לפני 10 שנים. 19 בפברואר 2014 בשעה 11:22
Thomas Jefferson's most enduring legacy is the American Creed, the belief expressed in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence that declares "all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights." These sentiments have been the vision in the struggle to create an egalitar-ian, multiracial society in the United States. However, the author of this passage believed fervently that all persons of African descent should not be permitted to reside in the new republic unless they were enslaved. *1
Judging from the Notes on the States of Virgina written by Thomas Jefferson, one deos not receive the impression that the same man wrote the above mentioned "All men are created equal....." together with the views expressed in his Notes on black slaves. Indeed, written in 1781 (and enlarged in the winter of 1782) after a horse injury and "
in response to a set of queries sent in late 1780 to influential members of the Continental Congress by the French legation at Philadelphia. The purpose of the queries was to inform French officials about the states in the new republic in North America. A copy was transmit-ted to Jefferson, then Governor of Virginia, who undertook the response for his state.*2.
This last element is, I think, of a certain importance when considering that these are no personal notes, but some to be published and for a French elite reading. And though, they donnot present any character of problematic for being fingerpointed as a "rascist" towards his fellow humans of African imported slaves. Maybe, this term, this notion was not completely tainted with guilt.
It seems too, to be an hybridis - albeit splendid account, one could even say hommage to the State of Virginia - in nature, as it unravels in front our eyes from a scientific posture, to an essay trying to approach the main spiritual issues at the morrow of the American revolution. Indeed, Jefferson starts to give an exact description of the limits and bounderies of the state of Virginia (Query I); he goes on with a long description of rivers and rivulettes, (Query II), a notive of its mountains (Query IV) , ports (which there is none !) in an exact and scientific approach description etc etc.... But thing starts to get a strange turn of tone when the author begins to answer the Query about animals... (P69).
« America has not yet produced one good poet » !
As if answering to the a French "scientist" the Count de Buffon -" as Wether Nature has enlisted herself as a Cis or Tras-Atlantic partizan?- I am induced to suspect there has been more eloquence than sound reasoning displayed in support of this theory*3 and *4" - his posture is that of man attacked on the capacity of Americans, to deliver genious. As if attacked on the capacity of his kins, his civilization, to produce "great men", he embarks in an uneasy succession in comparing the "aborigènes" as he writes, finding in the Indians, a people with many qualities. In other words, it is from a defensive position that Jefferson's is writing his lines
"Before we condemn the Indians of this continent as wanting genius, we must consider that letters have not yet been introduced among the…Were we to compare them in the present state with the Eyropeans North of the Alps, when the Romans arms and arts first crossed thos mountains, the comparaison would be unequal…..".
"I do not mean to deny that there are varieties in the race of man, distinguished by their powers both of body and mind. I believe there are, as I see to be the case in the races of other animals. I only mean to suggest a doub, whether the bulk and faculties of animals depend on the side of the Atlantic on which their food happends to grow…."
"When we shall have existed as a poeple as long as the Greeks, did before they produced a Homer, …the French a racine and Voltaire…..".
This feeling of undeniable inferiority complex - if one wants to indulge in a psychological approach for a moment - seems to permeate through and through this long recount of the New republic.
The "property"
But then, in page 78, again observing mother Nature, Jefferson adds to this catalogues of our indigenous animals, "I will add a short account of an anomaly of Nature, taking place sometimes in the race of negroes brought from Africa, who, though black themselves, have, in rare instances, white children called Albinos……..there are of a pallid cadaverous white, untinged with red, ….their hair of the same kind of white, short, coarse and curled as is that of the negro.."
It is in this instance that for the term of "property" appears when related to black slaves. They are placed as well under the category of animals. *5. But property is a mark that will undermine their status as human being in a very deep way I believe.
