94 Evils of Slavery (1781)

The plan of the revisal was this: to emancipate all slaves born after passing the act. The bill reported by the revisors does not itself contain this proposition. But an amendment containing it was prepared, to be offered to the legislature whenever the bill should be taken up. And further directing that they should continue with their parents to a certain age, then be brought up at the public expense to tillage, arts, or sciences according to their geniuses [talents] till the females should be eighteen and the males twenty-one years of age. When they should be colonized to such place as the circumstances of the time should render most proper, sending them out with arms, implements of household and of the handicraft arts, seeds, pairs of the useful domestic animals, etc. to declare them a free and independent people. And extend to them our alliance and protection till they shall have acquired strength. And to send vessels at the same time to other parts of the world for an equal number of white inhabitants to induce whom to migrate here, proper encouragements were to be proposed.

It will probably be asked, 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? 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. To these objections which are political may be added others which are physical and moral. The first difference which strikes us is that of color. Add to these flowing hair, a more elegant symmetry of form, their own judgment in favor of the whites, declared by their preference of them. Besides those of color, figure, and hair, there are other physical distinctions proving a difference of race. They seem to require less sleep. They are at least as brave and more adventuresome. But this may perhaps proceed from a want of forethought which prevents their seeing a danger till it be present. Their griefs are transient. In general their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection. To this must be ascribed their disposition to sleep when abstracted from their diversions and unemployed in labor. Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination it appears to me that in memory they are equal to the whites. In reason much inferior and in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.

It would be unfair to follow them to Africa for this investigation. We will consider them here, on the same stage with the whites and where the facts are not apocryphal on which a judgment is to be formed. In music they are more generally gifted than the whites with accurate ears for tune and time. Whether they will be equal to the composition of a more extensive run of melody or of complicated harmony is yet to be proved. Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry. Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry. The improvement of the blacks in body and mind in the first instance of their mixture with the whites has been observed by everyone and proves that their inferiority is not the effect merely of their condition of life. Whether further observation will or will not verify the conjecture that nature has been less bountiful to them in the endowments of the head, I believe that in those of the heart she will be found to have done them justice. That disposition to theft with which they have been branded must be ascribed to their situation and not to any depravity of the moral sense.

Notwithstanding these considerations which must weaken their respect for the laws of property, we find among them numerous instances of the most rigid integrity and of benevolence, gratitude, and unshaken fidelity. The opinion that they are inferior in the faculties of reason and imagination must be hazarded with great diffidence [caution]. To our reproach it must be said that though for a century and a half we have had under our eyes the races of black and of red men, they have never yet been viewed by us as subjects of natural history. 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. It is not against experience to suppose that different species of the same genus or varieties of the same species may possess different qualifications. Will not a lover of natural history then, one who views the gradations in all the races of animals with the eye of philosophy, excuse an effort to keep those in the department of man as distinct as nature has formed them? This unfortunate difference of color and perhaps of faculty is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people. Many of their advocates, while they wish to vindicate the liberty of human nature, are anxious also to preserve its dignity and beauty.

There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. 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. Our children see this and learn to imitate it, for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do. 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 peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals un-depraved by such circumstances. And with what execration should the statesman be loaded who permitting one half the citizens thus to trample on the rights of the other, transforms those into despots and these into enemies, destroys the morals of the one part and the amor patriae [love of country, patriotism] of the other. For if a slave can have a country in this world, it must be any other in preference to that in which he is born to live and labor for another, in which he must lock up the faculties of his nature, contribute as far as depends on his individual endeavors to the evanishment [disappearance] of the human race, or entail his own miserable condition on the endless generations proceeding from him.

With the morals of the people their industry also is destroyed. For in a warm climate no man will labor for himself who can make another labor for him. This is so true that of the proprietors of slaves a very small proportion indeed are ever seen to labor. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever. That considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation is among possible events; that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.  But it is impossible to be temperate and to pursue this subject through the various considerations of policy, of morals, of history natural and civil. We must be contented to hope they will force their way into everyone’s mind. I think a change already perceptible since the origin of the present revolution. The spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust. His condition mollifying, the way I hope preparing under the auspices of heaven for a total emancipation and that this is disposed in the order of events to be with the consent of the masters, rather than by their extirpation.

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), 227-273. https://archive.org/details/toldcontemporari03hartrich/page/14/mode/2up