Virginia slaveowner who drafted the Declaration of Independence, called
the institution of slavery an ‘abominable crime.’ But he felt trapped by the
system that required him to be responsible for the welfare of his slaves while
doubting their ability to succeed in a white man’s world. Jefferson was hardly
alone in thinking that blacks were hideous, child-like, inarticulate, lascivious,
and suited only to manual labor. He concluded that blacks were inassimil-
able in a society that entrusted republican self-government to a ‘natural
aristocracy’ of white Protestant men who owned substantial property. To
avoid a convulsive race war, Jefferson proposed shipping the slaves back
to Africa, a prohibitively costly plan. At the Constitutional Convention, the
delegates temporarily resolved their differences over slavery by equating each
slave with three-fifths of a free person and permitting a ban on slave imports
when they were no longer needed.
Racism received a powerful boost in the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries. European philosophers revived the Aristotelian notion that each
human group had its own place, depending on how far it had degenerated
from the original creation. This great chain of being hypothesis dovetailed
with the typologies that European and American scientists developed to dis-
tinguish between animals. French naturalist Comte de Buffon first used the
term ‘race’ to legitimize European claims of human biological superiority.
Buffon believed that the white race represented ‘the real and natural color of
man’ and regarded pale-skinned Europeans as close to the Greek physical
ideal portrayed in statues. Europeans, in his view, were not only more hand-
some, but more intelligent and civilized than ‘defective’ Africans. He attributed
the alleged inferiority of Africans to the theory that black women procreated
with chimpanzees. Josiah Nott, an Alabama physician with a national reputa-
tion in ethnology, argued that blacks had been created separately from whites
and that black skulls possessed smaller, inferior brains, which justified black
enslavement. To these intellectuals, racial characteristics were distinct, inher-
ited, and immutable.
These racial theories enabled southerners to stop apologizing for their
‘peculiar institution’ as white northerners and ex-slaves like William Lloyd
Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and Henry Highland Garnet attacked it. Such
attacks sometimes represented rank hypocrisy, because slavery was un-
suited to a region with rocky soil and unnecessary as labor-saving machines
were introduced. Northern businesses, such as textile factories, shipping,
and insurance, benefited enormously from slavery in the South. Moreover,
northerners discriminated against blacks, segregating them in school and
prohibiting more of them from settling in their states. Southern defenders
of slavery noted that the Bible’s Ten Commandments sanctioned slavery and
that Jesus never said a word against it. Moreover, slaveholders claimed that
all great ancient civilizations required a ‘mudsill class’ that did the dirty4 THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTDouglass, Frederick
(1817–1895): An ex-slave
and abolitionist known
as the ‘father of the civil
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