In Paris, Thomas Jefferson revealed his real beliefs about slavery, writes Fred Kaplan
and the published version had extended his views to a wide audience in America, England, and France, where he had had discussions with Enlightenment luminaries and French admirers of the United States, particularly Lafayette, Nicolas de Condorcet, and Jacques Brissot, all three of whom felt that Jefferson stopped at a bridge far too short of where antislavery ought to go.
In France, in 1789, the year of the start of the French Revolution, Jefferson’s good friend, Lafayette, of course knew that Jefferson owned many slaves. Who else among the members of Jefferson’s salon and intellectual-political circle knew? When Jacques Brissot, a leading abolitionist and the founder in 1788 of the Society of the Friends of the Blacks, invited Jefferson to become a member, he declined. It would be incompatible, he said, with his official position.
Jefferson responded early in 1789 that “as far as I can judge from the experiments which have been made, to give liberty to, or rather, to abandon persons whose habits have been formed in slavery is like abandoning children.” To get them to work, they needed to be watched and even whipped. It was not the fault of the slaves, he said, for “a man’s moral sense must be unusually strong, if slavery does not make him a thief.
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