage, applying notions of natural law, equal rights, and the “Golden Rule” to the labor systems that brought tremendous wealth to owners and empires alike.

Jefferson was one of the earliest Virginians to develop concerns about the immorality of slavery. While at the College of William and Mary, he was most fortuitously mentored by several antislavery men—including his law professor, George Wythe. Jefferson’s college writings indicate a growing awareness of Enlightenment principles, and particularly a belief in the barbarity of slavery and the need for nations to progress in their morals.[4]

Jefferson soon attempted to put his newfound principles into practice. In colonial Virginia, it was illegal to free enslaved people unless an owner first petitioned the legislature and gained special permission.[5] One of Jefferson’s first acts upon being elected to the House of Burgesses at age twenty-six was to co-sponsor a bill that would have allowed masters to manumit their slaves for any reason. However, Jefferson later recalled that this bill was defeated so soundly that his older co-sponsor was “denounced as an enemy to his country, & was treated with the grossest indecorum.”[6] As the younger member, Jefferson was spared from similar humiliation, but he retained a valuable lesson about the political capital that was expended whenever the issue of slavery was raised.

This lesson was perhaps reinforced by Jefferson’s earliest efforts to use natural law arguments on behalf of enslaved people: during his seven years of legal practice, Jefferson took on six freedom suits pro bono, having concluded during his studies that slavery had no legitimate basis in either common law or statutory law.[7] In a 1770 case, Jefferson argued that “under the law of nature, all men are born free, and every one comes into the world with a right to his own person.”[8] The court did not even wait to hear opposing counsel’s argument before throwing out Jefferson’s suit; he met with similar obstacles in each of his other attempts to use the law to free slaves.

In 1778, the Virginia legislature did at least end its participation in the transatlantic slave trade; Jefferson wrote in his 1821 Autobiography that he was the author of that anti-trade bill, though he was not present when the Assembly finally approved it. Jefferson viewed a ban on the importation of slaves as an important step toward the “final eradication” of the “evil” of slavery—something that antislavery Quakers in the northern colonies had been arguing since the early 1700s.[9] However, other Virginians may have approved the ban simply to inflate the prices of their existing human property, and Jefferson would not find the legislature amenable to any of his other antislavery efforts.

Instead, Jefferson kept encountering racism and resistance to any attempts at wholesale emancipation: at first, he hoped that banning the trade would at least “in some measure stop the increase of this great political and moral evil, while the minds of our citizens may be ripening for a complete emancipation of human nature.”[10] But the minds of many of Virginia’s citizens were too prejudiced to consider the possibility of a multiracial future. One anonymous essayist in 1773 argued that Africans were not “the same Species of Man with the White People,” but rather were “formed in common with Horses, Oxen, Dogs &c, for the Benefit of the white People alone, to be used [by] them either for Pleasure, or to labour with their other Beasts.”[11]

By 1782, writers in the Virginia Gazette were considering with horror the idea that their racially distinct workforce could ever live as equals among the white citizens: if freed, they would “war [against] their former masters,” and if allowed to remain in the same neighborhoods, they would be “ravishing and cohabitating with our white women, and in a century or less, our offspring would be a mixed mongrel of mulattoes, of whites and blacks, bays, chestnuts, sorrels, and skewbalds”—terms normally reserved for horses, and implying that mixed-race children would be less than human. Moreover, a Gazette essayist continued, enslaved labor freed white men to cultivate their own minds. Half a century before John C. Calhoun developed his “positive good” argument, Virginians were already arguing that civilization depended on slavery.[12]

Jefferson made two more legislative efforts to end slavery in Virginia: In 1777, while working to bring Virginia’s legal code into line with the revolutionary state’s newly republican principles, Jefferson collaborated with his mentor, George Wythe, to write an emancipation amendment. This amendment contained three elements: emancipation, education, and colonization for the freed slaves. These elements were designed to balance justice with an appeal to the prejudiced, tight-fisted Virginia slaveholders: emancipation applied only to babies born after the passage of the bill, ensuring that slaveholders would not lose any of their current property. The freed children would be educated at the state’s expense, indicating Jefferson’s concern that the race so viciously wronged by the injustice of slavery would receive the best chance to succeed in life. Finally, in a move designed to appeal both to racism and justice, once educated the youths would be colonized to some yet-to-be-determined destination, receiving state-sponsored aid, in addition to “alliance and protection, till they shall have acquired strength” to exist as an independent black nation.[13] The racial prejudices and fears of white Virginians were overcome, in this Wythe/Jefferson plan, by a process of gradual emancipation and separation. However, as Jefferson recalled in his Autobiography, this emancipation amendment was never presented to the legislature, because “it was found that the public mind would not yet bear the proposition.”[14]

In 1784, Jefferson wrote a constitution for the newly independent state, including a proviso that would have abolished slavery in the state after the year 1800. His constitution was not adopted.[15] As James Madison reported to George Washington a few months later, the legislature at that time was so hostile to emancipation proposals that any petitions to that effect were “rejected without dissent.”[16]

In 1785, Jefferson printed copies of his book Notes on the State of Virginia to send specifically to students at the College of William and Mary, telling several correspondents of his hope that the “rising generation” would be the one to have the boldness and firmness of conviction to enact the “great reformations” Virginia needed. Under the leadership of Professor George Wythe—“whose sentiments on the subject of slavery are unequivocal”—the students could be persuaded by Jefferson’s antislavery sentiments, including his famous lines prophesying divine judgment on Virginians if they refused to free their slaves (“I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever…”) and his account of the antislavery amendment.[17] This plan did actually bear some antislavery fruit: in his memoirs, Union General Winfield Scott recalled that he and “most, if not all, my companions” at William and Mary developed antislavery views while reading Jefferson’s Notes as students.[18] But by the 1830s, the College had taken a decidedly proslavery turn.

