The Notes on the State of Virginia, like so much else TJ wrote, are internally contradictory and, I would argue, self serving.  
I assume Professor Meyers is referring to this statement:
“I think a changealready perceptible, since the origin of the present revolution. The spirit ofthe master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust, his conditionmollifying, the way I hope preparing, under the auspices of heaven, for a totalemancipation, and that this is disposed, in the order of events, to be with theconsent of the masters, rather than by their extirpation.”


This comes at the very end of the famous "Query XVIII" where Jefferson talks about how harmful slavery is to white people and to the master class. But is hard to see this as a "call" for total emancipation.  It is more like a prayer for divine intervention to prevent what TJ really fears, which is a massive slave revolt that will lead to the "extirpation" of the masters.  
This is an amazing passage, especially from someone who is a deist (at most) and does not believe in "divine intervention" in human affairs.  In other words, Jefferson is hope that a God, which he does not believe exists, will somehow end slavery peacefully.  Here is one of America's first scientists and political theorists, hoping that a problem will be solved "under the auspices of heaven."
In his earlier section, on "the laws" (Query XIV) he wrote about laws to be considered before the legislature.  He said there was a bill
“To emancipate allslaves born after passing the act. The bill reported by the revisors does notitself contain this proposition;  but anamendment containing it was prepared, to be offered to the legislature wheneverthe bill should be taken up, and further directing, that they should continuewith their parents to a certain age, then be brought up, at the public expence,to tillage, arts or sciences, according to their geniusses, till the femalesshould be eighteen, and the males twenty-one years of age, when they should becolonized to such place as the circumstances of the time should render mostproper. . .”


There are some significant issues with this passage that need to be explopred. While TJ says it is a bill "to emancipate all slaves born ..." he immediately says that the bill sent by the revisors did not contain this provision, but rather it was going to be "offered" as an amendment "whenever the bill should be taken up."  The implication here is that TJ supported this bill and this plan.  But what the Notes do not say, is that Jefferson was the chair of the committee to revise the laws, and he killed the gradual abolition proposal in committee, and that by the time he wrote the Notes, this bill was dead.  Thus, if we read the Notes we are left with the very false impression that TJ is advocating gradual abolitionin VA, when he is not.


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Paul FinkelmanArielF. Sallows Visiting Professor of Human Rights LawCollegeof LawUniversityof Saskatchewan15Campus DriveSaskatoon,SK  S7N 5A6   [log in to unmask]
c) 518.605.0296 (US number)


      From: Terry L. Meyers <[log in to unmask]>
 To: [log in to unmask] 
 Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2016 7:36 AM
 Subject: Re: [VA-HIST] Censoring Jefferson
   
    Jefferson on slavery seems to be an endless labyrinth -- multiple entrances but no exit. 

    In my own work on the thinking at W&M over several centuries about slavery,* I was interested to learn that Jefferson in Notes on the Sate of Virginia called for, ultimately, "the total emancipation" of the enslaved, but was so nervous in doing so that he restricted circulation of the book in Virginia to one copy, passed along clandestinely, and discussed by its few readers in code.

    And yet he also thought at first to encourage the academic skepticism about slavery pervasive at W&M by perhaps sending enough copies to Williamsburg so that every student here could have a copy.  He dropped that plan, although with the second edition he did send multiple copies to the College, a number for George Wythe to give to students as Wythe determined.

    Jefferson seems for some time to have thought that the next generation of Virginia’s leaders, properly educated at W&M, could do something about slavery that he and his generation could not (or would not).

    I’ve sought for any echo of that hope as Jefferson worked to found UVA, but so far in vain—possibly he had changed his mind, but, more likely, I presume, he judged that that would be a weak selling point in asking for funds from the state.

    So (and this may be germane to the current controversy), though Jefferson did ultimately abandon W&M, he seems to have founded UVA with a perhaps pragmatic (but troubling) evasion of his earlier values.


*http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmborj/vol21/iss4/6/

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Terry L. Meyers, Chancellor Professor of English Emeritus, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg Virginia 
 23187 

http://wmpeople.wm.edu/site/page/tlmeye/ <http://wmpeople.wm.edu/site/page/tlmeye/>

http://www.ecologyfund.com/ecology/_ecology.html <http://www.ecologyfund.com/ecology/_ecology.html>
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      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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