I thank everyone who contributed to this thread for their posts. Very
helpful.

-- Stephan

On Wed, Jun 1, 2022 at 12:29 PM Paul Finkelman <
[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Lyle's point is spot on.  But of course, where would he find people who
> wanted to be serfs or peasants?
>
> If I can add one more point to this discussion.
> TJ envisioned a world where blacks were slaves or that they disappeared --
> sent out of the country. But he also knew there were not enough ships in
> the world to move all the blacks out of the US.  He understood colonization
> was a chimera for slaves.  His cousin, Chief Justice John Marshall, was a
> strong supporter of colonization -- but only for free blacks.  After the
> Nat Turner Rebellion is begged the VA legislature to appropriate enough
> money to move all the free blacks (which like Jefferson he called "pests")
> to Africa.  If anyone is interested in this, I cover it at great length in
> Supreme Injustice:  Slavery in the Nation's Highest Court (Harvard Univ.
> Press, 2018) but I also have two short articles on this.
>
> The server will not let me send PDFs, but you can get to them here:
> https://lawreviewblog.uchicago.edu/tag/paul-finkelman/
>
> and here
> https://lawreviewblog.uchicago.edu/tag/paul-finkelman/
>
>
>
> ------------------Paul FinkelmanChancellor and DistinguishedProfessor of
> History
> Gratz College, Melrose Park, Pa.
> Mailing Address
> 48 Thorndale RoadSlingerlands, NY  12159
> [log in to unmask]) 518-605-0296
>
>
>
>
>     On Wednesday, June 1, 2022 at 01:32:43 PM EDT, Lyle E. Browning <
> [log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>  Further to Paul’s post, it would appear that TJ envisioned some form of
> feudal society, if slavery disappeared. An agrarian society needs labor.
> The oligarchs did not seem to be inclined to deal with hired labor, given
> comments about unruly Irish and so forth. In my view, the logical end to
> slavery was farm equipment mechanization, and that was only due to
> increased output versus manual labor. The cotton gin was invented to ease
> the burden of seed removal with the unintended consequence of increasing
> slavery due to the elimination of the bottleneck of removing seeds. Not
> until the widespread use of tractors with the internal combustion engine
> did farm mechanization take off.
>
> As bad as it was, war was the faster mechanism to stop slavery. The graph
> of farm tractors vs draft animals crossed in 1944 if memory serves.
> Mechanization was a long way off in TJ’s time.
>
> Lyle Browning
>
> > On Jun 1, 2022, at 11:38 AM, Paul Finkelman <
> [log in to unmask]> wrote:
> >
> > Dear Terry:
> > I think there is very little evidence that Jefferson imagined any end to
> slavery in the forseeable future.  I would urge you to read the last two
> chapters of my book, Slavery and the Founders:  Race and Liberty in the Age
> of Jefferson (3rd ed.) (NY:  Routledge, 2014).  I do not think he "gave up"
> on any vision.  There is no evidence he had such a vision.
> >
> > Here are some thoughts.
> >
> > 1: In Notes on the State of VA he makes it quite clear that blacks can
> never be emancipated in VA. His racism and fear of blacks is quite open.
> He argues 1) that they can never be integrated into VA society; 2) they
> threaten white people; and 3) that black men are a threat to white women
> (Jefferson never considers the absurdity of this, since the large mixed
> race population in VA was the result of white men have sex with black
> women).  Furthermore, he argues that ending slavery is impossible unless
> there is another source of labor (he suggests German peasants.  The bottom
> line for TJ is that emancipation is possible only with an expulsion (ethnic
> cleansing?) of blacks from the US and TJ knows that is simply impossible.
> > 2:  He fears free blacks.  He is obsessed with Haiti, and develops a
> foreign policy to destroy the country.
> > 3: In his famous letter to Edward Coles he starts out by saying how
> happy he is that the younger generation is anti-slavery, but then ends by
> telling Coles not to free his slaves and telling him free blacks are
> "pests" on Society.
