Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (19 page)

ON JULY
15, 1787, eight-year-old Polly Jefferson and fourteen-year-old Sally Hemings reached Jefferson’s Paris doorstep. Sally Hemings had come to Monticello as an infant in 1773 as part of Martha Jefferson’s inheritance from her father. John Wayles had fathered six children with his biracial captive Elizabeth Hemings. Sally was the youngest. By 1787, she was reportedly “very handsome, [with] long straight hair down her back,” and she accompanied Polly to Paris instead of an “old nurse.”
²⁶

As his peers penned the US Constitution, Jefferson began a sexual relationship with Sally Hemings. Her older brother James, meanwhile, was training as a chef in Paris to satisfy Jefferson’s gustatory desires. Hemings was more or less forced to settle for the overtures of a sexually aggressive forty-four-year-old (Jefferson also pursued a married local Frenchwoman at the time). Jefferson pursued Hemings as he arranged for the publication of
Notes
in London. He did not revise his previously stated opinions about Blacks; nor did he remove the passage about Whites being more beautiful than Blacks.
²⁷

Jefferson had always assailed interracial relationships between White women and Black or biracial men. Before arriving in Paris, he had lobbied, unsuccessfully, for Virginia’s White women to be banished (instead of merely fined) for bearing the child of a Black or biracial man. Even after his measure was defeated, even after his relations with Hemings began, and even after the relations matured and he had time to reflect on his own hypocrisy, Jefferson did not stop proclaiming his
public position. “Amalgamation with the other color, produces degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence in the human character, can innocently consent,” he wrote in 1814, after he had fathered several biracial children. Like so many men who spoke out against “amalgamation” in public, and who degraded Black or biracial women’s beauty in public, Jefferson hid his actual views in the privacy of his mind and bedroom.
²⁸

In 1789, Jefferson had a front-row seat to the anti-royal unrest in Paris that launched the French Revolution. He assisted his friend the Marquis de Lafayette in writing the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, adopted in August, weeks before his departure. But while putting the starting touches on the French Revolution and the finishing touches on the American Revolution, Jefferson had to deal with a revolt from sixteen-year-old Sally Hemings. She was pregnant with his child, refused to return to slavery, and planned to petition French officials for her freedom. Jefferson did the only thing he could do: “He promised her extraordinary privileges, and made a solemn pledge that her children should be freed,” according to an account Hemings told their son Madison. “In consequence of his promise, on which she implicitly relied, she returned with him to Virginia,” Madison wrote in his diary. Hemings gave birth to at least five and possibly as many as seven children from Jefferson, a paternity confirmed by DNA tests and documents proving they were together nine months prior to the birth of each of Sally’s children. Some of the children died young, but Jefferson kept his word and freed their remaining children when they reached adulthood.
²⁹

Upon his return from Paris, Jefferson agreed, after some wavering, to become the first US secretary of state in George Washington’s inaugural administration. Beginning his tenure on March 22, 1790, Jefferson quickly felt uncomfortable surrounded by all those aristocratic, anti-republican cabinet members in America’s first political party, the Federalists. Vice President John Adams was questioning the effectiveness of “equal laws.” Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton was quietly calling for a monarchy; he wanted to hand control of the economy over to financiers, and he pushed for close (or, in Jefferson’s
conception,
subordinate
) economic ties to Britain. Jefferson took solace watching the French Revolution. That is, until it spilled over into Haiti. In 1790, Haiti’s enslavers saw the Declaration of the Rights of Man (Article 1: “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights”) as a green light for their independence drive and for their demands for new trade relations to increase their wealth. Free and affluent biracial activists numbering almost 30,000 (slightly less than the White population) started driving for their civil rights. Close to half a million enslaved Africans, who were producing about half the world’s sugar and coffee in the most profitable European colony in the world, heard these curious cries for rights and liberty among the island’s free people. On August 22, 1791, enslaved Africans revolted, inspired in more ways than one by Vodou priest Dutty Boukman. They emerged as the fourth faction in the civil war between White royalists, White independence seekers, and free biracial activists.
³⁰

It was a civil war that no slaveholder, including Thomas Jefferson, wanted enslaved Africans to win. If these Black freedom fighters could declare their independence and win it on the richest soil of the Americas, then their nation would become the hemispheric symbol of freedom, not Jefferson’s United States. Enslaved peoples everywhere would be inspired by that symbol and fight for their freedom, and there was nothing that racist ideas could do anymore to stop them.

