American Sphinx (45 page)

CONSOLIDATION AND DIFFUSION

O
NE AREA OF
latter-day revisionism merits special attention, both because of its dramatic and long-term historical implications and because of the passionate intensity Jefferson brought to its reconsideration. This of course was slavery, a subject on which Jefferson had been an outspoken opponent early in his career, but only a tentative and elusive commentator later on. He regarded it as absolutely imperative for the historical record, as well as for his own place in the American pantheon, that his moral revulsion against slavery be made clear to posterity, along with his sincere conviction that it was incompatible with the principles on which the republic was founded. He therefore saw to it that one of his most unequivocal condemnations of slavery was prominently placed in his autobiography: “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free. Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever, that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events. . . . The Almighty has no attribute which can take sides with us in such a contest.”
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The ringing clarity of this pronouncement was designed to leave no doubt about his final thoughts on America’s great anomaly. When Abraham Lincoln eventually made the decision to emancipate the slaves, he harked back to Jefferson as his moral beacon, even appropriating some of the language from Jefferson’s autobiographical pronouncement in his own Second Inaugural Address.

Moral pronouncements aside, Jefferson had also left a long and clear record of procrastination and denial on the slavery issue. Despite prodding from several northern friends, whose consciences were admittedly not cluttered with the practical and financial impediments he faced as a slaveowner, and from a few southern friends, who wanted him to assume moral leadership for the cause of gradual abolition in Virginia, Jefferson had steadfastly refused to speak out. “I have most carefully avoided every possible act or manifestation on that subject,” he wrote to a Quaker petitioner in what had become his standard response. “Should an occasion ever occur in which I can interpose with decisive effect,” he explained, “I shall certainly know and do my duty.” In the meantime any public statement “would only be disarming myself of influence to be taking small means.” The propitious moment for decisive action, however, kept receding into the middle distance so that by 1817, upon receiving another plan for gradual emancipation from a northern admirer, he endorsed it in the most general terms (“The subordinate details might be easily arranged”), then declared his disappointment that the rising generation of American statesmen, “in which I once had sanguine hopes,” had not been able to work out these details themselves. He was no longer convinced that the end of slavery was near. Certainly he would never live to see it: “I leave it, therefore, to time.” Silence had become his official policy.
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What broke the silence and thrust his reputation squarely into the middle of the national spotlight, and in a way he would have preferred to avoid at almost any cost, was the debate over slavery in the Missouri Territory. It began in 1819 when a congressman from New York, James Tallmadge, Jr., proposed an amendment to the bill admitting Missouri into the Union that was designed to prohibit slavery in the new state. In his correspondence with Adams, Jefferson’s initial reaction to what was being called the Missouri Question was calm and assured. He expressed the hope that the issue would pass “like waves in a storm pass under the ship.” But as the national debate over the Missouri Question mounted, Jefferson lost his sense of confidence and his political balance. He began to describe the crisis as “the most portentous one which ever yet threatened our Union” and the greatest threat to the survival of the American republic “since the gloomiest days of the [Revolutionary] war.” An old colleague from presidential days who visited Monticello in 1820 described him as obsessed with the Missouri Question, gesturing dramatically as he walked the grounds, warning of imminent civil war, which would lead to racial war and then to “a war of extermination toward the African in our land.”
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His most graphic statement, which became an enduring part of the historical record because of its memorable metaphors, came in a letter to John Holmes, a congressman from Massachusetts. Jefferson explained that until recently he had been content to avoid newspapers and to regard himself as “a passenger in our bark to the shore from which I am not distant.” But the Missouri Question had roused him “like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror.” He went on to claim that no man on earth wanted an end to slavery more than he did, that banishing slavery from all America “would not cost me a second thought, if, in that way a general emancipation and
expatriation
could be affected. . . .” But no workable plan for compensating owners and relocating the freed slaves had yet been devised. So, “as it is, we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.” It was an intolerable and insoluble dilemma: “Justice is in one scale and self-preservation in the other.” He concluded the letter to Holmes with the most pessimistic and fatalistic remark about America he ever made: “I regret that I am now to die in the belief, that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776 . . . is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be, that I live not to weep over it.”
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What was behind, or perhaps beneath, this sudden torrent of outrage and despair? After all, the Missouri Question was hardly unprecedented; it merely raised in a new location the question of slavery in the western territories, which Jefferson had encountered in the 1780s and answered with a clear and resounding negative; it had been lurking in the political shadows ever since his single most brilliant stroke of presidential leadership, the Louisiana Purchase, had placed the entire Mississippi Valley within the national domain. What’s more, the idea of prohibiting the extension of slavery into the western territories could more readily be seen as a fulfillment rather than a repudiation of the American Revolution, indeed as a fulfillment of Jefferson’s own early vision of an expansive republic populated by independent farmers unburdened by the one legacy that defied the principles of 1776. Adams in fact interpreted the Missouri Question in precisely those terms, apprising several of his friends that the extension of slavery violated his sense of what the founders had intended; the present crisis, he thought, represented a welcome opportunity to take a moral stand against “an evil of Colossal magnitude” before it grew so large and intractable that it put the survival of the American republic at risk.
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He did not write Jefferson in this vein; it was another one of those sensitive subjects that put the fragile friendship at risk. When told that several of Jefferson’s southern disciples were arguing that the core issue was constitutional—that the federal government lacked the authority to legislate in this area—Adams insisted that the core issue was obviously moral, not constitutional, and he relished the chance to remind his southern friends that Jefferson had established the constitutional precedent in 1803. “That the purchase of Louisiana was unconstitutional or extra Constitutional I never had a doubt—but I think the Southern gentlemen who thought it Constitutional then ought not to think it unconstitutional in Congress to restrain the extension of slavery in that territory now.”
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Jefferson had in fact worried out loud about the constitutional precedent he was setting with the acquisition of Louisiana in 1803. In that sense his worries proved to be warranted. The entire congressional debate of 1819–20 over the Missouri Question turned on the question of federal versus state sovereignty, essentially a constitutional conflict in which Jefferson’s long-standing opposition to federal power was clear and unequivocal, the Louisiana Purchase being the one exception that was now coming back to haunt him. But just as the constitutional character of the congressional debate served only to mask the deeper moral and ideological issues at stake, Jefferson’s own sense of regret at his complicity in providing the constitutional precedent for the Tallmadge amendment merely scratched the surface of his despair. For him, as for Adams, the deeper issues were moral and historical, the original intent of the revolutionary generation they so poignantly symbolized. And for him, as for the members of Congress, the unmentionable subject was slavery. In the many letters on the Missouri Question he wrote in 1819–20, as in the congressional debate at the same time, the word “slavery” seldom appears, but like the proverbial ghost at the banquet, it dominated the underlying dialogue within the Congress and within Jefferson’s own mind. It forced him to declare himself on the question of his own original and final intentions about the unmentionable subject in terms that he knew would not look attractive to posterity.

