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.
Jeffersons disparaging and paranoid remarks about blacks
are among the most virulent of his day. They do not jibe well
with his own conduct, and they are made all the stranger by his
tremendously liberal views about the native tribes of America.
Scholars have tried to explain away this discrepancy in every
possible way. Some have proposed that Jeffersons cruel remarks
against blacks were simply a suppression, whether conscious or
not, of his true adoration, affection, and envy of them. Others
have theorized that Jefferson truly despised blacks, and that his
love of the native was a consequence of his own partial descent
from their ranks. Although this would do much to explain his unusual
support of mixing between the native and white populations, there
is little extant evidence to support such a hypothesis.
Ever-reluctant to be pinned down, Jefferson disliked the
idea of being held to his published words, and never again was
he to write at such length on such a variety of topics as he did
in Notes on the State of Virginia. His momentum
as a writer was also severely stifled by the untimely death of his
wife Martha. An extended mourning period ensued; his convalescence
took weeks. Only the call of foreign diplomacy could stir him
once again. Summoned in November of 1782 to travel to France in
order to negotiate peace terms with Britain, Jefferson made for
Baltimore and prepared to make the Atlantic crossing. However,
a combination of icy waters and a hostile British naval presence
delayed his passage, and by the time he was cleared for departure
the 1783 Treaty of Paris had already been signed.
Returning to Virginia briefly, Jefferson next found himself
back amongst the members of Congress, who convened first at Princeton and
later at Annapolis. In the ensuing months, Jefferson took charge
of the push to ratify the Treaty of Paris, successfully rounding
up the necessary votes after a lengthy debate over terms which were
by any measure generous to the newly formed United States. Then,
with foreign relations relatively stabilized, Jefferson turned to the
question of domestic policy on a national level.
One of Jeffersons most lasting innovations of the mid
1780s was to propose a decimal system of currency based on the
Spanish dollar. But beyond this simple and sensible fiscal measure,
most of his legislation related to land policies. Chairing a congressional
committee on the administration of western territories, Jefferson drafted
an Ordinance in 1784, providing for the eventual creation of sixteen
states out of the Great Lakes region that Virginia had reclaimed
during the war. Interestingly, Jefferson proposed a series of
names for these new states, some of which, like Illinois and Michigan,
were eventually adopted. Others, like Cherronesus and Polypotamia,
never really stuck.
That such areas should obtain full rights of statehood
upon acceding to the union was never really questioned. A trickier
issue revolved around the slavery policy that was to be adopted
in these newly created states. Jefferson wrote a proposal by which
slavery would have been forever prohibited in these and all other
new territories that the United States acquired after 1800. In
one of the cruel ironies of democracy, the provision was defeated
by a single vote. Had it passed, it would have precluded slavery
in the Louisiana Territory that was later acquired, thus averting
the bitter divisions that led to the Missouri Compromise, Bloody
Kansas, and ultimately, the Civil War (See
the Civil War SparkNote).
Jefferson understood the significance of this defeat,
ruing the fact that the voice of a single individual would have
prevented this abominable crime from spreading itself over the
new country.... Thus, he continued, we see the fate of millions
of unborn hanging on the tongue of one man, and heaven was silent
in that awful moment. As it stood, Jefferson was able to outlaw
the expansion of slavery into the Great Lakes region, but the status
of slavery in subsequently acquired territory remained an open
question.
Once again, Jefferson stumbled where slavery was concerned, yet
contributed to fantastic innovations in other regards. By the Land
Ordinance of 1785, a comprehensive survey system of western lands
was laid out, and the distribution and sale of lands was ordered
into organized townships and counties. Further, a certain section
in each township was reserved for the establishment of a public
school. All of these aims, while ignoring the plight of the slave,
did much to forward the cause of democracy in the swiftly developing
United States.
And whither democracy, now that the war had been won?
The success of the American experiment was by no means assured
in the heady days following the revolution. Many of the new nations most
important statesmen saw a limited term to the experiment of a democratic
republic. John Adams believed that the United States would endure
for a century, or maybe for a century and a half. His great-grandson,
Henry Adams, later marveled at the audacity of this initial American
project to raise the average man on a par with the most favored
in terms of intellectual and social opportunity and privilege.
As he wrote of this radical egalitarianism in his formidable study
of American history in the Jeffersonian era:
The destinies of the United States were
certainly staked, without reserve or escape, on the soundness of
this doubtful and even improbable principle, ignoring or overthrowing
the institutions of the church, aristocracy, family, army and political
intervention, which long experience had shown to be needed for
the safety of society.
Somehow, up until now, the improbable principle of egalitarianism, although,
or perhaps because, mitigated, has worked to a fair degree of success
in America. For other nations, adventures in democracy have been
a far more tumultuous affair. During the last half of the 1780s,
Jefferson was to receive a firsthand introduction to the potentially
dangerous character of radical political reforms, during his tenure
as minister to France.
In May 1784, having obtained an appointment as minister
to France, Jefferson finally received the European invitation he
could make good on. The summer saw him through the long Atlantic
passage, accompanied by his daughter, personal assistant and most trusted
slave. Then, on August 6, 1784, Jefferson entered Paris for the
first time, poised on the brink of a life-altering five year tenure
in a country he would grow to love even as he continued to revile
it.
