Slavery, Race, and Equality: Jefferson and the Pathos of the Enlightenment

Abstract

in 1785, referring to the privately printed Notes on the State of Virginia. cannot now say much about it, Adams continued, I think it will do its Author and his Country great Honour. The Passages upon slavery, are worth Diamonds. They will have more effect than Volumes written by Philosophers.' For almost two centuries American historians have ignored Adams' advice on the significance of the passages on slavery contained in Jefferson's random Notes. Not until Winthrop Jordan's White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward The Negro, 1550-1812, published in 1968, were the Notes thoroughly analyzed for their psychological as well as philosophical value. The same veil of ignorance had been draped over Jefferson's private life by historians, biographers, essayists, and even warts-and-all novelists. Is there rather that has been kept out of sight about Jefferson's relations with Negroes? Edmund Wilson asked John Dos Passos in 1950. Did he have close and unprincipled relations with those that were made up of brown extract from the lack of close relations with white people? I learn from the same source-and for the first time-that he had several mulatto children.2 Again it was only with the publication of Jordan's book that we learned not only something rather interesting in Jefferson's relations with blacks but discovered a complex pattern of behavior that turned out to be highly illuminating. John Adams was right for the wrong reason. After White Over Black, even mere intellectual historians must admit