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You are studying with a classmate from your American History course. Your assignment: to read Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia and explain Jefferson’s attitudes toward slavery in a 3-5 page essay. Your friend asks you to give her some feedback on the first draft of her essay. You read:
Jefferson says that slavery is a threat to the political liberties of the nation because slavery is unjust. It undermines the notion that liberties are the gift of God. He worries that God’s justice may one day lead to a revolution in the wheel of fortune. “The commerce between slave and master is an exercise of the worst passions” (Jefferson, 288-9).
Something about this paragraph strikes you as familiar. You take out the Notes and find the following passage in Jefferson’s own words:
There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it. . . . The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to the worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances. . . . Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? . . . I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest. (From Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia [Boston, 1829; reprint ed., New York: Library of America, 1984], 288-89.)
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