Journal of Southern History

In the summer of 1831 Nat Turner led one of the largest slave revolts in American history, prompting citizens of Virginia to engage in an unprecedented public debate regarding emancipation. During the ensuing winter, both pro- and antislavery legislators responded to the outcry by invoking Thomas Jefferson in order to justify their preferred legislative response (or lack thereof). Supporters of slavery in the General Assembly contended that the recently deceased third president might have spoken about wishing for slavery's end when he was a young man, but those early musings had been nothing more than the "daydream" of a "patriot and … philanthropist." Moreover, they argued that Jefferson had quickly abandoned that dream, for if he had actually been committed to emancipation he would have freed all of his own slaves at the time of his death. And since Jefferson himself had failed, who were they to attempt the impossible? After all, "When Hercules died, there was no man left to lift his club."¹

To counter the proslavery side, a newly elected delegate from Albemarle County rose: Thomas Jefferson's oldest grandson, Thomas [End Page 171] Jefferson Randolph. It was the almost forty-year-old Randolph whose gradual emancipation proposal had helped stoke the fires of debate, and although he hated to speak in public almost as much as his grandfather had, Randolph now felt compelled to remind his colleagues that "Mr. Jefferson's" commitment to emancipation had been more than an early musing. Jefferson had in fact set forth a detailed emancipation and colonization plan, publicly available for many years in his frequently reprinted book Notes on the State of Virginia. Randolph had been inspired by his grandfather's plan; and although his own emancipation proposal differed in several respects, other delegates were wrong to imply that Thomas Jefferson would not have supported Randolph's ideas. In fact, Randolph declared with certainty that if Jefferson were alive in 1832, he would have urged the delegates to vote for emancipation. The older statesman had never deviated from the antislavery sentiments that he had outlined in his book some fifty years earlier, Randolph insisted, and, more important, Jefferson had never stopped hoping that future generations of Virginians would succeed where his own had failed.²

Even when Jefferson's book was first published, the depth of his commitment to ending slavery had been called into question. Critics of the Notes in the 1790s as well as in recent years have pointed out that sections of the text are inconsistent—particularly when it comes to Jefferson's discussions of the nature of racial differences. While Jefferson sought to raise the reputation of Native Americans, combating European criticisms of their culture, strength, and ingenuity, his words concerning African Americans combined, as Winthrop D. Jordan puts it, "a heartfelt hostility to slavery and a deep conviction," itself "inconsistently expressed," with the contention that "Negroes were inferior to white men." These seeming contradictions were the manifestation, Jordan concludes, of Jefferson's own confused psychology—a confusion that reflected the unconscious fears of white Virginians.³

Jefferson may indeed have been deeply confused by his feelings regarding the African-descended people around him—particularly after [End Page 172] 1787, when Sally Hemings arrived in Paris—but careful study of the manuscript of Notes on the State of Virginia, only recently made available to scholars, reveals that many of the seeming inconsistencies in that text were not simply the manifestations of a tortured psyche. Instead, they are evidence of Jefferson's deliberate attempt to strengthen his antislavery views while still engaging with contemporary European scientific and philosophical work into the nature of race.⁴

This article reevaluates the Notes, situating it within the context of Jefferson's five-year-long composition process and examining the ways in which he revised as, over time, he imagined three very different audiences for his work: the French diplomats who first prompted his inquiries; the transatlantic members of the American Philosophical Society (APS) who encouraged him to expand the scope of his research; and the Virginians who he hoped might one...