Jefferson proceeded to attend more fully to the care of
his lands and means, but was slowed by a broken wrist he had suffered
the previous summer in a fall from his horse. Finding himself
incapacitated, he resumed work on an extended questionnaire regarding
methods of government that had been issued to him while governor
by the French diplomat Francois Barbe-Marbois. This effort resulted
in the renowned Notes on the State of Virginia, the
only extended tract that Jefferson ever published.
In his Notes, Jefferson recounted many
of the policies he had initiated while at work in the Virginia
Assembly during the late 1770s. In addition, he produced a veritable
encyclopedia of the region, outlining its environmental, geographical,
and historical aspects while mixing in various architectural, archeological
and climatic observations. Ever loyal to husbandry, Jefferson was
vociferous in his claim for the primacy of agrarian interests against
infringing manufacturing developments. To this end, he argued
that whereas the farmer was truly healthy, all other occupations
were at heart unsound.
The defense of agrarianism was only one in a set of conspicuous social
theories that Jefferson advanced in Notes. The
most famous of these were his remarks on the relative characteristics
of the black, native, and white populations in Virginia. While
Jefferson believed the native and white populations to be intellectually
comparable, he found blacks to be inferior to whites in the endowments
of both body and mind. Although willing to grant certain cosmetic
similarities between blacks and whites, he insisted on shortcomings
of blacks with regard to beauty, imagination, and reason.
Jefferson viewed such inherent differences between blacks
and whites as enough to make abolition impracticable. Although
he supported, and even encouraged, the mixing of native and white blood,
he viewed miscegenation between blacks and whites to be a crime
against nature. For this reason, upon the inevitable step of emancipation,
Jefferson could see no resort but to remove all blacks from the
American continent, in a massive relocation project that would
effectively repopulate the slave coast of Africa.
Strange as it sounds to contemporary ears, Jeffersons
policy was held in wide regard throughout the first half of the
nineteenth century. It was earnestly supported by respected political
figures such as Henry Clay, who helped to establish the charter
of an American Colonization Society. Under their auspices, a group
of freed slaves established a colony in West Africa in 1822, which
became the independent country of Liberia in 1847. Even as late
as 1862, Abraham Lincoln viewed the colonization scheme of repatriation
as the best solution to Americas mounting racial tensions (See the Lincoln
SparkNote).
Colonization was viewed by many as the only alternative
to out-and-out race war. As Jefferson speculated, if the two races
were allowed to co-exist in free relation, the thousand recollections,
by the blacks of the injuries they have sustained...will divide
us into parties, and produce convulsions that will probably never
end but in the extermination of one or the other race. Faced with
such a prospect, Jefferson trembled to consider the result. When
I reflect, he wrote to his fellow whites, that God is just: that
his justice cannot sleep forever...The Almighty has no attribute
which can take sides with us in such a contest.