So it is Under this sketch that Jefferson appears to approach what is, he reckons in a lucidity of what is going to be a problem for the New republic : that of the African blacks imported by the hundreds of thousands*6 and being an undeniable difficulty to reconcile with the new reality that he underwent to describe. Nature, animals, aborigènes, scientific approaches, but also what will be the fate of black slaves, in a tension between ideas of universal freedom and an ambivalent approach of that human reality - or human are they really? - of men Under the yolk of others, of masters, the latter having caused, in his words, a great amount of sufferings to the formers. The mere recognition of this suffering is surprisingly turned against these very slaves when Jefferson, suspecting that there will be a lot of grudges again their former masters, the blacks will create a social problem.
It is not the same rationalization than with William Byrd when this master finds in His order of things, an obvious position of superiority over these African blacks. There, with Jefferson, there is an obvious tension between a certain disgust towards "negros" and the reckoning with the fact that they are to be freed and equal in front of the law...Here, the American revolution has started to create an ambivalence that we see, obviously, from Under the pen of Thomas Jefferson. Swinging from a scientific approach and rationalization, stemming from his own inferiority complex as American English excluded from Civilization, fired by new ideas of complete freedom but not yet to "all", Under a psychological yolk of racism that was not yet fullyreckoned with (it is a 19th C. term), but obviously already a tremendous societal problem that had to be reckoned with by the very attitude of slaves refusing their fate as inslaved (see lessons of Prof. McCurry), Jefferson when approaching the law - that is to define and name things - is the most embarrassed and awckward as per what will be the fate of millions of African American mostly, at the time, living in the Southern Colonies.
Query IX Laws…p149 To emancipate all slaves born after passing the act.
It started with a law.
" During the regal government, we had at one time obtained a law, which imposed such a duty on the importation of slaves as amounted nearly to a prohibition, when one inconsidederate assembly placed under a peculiarity of circumstance, repealed the law…….could succeed in getting the royal assent to a renewal of the duty. In the very first session helf under the Republican Government, the assembly passed a law for the perpetual prohibition of the importation of slaves. This will, in some measure, stop the increase of this great political and moral evil while the minds of our citizens may be ripening for a complete emancipation of human nature" *7
It goes on with the rationalization of a scientific approach :
"….why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the State, and thus save the expense of supplying by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave ? Deep-rooted prjudices entertained by the whites, ten thousand recollections by the blacks of the injuries thay have sustained ; new provocations, the real distinctions with Nature has made ; and many other ciscumstance, will divide us into parties and produce convulstions, which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race. To these objections, which are political, may be added others, which are physical and moral. The first difference which strikes us is that of color. Wether the black of the negro resides in the reticular membrane between the skin and scarf skin, or in the scarf skin itself ; wether it proceeds from the color of the blood, te color of the bile, or from that of some other secretion, the difference is fixed in Nature…..and is this difference of no importance ? is it not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty in the two races ? are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or suffusions of color in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony which reigns in the countenances, that immovable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race ? Add to these flowing hair, a more elegant symmetry of form, their own judgement in favor of the whites, devlared by their preference of them as uniforly as is the preference of the Oranootan for the black women ….
It roams in the realm of "Superior beauty" and disgust, a notion totally subjective here :
P150 The circumstance of superior beauty is thought worthy attention in the propagation of our horses, dogs and other domestic animals…why not in that of man …..they secret less by the kidneys and more by the glands of the skin which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odor..
It goes on with further characterizations :
"A black after hard labor through the day, will be induced by the slightest amusements to sit up till midnight, or later, though knowing he must be out with the first dawn of the morning. They afe at least as brave …but this may perhaps proceed from a want of forethought, which prevents their seeing a danger till it be present."
Again : the animalist approach....
"They are more ardent after their female, but love seems with them to be more an eager desire than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation."
When comparing with their intellectual capacities ....
"More of sensation than reflection…To this must be ascribed their disposition to sleep when abstracted from their diversions and unemployed in labor. An animal whose body is at rest and who not reflect must be disposed to sleep of course"
"Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason and imagination, it appears to me that in memory they are equal to the whites ; in reason P151 much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the inverstigations of Euclid, and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless and anomalous."
