The title of Cara Rogers Stevens’s very fine first book, Thomas Jefferson and the Fight Against Slavery, does not fully capture its central argument. Yes, Stevens, an associate professor of history at Ashland University, manages to cover Jefferson’s long and consistent opposition to slavery, beginning with his failed effort to co-sponsor a bill in 1769 to abolish it, but she does so in a most original way, tracing the complicated history and reception of Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. CRB readers will likely know that Jefferson’s only book began as a response to 22 queries sent to each of the newly independent United States in 1780 by the secretary of the French delegation in Philadelphia, Francois, the Marquis de Barbé-Marbois. What most people do not know is that it took Jefferson seven years before the official London edition of his book finally appeared (though he had printed a small number of copies earlier for friends) and only then because an unauthorized French translation had been published the previous year. During this time, as Jefferson moved back and forth between Charlottesville, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, and then in 1784 to France, he discussed his responses with trusted American friends and French luminaries, revising and enlarging his initial responses. What began as a slim volume grew to more than three times its original 40 or so pages.  

In 2004 Douglas Wilson, the founding director of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation’s Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies, published in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography “The Evolution of Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia,” which painstakingly charted the many emendations Jefferson both pasted over earlier drafts and had written interlineally in his original copy of the Notes. Thanks to Wilson’s pioneering work, it became possible for Stevens to piece together the significance of the Notes in Jefferson’s lifelong fight against slavery. She convincingly shows that his intended audience shifted from a few French diplomats to a broader transatlantic readership, and finally to future generations of Virginia gentlemen. Appointed in 1779 to the governing board of the College of William & Mary while serving as governor of Virginia, Jefferson was now poised to oversee the curriculum and appoint professors who would in due course assign copies of his anti-slavery views provided by the author himself. Stevens traces Jefferson’s subsequent efforts to think through emancipation with some surprising twists and turns, and then follows the responses of two generations of his most devoted acolytes as they struggled with the volatile political situation in Virginia and beyond. 

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Stevens points out that today readers of the Notes are far more likely to focus on Jefferson’s racist discussion of blacks’ physical, moral, and intellectual qualities in Query 14 than they are on his sketch of an emancipation plan in that same query. The former passages are indeed cringeworthy, yet Stevens shows that they were not merely Jefferson’s idiosyncratic prejudices. On the contrary, he drew heavily on entries from Denis Diderot’s Encyclopedia, the foremost compendium of Enlightenment thinking at the time, a copy of which Jefferson, as governor, had ordered for the entire government of Virginia and was the first to read. The Encyclopedia’s entries on race reinforced his prejudices by dressing them up in the most up-to-date science. Still, not everyone to whom Jefferson showed his drafts of the Notes was convinced. Charles Thomson, who like Jefferson had recently been elected to the American Philosophical Society (and had served as secretary of the Continental Congress that produced the Declaration of Independence), sent Jefferson a lengthy commentary that, among other things, advised him to drop entirely the discussion of racial inferiority. Thomson warned that such observations might reinforce slaveholders’ arguments that blacks were naturally suited to be slaves. In response, Jefferson expanded his condemnation of slavery in Query 18, in which he argued that slavery was bad for the slaveholder because it set a tyrannical model for his children that eroded the virtues necessary for republican self-government. What’s more, Jefferson’s closing peroration in that Query, warning that in any contest between the two races a just God would take the side of the slaves, was further intended to offset his invidious discussion of race in Query 14. Jefferson, however, did not remove the offensive passages. Stevens returns to this point several times, lamenting how different the author’s reputation would be today if he had only listened to Thomson. 

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Why didn’t he? Ironically, Stevens argues, Jefferson emphasized slaves’ inferiorities in order to strengthen the case for emancipation. The reasoning was that once freed, blacks and whites could never live together as equals in the same country. A fortiori, amalgamation, or racial intermixing, was inconceivable between peoples so different. The abolition of slavery, which followed necessarily from the principles of the Declaration and which was made even more explicit in Jefferson’s initial draft, would, therefore, have to be followed by expatriation.  

Jefferson’s repeated insistence on colonizing the former slaves points to a major difference between him and some of his most devoted friends and followers. The Marquis de Chastellux, who spent time at Monticello in 1782 while Jefferson was composing the Notes, later proposed that only male slaves should be sent outside the country; females should be freed and encouraged to marry whites. William Short, Jefferson’s private secretary whom he regarded as his “adoptive son” and who remained in Europe after Jefferson returned home in 1789, went even further. In what Stevens describes as “the letter of a lifetime,” Short wrote to Jefferson in 1798 that after emancipation, not only should all blacks remain in America and enjoy the rights of full citizenship, but also that the way to overcome the color wall was for the two races to intermarry! Not for Jefferson, who in a letter to Short written in 1826 repeated the position he had put forth in the Notes three decades before that blacks should be expatriated, insisting that he still had a “great aversion” to “the mixture of color.” Stevens finds Jefferson’s opposition to such intermixing “tragic” both for him and for “the American story.” This is largely because she accepts the argument of her mentor John B. Boles, author of Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty (2017), who in turn follows Annette Gordon-Reed and others, that Jefferson fathered children with his slave Sally Hemings (see “We’ll Always Have Paris,” Fall 2017). Although Stevens admits that the DNA evidence is inconclusive, she nevertheless accuses Jefferson of hypocrisy for opposing racial intermixing while privately carrying on a long-term relationship with Hemings. One of my few disagreements with Stevens is that she accepts this argument uncritically, which leads her to some questionable conclusions.  

