Election Section

Jefferson Grappled With Crime of Slavery

By ROB BROWNING
Tuesday March 02, 2004

A proposal has emerged that will certainly engage the attention of thoughtful Berkeley residents. Should Jefferson School be renamed because Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder? 

The shame that is the heritage of those of us whose ancestors held slaves is painful but certainly nothing beside the pain that the heritage of slavery must represent to black Americans. 

Thomas Jefferson struggled throughout his life in the cause of justice, grappling time and again with what he called the “abominable crime” of slavery. He believed deeply, as he wrote in the Declaration of Independence, that all of us “are created equal” and he agonized to the end of his life over the “condition of moral and political reprobation” of the slaveholding society he lived in. As a young attorney in the courts of pre-revolutionary Virginia he dared repeatedly to raise questions about the “evil” of slavery. The first legislation he proposed as a new 26-year-old member of Virginia’s colonial legislature in 1769 called for the abolition of slavery. The proposal was resoundingly rejected. In his law practice he regularly declined fees in cases of people seeking their freedom from slavery. Defending such a man in 1770, he stunned the jurists of the Virginia General Court, a dozen of coloni al America’s wealthiest slaveholders, by declaring “Under the law of nature, all men are born free. Everyone comes into the world with a right to his own person, which includes the liberty of moving and using it at his own will. This is what is called per sonal liberty.” He lost the case. 

Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence in the hot Philadelphia summer of 1776. In that powerful, succinct, and graceful document this 33-year-old radical summarized the case for American independence from Englan d and gathered the principles that have guided our nation in its best moments for over 200 years, principles that resonate with particular force in such dismal days as our own. In Jefferson’s original draft those principles included the abolition of the slave trade, which he called a “cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people” who are captured and carried “into slavery in another hemisphere.” He condemned “this execrable commerce” of “a market where MEN” are “bought and sold.” 

Jefferson was disgusted by the timidity of his fellow delegates to the Second Continental Congress when they insisted on removing his condemnation of slavery from the final document. That rejection of his proposal for a peaceful end to slavery meant, tragically, that the evil institution would persist almost a century more before it was violently abolished in the cataclysm of the Civil War. 

Perhaps Jefferson’s most potent contribution to the cause of emancipation was his authorship of the Northwest Ordinance in 1784, the law that set the terms under which new states were to be admitted to union with the original thirteen. Jefferson’s ordinance abolished slavery in the new territories. Had slavery been extended into the West, our racial history would certainly have been even more brutal than it has been, and the Union would not have possessed the balance of power that finally enabled its victory in the Civil War. 

Today we ask of course how a man s o committed to the eradication of slavery could himself remain a slaveholder. Responding at the age of 71 with his characteristically sturdy optimism to a younger man who had sought his guidance on this subject, Jefferson wrote: “[My views] on . . . slave ry . . . have long since been in possession of the public, and time has only served to give them stronger root. The love of justice and the love of country plead equally the cause of [emancipation], and it is a moral reproach to us that they should have p leaded it so long in vain . . . . From [my own generation] I soon saw that nothing was to be hoped. . . . I had always hoped that the younger generation . . . would have sympathized with oppression wherever found, and proved their love of liberty beyond t heir own share of it. But [they have not] made . . . the progress I had hoped. . . . Yet the hour of emancipation is advancing . . . . It will come . . . This enterprise is for the young; for those who can follow it up, and bear it through to its consumma tion. It shall have all my prayers . . . . My opinion has ever been that, until more can be done for them, we should endeavor, with those whom fortune has thrown on our hands, to feed and clothe them well, protect them from all ill usage, [and] require su ch reasonable labor only as is performed voluntarily by freemen.” 

Like each of us, Thomas Jefferson was inescapably a man of his time and place. Like each of us, he was handed the conditions of his life. If he had done nothing toward improving those cond itions for his contemporaries and successors, for you and me, few would remember him, let alone honor him with a school bearing his name. 

By today’s standards, he clearly failed to do the obviously right thing: free his slaves. By the standards of his own day, he did his best: he protected within an evil system those for whom he was responsible and fought valiantly to change that system. 

Consider a comparison: We all know that the automobile and the vast infrastructure that supports it have for decades wrought untold damage on our natural environment, the environment that sustains life on earth. It poisons the air we breathe. It destroys the protective ozone layer of our atmosphere. Agricultural lands that we depend on for our food and wild lands that n urture us otherwise are paved and encroached upon by the urban sprawl encouraged by the automobile. Land and sea are scarred and polluted in our frenzy to fuel it. Some thoughtful, visionary, and—like Jefferson—optimistic people work to reverse this behav ior. It is a slow process. In the meantime, most of us go on driving, effectively at a loss to alter behavior we know is destructive. 

Perhaps our teachers—at Jefferson School and elsewhere—can draw some lessons from the example of Jefferson: 

• Doing th e right thing is not always easy. 

• Judging others, especially people in distant times and places, as though they were our contemporaries and neighbors, will probably distort our understanding of them. 

• Doing your best, even against great odds and in the face of repeated failure, is perhaps the truest sign of greatness. 

In a city that many regard as a beacon of civil liberties, perhaps we can still find reason to honor the author of the Declaration of Independence. 

 

Rob Browning is a longtime Berkeley activist and formerly an editor of UC Berkeley’s Mark Twain Papers. µ