68 The Colonial and Revolutionary Periodscolony, Jefferson insisted, where they could become “a free and independent people.”
Removal was necessary, Jefferson felt, because the “deep rooted prejudices” of the
whites and a lingering sense of injustice felt by the blacks would make coexistence
impossible. Not only that, Jefferson was willing to entertain the idea that physical
and moral differences between the two races further underlined the need for freed
blacks to go elsewhere. “In general, their existence appears to participate more of
sensation than reflection,” Jefferson observed of African-Americans. Among other
things, this made them deficient as artists and writers. All the arguments that black
people were inferior to white “in the endowments both of body and mind” were
advanced, Jefferson assured the reader, “as a suspicion only.” But the general burden
of the argument in Notes is clearly toward black inferiority. And the belief that, once
freed, blacks should be “removed beyond the reach of mixture” is stated consistently
and categorically. So, for that matter, is the belief that, if black people are not freed
soon, the American republic will reap a terrible harvest. “Indeed, I tremble for my
country when I reflect that God is just,” Jefferson famously declared in Notes. There
might, he thought, be “a revolution in the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation.”
But then, he added hopefully, there might be a more fortunate turn of events. “The
spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave is rising from the dust,” Jefferson told
his readers, and “the way I hope preparing ... for total emancipation ... disposed ...
to be with the consent of the masters, rather than by their extirpation.” It was a sign
of Jefferson’s intellectual honesty that he wrestled with the problem of slavery in the
first place. It was also a sign that he was, after all, a man of his times imbued with
many of its prejudices that he could not disentangle the ideal of black freedom from
the ideas of separation and removal. His doubts about the radical threat to the new
republic posed by its clear violation of its own clearly stated belief in natural rights
were, in the last analysis, subdued by his conviction that reason, as he construed it,
would prevail. That is the measure of his capacity for optimism, and of his belief
that, as he put it in Notes, “reason and free inquiry are the only effective agents
against error.” It is also, perhaps, a measure of a capacity for self-delusion that was
by no means uniquely his.
In 1813 Jefferson began a correspondence with John Adams (1735–1826),
repairing the breach in their friendship that had occurred when Jefferson defeated
Adams in the presidential elections of 1800; they were published separately and in
full in 1959. The first vice president and the second president, Adams was a lively
intellectual of a skeptical turn of mind and the founder of a family dynasty that
would produce another president, John Quincy Adams, and the historian, novelist,
and autobiographer, Henry Adams. Discussing literature, history, and philosophy,
Jefferson pitted his idealism against Adams’s acid wit and pessimistic turn of mind.
To Jefferson’s insistence that “a natural aristocracy” of “virtue and talents” would
replace “an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth,” Adams replied that
the distinction would not “help the matter.” “Both artificial aristocracy, and
Monarchy,” Adams argued, “have grown out of the natural Aristocracy of ‘Virtue
and Talents.’ ” “The five pillars of Aristocracy, are Beauty, Wealth, Birth, Genius, and
Virtues”; and, Adams suggested, “any one of the three first, can at any time over bearGGray_c01.indd 68ray_c 01 .indd 68 8 8/1/2011 7:54:56 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 56 AM