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As Jefferson recounts in Query 14, one part of revising Virginia’s laws, which he worked on with George Wythe in 1784 following the end of the American Revolution, was a bill calling for the gradual emancipation of slaves born after the bill became law. “Bill 51” never made it into the actual revisions, however; it was held in reserve until such time as the Virginia legislature was ready to take it up. The proposal further directed that slave children should remain with their parents to “a certain age, then be brought up, at the public expense, to tillage, arts or sciences, according to their geniuses” until females reached 18 and males 21, when they would then be sent out, to some unspecified place, properly supplied and under “our” (that is, Virginia’s) protection, to become “a free and independent people.” 

After his return from Europe, Jefferson continued to mull over his plan for gradual emancipation, exploring with Short various forms of European tenant-farming (métayage) as an intermediate step that would promote the habits and skills slaves would need to become independent tillers of the soil. One of the most surprising of these schemes was a plan to import German farmers from the Palatinate (or failing that, Germans from nearby Maryland and Pennsylvania) to work alongside blacks on Jefferson’s plantation. Not only would such a plan be good for the slaves (who would be treated more as serfs with certain rights until they could be colonized elsewhere), but it might also help to persuade slaveholders of the economic superiority of free over slave labor. Nothing ever came of Jefferson’s fanciful plan, which he was forced to abandon when the Virginia economy took a downturn. 

Another of the more well-known graduates of William & Mary to take up the anti-slavery cause was Edward Coles, who along with Winfield Scott (later the U.S. Army’s commanding general at the start of the Civil War) was in the class of 1805. Both attested to the powerful influence Jefferson’s Notes had on their thinking in very different circumstances from its initial release. In response to the savage murders of French colonials in Saint-Domingue and the establishment of the independent state of Haiti in 1804, the Virginia legislature passed a law in 1806 making it illegal for freed slaves to remain in the state for more than a year. Coles saw no future for himself or his slaves and determined to sell his plantation and move to where both he and his former slaves might enjoy their freedom. Writing to Jefferson in 1814 to explain his decision, he, like Short, implored the elder statesman once again to take up the anti-slavery cause. In keeping with his long-held view that each generation must determine its fate, Jefferson demurred, stating that his views had long been before the public and that it was up to the next generation to carry the emancipation torch. He implored Coles to remain in Virginia and fight. Coles chose instead to move with his slaves, whom he subsequently freed, to Illinois, where he was later elected governor. 

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Another of Jefferson’s followers was Thomas Mann Randolph, who later became Jefferson’s son-in-law. Randolph did not attend William & Mary, but as a student studying at the University of Edinburgh, he was the first to receive a copy of the Notes after it was printed. Randolph later served as Virginia’s governor when Congress passed the Missouri Compromise in 1820, which measure prompted a flurry of denunciations from Jefferson. Although Jefferson had drawn up a plan for the government of the western territories in 1784 that would have barred slavery after 1800 anywhere in the territories ceded or about to be ceded to the United States (which included lands adjacent to the slaveholding states), he now railed against Congress’s efforts to bar the spread of slavery into territory above the 36° 30′ line acquired (by Jefferson as president) through the Louisiana Purchase. Stevens tries to explain Jefferson’s change of heart by pointing out that the lands involved in his plan for the western territories were largely unpeopled (by whites anyway), whereas the territories in the Missouri Compromise were already well populated. Jefferson argued that the Missouri Compromise would deny to these settlers the same choice that the original 13 states enjoyed. Stevens omits some of Jefferson’s more hyperbolic statements, in which he discerns a conspiracy by Northern Federalists, using what he regarded as disingenuous moral arguments against slavery to regain political power. Although Jefferson’s dispersion theory (as historians have named it) makes a certain amount of sense from the limited perspective of slaveholding Virginia in that it might have reduced the number of slaves in the state, making emancipation more attractive, I was disappointed to see Stevens not engage with—or at least take note of—Abraham Lincoln’s powerful arguments against allowing the spread of slavery into territories where Congress had prohibited it. That Lincoln based his arguments on the principles of the Declaration makes them all the more compelling.  

Cara Stevens brings the story of the Notes on the State of Virginia to a close by showing how Jefferson’s daughter, Martha, Randolph’s long-suffering wife, and two of their children, Thomas Jefferson Randolph and Ellen Wayles Randolph Coolidge, kept the flame of Jefferson’s anti-slavery fight alive even as the Notes fell out of favor at William & Mary. It’s a fascinating story, one that seamlessly meshes liberal (in the original sense) political principles and historical events, allowing a new generation of readers, fed mostly on speculations about Jefferson’s sex life or focusing only on his racist remarks, to rediscover his unwavering commitment to emancipation. It also shows that there were, among his friends and followers, men who, in their vision of a mixed-race America, saw further than did their hero.