Considering that many smaller slave owners did free their slaves, it
could be done and many did it. But how many of the very wealthiest
did? A very few, not many. Their wealth rested on the backs and in
the hands of their slaves. It would take a real saint to give up all
their wealth and comforts, and perhaps land that had been in their
families for generations, and live in poverty, in order to free their
slaves. They might have or did know it was wrong, it bothered them,
but perhaps they just hoped the Almighty would understand their
situation and look the other way. I understand some theories were put
forth from time to time on how to live and run large plantations
without slave labor, but no one seems brave enough to have taken any
of the ideas seriously. All they knew, for generations, was the slave
economy. If they had reduced themselves to poverty, they would have
had very hard lives indeed; the times were not kind to the poor. I
doubt many of us would have done better, if we were in their
positions. It might not have been a lack of conscience or hypocrisy
so much as it was fear.
Nancy
-------
I was never lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.
--Daniel Boone
On Apr 29, 2008, at 5:09 PM, [log in to unmask] wrote:
> As I understand the DNA evidence, science has confirmed that the
> father of one of Sally Heming's children was someone descended from
> Thomas Jefferson's paternal grandfather. Obviously, that person
> might be Thomas Jefferson--but it could also be any of several
> other individuals as well.
>
> We will never know for certain, it seems to me. For one thing, it
> seems quite possible that the group of men descended from Thomas
> Jefferson's grandfather included men who were themselves enslaved.
> Given the prevalence of miscegenation in Virginia, how can we rule
> out the possibility that Jefferson had half-brothers or cousins who
> were slaves? It is not much of a stretch at all to imagine that
> Jefferson's father, uncles, or grandfather had children by enslaved
> women. As is the case with so many other plantation families in
> Virginia, our genealogies for the Jeffersons are partial and
> incomplete, precisely because sex between enslaved women and their
> owners or overseers was so common.
>
> And that, ultimately, is the point, isn't it? White men rather
> routinely had sex with their slaves. Even if Jefferson himself did
> not engage in sex with Hemings--a big if--he surely had to know it
> was happening. And he did nothing about it. Jefferson is damned
> either way. And the larger point is that this is necessarily true,
> because Jefferson was a slave owner. Jefferson's moral plight was
> no different, really, than that of any other slave owner, for
> reasons that he himself well understood. Slavery corrupted
> everyone who came into contact with it. Jefferson himself knew
> this, and wrote eloquently about it in NOTES ON THE STATE OF
> VIRGINIA. So on this issue there is no "out" for the man. Like
> Patrick Henry, Jefferson saw slavery for what it was, and did
> nothing, because (as Henry put it), owning slaves was "convenient."
>
> The dispute over the ancestry of Hemings' children, it seems to me,
> rather perversely distracts our attention from the deep hypocrisy
> at Monticello. Monticello was built on a lie. As much as
> Jefferson tried to hide slavery from view, slavery permeated the
> very bones of the house, as well as the life he crafted for himself
> there. If slavery contradicted the high ideals that Jefferson, at
> his best, so elegantly articulated, we should not forget that it
> was Jefferson who laid the foundation for the pro-slavery argument
> of the 1820s and 1830s. Jefferson pointed the way, in his
> discussion of the laws of Virginia, to reconcile slavery and
> Lockean liberalism.
>
> More charitably, Jefferson illuminates the condition of
> slaveowners--and by extension all of us--who lived enmeshed in
> social institutions that enveloped their lives in ways they could
> not fully grasp. For all the subtlety and clarity of his thinking,
> Jefferson never seemed able to internalize his understanding in
> ways that informed his actual day to day behaviour. Like almost
> all of his peers, Jefferson never managed to come to grips with the
> day to day evil in which he participated. If the very best men and
> women that 18th century Virginia produced could not pull off this
> feat, then perhaps we are asking too much of them? And if that is
> true, then what does that have to say about us? Is it not possible
> that we, too, live our lives enmeshed in social institutions, and
> reified power relations, whose evils we dimly perceive, and with
> which we grapple ineffectually?
> Kevin R. Hardwick, Ph.D.
> Department of History
> James Madison University
>
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