Madison and Jefferson (114 page)

In 1808 slave imports from abroad ended because of a provision in the federal Constitution. Afterward, as a matter of planters’ short-term economic self-interest, Virginia became a site for slave breeding and increased sales to other, newer states. In conjunction, whites’ rhetorical abhorrence for race mixing intensified. Expulsion (colonization abroad) became a fantasy solution, because all southerners understood that white-black unions—sex across the color line—was otherwise unstoppable.

The end of 1791 was the last time either Madison or Jefferson thought of criticizing slavery publicly. That was when Madison prepared notes for a
National Gazette
essay, never published, in which he asserted that slavery and republicanism were incompatible. It was not until after 1820 that Lafayette, an advocate of emancipation since at least the 1788 founding of the group Amis des noirs, demanded of the pair some justification for their inaction. As post-Napoleonic France enjoyed a new dawn, and the Virginia Dynasty of presidents neared its end, he pressed Jefferson to become again
the activist he had been when they first met. Recalling conversations they had had in Richmond in 1781 and outside Paris in 1789, Lafayette gloried that their world was a safer place now, and in his opinion “The Great Work of General Enfranchisement” could start over.

The French patriot said he was uncharacteristically tongue-tied on the subject of American slavery. “While I feel an inexpressible delight in the progress of every thing that is Noble minded, Honourable, and Useful throughout the United States,” he wrote, “I find, in the Negro Slavery, a Great draw Back Upon My Enjoyments.” Friends who knew of his affection for the United States frequently asked him to account for the persistence of slavery, and he had to admit that he had no defense. “Let me Confess, My dear friend,” he addressed Jefferson, “I Have Not Been Convinced, and the less as I think More of it, By Your Argument in favor of dissemination.” Understanding that it was easier to criticize from abroad, he gently but firmly protested that “this wide Blot of American Philanthropy is ever thrown in My face.”
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Today the problematic character of “American philanthropy” is often thrown in
Jefferson’s
face. He has been the target of intense criticism because of both his candor and his confusion. He never reconsidered the repugnant view he espoused regarding the presumed intellectual inferiority of Africa-descended Americans. He was not above suggesting that the free black mathematician Benjamin Banneker was an anomaly, or even a fraud. When his mentor George Wythe was murdered in 1806, a new Wythe protégé, the biracial Michael Brown, was killed along with him. Wythe’s will provided for Jefferson to oversee Brown’s further education, and Jefferson wrote that he would gladly have taken on the responsibility. The irony, of course, is that Wythe undertook Brown’s education to disprove the general assumption of black intellectual inferiority endorsed by Jefferson. Jefferson’s motivation in stating that he would have honored Wythe’s will speaks not to his concurrence with Wythe’s hypothesis about racial equality but only to his sympathy and devotion to Wythe himself.
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On the solution Jefferson promoted from the 1780s until his retirement years, the gradual but certain expulsion of blacks through colonization abroad, he did not stop to consider the needs and wants of free Negroes. Too few white Americans did. Jokes based on stereotypes mocking black pretensions to gentility were common across the North—not just the South—from the Revolution to the Civil War. Not even the European critics who left Lafayette speechless exhibited the nuanced perspective of the modern scholar who, in tracing the rise of abolitionist sentiment, is able to
show that in New England the end of slavery was not simply a function of popular belief in the natural rights of all people. Historian John Wood Sweet describes the reality of it: “As the value of slaves in the northern states fell, incentives for selling them southward rose.”

