Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson was both a social conservative and a racist. Raised in an environment where slaveholding was the norm, Jefferson's exposure to African-Americans was largely limited to blacks in bondage, and he formulated his racial philosophy based almost solely on this experience. Granted, the question of the morality of slavery weighed on Jefferson's mind throughout most of his adult life, and he periodically made attempts to prohibit the slave trade or even emancipate slaves. However, Jefferson clearly considered African-Americans inferior, and his crusade for emancipation entailed the deportation of manumitted slaves. Jefferson could not envision a society in which blacks and whites could live together as equals.

Jefferson grew up in colonial Virginia, where slaves supported the economy of the region's tobacco plantations. Jefferson's father carved out a vast estate by acquiring both land and slaves: "Slaves were ubiquitous in the society in which Jefferson was reared and in which he came to his majority" (Miller 2). Young Jefferson inherited a share of the family's lands, livestock, and slaves when the elder Jefferson died. Being only a youth when his father passed away, Jefferson had to wait until he reached the age of inheritance to become the owner of several thousand acres of land and more than 20 slaves. Later, when Jefferson married, he became executor of his father-in-law's sizeable estate, and the slaves passed on to Martha Jefferson allegedly included

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s were based on inherent, biological differences. In Notes he offers a list of abilities or talents in which he judged blacks to be superior, equal, or inferior to whites. Admitting that more research was needed, he proposed tentatively that African-Americans were superior to whites in music and equal to them in courage, memory, adventurousness, and moral sense, abut was guarded even in these assessments of equality: "They are at least as brave, and more adventuresome. But this may perhaps proceed from a want of forethought, which prevents their seeing a danger till it be present. When present, they do not go through it with more coolness or steadiness than the whites" (Jefferson 265). Jefferson argued that nature had created a hierarchy among the various races. Although he admitted that slavery, and lack of opportunity and education had robbed African-Americans of many of their abilities, Jefferson was of the opinion that certain elements of black inferiority had nothing to do with their environment. He believed that blacks were, in all probability, incapable of great achievement in intellectual pursuits like mathematics, science, and literature: "in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous . . . never yet coul

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