round,
When Gallic powers Columbia’s fury found;
And so may you, whoever dares disgrace
The land of freedom’s heaven-defended
race! . . .
Proceed, great chief, with virtue on thy side,
Thy ev’ry action let the goddess guide.
A crown, a mansion, and a throne that shine,
With gold unfading, WASHINGTON! be
thine.
But no encounter with a Founding Father would prove more lasting in its impact than that with Thomas Jefferson, whom she never met. (I should say that when we discuss the blind spots of giants like Jefferson, we must do so with the humility of knowing that, in future decades, others shall condescendingly be discussing our own blind spots, if they bother discussing us at all.)
Jefferson’s literary criticism of Wheatley was occasioned by François, the Marquis de Barbe-Marbois, who inspired Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. Marbois was, at the time, the secretary of the first French mission to the United States and later consul-general to the United States. In 1781, on behalf of his government, he had asked Jefferson for statistical information about various states in the Union, particularly Virginia. Jefferson sent his response to Marbois in 1781. Jefferson’s report caused such a stir among Benjamin Rush and his fellows at the American Philosophical Society that he enlarged and revised his answers. A private edition of Notes was printed in Paris in 1785, an “authorized” edition was published by Stockdale in London in 1787, and the first American edition followed in 1788. Of Marbois’s queries, it was that occasioned by his encounter with Wheatley’s Poems in 1779, which proved germinal in the history of the criticism of African-American writing.
Marbois considered Phillis “one of the strangest creatures in the country and perhaps the whole world.” In an August 28, 1779, journal entry subsequently sent to his fiancée in Paris, Marbois described Wheatley’s accomplishments:Phyllis is a negress, born in Africa, brought to Boston at the age of ten, and sold to a citizen of the city. She learned English with unusual ease, eagerly read and re-read the Bible, the only book which had been put in her hands, became steeped in the poetic images of which it is full, and at the age of seventeen, published a number of poems in which there is imagination, poetry, and zeal, though no correctness nor order nor interest. I read them with some surprise.
Jefferson begged to differ. In his response to his French correspondent’s questions, as outlined in Queries VI and XIV of the Notes, Jefferson lays out clearly his views. “The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.” The criticism comes in a passage setting out his views on the mental capacity of the various races of man. “In general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection,” Jefferson writes about blacks; he continues:Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me that in memory they are equal to whites, in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.
Echoing Hume and Kant, he argues that blacks are exposed daily to “countries where the arts and sciences are cultivated to a considerable degree,” yet they have absorbed little or nothing from this exposure. “Never yet,” said Jefferson, “could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration, never see even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture.” On the other hand, Jefferson has qualified praise for the African’s musical propensities.
In music they are more generally gifted than the whites with accurate ears for tune and time, and they have been found capable of imagining a small catch. . . . Whether they will be equal to the composition of a more extensive run of melody, or of complicated harmony, is yet to be proved.
Jefferson’s denigration of Wheatley seems aimed at the antislavery writers who since 1773 had cited her so frequently as proof positive of the equality of the African, and therefore as a reason to abolish slavery. Jefferson’s critique of Phillis is unusually harsh:Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry. Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but not poetry. Love is the peculiar oestrum of the poet. Their love is ardent, but it kindles the senses only, not the imagination. Religion, indeed, has produced a Phillis Whatley [sic]; but it could not produce a poet.
Jefferson was quite convinced that Wheatley’s finer sentiments, such as her piety, are quite separate from the “love” needed to write poetry. What Jefferson meant is quite simple. He believed that Africans have human souls, they merely lack the intellectual endowments of other races. Like his contemporaries, he separated “what we would call intelligence from the capacity for religious experience.” This division allows for both the religious conversion of slaves, as well as for the perpetuation of the principle of black inferiority. Guilt, as well as the growing evidence that blacks are indeed Homo sapiens, meant that Africans could no longer be regarded as brutes. So Jefferson accepted the souls and humanity of slaves, while still maintaining their inferiority. Phillis is, for Jefferson, an example of a product of religion, of mindless repetition and imitation, without being the product of intellect, of reflection. True art requires a sublime combination of feeling and reflection.
