
Americans used to put Jefferson on a pedestal as the primary creator of our democracy. Now his statues attract controversy and graffiti, which cast him as a racist and even rapist.
This denunciation troubles many, who worry that we will lose sight of his great accomplishments in leading a revolution and our nation—and in founding this university.
No leader of the revolutionary generation now engenders fiercer controversy and more polarized reactions. We seem conscripted to choose between seeing Jefferson as a hero or villain, with little room for the intervening ambiguity and complexity of humanity. That polarization pulls us from trying to understand how and why he became, other than George Washington, the most powerful and influential American of his time. Understanding differs from condoning or condemning.
As Hollywood has long known, Americans prefer melodramas that sort people into the good and the evil. So, we treat Jefferson as an icon of our unresolved prejudices and inequalities, which trace to slavery. As that burden becomes conspicuous in our national understanding, partisans wish to cast Jefferson as either an antislavery hero or a proslavery villain. In fact, he was both and neither.
Contradiction
Contradiction lay at the heart of the democracy that he helped create, one based on the consent of citizens. In his lifetime, Virginia’s citizens were white men, and many of them legally owned people of color. Committed to serving the will of citizens, Jefferson defended their (and his) right to practice slavery even while he criticized the system in principle.
Jefferson knew that slavery debased masters as it exploited enslaved people. He feared that masters became brutal and passionate. In his famous book Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson wrote, “The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities.” He later described his countrymen as “zealous for their own liberties, but trampling on those of others.” Recalling the revolution against British rule, he marveled that a Virginian could “inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose.”
Jefferson worried that enslaved people would revolt and destroy Virginia. On some night, a simmering plot might suddenly erupt into bloody retribution. Jefferson expected that God would help rebels crush their oppressors. “Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever. … The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.” To avert destruction, Virginia’s masters needed to free themselves from slavery.
Jefferson regarded emancipation as necessary but insufficient to liberate whites from danger. Despite declaring all men created equal, in Notes on the State of Virginia, he notoriously described black people as “inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.” Forsaking his usual optimism about human progress, Jefferson denied that people of different races could learn to live together as equals. He insisted that emancipated slaves would seek revenge, producing bloody “convulsions,” culminating “in the extermination of the one or the other race.” He likened slavery to possessing a dangerous beast: “We have the wolf by the ear and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.”
In 1779, Jefferson drafted a plan to emancipate Virginia’s slaves gradually, over the course of two generations, but he also proposed deporting them all to a distant colony in Africa or the West Indies. This colonization scheme was prohibitively expensive and economically ruinous for white Virginians, who relied on coerced labor and balked at paying higher taxes. The state lacked the means to finance and manage the overseas colonization of thousands of people. If adopted, Jefferson’s scheme would have annually cost Virginia at least five times its revenue, and a fivefold increase in taxation was unthinkable. After sounding out leading legislators, and finding them horrified, Jefferson withheld his emancipation plan, which survived in the pages of Notes on the State of Virginia. Throughout his long public career, Jefferson had a powerful aversion to public controversy and political defeat, which inhibited his championing any unpopular cause. Jefferson concluded that if African Americans could not be deported, they had better remain slaves.
His self-interest also led him to cling to slavery. Jefferson relied on the labor of more than 150 enslaved people to sustain his genteel standard of living and permit him the luxury of political leadership. He also wanted to provide generous inheritances to two daughters and a dozen grandchildren (in his legitimate, white line). His dependence on enslaved labor intensified as his debts mounted and his family grew.
Jefferson kept an enslaved mistress, Sally Hemings, who bore him six children. His friend John Hartwell Cocke reported that Virginia’s mixed-race people “would be found by hundreds. Nor is it to be wondered at, when Mr. Jefferson’s notorious example is considered.”
