Ari Helo and Peter Onuf

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Ari Helo and Peter Onuf | Jefferson, Morality, and the Problem of Slavery | The William and Mary Quarterly, 60.3 | The History Cooperative

Jefferson, Morality, and the Problem of Slavery

HOW could Thomas Jefferson, advocate of equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, have justified his ownership of human beings? How, in his draft of the Declaration of Independence, could he have accused King George III and the British nation of imposing slavery on the American colonies? Jefferson never thought that slavery was morally justifiable. In order to grasp his understanding of the issue of personal guilt, we need to historicize Jefferson's moral thought. Much of modern moral understanding begins with the autonomous individual and his "inalienable rights." We consider all people first and foremost as individuals, fellow claimants to dignity and respect whose inherent and irreducible rights constitute the foundation of modern morality. Our language, borrowed directly from the Declaration, is Jeffersonian. Yet, while the individual is important in his moral thought, Jefferson constantly made judgments about individuals on the basis of his exalted standard of virtuous behavior, recognizing that their capacity to act morally differed widely. In Jefferson's view, men were to be judged according to the manifestation of their moral dispositions. Slaves were beyond—or beneath—such judgments. As long as they were enslaved, they were by definition unable to exercise free will or to enforce claims to rights, inalienable or otherwise, and therefore could not be held morally accountable for their actions.	1
But if slaves were beyond the pale of moral judgment, the institution of slavery nonetheless raised profound moral problems for the new republic. "Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free," Jefferson wrote in his Autobiography, "nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government."¹ Jefferson's solution to the slavery problem was to institute a program of gradual emancipation, separate slave children from their parents in order to prepare them for freedom, send them to their own country—perhaps on the west coast of Africa—and "declare them a free and independant people."²	2
Jefferson's awareness of both the progressive and the destructive elements in contemporary western civilization—both so well exemplified in the history of the French Revolution—fundamentally shaped his understanding of humanity. His optimism about the continuity of certain positive trends in recent history did not lead him to embrace utopian notions of the ultimate moral end of the still ongoing historical process. It is remarkable how little interest Jefferson ever showed in metaphysical speculations about man's essence or in other kinds of extra historical "truths" about human nature.	3
Within this fundamentally historical intellectual framework, Jefferson can be accurately identified as a progressive republican in the Lockean mode, albeit with serious reservations about the dangers of civic corruption under human, and thus historical, government.³ Jefferson was acutely conscious of the need for general civic education in order to guarantee that citizens would fulfill the promise of their own history. As he lectured the marquis de Lafayette, gaining minimal control over this historical process required "the administration of reasonable laws favoring the progress of knowledge in the general mass of the people."Otherwise, there could never be an end to the repetitious cycle of falling into a tyranny of "the many, the few, or the one."⁴	4
Yet, whatever the limits of Jefferson's faith in the future, his own failure to take effective steps against the institution of slavery—by his own account, a major obstacle to the fulfillment of the republican promise in Virginia—remains conspicuous and demands explanation. To uncover the logic of Jefferson's position on slavery, even in the historicist-republican intellectual context delineated above, three fundamental points must be emphasized.	. . .

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