Li Haimo is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Houston
With the recent US election approaching, political issues have intensified, anti-racial discrimination and anti-police protests have been repeated, and statues of politicians in southern slave states during the American Civil War have been torn down to show great dissatisfaction with the historical legacy of slavery in the United States. And the wave continued to burn into the founding generation of the United States, and in June protesters demolished a statue of Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States and the main drafter of the Declaration of Independence, in Portland, Oregon. One of the core reasons for the downfall of the statue of Jefferson is that he once had a slave, which is ironclad and irrefutable, and Jefferson, as a politician known for advocating "the right of everyone to enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of pleasure", has kept a large number of slaves in his estate all his life, and it is indeed a major stain on his life that is difficult to clean up. But things are always complicated, and equating Jefferson directly with the politicians of the Southern slave states during the American Civil War may lead to a blind eye to another part of the historical facts.
Statue of Jefferson being pushed down. Richmond, Virginia, USA.
In fact, Jefferson was not only critical of slavery itself, calling it a moral depravity, but in the long run, Jefferson was in favor of a gradual emancipation. Jefferson had unequivocally condemned slavery as a huge burden on what he considered and cherished to be the so-called "American particularity," and he had made it clear that slavery brought about an aristocratic system similar to traditional hereditary lineage, and that there was no noble side to this distorted aristocracy in which rights were not respected, morals were shattered, love of the state was eroded, productivity was weakened, and even seeds of tyranny were sown (see Brian Steele: Thomas Jefferson and American Nationhood, Cambridge University Press, 2012, 111-112）。 Some scholars even believe that in Jefferson's view, slavery and republican politics are completely incompatible (see Dustin Gish et al., 2017). More scholars have pointed out that in the first draft of Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, slaves were explicitly recognized as human beings, and attacked the Emperor, saying that the Emperor violated the so-called natural right of liberty that black slaves should enjoy as human beings, but these words did not appear in the final draft of the Declaration of Independence (see Jean M. Yarbrough's related research). According to the American political scientist Lee Ward, Jefferson often opposed slavery when he encountered slavery-related issues in his life in public office.
As I mentioned in a previous article, one of the paradoxes in the early history of american political thought is that in terms of the liberal-conservative political spectrum, Jefferson is biased to the liberal and progressive side, hamilton's political thought is biased to the conservative side, but when it comes to slavery, Jefferson is clearly on the conservative and practical slave side, and Hamilton is relatively enlightened. One possible explanation is that the Northern commercial and financial power represented by Hamilton was not particularly dependent on slavery, but the Southern plantation owners behind Jefferson used and relied heavily on the slave economy. On a general level, however, if we want to roughly distinguish between left and right, Hamilton can be said to be a source of early American right-wing thought, and Jefferson has gradually become one of the deep roots of liberalism (although contemporary conservatives sometimes occasionally quote Jefferson).
John Trump's painting Declaration of Independence
So, what was Jefferson's view of slavery? First of all, he is not particularly friendly to the black community, the evaluation is not high, he is more optimistic about the Indians, think that his Kong Wu Xiao Yong, basically can be said to achieve a level-headed attitude, but he is obviously contemptuous and contemptuous of the black community, one of the reasons he gives is that black slaves often live next to white masters, but they have not fully learned the so-called "manners" and "demeanor" of white people, so it is difficult to be indoctrinated and enlightened (see Gordon Wood related research). Jefferson, however, has also been able to frankly admit that if black slaves had been treated better in the United States and treated better, perhaps the image of blacks in his view would have "evolved", that is, he also admitted that white slave owners may be partly responsible for the bad image of blacks in his eyes (see Max Lerner's research). When I participated in Jefferson's political literature reading class at the graduate level and explained Jefferson's ideas to undergraduates, I found that many contemporary American students, after reading Jefferson's description of the situation of black people, would think that Jefferson's wording did have some racist tendencies in today's perspective. Jefferson did favor the goal of abolishing slavery over a long period of time, but repeatedly stressed that the federal government could not unilaterally announce the abolition of slavery, but that the majority of slave owners should spontaneously agree to take the initiative to abolish slavery. Thus, Jefferson did very little work on abolition at the level of practical legislation, most notably in 1778, when he wrote a law for Virginia to ban the import of slaves from Africa.