One remark prompted by the Missouri crisis that Adams
did
think he could safely send to Monticello provides a window into the deeper regions of Jefferson’s despair. “Slavery in this Country I have seen hanging over it like a black cloud for half a century,” Adams wrote: “I might probably say I had seen Armies of Negroes marching and countermarching in the air, shining in Armour. I have been so terrified with this Phenomenon that I constantly said in former times to the Southern Gentlemen, I cannot comprehend this object. I must leave it to you. I will vote for forceing no measure against your judgments.” Here Adams was making explicit the unspoken understanding that, so he claimed, had shaped the behavior of the revolutionary generation toward the potentially volatile politics of the slavery issue—namely, that northerners would delegate the touchy matter of its resolution to southerners, who obviously had so much more at stake. This was perhaps the most dramatic and hidden meaning of Benjamin Rush’s description of Adams and Jefferson as “the North and South Poles of the American Revolution.” From this perspective, what most rankled Jefferson about the debate over the Missouri Question was that it was occurring at all. For the debate represented a violation of the sectional understanding and the vow of silence that Adams, the quintessential New England patriot, had faithfully observed. In that sense the real revolutionary legacy on the slavery question was not a belief in emancipation but rather a common commitment to delay and a common trust that northerners would not interfere with southern leadership in effecting a gradual policy of emancipation. This was why Jefferson so deeply resented northern leadership on the Missouri Question, claiming that “they [the northerners] are wasting Jeremiads on the miseries of slavery, as if we were advocates for it.” The sectional alliance that the Adams-Jefferson friendship so eloquently symbolized was being repudiated by the rising generation of northern politicians.
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Although the civility of their correspondence did not allow it, Adams might have reminded Jefferson that their unspoken understanding was contingent upon some discernible measure of progress toward ending slavery. In fact the Missouri debate did prompt several fresh initiatives in Virginia, one sponsored by Jefferson’s son-in-law, Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr., for a gradual emancipation scheme, coupled with hypothetical plans to deport the freed slaves to either Africa or Santo Domingo. The Missouri crisis seemed to stimulate Jefferson himself to take a more active role in lending his support to these initiatives and to think more specifically about what he had earlier dismissed as mere details. In 1824 he compiled the fullest analysis of the demographic and economic facts he ever attempted and calculated that it would take nine hundred million dollars to free and then deport the 1.5 million slaves in the United States over a twenty-five-year period. The daunting character of the costs, he acknowledged, made it “impossible to look at this question a second time.” Moreover, to make matters worse, the 1.5 million slaves would have doubled in number during the time the plans were being implemented, and many of the freed slaves, when offered passage to Africa or the West Indies, would surely say, “ ‘[W]e will not go.’ ”
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In effect, the more one thought about the subject, the more one realized that no useful purpose could be served by thinking about it. Only a gradual policy of emancipation was feasible, but the mounting size of the slave population made any gradual policy unfeasible because the population would increase at a faster rate than it could be removed. No one, certainly not Jefferson, wanted to say it out loud or face it squarely, but whatever opportunity might have once existed to end slavery gradually and peacefully had itself ended, especially if one presumed, as Jefferson did, that the freed blacks could not be allowed to remain in the United States. If there had been an unofficial and unspoken understanding that slavery was a problem that southerners should be allowed to resolve without northern interference, by 1820 it had become abundantly clear that procrastination and avoidance, which were Jefferson’s cardinal convictions on the subject, had rendered any southern-sponsored solution extremely unlikely. Jefferson’s wistful remarks on the intractability of it all left open only a tiny crack of hope. “The march of events has not been able to render its completion practicable within the limits of time alloted to me,” he admitted, “and I leave its accomplishment to the work of another generation.” Or, in the same vein: “On the subject of emancipation I have ceased to think because [it is] not to be the work of my day.” In terms of his legacy, and within the context of the silent sectional agreement shared by the leadership of the revolutionary generation, now passing away, this constituted a confession of failure. The enlightened southern branch of the revolutionary generation, which Jefferson unequivocally headed, had not kept its promise. The Missouri crisis made that unpalatable fact more obvious than ever before and made it more difficult, even for Jefferson, to avoid its unattractive implications.
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