> > 4:  Finally, during the Missouri Crisis he refuses to endorse any
> program to end the spread (and therefore the growth) of slavery.  His "wolf
> by the ear" comment to Congressman Holmes says that "self-preservation" is
> at stake.  He does not, I think, literally mean that if freed slaves will
> attack whites -- after all, to use the wolf analogy, if you had a wolf "by
> the ear" and let the wolf go, the wolf would most likely runaway, not
> attack you.  His "self-preservation" is about his own lifestyle, wealth,
> happiness, etc.  If slave ends, the Va elite will not be able to preserve
> the status it has -- which he personally embodies.
> >
> > ------------------Paul FinkelmanChancellor and DistinguishedProfessor of
> History
> > Gratz College, Melrose Park, Pa.
> > Mailing Address
> > 48 Thorndale RoadSlingerlands, NY  12159
> > [log in to unmask]) 518-605-0296
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >    On Wednesday, June 1, 2022 at 11:21:04 AM EDT, Meyers, Terry L <
> [log in to unmask]> wrote:
> >
> >            Recent studies of the founding of UVA seem to come to
> contradictory conclusions about Jefferson’s intentions for the university
> in terms of combatting slavery or not.  I’m wondering if there’s a good
> review essay someplace that explores the question and perhaps comes to a
> reliable evaluation of better and worse.
> >            I ask because in my own work I found that Jefferson, before
> he gave up on W&M, seemed to see the younger generations educated at the
> College in skepticism about slavery as likely able somehow to do away with
> slavery, something beyond him and his peers.
> >            Did he give up on that vision, that hope as he founded UVA?
> If so, why?
> >            Anyway, below is a survey of what I find regarding UVA’s
> founding mission (the UVA webpages are remarkably quiet about the history
> of the institution and for some unknown technical reasons I cannot access
> the Monticello account on the “Establishment of the University of
> Virginia”).
> >
> _____________________________________________________________________________
> >
> > "He [Jefferson} believed that a southern institution was necessary to
> protect the sons of the South from abolitionist teachings in the North.
> Jefferson wrote his friend James Breckenridge in 1821, expressing his
> concern with sending the youth of Virginia to be educated in the North, a
> place 'against us in position and principle.' He worried that in northern
> institutions, young Virginians might imbibe “opinions and principles in
> discord with those of their own country. This canker is eating on the
> vitals of our existence, and if not arrested at once will be beyond remedy.’
> >
> > In other words, Jefferson believed it was important to educate
> Virginians, and other southerners, in an institution that understood and
> ultimately supported slavery."  (p. 15)
> >
> > "The University that grew after Thomas Jefferson’s death in July 1826 in
> many ways fulfilled his vision in creating a southern pro-slavery Ivy
> League school."  (p. 35)
> > --from the President’s Commission on Slavery and the University, Report
> to Teresa A. Sullivan (2018).
> https://slavery.virginia.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/PCSU-Report-FINAL_July-2018.pdf
> > [The letter, Feb. 15, 1821, to Breckeridge is an important statement,
> but it was pointed out to me by a friend, a close student of Jefferson,
> that another letter the same day suggests that Jefferson was writing it
> simply to advance his interests in the General Assembly, that he deeply
> hoped it would never been seen in public.  In effect, this second letter
> seems a repudiation of the first.
> >
> https://founders.archives.gov/?q=%20Dates-From%3A1821-02-15%20Author%3A%22Jefferson%2C%20Thomas%22&s=1111311111&r=3&sr=
> <https://founders.archives.gov/?q=%20Dates-From:1821-02-15%20Author
> :"Jefferson,%20Thomas"&s=1111311111&r=3&sr=>
> > TLM]
> >
> _____________________________________________________________________________
> >            In Educated in Tyranny: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s
> University (2019), the editors, Maurice D. McInnes and Louis P. Nelson
> write in the Introduction that
> > “He [Jefferson] believed that a southern institution was necessary to
> protect the sons of the South from abolitionist teachings in the North.