After Jefferson’s wife died in 1782, he never remarried, keeping a vow made to her to protect the inheritance of their white daughters from a stepmother and additional white children. Instead, Jefferson relied on an enslaved woman and denied legal responsibility for her children. As the daughter of an enslaved woman and Jefferson’s father-in-law, Hemings was the half-sister of Jefferson’s late and beloved wife.
Delayed Solution
Although opposed to national interference in Southern slavery, Jefferson hoped that Virginia’s state government would revive his emancipation and colonization plan. He believed that passing time favored abolition as young liberals grew up to replace old conservatives among Virginia’s leaders. Black freedom would only come, he argued, “by diffusing light and liberality among their oppressors.” During the 1780s, Jefferson meant to work down from the top of society, beginning with young men attending the state’s leading college, William and Mary. He explained, “It is to them I look, to the rising generation, and not to the one now in power for these great reformations.” By treating the ruling generation as hopeless, Jefferson exempted himself from acting against slavery, save for encouraging younger men to do so.
To promote antislavery sentiment at William and Mary, in 1787 Jefferson donated 37 copies of his Notes on the State of Virginia to two key friends on the faculty who held antislavery views. George Wythe served as the professor of law and James Madison (a cousin of the more famous James Madison) was the college president. Jefferson asked them to provide copies to the most promising and idealistic students, who included Edward Coles, a young man from Jefferson’s home county, Albemarle.

Coles believed in the inspiring words of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. After hearing Madison lecture on the universal rights of man, Coles asked, “If this be true, how can you hold a slave? How can man be made the property of man?” In an embarrassed reply, Madison admitted that slavery “could not be justified on principle, & could only be tolerated in our Country” by “the difficulty of getting rid of it.” Not satisfied, Coles responded that “we could get rid of them with much less difficulty than we did the King of our forefathers,” and if Madison “could not reconcile Slavery with his principles, … he ought not to hold Slaves.” Coles concluded, “I could not consent to hold as property what I had no right to.”
His father’s will put Coles’ conscience to the test, for he inherited a farm and twenty slaves. His siblings pressured Coles to abandon his vow to emancipate. They worried that freeing some family slaves would lead the rest to resent and resist their lot. The siblings also cited a new state law requiring freed slaves to leave the state within the year. While falling quiet about his plans, Coles investigated land in Illinois, a free territory, as a haven to relocate freed slaves. He knew that he would have to leave behind “all my relations and friends.”
Before leaving, Coles made one last effort to persuade Jefferson to lead a public crusade against slavery. Writing to his hero in July 1814, Coles urged him to act consistently with “the principles you have professed and practiced through a long and useful life … in establishing on the broadest basis the rights of man.”
In a tortured reply written in August 1814, Jefferson regretted that Virginians had failed to free the enslaved. “The love of justice & the love of country plead equally the cause of these people, and it is a mortal reproach to us that they should have pleaded it so long in vain, and should have produced not a single effort, nay I fear not much serious willingness to relieve them & ourselves from our present condition of moral and political reprobation.” He declared that Coles offered a “solitary but welcome voice.”
Rather than rally to that voice, however, Jefferson claimed that he had grown too old to influence anyone. “This enterprise is for the young; for those who can follow it up, and bear it through to its consummation. It shall have all my prayers, and these are the only weapons of an old man.” Yet, Jefferson was still young enough to push for creating a new university for Virginia. He was capable of far more than prayer to promote the priority of his last years.
Jefferson urged Coles to remain in Virginia as a paternalistic master. Coles had a duty, Jefferson argued, to cling to his slaves and “your country,” meaning Virginia. Then he could “come forward in the public councils,” to “insinuate & inculcate” emancipation “softly but steadily, thro’ the medium of writing & conversation, associate others in your labours, and when the phalanx is formed, bring on & press the proposition perseveringly until its accomplishment.”
In sum, he wanted Coles to adopt Jefferson’s ameliorating mastery and cautious politics, waiting on an uncertain future to act more decisively.