In addition, it is a concern for demographic issues. In the early days of the United States, the constitution set the rule of counting the population by multiplying the actual population of slaves by three-fifths (it was not abolished until after the Civil War), and this arrangement of measures was naturally more favorable to the slave-owning South. Some contemporary scholars have argued that jefferson would not have won the 1800 U.S. presidential election if the slave states had been stripped of their extra votes (although academics disagree). In fact, as early as Jefferson's presidency, his political enemies had repeatedly criticized Jefferson as a hypocritical person, and how could a person who claimed that everyone was equal and had rights to keep slaves? Jefferson was inconclusive on this point; and Jefferson's political enemies pointed out that Jefferson's victory in the 1800 election was based entirely on a three-fifths clause, or he would not have won at all, that is, slavery had lifted Jefferson into the White House (see Robert M. S. McDonald's study). Therefore, the criticism of Jefferson by contemporary scholars is not new, but has already existed, and it is doubtful whether it is really fully established. One thing that should be certain, however, is that Jefferson and the Southern political forces, as potential beneficiaries, did not have the incentive to abolish slavery immediately and quickly, thanks to the existence of the three-fifths clause.
Jefferson also had a time to do justice for black people. When he was governor of Virginia, once a black man was convicted of treason, Jefferson thought the verdict was unfair and used his governor's power to give the black man a suspended sentence until The re-opening of the house of Parliament. Jefferson took a certain amount of political courage to make this decision, because his term as governor was about to expire and he did not have an advisory committee to endorse his decision, but Jefferson insisted on doing so (see Jeremy D. Bailey: Thomas Jefferson and Executive Power, Cambridge University Press, 2007, 42-43). In addition, Jefferson advocated the reduction of crop industries in Virginia, especially tobacco, which required a large number of slaves to work, and instead advocated the cultivation of wheat, rice, grapes, and olive trees that required fewer slaves, hoping to reduce virginia's demand for slaves.
The Haitian Revolution that occurred during the French Revolution, the black slave revolt, the white slave owners suffered, this event greatly touched Jefferson, not so much because he sympathized with the French Revolution and then sympathized with the Black Slaves in Haiti (in fact, he did not have much sympathy, but rather sympathized with the Haitian white slave owners who fled to the United States), but rather Jefferson was deeply shocked by the huge energy released by the black people when they rebelled, and the bloodshed that accompanied it. He was acutely aware of the great concerns that came with the heavy use of black slaves themselves.
Fundamentally, Jefferson, as a slave owner, was in favor of abolition. In Jefferson's view, the greatest evil of slavery is that it limits the growth of the natural capacities of enslaved people (see Ari Helo's research). But his approval of abolition had at least three collateral conditions: first, he agreed only to progressive abolition and not to a one-size-fits-all direct abolition, stressing that the financial losses suffered by slave owners in the abolition of slavery should be compensated by public appropriations (mainly from the profits associated with the sale of federal land); The labor gap created by the emancipation of slaves should be filled by the introduction of european free labor immigrants (most importantly immigrants from the Protestant class in Germany). Jefferson essentially believed that blacks were inferior to whites, so intermarriage and mixed-race marriage between the two should be banned. Jefferson also believed that in view of the abuse and oppression of black people by white slave owners, once black people were liberated, they would hate white people extremely, and if they were not removed from the United States, there would be countless black riots against white people, so these two groups could not be put together, and liberated blacks must go to the world outside the United States to find their own place to live. Jefferson had a very strange, even strange idea, that he thought that his own views on the black problem were insightful, because he had personally owned slaves and had many dealings with slaves, and slavery was mainly practiced in the South in the United States, and many Americans had no personal experience with slavery, so they would most likely not support Jefferson's three-point proposition on the issue of slavery, so in order to gain their support, it was necessary to popularize slavery. Especially at that time, the newly expanded western territory of the United States was popularized. Thus, Jefferson argues, slavery spread outside the Southern United States, and then people experience its daily practice, and then people should generally agree to adopt Jefferson's ideas and solutions. Jefferson's position on the unrestricted spread of slavery in the new frontiers of the West has long been questioned and criticized by many (see Garrett Sheldon's research).
《Declaration of Independence》
Finally, it should be noted that although the United States is the most famous slave country in recent human history, and because of this, it has been plagued by endless disasters and has had to seek more and more on the road to abolition and peace, one of the important initiators of slavery and the slave trade is Britain (which is why we see Jefferson attacking the Emperor at the beginning). Throughout the history of the British Empire, although it has developed a highly mature political civilization and liberal ideas internally, and the political situation has basically maintained long-term stability after the Glorious Revolution in 1688, it has at the same time engaged in the slave trade in the Americas, the opium trade in China, the colonies in the world and the instigation of contradictions between different groups of people as its rule.
Editor-in-Charge: Fan Zhu