The Trials of Phillis Wheatley (4 page)

Echoing Hume and Kant, he argues that blacks are exposed daily to “countries where the arts and sciences are cultivated to a considerable degree,” yet they have absorbed little or nothing from this exposure. “Never yet,” said Jefferson, “could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration, never see even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture.” On the other hand, Jefferson has qualified praise for the African's musical propensities.

Jefferson's denigration of Wheatley seems aimed at the antislavery writers who since 1773 had cited her so frequently as proof positive of the equality of the African, and therefore as a reason to abolish slavery. Jefferson's critique of Phillis is unusually harsh:

Jefferson was quite convinced that Wheatley's finer sentiments, such as her piety, are quite separate from the “love” needed to write poetry. What Jefferson meant is quite simple. He believed that Africans have human souls, they merely lack the intellectual endowments of other races. Like his contemporaries,
he separated “what we would call intelligence from the capacity for religious experience.” This division allows for both the religious conversion of slaves, as well as for the perpetuation of the principle of black inferiority. Guilt, as well as the growing evidence that blacks are indeed Homo sapiens, meant that Africans could no longer be regarded as brutes. So Jefferson accepted the souls and humanity of slaves, while still maintaining their inferiority. Phillis is, for Jefferson, an example of a product of religion, of mindless repetition and imitation, without being the product of intellect, of reflection. True art requires a sublime combination of feeling and reflection.

To illustrate more convincingly the inherent inferiority of the black mind, Jefferson compared the slaves in America to the ones of ancient Greece and Rome. After exposing the even greater duress under which the Roman slaves lived, Jefferson pointed to three famous, learned ones: “Epictetus, Terence, and Phaedrus,
were slaves. But they were of the race of whites.” From this fact, Jefferson drew his conclusion that it is not slavery, but an inherent mental inferiority, that has prevented the existence of Epictetus' black counterpart: “It is not [the blacks'] condition then, but nature which has produced the distinction.” Sidestepping the full consequences such allegations of inferiority would have, Jefferson retreated behind the shelter of “suspicion”: “I advance it, therefore, as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.”

Unlike the American Indian, who is equal to the white in body, and whose mind is affected by external circumstances alone, the black is fundamentally different from the white. In reference to the Indians, Jefferson writes:

Jefferson recognized the capability for “improvement,” especially mental improvement. He pointed to Europe, asking if the white person has not also shown, and needed time to show, progress in history:

One must make allowance, maintained Jefferson, for the fact that the Indian is not called on to display his intelligence in the same way as the European. The Indian displays his capabilities
to the white person in the form of war, in speeches, and in drawings:

Jefferson argued that the Indian's expressions of reason, sentiment, and imagination may be primitive, but they are potentially equal to those of whites. While other races and peoples advance and develop, the black will be unable to do so. Unlike his thinking on the Indian, Jefferson believed that there are “real distinctions which nature has made,” separating the blacks from the whites. Therefore, in the case of blacks, Jefferson disregarded the criteria by which he asserted Indian mental equality: he does not advocate making “a great allowance . . . for these circumstances
of their situation which call for a display of particular talents only.” For Thomas Jefferson, the black is a static element on the Great Chain of Being, and he will be left further down on the
scala naturae
as whites (and perhaps in sixteen centuries, the Indians) move up.

Jefferson reaches these conclusions, in some part, from his reading of Phillis Wheatley's poetry. Yes, he, concedes, she may very well have written these works, but they are derivative, imitative, devoid of that marriage of reason and transport that is, in his view, the peculiar oestrum of the poet. By shifting the terms of authenticity—from the very possibility of her authorship to the quality of her authorship—Jefferson indicted her for a failure of a higher form of authenticity. Having survived the tribunal of eighteen in 1772, Wheatley now finds her genuineness impugned by a larger authority, subjected to a higher test of originality and invention. And the complex rhetoric of authenticity would have a long, long afterlife.

To be sure, Jefferson's opinions generated scores of rebuttals: “reactions to Jefferson were immediate and they quickly proliferated,” says William Robinson, writing on Wheatley two centuries after the publication of the
Notes
. “Indeed, much of the early Wheatley criticism is essentially rebuttal of Jeffersonian disdain.” The most crucial aspect needing refutation was Jefferson's claim of the black's general inferiority to Europeans.

