So Help Me God: The Founding Fathers and the First Great Battle Over Church and State by Forrest Church

Author:Forrest Church
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2008-09-08T07:00:00+00:00

Equal but Separate: Jefferson’s Slavery Problem

In marked contrast to the political religious free-for-all during the election of 1800, the religious darts thrown during Jefferson’s race for reelection proved little more than dull-pointed irritants. One moral issue, however, with all its attendant rumors, wouldn’t go away—the continuing ambiguity surrounding Jefferson’s attitude toward race.

The gap between President Jefferson’s ideals and practice on race relations found dramatic expression in his terrified response to the slave rebellion in Haiti. He rushed to assure Napoleon that “nothing would be easier than to furnish your army and fleet with everything and to reduce Toussaint-Louverture to starvation.” As the president was privately endeavoring to subvert the valiant ex-slave’s struggle to establish a Dominican Republic, his disciple Abraham Bishop was quoting the Jeffersonian gospel chapter and verse on behalf of the Haitian rebels, invoking the Declaration of Independence to shame his fellow citizens into supporting the insurrection. “We have firmly asserted that all men are free ” Bishop preached. “Yet as soon as the poor blacks ... cried out, It is enough ... we have been the first to assist in riveting their chains!”

What little ardor Jefferson displayed for blacks appeared to come from a different quarter entirely, his slave quarters, leaving tongues around the country wagging with rumors that he kept a Negro mistress. Scabrous wits could not resist the temptation to exploit these delicious whisperings, and rumors of his maintaining a sexual relationship with one of his slaves would dog Jefferson throughout his days. Two centuries later, with the plausible but slim possibility that his brother Randolph may in fact have been the culprit, DNA tests appear to have eliminated most doubt that these rumors were, in fact, true.

For someone who condemned slavery with theological flourish, the gratitude Jefferson expressed to Providence for the economic advantages of slave breeding is chilling. “I consider the labor of a breeding woman as no object, and that a child raised every two years is of more profit than the crop of the best laboring man,” Jefferson advised his overseer. “In this, as in all other cases, Providence has made our interests and our duties coincide perfectly.” He had not always been so callous. Years before, Jefferson summed up the moral peril attendant on slaveholders as well as anyone. “The whole commerce between master and slave,” he said in Notes on Virginia, “is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.... The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.” In this respect, Jefferson was apparently no prodigy.

Jefferson possessed upward of 150 slaves when he authored the Declaration of Independence, and bought and sold at least that many over the course of his lifetime, including, always discreetly, during the years of his presidency. Less hypocritical than convoluted, his position on slavery rested on eight unshakeable principles. In isolation, these principles may appear to contradict each other but, following

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