Quote of the Week

Students of the early American republic will probably remember the highly-conditional emancipationist sentiments Thomas Jefferson expressed in Notes on the State of Virginia (1782). The state should abolish slavery, TJ wrote, but African-American freedmen should not be permitted to remain in the Commonwealth, lest they try to take vengeance on their former masters or - perhaps worse, in Jefferson's eyes - marry them.* This was a common enough sentiment among whites in the contemporary upper South, one which would help inspire the colonization movement of the early nineteenth century.

Lest we think that only Virginia slaveholders held such views, however, let us attend to the words of Governor James Sullivan (1744-1808) of Massachusetts, who expressed Jefferson's idea in more allegorical (and more memorable) language:

"We have in history but one picture of a similar enterprise [colonization], and there we see it was necessary not only to open the sea by a miracle for them** to pass, but more necessary to close it again to prevent their return." (Quoted in Eva Wolf, Race and Liberty in the New Nation [LSU Press, 2006], 128.) 

Nothing like a little anti-semitism to help wash down the racism, I guess.




* TJ did not extend his opposition to interracial liaisons to himself and his own human property. Rules are for other people.

** For those unsure about the identity of "them," see Exodus 14: 21-29.