Just the passage from Notes I had in mind. Thank you. The book Paul
Finkelman referred to this morning is: Boynton Merrill, Jefferson's
Nephews: A Frontier Tragedy (1976). Robert Penn Warren's poem of 1953
is: "A Brother to Dragons."  I saw it, when I first read it in the
1970s, as drawing a parallel with the Southern white liberals of the
time (Warren had just turned his attention to redoing his essay in I'll
Take My Stand). Like Jefferson and slavery, they hated segregation and
the caste line but could not bring themselves to denounce it. Like TJ
and Lewis, they were often confronted with the barbarities of lynching,
every bit as gruesome as the crime of Lilburn Lewis. Like TJ, they too
were like Job in the Bible, " A Brother unto dragons, and a campanion of
 owls."

Jim Hershman

Kevin Hardwick wrote:

> I suspect that Professor Hershman was referring to Jefferson's
> analysis, in
> Chapter XVII ("Manners") of his NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA, of the
> debilitating and corrosive effects of slavery on the habits and
> demeanor of
> the slave owner:  "The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the
> lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller
> slaves,
> gives a loose to his worst passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily
> exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious
> peculiarities.  The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and
> morals undepraved by such circumstances."
>
> Best,
> Kevin R. Hardwick
>

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