To illustrate more convincingly the inherent inferiority of the black mind, Jefferson compared the slaves in America to the ones of ancient Greece and Rome. After exposing the even greater duress under which the Roman slaves lived, Jefferson pointed to three famous, learned ones: “Epictetus, Terence, and Phaedrus, were slaves. But they were of the race of whites.” From this fact, Jefferson drew his conclusion that it is not slavery, but an inherent mental inferiority, that has prevented the existence of Epictetus’ black counterpart: “It is not [the blacks’] condition then, but nature which has produced the distinction.” Sidestepping the full consequences such allegations of inferiority would have, Jefferson retreated behind the shelter of “suspicion”: “I advance it, therefore, as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.”
Unlike the American Indian, who is equal to the white in body, and whose mind is affected by external circumstances alone, the black is fundamentally different from the white. In reference to the Indians, Jefferson writes:To form a just estimate of their genius and mental powers, more facts are wanting, and a great allowance to be made for those circumstances of their situation which call for a display find they are formed in mind as well as in body, on the same module with the Homo sapiens Europeans.
Jefferson recognized the capability for “improvement,” especially mental improvement. He pointed to Europe, asking if the white person has not also shown, and needed time to show, progress in history:I may safely ask, how many good poets, how many able mathematicians, how many good inventors in arts and sciences, had Europe, north of the Alps, then produced? And it was sixteen centuries after [the Romans crossed the Alps] before a Newton could be formed.
One must make allowance, maintained Jefferson, for the fact that the Indian is not called on to display his intelligence in the same way as the European. The Indian displays his capabilities to the white person in the form of war, in speeches, and in drawings:The Indians . . . will often carve figures on their pipes not destitute of design and merit. They will crayon out an animal, a plant, or a country, so as to prove the existence of a germ in their minds which only wants cultivation.
Jefferson argued that the Indian’s expressions of reason, sentiment, and imagination may be primitive, but they are potentially equal to those of whites. While other races and peoples advance and develop, the black will be unable to do so. Unlike his thinking on the Indian, Jefferson believed that there are “real distinctions which nature has made,” separating the blacks from the whites. Therefore, in the case of blacks, Jefferson disregarded the criteria by which h
e asserted Indian mental equality: he does not advocate making “a great allowance . . . for these circumstances of their situation which call for a display of particular talents only.” For Thomas Jefferson, the black is a static element on the Great Chain of Being, and he will be left further down on the scala naturae as whites (and perhaps in sixteen centuries, the Indians) move up.
Jefferson reaches these conclusions, in some part, from his reading of Phillis Wheatley’s poetry. Yes, he, concedes, she may very well have written these works, but they are derivative, imitative, devoid of that marriage of reason and transport that is, in his view, the peculiar oestrum of the poet. By shifting the terms of authenticity—from the very possibility of her authorship to the quality of her authorship—Jefferson indicted her for a failure of a higher form of authenticity. Having survived the tribunal of eighteen in 1772, Wheatley now finds her genuineness impugned by a larger authority, subjected to a higher test of originality and invention. And the complex rhetoric of authenticity would have a long, long afterlife.
To be sure, Jefferson’s opinions generated scores of rebuttals: “reactions to Jefferson were immediate and they quickly proliferated,” says William Robinson, writing on Wheatley two centuries after the publication of the Notes. “Indeed, much of the early Wheatley criticism is essentially rebuttal of Jeffersonian disdain.” The most crucial aspect needing refutation was Jefferson’s claim of the black’s general inferiority to Europeans.
If Phillis Wheatley was the mother of African-American literature, there is a sense in which Thomas Jefferson can be thought of as its midwife. Blacks took on Jefferson’s challenge immediately following the Revolution. As the historian Benjamin Quarles puts it, “Still unspent, the spirit of ’76 found new outlets among blacks. The Revolutionary War as a black declaration of independence took on a power of its own, fueled by residual revolutionary rhetoric and sustained by the memory of fallen heroes and the cloud of the living black witness.” Moreover, Jefferson’s comments about the role of their literature in any meaningful assessment of the African-American’s civil rights became the strongest motivation for blacks to create a body of literature that would implicitly prove Jefferson wrong. This is Wheatley’s, and Jefferson’s, curious legacy in American literature.