Even if "We" try hard :
"The improvement of the blacks in body and mind, in the first instance of their mixture with the whites, has been observed by every one and proves that their inferiority is not the effect merely of their condition of life. We know that among the Romans, the concdition of their slaves was much more deplorable than that of the blacks on the continent of America….P152"
"P153 It is not their condition then, but Nature, which has produced the distinction. Whether further observation will or will not verify the conjecture, that Nature has been less bountiful to them in the endowments of the head, I believe that in those of the heart she will be found to have done them justice.
This unfortunate difference of color, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstable to the emancipation of these people. Many of their advocates while they wish to vindicate the liberty of human nature are anxious also to preserve its dignity and beauty. … among the Romans emancipation required but one effort. The slave wen made freee might mix with withough staining the blood of his master. But with us a second is necessary unknown to history. When freed, he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture… ! P155"
When freed, he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture (p.143)
So what is to be the solution if emancipation is to be granted to this population of anomalous and inferior status? First and foremost, they are not to be mixed with the white race lest they will provoke a deterioration of the white beauty. and then, they will be relocated out of the United States, back to Africa.
A personal Conclusion :
When I lived in Africa (the Republic of Congo), among a group of foreign individuals, I still held some quite naive views that black racism would have been quite mellowed down by nowadays. That is when within a fortnight, I heard the following remarks that made my eyebrows rise with chock; some French diplomat expressed surprise when exposed to the capacity of a black student to be a genious in mathemathics; another fellow from South Africa was absolutely adamant in his belief that AIDS is spreading preferably among blacks because " they like to make love more than Us"...I will finish with a conversation I had with a close friend of mine, a African American who, while travelling a lot through Africa was told the following by a black African : "Ah...you are not black...You are white !"...
Laws can be passed but ideas, predjudices, cliches are of an extreme complex nature to solve, to say the least. I have taken this course, formidable in its scope of informative value for me, to be able to understand a bit more about the nature of racism in the USA, me, as a Jew, I felt that this aspect of the American society is of tremendous value for me to be able to comprehend a little...
But again, it seems that there is still so much to be resolved about human judging others...and in particular when they are mainly cultural in essence.
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references :
*1THOMAS JEFFERSON AND SLAVERY An Analysis of His Racist Thinking as Revealed by His Writings and Political Behavior NICHOLAS E. MAGNIS University of Texas at Dallas http://www.southalabama.edu/history/faculty/donald/jeffersonandslavery.pdf
Thomas Jefferson and Slavery: An Analysis of His Racist Thinking as Revealed by His Writings and Political Behavior Author(s): Thomas Jefferson and Nicholas E. Magnis Source: Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 29, No. 4 (Mar., 1999), pp. 491-509
*2 "...."
*3 P70 Wether Nature has enlisted herself as a Cis or Trans-Atlantic partizan ? I am induced to suspect there has been more eloquence than sound reasoning displayed in support of this theory…
*4 P 70 So far the Count de Buffon has carried this new theory of the tendency of Nature to belittle her productions on this side of the Atlantic. Its application to the race of whites, transplanted from Europe, remained for the Abbé Raynal « On doit être étonné (he says) que l’Amerique n’ait pas encore produit un bon poete, un habile mathématicien, un homme de génie dans un seul art ou une seule science ».
*5 « property ». like « the seventh instance os of a male belonging to a Mr. Lee, of Cumberland. ».
*6Census of the year 1782….it will at the same time develope the proportion between the free inhabitants and slaves. The following return of taxable articles for that year was given in ; 5328 free males above 21 years of age ; 211689 slaves of all ages and sexes;23766 not distinguished in the returns but said to be titheable slaves ; 195439 horses; 609734 cattles etc…..
*7 P. 49
