In response to Kevin Hardwick, I note that it was not Jefferson who
discovered a way to reconcile slavery with Lockean liberalism, but the May
Convention of 1776 -- that interim ruling body of revolutionary Virginia.
It was that body that decided, in debating George Mason's draft Declaration
of Rights, not to come out and flatly claim that all men were born free and
equal and that government was to protect their rights, but instead
interlineated Edmund Pendleton's phrase "when they enter into a state of
society" (or some such).  As a result, Virginia from its birth was a
society in which the blacks had not been parties to the social compact;
they had not "entered into a state of society," but had been kept as a
captive nation.  *Before* republican Virginia was established, its leaders
made this decision to have *both* a Lockean social compact *and* slavery.

I detail this development in chapter one of _Virginia's American
Revolution:  From Dominion to Republic, 1776-1840_ (Lexington Books, 2007).

For Jefferson, the commitment to Lockean rights could only be squared with
the decision to keep blacks outside Virginia's social compact through
colonization.  I examine this issue in "Lincoln as Jeffersonian:  The
Colonization Chimera," in _Lincoln Emancipated:  The President and the
Politics of Race_, ed. Brian Dirck (Northern Illinois University Press,
2007).

Kevin Gutzman

Kevin R. C. Gutzman, J.D., Ph.D.
Associate Professor of History
Western Connecticut State University
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