A History of the American People

contact not only with her own servile half-brothers and sisters, one of whom at least worked in
the house, but with her husband's concubine. Some Southern white women put up with this kind
of thing, others were deeply grieved, others seemed unconcerned. What Jefferson thought we do
not know-in all his voluminous writings he never discusses his own sexual relations with black
or colored women. But he was clearly torn in two. We know he came to hate miscegenation, as
the source of endless misery for all concerned.
He also hated slavery, feared it, reviled it, privately at least, and sought in vain both to curtail
it publicly and to cut it out of his own life. His Notes on the State of Virginia (1781) is such an
outspoken denunciation of slavery on almost every ground that he told James Monroe that he
hesitated to publish it, because the terms in which I speak of slavery and of our Constitution [in Virginia] may produce an irritation which will revolt the minds of our countrymen against the reform of these two articles, and thus do more harm than good.' He argued that slavery was not just an economic evil, which destroyedindustry,' but a moral one which degraded the slave-
owners even more than the slave. He wanted outright abolition, and none of the future
abolitionists from the North argued more fervently or more comprehensively against the
peculiar institution.' Friends, including Virginians, urged him to publish and he did so, insuring that a number of copies were put in the library of William and Mary College, so that the young would read it. Though an emancipationist in theory, however, Jefferson did nothing in practice to end slavery, either as governor of Virginia or as the revisor of its law-code. Nor, as secretary of state, as vice-president, or as a two-term president, did he do anything effective to end the slave-trade. He accepted the Southern contention that emancipated slaves could never be allowed to live as freemen in the Southern states. The liberated blacks would have to form a separate and independent country-preferably in Africa-to whichwe should extend our alliance and
protection.’ One reason Jefferson shared this Southern view was that he agreed with most
Southern whites that blacks were quite different and in some ways inferior. They secrete less by the kidneys and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odor.' Theyrequire less sleep.' Their sexual desires are more ardent' but lackthe tender,
delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation' displayed by whites. They are much inferior' in reason, though equal in memory. Jefferson said he had never heard of a black person who could paint a picture, write a musical composition, ordiscover a truth.' He thought it would not be
possible to find any capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid.' Jefferson, one need hardly say, was not a bigoted racist. One of the grand things about him was that he was always open-minded to new evidence. It is significant that he disagreed with virtually all Americans of his day in rating the Indians as the equals of the whites in ability. And when he was sent specimens of mathematical work by Benjamin Banneker, a free black planter in Maryland, he not only altered his views on this point but gleefully sent the manuscript off to the Marquis de Condorcet, secretary of the Paris Academy of Sciences, saying he washappy to
inform you that we have now in the United States a negro ... who is a very respectable
mathematician.' Jefferson hoped that more Bannekers would emerge to prove that any apparent
inferiority of blacks ‘does not proceed from any differences in the structure of the parts on which
the intellect depends' but `is merely the effect of their degraded condition.’ He did not, however,
change his opinion that freed blacks could not remain in the South.
Nor did Jefferson ever get round to doing anything for his own slaves, such as emancipating
them. The reason was pitifully simple: money. Jefferson was never in a financial condition to
indulge his conscience. Indeed, in an unsuccessful attempt to increase the income from his