North of the Mason-Dixon Line, it is not clear that a majority reflected the culture of sensibility (cultivated sympathy) or even the slightly less noble emotion of pity. Nor was it just men of business who refused to feel for African Americans. In 1795 John Adams wrote of the situation in Massachusetts, where he adjudged slaves to have grown “lazy, idle, proud, vicious, and at length wholly useless to their masters, to such a degree that the abolition of slavery became a measure of œconony.” So much for pure motives, at least in the first half-century of Madison’s and Jefferson’s lives.
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Pennsylvania was the first state to rule in its courts that free blacks were not citizens and were ineligible to vote. Massachusetts, in 1786, passed the Solemnization of Marriage Act, forbidding interracial unions. Rhode Island’s state assembly, in 1800, constrained black women from suing white men for child support. In 1821, just after the Missouri Compromise was hammered out, a good many delegates to New York’s constitutional convention agitated for the disenfranchisement of free blacks—one contended that they were “a peculiar people” lacking “discretion, prudence, or independence” of thought. In sum, the legal degradation of African Americans was not simply a function of the institution of slavery.
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Jefferson never doubted that the descendants of those who had been kidnapped from West Africa deserved better. On his own lands, he mixed patience and a system of rewards with expectations of industry and devotion. He regarded himself as a kind patriarch and his biracial slaves as subordinate family members. He, and Madison too, reckoned there were many in Virginia who acted in this way. But when thinking generically of the dark skinned in their midst, they were unsentimental and legalistic.

Jefferson saw nationhood in racially untainted hues. He feebly addressed outsiders’ concerns, offering bland wishes. Madison did not do much better. Returning blacks to West Africa was costly and unrealistic, even as the American Colonization Society was thriving during Monroe’s two terms as president. That society, founded in 1816 and heavily invested with Virginia slave owners, proposed to organize regular, voluntary removals of African Americans to Liberia. Madison lent his name to the organization and never abandoned it, while Jefferson steered clear of commitment. To offer the reader a longer view, it bears saying that for most of
his career in politics, the “Great Emancipator,” Abraham Lincoln, saw the merits of a voluntary removal plan.

Colonization as envisioned by white reformers encroached on free blacks more than it consulted their interest. Between 1782 and 1802 private manumissions occurred with regularity, but after 1802 state law required that emancipated slaves leave Virginia within one year. From this moment on, it became increasingly difficult for Virginians to conceive of a way to phase out slavery. Their uncertainty as to a proper course of action made room for a new southern literature. That literature described an illusion: contented slaves and a sinless, or at least humane, white planter class.

The slow pace of sailings under the auspices of the American Colonization Society, relative to the growth of the African-American population, made it perfectly plain that the society had limited hopes of succeeding. Like most of their cohort, Madison and Jefferson were ready to put off doing anything of substance. The covertly hostile program of colonization relied on the regular publication of poems and essays glorifying the prospective return of a long-lost people to their roots: “Oh, unhappy Africa,” one representative writer lamented in 1825. “How long must thy soil be washed with the tears of those who weep for their nearest and dearest relatives, who have been torn away from them, and dragged into bondage.”
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In 1829, three years after Jefferson’s death, Virginian John Hartwell Cocke sat on the Board of Visitors of Jefferson’s university. A devout Presbyterian, he wished to couple emancipation with colonization and in later years was to bemoan the example set by Jefferson in having had a slave concubine. William Short, seventy years old in 1829 and living in Philadelphia, wrote to Cocke and expressed puzzlement over Jefferson’s original formulation in
Notes on Virginia.
As Jefferson’s personal secretary when
Notes
was first printed, he revealed his dismay in unambiguous language. “Sending vessels charged with a number of one color & bringing back the same number of another [i.e., European peasants] always appeared to me to be among the wildest & most impracticable that could be imagined,” he wrote, with respect to Jefferson’s scheme. Short believed that “the best remedy” for the evil of slavery was for Virginia’s state legislature to convert slaves into “serfs” in the manner that they existed in northern Europe. This, he said, would constitute “the gentlest alleviation” of slaves’ current status as property, while saving their masters from having to acknowledge moral accountability in being born to slave ownership. He doubted that the Virginia Assembly would countenance even this small alteration in the status
of Virginia’s enslaved population. Nor would a redefinition of this sort whiten Virginia, which the planter elite wished to accomplish. So if his notion was no more practical than Jefferson’s was in the 1780s, William Short’s thinking does serve as a guide to the limits of imagination prior to the explosion of abolitionist sentiment in the North.
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Shortly after the Missouri crisis, Jefferson’s favorite granddaughter, the most intellectually resilient of the family, married and became a Bostonian. Seeing a society without slaves, she expressed disgust with the perpetuation of slavery in the South. The females in her family at Monticello felt similarly. The patriarch of that family, who had found a way to validate the violence that attended the French Revolution, and who believed that rebellion against tyranny was justified, did nothing to address how future catastrophe might be averted or how Virginians could avoid being classed with the world’s tyrants. The “mildness” of the slavery that Virginia planters practiced was one of several convenient rationales for continued delay.

