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on slavery |
(approx 1770): “ I made one effort in (the Virginia legislature)
for the permission of the emancipation of slaves,
which was rejected: and indeed, during the regal government,
nothing liberal could expect success.” (published in
1821. ) (Jefferson, 1984, p5.)
1774: “The abolition of domestic slavery is the
great object of desire in those colonies (America), where it was
unhappily introduced in their infant state. But previous
to the enfranchisement of the slaves we have, it is necessary
to exclude all further importations from Africa…” (Jefferson,
1984, p115.)
1776: “(King George III) has waged cruel
war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights
of life
and 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. This piratical warfare, the
opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN
king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a
market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted
his negative for suppressing every legislative
attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce:
and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact
of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to
rise in arms against us, and to purchase that liberty of
which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom
he also obtruded them thus paying off former
crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes
which he urges them to commit against the lives of
another.” -from TJ's draft of the Declaration of Independence.
This paragraph was voted down by the
Congressional Congress. (Jefferson, 1984,
p22.)
1778: “I brought a bill to prevent (the slave’s)
further importation (to Virginia). This passed without
opposition, and stopped the increase of the evil by importation,
leaving to future efforts its final eradication.”
(published in 1821.) (Jefferson, 1984, p 34.)
1787: “Under the mild treatment our slaves experience,
and their wholesome, though coarse food, this blot in our
country increases as fast, or faster, than the whites.” (Jefferson,
1984. p 214.)
1787: TJ discussed his 1777 bill which, if passed,
would have eventually freed the slaves of Virginia
and deported them: “It will probably be asked, Why not
retain and incorporate the blacks into the state…?
Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousands
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.” (Jefferson, 1984. p 264.)
1787: “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.” (Jefferson,
1984. p 270.)
1787: "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...
Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just:
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." (Jefferson, 1984. p 288-9)
1787: “This unwillingness (to sell slaves)
is for their sake, not my own; because my debts once cleared off, I
shall try some plan of making their situation happier, determined
to content myself with a small portion of their
labor.” (Miller, p57.)
1800: “We are truly to be pitied!” -TJ’s reaction to Gabriel’s Conspiracy, an attempted slave’s uprising in Virginia. (Miller, p127.)
1807: TJ told an English diplomat that the Blacks were “as far inferior to the rest of mankind as the mule is to the horse, and as made to carry burdens.” (Miller, p57.)
1807: The Constitution said Congress could not ban the slave trade (that is, importing slaves into the country) until 1808. In March of 1807 TJ recommended, and Congress enacted, such a law to take effect January 1, 1808. (Miller, p145)
(approximately) 1814: “The amalgamation of whites
with blacks produces a degradation to which no lover of his
country, no lover of excellence in the human character, can
innocently consent.” (Miller, p207)
1815: “The slave is to be prepared by instruction and
habit for self-government, and for the honest pursuits of
industry and social duty. The former must precede the
latter.” (Miller, p253.)
1820: (Discussing slavery) “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.”
(Miller, p241)
1821: “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people (slaves) are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.” To the modern mind the first sentence reads like a battle-cry for emancipation. In Jefferson’s context it meant almost the opposite: since emancipation was inevitable, attempting to speed it along it was unnecessary and probably counterproductive. The first sentence is inscribed on the walls of the Jefferson Memorial; the other sentences are not. (Jefferson, 1984. p 44)
1824: TJ discussed his continuing hope that the slaves can be sent to Africa: “To send off the whole of these at once, nobody conceives to be practicable for us, or expedient for them. Let us take twenty-five years for its accomplishment, within which time they will be doubled. Their estimated value as property…must be paid or lost by somebody.” (Jefferson, 1984. p1485)
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