If Phillis Wheatley was the mother of African-American literature, there is a sense in which Thomas Jefferson can be thought of as its midwife. Blacks took on Jefferson's challenge immediately following the Revolution. As the historian Benjamin Quarles puts it, “Still unspent, the spirit of '76 found new outlets among blacks. The Revolutionary War as a black declaration of independence took on a power of its own, fueled by residual revolutionary rhetoric and sustained by the memory of fallen heroes and the cloud of the living black witness.” Moreover, Jefferson's comments
about the role of their literature in any meaningful assessment of the African-American's civil rights became the strongest motivation for blacks to create a body of literature that would implicitly prove Jefferson wrong. This is Wheatley's, and Jefferson's, curious legacy in American literature.

It must be said that part of the fascination of black intellectuals with Jefferson in the nineteenth century stemmed from rumors about his paternity of Sally Hemings's children. Rather than attempt to wade through complex DNA data and genealogical records, I would rather point to the tradition in black letters of naming Jefferson as Sally's lover, which had its origins in the nineteenth century. For example, at an 1860 meeting of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, a speaker described Jefferson as “a good antislavery man.” According to the scholar Dorothy Sterling, he was interrupted by shouts that “he sold his daughter!” The man who took the floor was Robert Purvis, who had inherited “a substantial fortune” from his white
father, a successful cotton broker, and had attended both Pittsfield and Amherst academies. He was a major figure in the abolitionist movement, becoming in 1839 the first president of the Vigilant Committee, which was in his words, “the first organized society of the Underground Railroad.” He was well educated, articulate, and militant about black rights. He stood up and declared:

Purvis must later have regretted calling Jefferson a “scoundrel” in his spoken remarks, because he deleted that word from the printed version.

The subject of Jefferson's black children assumed one of its first and most popular outlets
in 1853, in William Wells Brown's novel
Clotel, or, The President's Daughter
. Published in London, as Wheatley's poem had been, it was the first novel to be published by an African American. Brown, the author of a slave narrative second only in sales and artistry to that of Frederick Douglass, was the tradition's first true man of letters, as Joyce Carol Oates recently pointed out. Brown published in a wide variety of genres, including poetry, travel writing, drama, and history, as well as fiction.
Clotel
's action commences with the auction of Jefferson's mistress, as well as their two daughters, including Clotel herself. Clotel is later sold by the father of her child, escapes from a slave dealer only to be captured again (in the midst of Nat Turner's rebellion), is transferred to prison, where she escapes yet again—only to leap to her death in the Potomac rather than succumb to her captors.

To say that Brown was obsessed with the rumors of Jefferson's relation to Sally Hemings would be an understatement: Brown
would revise and republish the story four times, once as a play in 1858, then, greatly revised, under new titles in 1860, 1864, and 1867, including a widely circulated serialized version. When Robert Purvis rose to speak about Jefferson at the anti-slavery meeting, it was Brown's version of the Jefferson legend that he had in mind. But Jefferson's relationship to Hemings and her children has been the stuff of the African-American oral tradition for two hundred years; even black historians addressed the subject before the recent controversy manifested itself in the works of Fawn Brodie and Annette Gordon-Reid. Indeed, I first encountered the story of Jefferson and Hemings in an old copy of
Ebony
magazine, dated 1954, and entitled “Thomas Jefferson's Negro Grandchildren,” widely discussed in Mr. Coombie Carroll's barbershop in Keyser, West Virginia, even then.

Despite the titillating pleasure of oral reports of the Hemings-Jefferson liaison, it was Jefferson's
Notes
that preoccupied black and
white abolitionists alike, containing as it did too many adamant allegations of black mental inferiority to be ignored. In fact, his statements acted as catalysts in sparking refutations of his opinions. The heated debate of black capacity and of the black's place in nature would continue well into the twentieth century.

 

Jefferson kept a commonplace book. It was edited and published by Gilbert Chinard in 1928. One of Jefferson's favorite citations from Horace, included therein, reads as follows:

If anxiety—figured here as “that black consort”—dogged Jefferson's steps relentlessly,
then it can also be said that Mister Jefferson is the consort who has dogged African-American politics and letters. No Founding Father has been the subject of more speeches, essays, and books in the African-American tradition than Thomas Jefferson. No other figure has been more reviled yet, paradoxically, more revered; and no other figure has had a greater shaping impact upon both the discourse of black rights and the evolution of the African-American literary tradition than Thomas Jefferson.

The transformation of Jefferson's image into that of a motivator took its most curious and ironic form in the work of David Walker, whose
Appeal in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in particular, and very expressly, to those of the United States of America
was published in Boston in 1829. It was, the scholar Peter P. Hinks tells us, “one of the nineteenth century's most incisive and vivid indictments of American racism and the insidious undermining it wrought on the black psyche.”