Thomas Jefferson and Philosophy by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

In this conflicted passage are contained almost all the elements of Jefferson’s understanding of the problem of slavery during the immediate post-revolutionary period. The principal issues he does not reach are slave trade abolition and the question of the territorial expansion of slavery, but neither relates directly to the gradual emancipation amendment that was never moved. In this passage there is acknowledgment that slavery is unjust—far more unjust in fact than the imperial tax regime against which the American revolutionaries complained—and, perhaps less typically, recognition not just of American guilt, but of American agency (the latter expressed in the form of the verb “inflict”). There is recognition that no legislative majority for emancipation currently exists in Virginia, and, implicitly, that emancipation without majority electoral consent is not feasible or, perhaps, even desirable. There is also the assertion, not implausible—think of the proslavery petitioners’ response to the Manumission Law mentioned previously—but not explained, that a failed emancipation measure would tighten slavery’s hold on the Commonwealth. And finally, there is assurance that slavery will one day end, either because the God of the Enlightenment opens the hearts of the slaveholders or because the God of Revelation and the Old Testament would intervene against them and on behalf of the enslaved, should the slaveholders chose to remain deaf to the commands of justice. An odd marriage of detached reflection and jeremiad, Jefferson’s proposed encyclopaedic insertion may be counterintuitive in many respects, but it is wholly consistent with everything else he said on slavery during this period. It acquires more credence still when we reflect that Jefferson may have been striving for rhetorical effect, but was not likely posturing for reputation’s sake. Had antislavery image-building been his purpose, he could easily have accepted Démeunier’s original entry, and painlessly retained credit for the moral uprightness of an amendment that was never moved. Instead, he comes very close to accepting that he could not have moved the amendment even if he been on the scene himself; in the court of world opinion, this amounts to a confession against interest, a form of testimony given great weight in the law of evidence for its presumed tendency to truthfulness.

William Freehling has attached the label “conditional termination” to Jefferson’s stance on emancipation, and, more broadly, has called conditional terminators upper Southern leaders from the revolutionary through the ante-bellum periods who announced their willingness to accept the end of slavery in their states when certain conditions were met, the principal of which was state consent.[52] Freehling’s label fits perfectly. He used it to telling effect to develop his thesis that there were from independence onwards effectively two Souths: a lower South wedded to slavery and an upper South whose commitment to the institution the lower South never trusted. In Eugene Genovese’s language, what was at issue was the hemispheric future of slavery. The lower South was dedicated to slavery’s survival, the upper South was (or at least its progressive leaders were) unsure, indifferent, or cautiously disinclined. This, the lower South found profoundly frightening.

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