CHAPTER 10

Uplift Suasion

AS FREED PEOPLE
in Haiti were warring against French re-enslavers, a prominent free Black man in Maryland sat down to write to Thomas Jefferson. The man’s grandmother, Mary Welsh, had come to Maryland in the 1680s as an indentured servant. After finishing her indenture, she acquired some land and two Black captives, freed them, and married one, named Bannaka. This interracial family defied White males’ insistence that White women not marry Black men. Their biracial daughter, Mary, married an enslaved man named Robert. Mary and Robert birthed a free son in 1731 and named him Benjamin. As Benjamin came of age, “all he liked was to dive into books,” remembered an observer. Friendly White neighbors were constantly loaning him books. Proceeds from growing tobacco on his inherited farm—he was as adept a farmer as anything else—gave Benjamin Banneker the time to read and think and write.
¹

Few free Blacks had the leisure time to read and write in Banneker’s day. As soon as they shook off slavery’s shackles, the shackles of discrimination clamped down on them. Northern states, in gradually eliminating slave labor during the Revolutionary era, made almost no moves—gradual or otherwise—to end racial discrimination and thereby racist ideas. Proposals to ensure the manageability of African people by former masters, as if they were more naturally slave than free, shadowed abolition proposals. Discriminatory policies were a feature of almost every emancipation law.
²

Debates about the future of slavery and the characteristics of enslaved Blacks, both in Congress and between prominent intellectuals,
only reinforced the climate of racism and discrimination that plagued free Blacks like Banneker. Benjamin Franklin, who had become head of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, spent some of his last days trying to resolve the world’s greatest political contradiction: America’s freedom and slavery. In early 1790, the eighty-four-year-old trudged before Congress to give what one narrator called “a memorial.” Christianity and the “political creed of Americans” demand the removal of this “inconsistency from the land of liberty,” Franklin implored. He conceded that Blacks too often fell below “the common standard of the human species,” but he urged his peers to “step to the very verge of the power vested in you.”

Franklin’s speech and a torrent of Quaker emancipation petitions aroused a bitter boxing match over slavery in the First US Congress. It carried on for months after Franklin’s death on April 17, 1790. Black people were “indolent, improvident, averse to labor; when emancipated, they would either starve or plunder,” one congressman argued, defending the interests of southern planters who were dependent on slave labor. Blacks were “an inferior race even to the Indians,” another insisted. A northern congressman held that southerners would never submit to a general emancipation without civil war. As they argued over slavery, congressmen paused to unite for the first Naturalization Act on March 26, 1790, which limited citizenship to “free white persons” of “good character.”
³

The congressional slavery debate dribbled into the rest of society. Assimilationists challenged segregationists, stressing Black
capability
for equality if Blacks were not under the imbruting boot of slavery. Critiquing David Hume, citing Samuel Stanhope Smith, and parading out a line of Black exhibits, from Sancho to Phillis Wheatley, Pennsylvania abolitionist Charles Crawford asserted that the “Negro is in every respect similar to us.” In 1791, Quaker Moses Brown pointed to Black exhibits from his Providence school as proof of “their being Men capable of Every Improvement with ourselves where they [are] under the Same Advantages.” Benjamin Rush, perhaps the nation’s leading abolitionist after Franklin’s death, presented adult exhibits: New Orleans physician James Derham and Thomas “Negro Calculator” Fuller
of Maryland. Legend has it that it took Fuller only a few minutes to calculate the number of seconds a man aged seventy years, seventeen days, and twelve hours had lived. But these remarkable exhibits of remarkable Black adults and children did little to sway the proslavery mind. Enslavers probably knew more than anyone about Black capabilities in freedom. But they only cared about Black capabilities to make them money.
⁴

As quite possibly the most remarkable exhibit of them all, Benjamin Banneker was literally in the middle of these debates between assimilationist abolitionists and segregationist enslavers. And so was Thomas Jefferson, agreeing and disagreeing with both sides. Early in 1791, months before writing to Jefferson, Banneker had helped survey the nation’s new capital, Washington, DC.