Discouraged by Jefferson’s response, Coles considered emancipation a lost cause in Virginia. In 1819, he moved to Illinois with his slaves, whom he freed and granted 160 acres to each family. Elected governor of the new state, he helped defeat an effort to legalize slavery in Illinois.
Coles’ victory ensured that, during the 1860s, Illinois would rally to the cause of Union and antislavery in the Civil War that violently destroyed slavery in Virginia. That result would have pained Jefferson, had he lived to see it, for he wanted Virginians to abolish slavery voluntarily, peacefully and on their own timetable. And he also urged them to whiten Virginia by shipping away all former slaves.
Judging
Most modern readers identify with Coles rather than Jefferson. We like to think that we, too, would put moral consistency ahead of caution and self-interest. It is fair to wish that Jefferson had done far more, openly and consistently, to speak, write and act against a system whose evils he knew. There was no one more influential to lead an antislavery crusade. But he felt inhibited by his own interests, those of his heirs, and especially by the will of Virginia’s white, male citizens.
We also should recall the rarity of Coles’ sacrifice in favor of principle. How many people like him do we have today? We sustain our own racial, political and environmental woes that collectively threaten the existence of future generations. If we simply condemn Jefferson, we feel virtuous and on the right side of history. But that is too easy on us, for it does too little to advance justice in our time.
The University of Virginia is celebrating its bicentennial. Such celebration tends to cast Jefferson as a noble founder and to seek a direct line from his precepts to the best qualities of the University today. But a historian wants to understand the very different context of 200 years ago, when Virginians created a university to defend a way of life that included slavery. Many twists and turns separate Jefferson’s University from today’s version, which has become far larger, more complex and cosmopolitan. During the past 60 years, the University made new commitments to diversity and equal opportunity, including the long overdue admission of women and African Americans. There is more to celebrate in what the University has become than in how it began. But this university and the United States do benefit from cherished parts of Jefferson’s legacy, including the pursuit of democracy, a devotion to rational inquiry and a determination to pursue truth wherever it leads. If that pursuit leads us to conclude that he fell short, the burden falls on us to do better.
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Comments
sky lark on 04/13/2019
why do white people continue to make excuses for this racist, raping, pedophile? When was it ever a time to rape? Jefferson was a sexual predator who raped multiple enslaved women on his plantation. He was a trafficker of Black bodies. A terrorist, trespasser on stolen land. A racist! A coward! His values and morals were perverted, and his integrity and humanity flawed. He saw Black people as inferior to Whites. He was a White Supremacist. What is the double standard with “separating the man from his contributions”? Shall that be the new standard of the #METOO movement? What about accountability and truth?
Stan on 02/08/2019
I invite readers to reference my previous comment of 12/17/2018 and the daily ongoing revelations as to the predictable Democrat behavior at the Virginia governor state level. As to Northam would you take your newborn child for post natal care to this ghoulish pediatrician who advocates infanticide? Add to that his admitted racism along with that of the state attorney general and then the lieutenant governor Fairfax as to sexual abuse of women. Is it time to wake up as to what Democrats are REALLY about as I related earlier?
VN DALMIA on 02/06/2019
An extremely well-written and balanced piece. Well done, Mr Taylor. As it happens, I agree largely with Mr Leech’s comments above.
Steven T. Corneliussen on 02/05/2019
Mr. Payne not only cites, but appears to draw conclusions from, some true, important things: “that it was Africans themselves who captured and sold each other into slavery; that slavery was practiced in the Spanish empire well before 1619 ... and that slavery is practiced to this day.” I see such true, important things cited regularly elsewhere as if they prove something about how to remember American slavery. It seems to me that they don’t.
Bruce Claycombe on 02/05/2019
One facet of Mr. Jefferson’s life, his constant indebtedness, has not been linked to his failure to free his slaves. In Jefferson’s time, slaves were valuable assets, which in Jefferson’s circumstance, simply could not be freed because of the financial disaster the manumission would cause. Selling slaves was just like selling crops. Jefferson needed the money from slavery to maintain his lifestyle and to keep his creditors at bay.
