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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