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Yes, Jefferson Owned Slaves Yes, Jefferson Owned Slaves. When he inherited slaves upon the deaths of his father and father-in-law, it was illegal to free them. In 1769 Jefferson wrote the statute that when later enacted permitted the manumission of Virginia slaves. He later authored the law that prohibited the importation of new slaves into Virginia; and his 1776 draft Virginia constitution provided: “No person hereafter coming into this country shall be held within the same in slavery under any pretext whatever.”1 In his draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson charged King George III had “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.”2 Sadly the language was deleted when South Carolina and Georgia threatened to walk out of the convention.3 Writing for a British abolitionist newspaper in 1843, former President John Quincy Adams praised Jefferson’s struggle against slavery, contending that his draft Declaration stood as “an unanswerable testimonial to posterity, that on the roll of American abolitionists, first and foremost after the name of George Washington, is that of Thomas Jefferson.4 More than a century later, Philip Foner, editor of The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, argued that the frequent characterization of Paine as “the first American abolitionist” was inaccurate because of Jefferson’s 1769 effort to legalize the freeing of Virginia slaves.5 When the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution (outlawing slavery) was drafted in 1864, to honor Jefferson’s courageous struggle against slavery, its authors chose language he had written seven decades earlier seeking to ban slavery in the Northwest Territory.6 In an August 25, 1814, letter to his neighbor and fellow abolitionist Edward Coles, Jefferson said until slavery could be abolished, slaveowners had a duty “to feed and clothe them well, protect them from ill usage, require such reasonable labor only as is performed voluntarily by freemen, and be led by no repugnancies to abdicate them, and our duties to them.”7 I believe Professor Joseph Ellis was correct when he wrote in American Sphinx that Jefferson could have passed a 1 https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-01-02-0161-0004 2 https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/declaration-independence-and-debate-over-slavery/ 3 https://herb.ashp.cuny.edu/items/show/788 4 John Quincy Adams Letter dated 4 July 1843, ANTI-SLAVERY REPORTER, vol. IV, No. 20, 20 Sept. 1843. (https://books.google.com/books?id=S95RAQAAMAAJ&pg=RA1-PA169&lpg=RA1- PA169&dq=“it+stands,+an+unanswerable+testimonial+to+posterity,+that+on+the+roll+of+American+abolitionists, +%22&source=bl&ots=k_kO9wcmmM&sig=ACfU3U2vaWSbAOlCTzZ4bKw3xzpUQu49iw&hl=en&sa=X&ved= 2ahUKEwjAgIuQq67jAhVHWs0KHQzhC90Q6AEwAHoECAQQAQ#v=onepage&q=“it%20stands%2C%20an%2 0unanswerable%20testimonial%20to%20posterity%2C%20that%20on%20the%20roll%20of%20American%20abol itionists%2C%20%22&f=false) 5 Philip S. Foner, African Slavery in America, in 2 COMPLETE WRITINGS OF THOMAS PAINE 15 (Philip S. Foner ed. 1945). 6 CONG. GLOBE, 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 1489 (1864). 7 Jefferson to Coles, Aug. 25, 1814, in 9 WRITINGS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON 477-78 (Paul Leicester Ford, ed. 1898). polygraph test on his belief his own slaves “were more content and better off as members of his extended family than under any other imaginable circumstances.”8 Days before he ended his presidency, Jefferson wrote to Henri Gregoire about the rights of black Americans: “[W]hatever be their degree of talent it is no measure of their rights. Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others.” Jefferson expressed hope that blacks were on their way “towards their re- establishment on an equal footing with the other colors of the human family.”9 In 2000-2001 I had the honor of chairing the Jefferson-Hemings Scholars Commission, a group of more than a dozen senior professors from around the country that after a year-long examination of all of the evidence concluded with but one mild dissent that President Jefferson did not father any children by Sally Hemings.10 Many people were misled when they read that 1998 DNA tests had proven President Jefferson fathered Sally’s youngest child Eston. In fact, no DNA from Thomas Jefferson was available, so DNA from descendants of his uncle was used. It pointed no more to President Jefferson than it did to at least two-dozen other Jefferson males in Virginia at the time. Charlottesville Mayor Nikuyah Walker was quoted by the Daily Progress as saying she wanted the historical perspective to be “told from the black viewpoint.” But that’s not what the city council embraced. The allegation that Jefferson fathered a Hemings child originally came from the pen of James Thomson Callender, a vile racist—who described Sally Hemings as “a slut as common as the pavement.” Callender’s case was premised on the existence of a child named “Tom,” who was later identified as Thomas Woodson. But 1998 DNA tests of descendants of Woodson’s three sons showed he could not have been fathered by a Jefferson. More importantly, Eston Hemings’ descendants passed down the story he was not President Jefferson’s child, but the son of an “uncle.”11 It was not until the mid-1970s, when white historian Fawn Brodie persuaded them Eston was actually the President’s child, that Eston’s descendants changed their family history.12 The President’s younger brother was widely known at Monticello as “Uncle Randolph”13 and was invited to visit14 shortly before Eston’s likely conception date. The book Memoirs of a Monticello Slave documents that when visiting Monticello Randolph would “come out among black people, play the fiddle and dance half the night.”15 Randolph shared the same Y chromosome found in a descendant of Eston Hemings, and is the only suspect who fits all of the evidence. 8 Joseph Ellis, American Sphinx p. 177. 9 https://www.loc.gov/resource/mtj1.043_0836_0836/?st=text 10 The Executive Summary of the Scholars Commission Report https://www.tjheritage.org/the-scholars-commission 11 The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy pp. 15-16, 162-66. https://www.amazon.com/Jefferson-Hemings- Controversy-Report-Scholars-Commission/dp/0890890854. 12 Ibid. pp. 12-13, 162-66. 13 Ibid. pp. 13, 162-63. 14 Ibid. pp. 16, 224-27. 15 https://archive.org/stream/memoirsofamontic031158mbp/memoirsofamontic031158mbp_djvu.txt. [Chapter 20] Prof. Robert F. Turner Charlottesville, VA .
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