Charles E. Payne on 02/05/2019
For some time now we Americans have engaged in the self-destructive activity of tearing down our basic institutions and the few truly great people who started this country. By engaging in that they diminish those icons who sparked a global movement away from monarchy and its abuses.
Those Americans who are denigrating our historical icons should perhaps reflect on the fact that it was Africans themselves who captured and sold each other into slavery; that slavery was practiced in the Spanish empire well before 1619, and on a vast scale, far greater than in the English colonies of North America; and that slavery is practiced to this day by those who are involved in human trafficking, and by those of certain religious beliefs who control and oppress people of other beliefs and ethnicity. Indeed, those who are drug addicted are the slaves of their drug pushers.
Mr. Jefferson, though a product of his era, did not start slavery, is not responsible for it, and his place in history should not be diminished because of it. Our time and energy would be better served working to put a final end to slavery in all its forms.
Nancy Premen on 01/29/2019
I’m disappointed that Mr. Taylor makes the declarative statement that Thomas Jefferson kept Sally Hemings as his mistress & that she bore him 6 children. My understanding was that there is Jefferson DNA in the Hemings descendants, but there is no way to be certain who the direct link was . According to the Jefferson-Hemings Scholars Commission, over a dozen scholars felt it was highly unlikely that Jefferson was the father. There was some thought that the father was Randolph Jefferson, Thomas’s younger brother . All of this is speculation ... unless you were there , which is impossible , thus no one will ever know for certain. Having said that , isn’t it still valid to credit Thomas Jefferson with the amazing things he did (Declaration of Independence, 3rd President, founder of the University of Virginia & more) & assume that he obviously was not perfect, that he was a slave-owner ..as were most men of his time ...but a man that recognized it & most likely if he were alive today , would be foremost in condemning these things ... that with the passage of time, enlightenment has proved such an institution invalid & horrific ? I think it is a false narrative to condemn someone who did so many great things & who obviously recognized the importance of freedom & liberty ... who started the US on the road to being an enlightened country , with equality for all…while forgetting that he was not perfect , was a man of his era, & made mistakes… but to definitively say he was a predator (as I have seen elsewhere ), is an affront to the intelligence of today’s society . The man may or may not have had Sally Hemings as his mistress ... we’ll likely never know for sure… but we do know the incredible things he did do . Accept him for what he was ..a brilliant man who we can credit for helping to create this land of opportunity .... but he wasn’t perfect.
Michael Leech on 01/10/2019
Excellent article. As Bernie Mayo taught me, every generation sees history through the lens of its own biases. We judge people by the standards of our own time rather than theirs. Future generations will be appalled at the persistence of racism, slavery’s stepchild, and our failure to recognize and remedy the economic impact of centuries of slavery and oppression.
Slavery was not “celebrated” in Jefferson’s time. Most of the founders saw that it was inconsistent with the principles of the Declaration but believed that it would die out in the south as it was doing in the north. The “celebration” began with John C. Calhoun in the 1830’s. But before his death, Jefferson foresaw the grave danger slavery posed to the nation. His reaction to the 1820 Missouri compromise was to predict, accurately, the cataclysm that occurred 40 years later.
Steven T. Corneliussen on 12/28/2018
I’m glad I got to see this essay explaining that partisans “wish to cast Jefferson as either an antislavery hero or a proslavery villain” though in fact “he was both and neither.” But why misrepresent what TJ actually wrote about black people?
Professor Taylor says misleadingly, “Despite declaring all men created equal, in Notes on the State of Virginia, [TJ] notoriously described black people as ‘inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.’”
If you read that passage in Notes, though, you find that after extensively stipulating that the data and the observational circumstances were insufficient for making an objective judgment, TJ actually wrote that he advanced “it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks…are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.”
