JEFFERSON'S WOLF

A closely argued study of Thomas Jefferson’s complex relationship to the institution of slavery.

Even at the time of the Declaration of Independence, write historians Dierksheide and Guyatt, “many Americans had a more expansive sense of ‘all men are created equal’ than the phrase’s author.” By their account, Jefferson was neither for or against slavery as such but instead an advocate of “antislavery exclusion,” the view that Blacks and whites could not coexist, especially after the injuries wrought by enslavement, and that manumitted people had to be deported—perhaps to a Black Caribbean cordoned off from the U.S., perhaps to Africa. Jefferson, like many slaveholders in the colonies and early Republic, had an understandable fear of slave revolts, among them those abetted by the British crown. His view that emancipating enslaved people would pose a danger to white Americans is less understandable, though it gave rise to the wolf metaphor of the title: “We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.” Toward the end of his life, the authors note, Jefferson even rationalized “diffusion” of enslaved people throughout the new territories to the west, limiting concentrated populations of Blacks in the hope of averting uprisings. (Congress settled instead on a division of new territories into free and slaveholding entities.) Ironically, while he advocated liberty for all in theory and argued against new importations from Africa, he also worked hard to preserve his own ownership of enslaved people while still advancing his program of “emancipation paired with racial removal.” Of course, there was no end to the hypocrisy of the situation: As the authors also observe, Jefferson petitioned the Virginia legislature for the right of his mixed-race sons to remain in their home state following his death rather than suffering deportment.

A nuanced history of the giant mote in the eye of the great thinker and revolutionary.