One final addition to Jefferson’s Virginia antislavery efforts consists of his little-known plan to import German workers and set them up as tenant farmers, working side-by-side with enslaved individuals from Jefferson’s plantations, in order to transition the enslaved workers to life as free farmers. While he worried that some of the older enslaved people would struggle, “Their children shall be brought up,” he wrote, “as others are, in habits of property and foresight, and I have no doubt but that they will be good citizens.”[19]

Not mentioned in Jefferson’s writings on this plan is any hint of colonization: at all other points in his life, Jefferson’s concern about his fellow Virginians’ prejudices, and indeed his own racism, pushed him toward expatriation for free slaves. But it seems that while he lived in Europe during the 1780s, Jefferson was able to imagine a multiracial future for Virginia. Upon his return in 1789, though, Jefferson found the white inhabitants of the state just as fearful as ever of freeing their racially distinct workforce; by 1806 the legislature passed a bill banning freed people from living in the state for longer than one year. And by the end of his life, Jefferson could not have freed all his enslaved property, even if he had tried. The law dictated that freed people could be seized and re-enslaved to pay off their old master’s debts, and Jefferson died deeply in debt.[20]

Looking back, it is tempting to see Jefferson’s failure to free all his enslaved workers as hypocritical, overshadowing all his successes. But hypocrites are pretenders—people who attempt to fool others with lofty rhetoric while embracing the very behavior they outwardly condemn. Jefferson did not embrace slavery. He questioned it; he denounced it; he tried—in several different ways, at different times—to free his state from what he described in his original draft of the Declaration of Independence as a system that violated the “most sacred rights of life & liberty.”[21]

Could Jefferson have done more—risked his political capital or his financial profits—on more occasions? Absolutely. And, if he had, we might look more favorably on him today than we do—that is, if his risk-taking did not scuttle his political career before he was able to become president, sending him home to the backwoods. For Virginia in the late 17th and early 18th centuries was a place extremely hostile to emancipators, viewing them as threats to the settled racial order. Jefferson attempted to act within the boundaries of what was acceptable at the time, doing less than some, and more than most. We should question and condemn and praise and re-evaluate this complex man’s words and actions, particularly when it comes to his influence on racist discourse and his relationship with Sally Hemings—but only after putting Jefferson into his proper context.

[1] Will of Peter Jefferson, 13 July 1757, Albemarle County Will Book 2:32-4, transcribed at Jefferson Quotes and Family Letters, Monticello.org, https://tjrs.monticello.org/letter/1797.

[2] Despite a relative absence of hereditary chattel slavery (in which one person legally owns the life and labor of another person and that person’s descendants) in most nations, the current number of unfree laborers worldwide is estimated to be above thirty million. See for example the research published at http://www.globalslaveryindex.org/findings/.

[3] James H. Sweet, “The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 54, No. 1 (Jan., 1997): 143–66.

[4] Cara Rogers Stevens, Thomas Jefferson and the Fight Against Slavery (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2024), 37–42; 49.

[5] Eva Sheppard Wolf, Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in Virginia from the Revolution to Nat Turner’s Rebellion (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 3.

[6] Thomas Jefferson (hereafter “TJ”), Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson, 1743-1790: Together with a Summary of the Chief Events in Jefferson’s Life, ed. Paul Leicester Ford (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 7.

[7] David T. Konig, "Thomas Jefferson and the Practice of Law," in Encyclopedia Virginia Dec. 7, 2020, https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/jefferson-thomas-and-the-practice-of-law/#:~:text=Though%20he%20had%20seen%20the,strict%20construction%20of%20their%20language.

[8] “Argument in the Case of Howell v. Netherland,” April 1770, in The Works of Thomas Jefferson, 10 vols., ed. Paul Leichester Ford (New York and London, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904–5), I: 376.

[9] TJ, Autobiography, 60–61. For the authorship of the bill see editorial note, Papers, “Bill to Prevent the Importation of Slaves &c.,” 16 June 1777, and my discussion of the controversy surrounding its authorship in Stevens, Jefferson, 60–61. For northern antislavery, see Matthew Mason, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 28.

[10] TJ, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. Frank Shuffelton (New York and other cities: Penguin Group, 1999), 94.

[11] Anonymous author, Virginia Gazette (Williamsburg: Purdie & Dixon), 2 Dec. 1773; quoted in Wolf, Race and Liberty, 17.

[12] See John C. Calhoun, “Slavery a Positive Good” (speech before the U.S. Senate, 6 Feb. 1837), available online at http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/slavery-a-positive-good/.

[13] TJ, Notes, ed. Shuffelton, 135.

[14] TJ, Autobiography, ed. Ford, 77.

[15] “Jefferson’s Draft of a Constitution for Virginia [May–June 1783],” in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Digital Edition, eds. Barbara B. Oberg and J. Jefferson Looney, http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/TSJN. Unless otherwise noted, all Jefferson correspondence is from this collection.

[16] Madison to Washington, 11 Nov. 1785, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov.

[17] TJ to Chastellux, 7 June 1785; TJ to Richard Price, 7 Aug. 1785; TJ, Notes, ed. Shuffelton, 169.

[18] Winfield Scott, Memoirs of Lieut.-General Scott, vol. 2, (New York: Sheldon and Co., 1864; reprinted Bedford: Applewood Books., n.d.), 372.

[19] TJ to Edward Bancroft, 26 Jan. 1789.

[20] Wolf, 122; 116-118. See also Herbert E. Sloan, Principle and Interest: Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Debt (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001).

[21] Jefferson, “original Rough draught” of the Declaration, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/declara/ruffdrft.html.