Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (21 page)

Even Jefferson’s old law teacher, his “earliest and best friend,” engaged in an interracial liaison. Widower George Wythe had lived for some time in Williamsburg with the young, biracial Michael Brown and a Black “housekeeper,” Lydia Broadnax. Wythe willed his house to Broadnax, and he asked Jefferson to oversee Brown’s education. Perhaps angry about this arrangement, Wythe’s White grandnephew, George Sweeney, probably poisoned Wythe, Broadnax, and Brown one day in 1806. Only Broadnax survived. In his second presidential term, Jefferson publicly avoided the Wythe scandal, trying to create as much “imaginative distance,” to use his biographer’s term, as possible.
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Master/slave sex fundamentally acknowledged the humanity of Black and biracial women, but it simultaneously reduced that humanity to their sexuality. In the Christian world, sexuality was believed to be the animal trait of humans. Fast becoming the iconic image of a Black woman at this time was the 1800
Portrait d’une negresse
(
Portrait of a Negress
) by French painter Marie-Guillemine Benoist. An African woman sits staring at the viewer with her head wrapped and breast exposed. The white cloth wrapping her head and lower body contrasts
vividly with the darkness of her skin. The portrait is thought to be the first painting of a Black woman by a European woman.
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It is not surprising that Jefferson’s career survived Callender’s scandalous revelation. During his presidency, many Americans came to understand slavery (and its sexual politics) as an immutable fact of their lives and their economy. The nation that Jefferson had called “the world’s best hope” and “the strongest government on earth” in his First Inaugural Address in 1801 was not hopefully anticipating the end of slavery. The antislavery refrains first heard from the mouths of the Germantown Petitioners reached a crescendo during the American Revolution, but then started to trail off. And the remaining abolitionists, such as Benjamin Rush and company, who were urging uplift suasion hardly had as large an audience as John Woolman and Samuel Hopkins had enjoyed a generation prior. King Cotton was on the march. And the slaveholding producers of racist ideas had convinced legions of Americans to see slavery as a necessary evil to pay off their debts and build their nation. Besides, it seemed better than the supposed horrific barbarism bound to arise, they argued, from Black freedom.
²²

More than anything else, the Haitian Revolution and the slave rebellions it inspired across the Americas made White Americans fearful of race war and, even more worrying, a potential Black victory. Southern congressmen and newspaper editors did what they could to silence dissent and stoke White fears, claiming that public discussion of slavery and the presence of free Blacks were inciting slaves to rebel. And there were more free Blacks than ever before, because of wartime runaways and the outbreak of manumissions following the Revolution. The free Black population in Virginia, for instance, leaped from 1,800 in 1782 to 12,766 in 1790 and then to 30,570 in 1810.
²³

Then there was the sudden expansion of the cotton kingdom. Napoleon’s defeat at the hands of Haitian revolutionaries—free Black Haiti declared independence in 1804—required him to reimagine the French Empire. Holding and defending faraway colonies had become too costly and too bothersome. The vast Louisiana Territory did not fit in his new leaner, stronger empire. “I renounce Louisiana,”
Napoleon said on April 11, 1803. By April 30, the Jefferson administration had purchased the territory from France for $15 million, or three cents per acre. Jefferson learned of the purchase on the eve of Independence Day. “It is something larger than the whole U.S.,” he wrote with happiness.

Over the next few decades, slaveholders marched their captives onto the new western lands, terrorizing them into planting new cotton and sugar fields, sending the crops to northern and British factories, and powering the Industrial Revolution. Southern planters and northern investors grew rich. With so much money to make, antislavery and antiracist ideas were whipped to the side like antislavery, antiracist Africans.
²⁴

THE NEW LIFE
and lands of slavery, and the new crops and cash from slavery, sucked the life out of the antislavery movement during Jefferson’s presidency in the early 1800s. Assimilationist ideas, especially monogenesis, also faded. Theologians like Princeton’s president, Samuel Stanhope Smith, the most eminent scholar on race in the United States in that era, seeing the loss of their cultural power, grew to hate Jefferson’s disregard for religious authority. Jefferson questioned the orthodox Christian belief that all humans descended from Adam and Eve, and articulators of separately created human species nagged Smith like an incessantly barking dog.
²⁵

