Jefferson's greatness - Letters to the editor

Professor Gregory Shafer's laboriously documented condemnation of Thomas Jefferson's attitude towards slavery in the January/February 2002 Humanist is unremitting in its reproof of this great founding father.

Yes, Jefferson did believe that institutionalized slavery as it existed in the South made it impossible for free blacks to live in peace with their former white slaveowners in the same land. And, yes, in line with the eighteenth-century scientific idea that black Africans were inferior to whites, Jefferson did write (in his early Notes):

   I advance it, therefore, as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether
   originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are
   inferior to whites in the endowments of body and mind (emphasis added).

Thereafter, however, he wrote (August 30, 1791) to a black mathematician who was serving as the official surveyor of the District of Columbia:

   No body wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that
   nature has given to our black brethren talents equal to those of the other
   colors of man, and that the appearance of a want of them is owing merely to
   the degraded condition of their existence, both in Africa and America.

And in a letter to Henri Gregoire (February 25, 1809) Jefferson expressed further doubts about his earlier views on race:

   No person living wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a complete
   refutation of the doubts I have myself entertained and expressed on the
   grade of understanding allotted to them by nature.... My doubts [in the
   Notes] were the result of personal observation on the limited sphere of my
   own state where the opportunities for the development of their genius were
   not favorable.

As a large Virginia landowner in the agricultural South, Jefferson's ownership of slaves to work the land barely enabled him to survive economically.

As the great Jefferson himself so eloquently said: "None of us, no, not one, is perfect; and were we to love none who had imperfections, this world would be a desert for our love."

Sidney M. Goetz
Gulfport, FL

COPYRIGHT 2002 American Humanist Association
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