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/jefferson/ch14.html
Funny; in a January 2018 New York Times op-ed, American University Professor Ibram X. Kendi did much the same, misleadingly calling TJ “a slaveholder who once declared that black people ‘are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.’”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/13/opinion/sunday/heartbeat-of-racism-denial.html
Why these scholarly lapses? Isn’t this stuff complicated and contentious enough already?
Robert Corder on 12/17/2018
I was very surprised to read the statement that Virginians created The University of Virginia “.... to defend a way of life that included slavery.” I always thought it was created to educate people, not to defend a particular way of life!
Stan on 12/17/2018
If readers are wondering why the current focus on slavery at the University one only has to look at those promoting this focus and what lies behind their collective psyche. Guilt. This side has been with us since the nation began and their unconscious behavior is such as to perpetrate abuse and then later seek to shed the guilt by projection. Even to the point of raising figures like TJ from the past to use as scapegoats. This side of our nation were the slave owners, the segregationists, yes, the real racists even unto today. If you doubt me, then simply look at the clear historical record, as they gave us the KKK, Jim Crow laws, segregation, and before the Civil War were in fact the only slave owners. And they have always belonged to one political party. Democrats. No, you cannot change the stripes on a zebra. Nor the underlying subconscious racism and guilt associated insanity in a Democrat. It is best to choose to go forward in observing this spectacle with eyes wide open, not shut.
RITA on 12/15/2018
The article is about slavery, but it is also about an ethical struggle within a man who had the power to decry the inhumanity of slavery but not be able to blaze a trail for its end. Being a “victim of his time” does not excuse him from himself or from doing what is morally right. To give up his life-long career and become a poor laughing stock would have caused him to fall from his status in the profession of politics. No one human wants to fail in an occupation. Why do people criticize so greatly such a man because he was not superhuman in his decisions about life? Yes, he made some bad decisions about humanity, but he should not become a scapegoat for history. We, as a society, must learn lessons from Jefferson’s struggle in politics and in matters of love to avoid the chains he was unable to release.
Robert on 12/14/2018
It is worhwhile to discuss the good and bad of any individual. Jefferson’s gift for advocating for personal liberty is in stark contrast to owning other human beings. I do get frustrated that the author accepts as fact the narrative around the Hemings controversy with no acknowledgement of the opposite conclusion of the Scholars Commission.
Paul Dee on 12/14/2018
David McCullough was in C’Ville for a period to research a possible biography of TJ. For some reason he switched to a biography of John Adams. Reading between the lines of that biography I suspect Mr McCullough didn’t have much respect for Mr Jefferson
Camille Wilson on 12/13/2018
It wasn’t that Jefferson benefited from the labor of slaves. But that he sold them to make a living. That compounds the evil in that he made an enterprise of selling human beings some of whom could have been his children.
John A Matel on 12/13/2018
When Jefferson was born, slavery was tolerated or usually openly legal, even celebrated everywhere in the world. It had existed from prehistoric times, and most people assumed that it was normal. Taking slaves was a goal of war in many parts of the world. It was only in Jefferson’s generation that significant numbers of influential people thought seriously about abolishing slavery.
Jefferson was a thought-leader in liberty, even if his character flaws meant he did not take personal action on his ideas. We can see, however, that w/o leaders like Jefferson various sorts of slavery and oppression would have persisted much longer.
Jefferson exploited his fellow humans, as almost all those with the power to do so had done since the dawn of history. In this he was not remarkable. He also was a drafter of the Declaration of Independence, Founder of University of Virginia and a key leader in establishing liberty in the world. This is much less common.
In other words, in his evil and flaws, he was much like people of his time, and before and after. In the good he did, he was extraordinary.
Shakespeare quotes Marc Antony saying, “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.” This was NOT true of Jefferson. We are all still living with the good Jefferson did.
ROBERT MOORE on 12/13/2018
The title is Hero or Villain. The entire article is about slavery.