English physician Charles White, the well-known author of a treatise on midwifery, entered the debate over species in 1799. Unlike Scotland’s Lord Kames, White circled around religion and employed a new method of proving the existence of separate race species—comparative anatomy. He did not want the conclusions in his
Account on the Regular Gradation in Man
to “be construed so as to give the smallest countenance to the pernicious practice of enslaving mankind.” His only objective was “to investigate the truth.” White disputed Buffon’s legendary contention that since interracial unions were fertile, the races had to be of the same species. Actually, orangutans had been “known to carry off negro-boys, girls, and even women,” he said,
sometimes enslaving them for “brutal passion.” On the natural scale, Europeans were the highest and Africans the lowest, approaching “nearer to the brute creation than any other of the human species.” Blacks were superior in areas where apes were superior to humans—seeing, hearing, smelling, memorizing things, and chewing food. “The PENIS of an African is larger than that of an European,” White told his readers. Most anatomical museums in Europe preserved Black penises, and, he noted, “I have one in mine.”
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Science had been too religious in the days of Voltaire for discussions of separate species to catch on. Too much freedom and Revolutionary rhetoric clouded the words of Edward Long and Lord Kames. By the period of Charles White’s publication, the debate was on. In 1808, New York physician John Augustine Smith, a disciple of Charles White, rebuked Samuel Stanhope Smith as a minister dabbling in science. “I hold it my duty to lay before you all the facts which are relevant,” John Augustine Smith announced in his circulated lecture. The principal fact was that the “anatomical structure” of the European was “superior” to that of the other races. As different species, Blacks and Whites had been “placed at the opposite extremes of the scale.” The polygenesis lecture launched Smith’s academic career: he became editor of the
Medical and Physiological Journal
, tenth president of the College of William & Mary, and president of the New York College of Physicians and Surgeons.
²⁷

The advance of slavery, possibly more than the persuasive arguments of Lord Kames, Charles White, and John Augustine Smith, caused intellectuals long committed to monogenesis to start changing their views. Watching the Christian world unravel, Samuel Stanhope Smith made one last intellectual stand for theology, for assimilationists, and for monogenesis. He released an “enlarged and improved” second edition of
Essay on the Causes of Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species
in 1810, pledging to appeal “to the evidence of facts.” Nothing in the past twenty years had changed his position: racial difference resulted from climate and the state of a society. If anything, Smith asserted it more forcefully. And he introduced “another fact” in the climate section: Henry Moss’s skin had changed, and his new
“fine, straight hair” had replaced “the wooly substance.” In a hard-hitting appendix, Smith responded to “certain strictures made on the first edition of this essay,” the polygenesis of Charles White, Thomas Jefferson, and John Augustine Smith. “Let infidels appear in their true form,” Smith roared in closing. “If they seek the combat, we only pray, like Ajax, to see the enemy in open day.”
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Thomas Jefferson did not publicly respond to Samuel Stanhope Smith in 1810. He refused to come out into open day altogether. He had retired from public life.

CHAPTER 11

Big Bottoms

LESS THAN THIRTY
years earlier, Thomas Jefferson had been anxious to leave Monticello and to be free from the sorrow of his wife’s passing. After France, three years as US secretary of state, four years as vice president, and eight years as president, he wanted to return to his home in Virginia. “Never did a prisoner, released from his chains, feel such as I shall on shaking off the shackles of power,” he informed a French businessman on March 4, 1809, days before his release from the presidency.