> Jefferson wrote to his friend James Breckinridge and expressed his concern
> with sending the youth of Virginia to be educated in the North, a place
> ‘against us in position and principle.’  He worried that in northern
> institutions young Virginians might imbibe ‘opinions and principles in
> discord with those of their own country.  This canker is easting on the
> vitals of our existence, and if not arrested at  once will be beyond
> remedy.’    In other words, Jefferson believed it was important to educate
> Virginians, and other southerners, in an institution that understood and
> ultimately supported slavery” (p. 4).
> >
> _____________________________________________________________________________
> >            The editors of The Founding of Thomas Jefferson’s University
> (2019), John A. Ragosta, Peter S. Onur, and Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy, seem
> to suggest in a prefatory note, “Building an Idealized Academical Village,”
> that even though Jefferson “necessarily adapted to the political and social
> realities of a society in which the peculiar institution was deeply,
> inextricably entrenched,” “the University’s design nonetheless testified to
> his enduring commitment to progress, enlightenment, and republican
> government” (p. 93). As I read this, I see an implicit suggestion that
> Jefferson still had in mind in educating UVA’s students some hope to see
> them in the future somehow erode slavery (see the discussion on p. 92).
> >
> >
> _____________________________________________________________________________
> >            In Thomas Jefferson’s Education (2019], Alan Taylor suggests
> that Jefferson did back away from his hopes for W&M students, that
> “Jefferson had grown ambivalent about acting on the anti-slavery words
> [Notes on the State of Virginia] he had planted in the College [of William
> and Mary] in 1787” (p. 136).  But he also comments of Jefferson’s hopes for
> graduates of UVA that “he wanted them to make the sweeping reforms,
> including gradual emancipation, that his generation had failed to enact
> “(p. 214).
> >            Taylor comments that one of Jefferson’s two goals in founding
> UVA was to educate “a more enlightened leadership [that] could reform
> Virginia,” having. among other goals to “both free and deport enslaved
> people.”  He notes Jefferson’s counting “on a new generation to succeed
> where he had fallen short,” but says of that generation that “rejecting
> Jefferson’s denunciation of slavery as immoral, they overtly celebrated
> slavery as a positive good for enslaved people as well as masters”: “rather
> than uproot slavery, as Jefferson had hoped, the University’s students
> defended it and served the Confederacy in the Civil War” (p. 307).
> >
> _____________________________________________________________________________
> > In The Illimitable Freedom of the Human Mind: Thomas Jefferson’s Idea of
> a University (2021), Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy writes that Jefferson’s
> “vision for the University of Virginia did not originate in the sectional
> crisis between the North and the South over slavery as an attempt to create
> ‘a southern pro-slavery Ivy League school” (p. 58).  He footnotes both the
> Commission on the University and Slavery (pp. 15, 35) and the
> McInnis/Nelson Introduction, noting that those “polemical claims” were
> repeated in a number of reviews (p. 274, n.85).  In a detailed discussion
> of Jefferson and slavery O’Shaughnessy writes that “Jefferson gave priority
> to establishing the university in the belief that it would train a
> generation of political leaders who would not only perpetuate the republic
> but solve those problems left by his own generation…” (p. 197).
> >
> >
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > Terry L.. Meyers, Chancellor Professor of English, Emeritus, The College
> of William and Mary, in Virginia, Williamsburg  23187
> >
> > Offset Your Carbon Footprint? Choose at https://tinyurl.com/5546274z
> > ————————————————————————————————————————————————————
> > Have we got a college?  Have we got a football team?....Well, we can't
> afford both.  Tomorrow we start tearing down the college.
> --Groucho Marx, in "Horse Feathers."
> >
> >
> >
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-- 

 Stephan A. Schwartz
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California Institute for Human Science
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