Madison appears not to have internalized Jefferson’s assumptions about black inferiority. He did not fixate on racial “amalgamation” or “blood admixture” as his friend did. Madison’s personal behavior is demonstrably less troublesome than Jefferson’s: he behaved more than courteously to freed Virginia slave Christopher McPherson, who became a clerk in the Virginia High Court of the Chancery in 1800. When McPherson delivered a packet of books and a letter sent by Jefferson, the Madisons invited him to stay for dinner, and they treated him as an equal at their table. The ex-slave described the encounter: “I sat at Table Even[in]g & morn[in]g with Mr. M and his Lady & Company & enjoyed a full share of the Convers[ation].” Jefferson apparently felt less comfortable with McPherson as a free man. Writing Madison that same year, he used McPherson’s slave name, identifying him as “Mr Ross’s man Kitt,” thus reaffirming his status as an inferior.
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Madison looked past color and saw intelligence and ability, but he did not think that the vast majority of white Americans ever could. Like Jefferson, he was quick to defend his fellow Virginia slaveholders for consistently acting to improve the lives of those they owned. Since the Revolution, he wrote in 1819, slaves were “better fed, better clad, better lodged, and better treated in every respect.” Gradual improvement was good enough for him. His compromise solution to slavery was similar to that of slave-owning Colonization Society supporters Henry Clay and John Randolph: colonization would improve the ratio of whites to blacks. These national politicians
had convinced themselves that
some
blacks would be grateful after receiving a new lease on life on the coast of West Africa.
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Madison and Jefferson attended to the needs of those of their color and class. They could not betray their own kind, those agreeable white landowners with whom they had interacted closely since youth, who wanted the good life to continue. Nor could they ignore the aspirations of their neighbors’ land-hungry offspring who would be taking their slaves west. This dual biography, after all, is as much a collective biography of the Virginians whose weight and whose prejudices were brought to bear on their state and nation: Edmund Pendleton and Edmund Randolph, John Randolph of Roanoke and John Taylor of Caroline, Patrick Henry and his son-in-law Judge Spencer Roane, George Mason and George Washington. Friendly congressmen and loyal state legislators who regularly corresponded with Madison and Jefferson influenced their thoughts and conditioned their actions. Add to the list John Page and Wilson Cary Nicholas, John Wayles Eppes and William Branch Giles, and append to them the unnamed subscribers to Thomas Ritchie’s Richmond newspaper.

These men’s common conviction was that every free American’s birthright was an opportunity for advancement and renewal through land ownership. Property conferred honor. If they had a choice between freeing their slaves and sustaining their fathers’ vision of the good life, they, like Madison and Jefferson, chose the latter. It was a rare individual, such as Edward Coles, who made common cause with the men and women he had inherited as property.

Looking back to the first chapter of this book, we can ask: Would the common desire to uphold white power in Virginia have been so entrenched if the British had not fomented slave defections in 1775–76; and if, as General Washington reluctantly acknowledged, southerners had grown comfortable with blacks fighting for their freedom as patriot soldiers? It is impossible to answer with certainty, though at the time of the Revolution, Jefferson was more open to extending legal protections to African Americans than he subsequently became. After America’s independence was recognized, southern discomfort grew by the decade. In 1792, at a time when Madison was in Congress and Jefferson in the executive, the state assembly in Virginia defined, for legal purposes, what “white” meant. In 1805 the same assembly updated a colonial injunction against teaching slaves to read by extending the ban to free black children. This was the spirit of the times.
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