‘Thomas Jefferson and the Fight Against Slavery’
By Cara Rogers Stevens
University Press of Kansas, 385 pages

Thomas Jefferson believed that slavery was evil. He also tended to think that Black people were inferior intellectually and, perhaps, morally to white people. He could not imagine whites and liberated Blacks living on terms of equality or even comity, and he was a life long advocate of colonization — sending former slaves to Africa, or, after the Haitian revolution, to Haiti.

This bald summary of Jefferson on race makes him repugnant to contemporary democratic values and beliefs in a pluralistic society. Cara Rogers Stevens does not rationalize his convictions so much as she analyzes the sources, the consequences, and the prevalence of his attitudes. Many abolitionists, South and North, believed in Black inferiority.  They abhorred the cruelty of slavery but abjured miscegenation.  

Ms. Rogers Stevens concentrates on Jefferson’s much-revised book, “Notes on the State of Virginia.” Over many years, he refined but did not radically alter his argument that freeing slaves was essential if the Union was to survive.

That Blacks might be inferior to whites, Jefferson contended, was no more an argument for the perpetuation of slavery than, say, the enslavement of certain whites was justifiable because their masters were of superior intelligence. That Newton, for example, was a genius did not mean he should rule the world or subjugate others with lesser minds.

To the charge that Jefferson was a hypocrite, Ms. Rogers Stevens replies that Jefferson died in bankruptcy, and under Virginia’s laws he could not have freed his slaves because he had not settled his enormous debts. He was like other slave owners of his generation who found it impossible under state laws to manumit. 

So what did Jefferson suppose would happen to slavery if he thought it so injurious to the nation? Above all, he placed hope in the new, post-Revolutionary generation, those educated at colleges such as William and Mary, which had an abolitionist tradition of teaching. He supported this, as that was where he first formed his own anti-slavery views.

Both Jefferson and Madison failed to employ their immense political capital to work toward the abolition of slavery because, as Ms. Rogers Stevens shows, every time legislation was proposed to emancipate slaves, however gradually and with whatever compensation to slave owners, the outcry against manumission was savage.

To Jefferson, decreeing an end to slavery would not work because in a republic it had to be the will of the people that ruled, and the public mind in the South was against freedom for Blacks, and public opinion could be altered, he believed, only by education. Yet, as Ms. Rogers Stevens acknowledges, neither Jefferson, Madison, nor others of their generation could conceive of an America that would assimilate free Black citizens.  Jefferson feared that slavery had so injured Black people that they would retaliate in a race war.

Ms. Rogers Stevens does not point out the irony of Jefferson’s position. He believed that ideas of liberty would prevail in a republic, but he was unable to imagine that Black people would take those ideas to heart, and demand the nation fulfill what is stipulated in the Declaration of Independence.

What of Jefferson the man? How could he square a likely liaison with a slave, Sally Hemings, in whom he placed his confidence, with his conviction that the races could not mix. How could he tolerate and even encourage her progeny — some of them quite white in appearance — and yet oppose integration?

Ms. Rogers Stevens can have no answer to such questions because Jefferson declined to acknowledge what DNA testing indicates — that either Jefferson or just possibly his brother Randolph fathered many members of the Hemings family.

Jefferson’s belief that a new, educated generation would abolish slavery was destroyed after what happened at his alma mater, William and Mary. A new corps of faculty repudiated Jeffersonianism and three generations of abolitionist thinking, and even argued for slavery as a positive factor in Southern life.  

Jefferson and race is a complex story full of ironies that Ms. Rogers Stevens presents very carefully, dispensing with political judgements. As a result, her book is all the more powerful. What she does not say but what seems apparent to a biographer is the self-deception that led astray one of the great Founders of this country.

Mr. Rollyson’s work in progress is “Making the American Presidency: How Biographers Shape History.”