After rooming for years in earsplitting Washington, Jefferson longed for quiet seclusion to read, write, and think in private. “But the enormities of the times in which I have lived,” he said, “have forced me to take part in resisting them.” No foreign enormity was greater than the wars raging in the early 1800s between France and England. Jefferson kept the United States neutral, ignoring war hawks, but he could not ignore the violations on the high seas of American neutrality. He proposed (and Congress adopted) a general embargo of US trade with France and England in 1807. Congress repealed the controversial embargo during the final days of Jefferson’s presidency on March 1, 1809. Jefferson’s neutral doctrine delayed the inevitable. Three years after he had left the presidency, the United States faced off with England in the War of 1812.
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Presiding over the American Philosophical Society from 1797 to 1815, Jefferson did remain neutral in the war between monogenesis and polygenesis. He rarely even struck back at the Federalist offensive
against his
Notes on the State of Virginia
in the presidential campaigns. In 1804, printer William Duane offered Jefferson the opportunity to respond in a new edition. Jefferson balked. He did not have time. But he did plan to revise and enlarge
Notes
when he left Washington in 1809.
²

Weeks before leaving office, Jefferson thanked abolitionist and scientist Henri Gregoire for sending him a copy of
An Enquiry Concerning the Intellectual and Moral Faculties, and Literature of Negroes
on February 25. Gregoire offered travel “testimony” of glorious Black nations to refute what “Jefferson tells us, that no nation of them was ever civilized,” he wrote. “We do not pretend to place the negroes on a level” with Whites, Gregoire explained in assimilationist form, but only to challenge those who say “that the negroes are incapable of becoming partners in the store-house of human knowledge.”
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After years of apologizing for American slavery, Jefferson probably finally felt good about responding to Henri Gregoire. He was in a better position now to write to the famed abolitionist. In his Annual Message to Congress three years earlier, Jefferson had condemned the “violations of human rights” enabled by the slave trade and urged Congress to abolish it. Congress followed his lead in 1807, after a contentious debate over how illegal slave traders would be punished. Traders, they decided, would be fined under the Slave Trade Act of 1807. But Congress did nothing to ensure the act’s enforcement.

It was an empty and mostly symbolic law. The act failed to close the door on the ongoing international slave trade while flinging open the door to a domestic one. Violations of human rights continued when children were snatched from parents, and slave ships now traveled down American waters in a kind of “middle passage” from Virginia to New Orleans, which took as many days as the transatlantic “middle passage” had. Jefferson and like-minded planters of the Upper South started deliberately “breeding” captives to supply the Deep South’s demand. “I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man on the farm,” Jefferson once explained to a friend. A year after the Slave Trade Act, a South Carolina court ruled that enslaved women had no legal claims on their children. They stood “on the same footings as other animals.”
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Ending the international slave trade was in reality a boon for the largest American slave-owners, as it increased the demand and value of their captives. And so the largest slave-owners and the gradual-emancipation advocates joined hands in cheering on the legal termination of the international slave trade on January 1, 1808. Massachusetts clergyman Jedidiah Morse deemed it a victory. He spoke for most northern assimilationist evangelicals when he proclaimed that since Christianity was finally lighting up the “heathenish and Mahometan darkness” of Africa, “its natives have no need to be carried to foreign lands.” Morse believed that slavery would be gradually abolished, too.
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Thomas Jefferson must have relied on this widespread support for the Slave Trade Act when he finally replied to Henri Gregoire in stock fashion in 1809. “No person living wishes more sincerely than I do,” he said, to see racial equality proven. “On this subject [Black people] are gaining daily in the opinions of nations,” Jefferson wrote, “and hopeful advances are making towards their re-establishment of an equal footing with the other colors of the human family.”
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In fact, Black people were losing ground daily in the opinions of European nations. Not long after Gregoire and Jefferson exchanged letters, London was blitzed with a broadsheet picturing a seminude African woman standing sideways to the viewer, her oversized buttocks exposed on one side, the unseen side draped in animal skin. A headband wraps her forehead, and she holds a body-sized stick. Whitening Blacks, Black exhibits, and “converted Hottentots,” sharing their supposed journeys from savagery to civilization, were becoming less remarkable with each passing year. But Londoners were captivated by Sarah Baartman, or rather, her enormous buttocks and genitalia.