Banneker began his letter “freely and cheerfully” acknowledging that he was “of the African race.” If Jefferson was flexible in his sentiments of nature, friendly to Black people, and willing to aid in their relief, Banneker wrote, then “I apprehend you will embrace every opportunity, to eradicate that train of absurd and false ideas and opinions.” Jefferson and his slaveholding countrymen who were “detaining by fraud and violence so numerous a part of my brethren,” but who assailed against British oppression, were walking, talking contradictions. Banneker closed the letter by introducing his enclosed unpublished almanac, “in my own hand writing.” Banneker’s letter was staunchly antiracist, a direct confrontation to the young country’s leading disseminator of racist ideas.
⁵

Nearly two weeks later, on August 30, 1791, Thomas Jefferson sent Banneker his standard reply to antislavery and antiracist letters. “No body wishes more than I,” he said, to see the end of prejudice and slavery. He informed Banneker that he had sent the almanac to Monsieur de Condorcet, the secretary of the Academy of Science in Paris, because “your whole colour had a right for their justification against the doubts which have been entertained of them.” Jefferson sidestepped his contradiction. But what could he say? In his letter to Condorcet, Jefferson called Banneker a “very respectable mathematician.” In
Notes
, he claimed that Black people did not think “above the level of plain narration.” Did Banneker change Jefferson’s mind? Yes
and no. Jefferson branded Banneker an extraordinary Negro. “I shall be delighted to see these instances of moral eminence so multiplied,” he told Condorcet.
⁶

FROM THE PERSPECTIVE
of the enslaved, the most profound instance of moral eminence was evolving in Haiti. Jefferson learned of the Black revolt on September 8, 1791. Within two months, a force of 100,000 African freedom-fighters had killed more than 4,000 enslavers, destroyed almost 200 plantations, and gained control of the entire Northern Province. As historian C. L. R. James explained in the 1930s, “they were seeking their salvation in the most obvious way, the destruction of what they knew was the cause of their sufferings; and if they destroyed much it was because they had suffered much.”
⁷

What Jefferson and every other holder of African people had long feared had come to pass. In response, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, bestowing on slaveholders the right and legal apparatus to recover escaped Africans and criminalize those who harbored them. Thomas Jefferson, for one, did not view the Haitian Revolution in the same guise as the American or French Revolutions. “Never was so deep a tragedy presented to the feelings of man,” he wrote in July 1793. To Jefferson, the slave revolt against the enslavers was more evil and tragic to the feelings of man than the millions of African people who died on American plantations. Jefferson would soon call General Toussaint L’Ouverture and other Haitian leaders “Cannibals of the terrible Republic.”
⁸

That year, Jefferson’s troubles over revolting Haitians also hit closer to home. A ship or two of distressed masters and slaves from Haiti arrived in Philadelphia in late July. Philadelphians started dying a week later. By August 20, 1793, Benjamin Rush had fatefully noticed the pattern of the contagion of yellow fever. But it was not yet an epidemic, so Rush had time in the late summer to attend to other matters. He possibly sent off letters to abolitionists around the nation. The next year, he welcomed to Philadelphia twenty-two delegates from abolitionist societies across the United States as they arrived for the
“American Convention for promoting the Abolition of Slavery and Improving the Condition of the African Race.” The convention met over the next few years and then sporadically over the next three decades, pressing for gradual emancipation, anti-kidnapping legislation, and civil rights for alleged runaways.