Jefferson, the Antislavery Slaveholder
By Janice Rogers Brown and Jed Donahue
This article appears in the Winter 2025 issue of the Coolidge Review. Request a free copy of a future print issue.
Thomas Jefferson and the Fight Against Slavery
by Cara Rogers Stevens (University Press of Kansas, 2024)
The historian Jay Winik has said, “Madison provided the architecture for the republic, Hamilton its masonry, and Jefferson its soul and poetry.” Despite Thomas Jefferson’s undoubted eloquence and his stature as a diplomat and public intellectual, the nation’s third president has remained an enigmatic figure. His idiosyncrasies have fueled scholarly skepticism about the Declaration’s debt to the natural law tradition and the depth of the Founders’ commitment to the ideal of human equality. Jefferson—perhaps more than any other member of the Founding generation—has been vilified for hypocrisy on the question of slavery.
Cara Rogers Stevens’s portrait of Jefferson is thus a revelation.
In Thomas Jefferson and the Fight Against Slavery, Rogers Stevens examines Jefferson’s only book-length writing project, Notes on the State of Virginia.
Notes, she writes, “is today best known for its prejudiced sections on racial differences.” But she provides a much more complete view through her careful exegesis of Jefferson’s original manuscript, which only recently became available to scholars.
Rogers Stevens shows that the extensive revisions Jefferson made to the work reflect sincere efforts to shift the public debate in favor of emancipation.
SLAVERY AS A “MORAL DEPRAVITY”
Jefferson’s “thought, actions, and failures” on slavery are nothing if not complex, Rogers Stevens observes. The man who described slavery as a “moral depravity” enslaved hundreds of people. What’s more, he resisted calls to free his slaves, even in his will.
The few slaves Jefferson did emancipate reflect another anomalous part of his story. He wrote that racial mixing produced “a degradation which no lover of his country, no lover of human excellence in human character can innocently consent.” And yet, as the Thomas Jefferson Foundation has concluded, he fathered children with Sally Hemings, a young slave woman. Jefferson never publicly acknowledged this relationship, but it was notorious enough that his political enemies joked about “Dusky Sally.” The only slaves Jefferson freed were Hemings’s children. After Jefferson’s death, Sally Hemings lived, undisturbed, as a free woman in Charlottesville.
Despite these many contradictions, Jefferson’s support for abolishing slavery proved genuine. He came to such views at an early age. At the College of William and Mary, Jefferson was mentored by the legendary George Wythe, whose antipathy to slavery Jefferson later described as “unequivocal.” Rogers Stevens shows that another mentor, William Small, “introduced Jefferson to the strains of antislavery thought then developing as part of the Scottish Enlightenment.” Jefferson came to believe that the greatest hope for liberty lay in the “openness to antislavery thought” that he imbibed at college.
Jefferson took action as well. Even as a young legislator, he wrote or cosponsored legislation designed to limit or end slavery. In 1784, he wrote a draft of what became the Northwest Ordinance that fell only one vote short in Congress. Jefferson’s version would have prohibited slavery in any new state after 1800.
How could genuine antislavery sentiment coexist with deeply disturbing passages of racism?
ANTISLAVERY RACIST
If Jefferson opposed slavery, why didn’t he push for immediate emancipation? In answering this question, Rogers Stevens cites Jefferson’s caution to a colleague: “The ground of liberty is to be gained by inches. It takes time to persuade men to do even what is for their own good.” And Notes on the State of Virginia, she argues, represents his most concerted effort to prepare the ground. The public could not be forced to accept progressive policy prescriptions, he believed. Instead, he sought to enlighten leaders—and especially the rising generation—so that they would commit to emancipation.
The opportunity for Notes arose in 1780. Seeking information about the former colonies, the secretary of the French delegation to America sent queries to each of the thirteen states. Only two responded. One was Virginia, in the person of Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson moved far beyond providing factual answers to the queries. From 1780 until 1785, while living in Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Paris, he corrected, enlarged, and revised his response.
He expanded his intended readership as well. Jefferson began by writing for “just a few French diplomats,” Rogers Stevens says. But soon he saw that his response “could have value for fellow Americans as well.” By 1783 he wanted to reach “a transatlantic network of scholars”; he would publish Notes in both English and French.
The long process of revision resulted in what Rogers Stevens calls “one of America’s most significant works on race and slavery.” Notes, she observes, contains “the harshest criticism of slavery published by any of the Founders—as well as one of the most deeply disturbing passages of racism.”
How could genuine antislavery sentiment coexist with discourses on the supposed inferiority of African Americans? An early reader of the manuscript, Charles Thomson, noted the problem. Thomson urged Jefferson to remove “the dissertation on the difference between Whites & blacks,” because “such an opinion might seem to justify slavery.” Jefferson left the section in—partly, Rogers Stevens argues, because Jefferson needed to justify to white American readers, including slaveholders, his call for spending taxpayer dollars on the plan he outlined in Notes. That plan called for emancipating, educating, and colonizing slaves.
Rogers Stevens concludes with this provocative argument: “Incredible as it seems today, Jefferson did not include several pages of racist observations in his Notes simply because he was prejudiced against African Americans; he also included them because he was antislavery.”
SHAPING FUTURE GENERATIONS
Jefferson’s boldest antislavery strategy was to circulate copies of Notes to William and Mary students. He sought to shift public opinion by developing a generation of leaders “more committed to living out their enlightened principles than his own generation,” Rogers Stevens writes.
Jefferson influenced many among the rising generations. In the winter of 1831–32, more than five years after Jefferson’s death, Virginia’s legislators held a fierce debate on an emancipation proposal from Jefferson’s eldest grandson. Antislavery forces cited Notes on the State of Virginia to show that Jefferson’s desire for emancipation was real.
Edward Coles attended William and Mary in the early 1800s and became devoted to the antislavery cause. As Rogers Stevens writes, Coles “eventually left Virginia entirely, freeing his slaves en route to Illinois and becoming governor there after running on an antislavery platform.”
Winfield Scott attended William and Mary around the same time as Coles. Writing in his 1864 autobiography, the Union general said, “In common with most, if not all, my companions, I became deeply impressed with the views given by Mr. Jefferson, in his ‘Notes on Virginia,’…in favor of a gradual emancipation of slaves.”
The Civil War ended the peculiar institution Jefferson had opposed. The Reconstruction Congress echoed Jefferson’s language in the Northwest Ordinance in drafting the Thirteenth Amendment. Had the Freedmen’s Bureau and the Reconstruction Congress given half as much thought to education and economic sufficiency as Jefferson did, the murderous reign of Jim Crow might have ended before it began.
A FRESH PERSPECTIVE ON JEFFERSON
For more than two centuries, writers have seen Notes on the State of Virginia as a racist tract and a tool for oppression. More recently, scholars like Paul Finkelman have condemned Jefferson as “a self-indulgent and negrophobic Virginia planter” who did not deserve a reputation for being antislavery. Cara Rogers Stevens challenges such castigations.
This is not to say she fully rehabilitates Jefferson. Rather, Rogers Stevens tries to steer a middle course between hagiography and contempt to depict Jefferson as a sincere antislavery advocate who, through law and persuasion, sought to change his society. She succeeds admirably.
Janice Rogers Brown served as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 2005 until she retired from the bench in 2017. Jed Donahue is the editor of the Coolidge Review.
This article appears in the Winter 2025 issue of the Coolidge Review. Request a free copy of a future print issue.