It must be said that part of the fascination of black intellectuals with Jefferson in the nineteenth century stemmed from rumors about his paternity of Sally Hemings’s children. Rather than attempt to wade through complex DNA data and genealogical records, I would rather point to the tradition in black letters of naming Jefferson as Sally’s lover, which had its origins in the nineteenth century. For example, at an 1860 meeting of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, a speaker described Jefferson as “a good antislavery man.” According to the scholar Dorothy Sterling, he was interrupted by shouts that “he sold his daughter!” The man who took the floor was Robert Purvis, who had inherited “a substantial fortune” from his white father, a successful cotton broker, and had attended both Pittsfield and Amherst academies. He was a major figure in the abolitionist movement, becoming in 1839 the first president of the Vigilant Committee, which was in his words, “the first organized society of the Underground Railroad.” He was well educated, articulate, and militant about black rights. He stood up and declared:Mr. Chairman, I am astonished at the audacity of the gentleman from Long Island in claiming Thomas Jefferson to be an anti-slavery man. Sir, Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder and I hold all slaveholders to be tyrants and robbers. It is said that Thomas Jefferson sold his own daughter. This if true proves him to have been a scoundrel as well as a tyrant!
Sir, I am free to confess that I have no veneration for the founders of this government, I do not share with others in their veneration for the “father of our country.” General Washington was a slaveholder, General Washington as President of the United States signed the fugitive Slave bill. General Washington tries, under the bill, to recover a poor woman flying through the perils and toils (thereby showing a truer courage than ever he did) that she might escape the yoke of slavery on his plantation.
When a man professing to be an Abolitionist has the—has the—Sir, I don’t want to say audacity, but I can’t think of any other word—to come here and hold a slaveholder as a good antislavery man, I forget all my resolutions to be guarded and speak with a vehemence which I afterwards regret.
Purvis must later have regretted calling Jefferson a “scoundrel” in his spoken remarks, because he deleted that word from the printed version.
The subject of Jefferson’s black children assumed one of its first and most popular outlets in 1853, in William Wells Brown’s novel Clotel, or, The President’s Daughter. Published in London, as Wheatley’s poem had been, it was the first novel to be published by an African American. Brown, the author of a slave narrative second only in sales and artistry to that of Frederick Douglass, was the tradition’s first true man of letters, as Joyce Carol Oates recently pointed out. Brown published in a wide variety of genres, including poetry, travel writing, drama, and history, as well as fiction. Clotel’s action commences with the auction of Jefferson’s mistress, as well as their two daughters, including Clotel herself. Clotel is later sold by the father of her child, escapes from a slave dealer only to be captured again (in the midst of Nat Turner’s rebellion), is transferred to prison, where she escapes yet again—only to leap to her death in the Potomac rather than succumb to her captors.
To say that Brown was obsessed with the rumors of Jefferson’s relation to Sally Hemings would be an understatement: Brown would revise and republish the story four times, once as a play in 1858, then, greatly revised, under new titles in 1860, 1864, and 1867, including a widely circulated serialized version. When Robert Purvis rose to speak about Jefferson at the anti-slavery meeting, it was Brown’s version of the Jefferson legend that he had in mind. But Jefferson’s relationship to Hemings and her children has been the stuff of the African-American oral tradition for two hundred years; even black historians addressed the subject before the recent controversy manifested itself in the works of Fawn Brodie and Annette Gordon-Reid. Indeed, I first encountered the story of Jefferson and Hemings in an old copy of Ebony magazine, dated 1954, and entitled “Thomas Jefferson’s Negro Grandchildren,” widely discussed in Mr. Coombie Carroll’s barbershop in Keyser, West Virginia, even then.
Despite the titillating pleasure of oral reports of the Hemings-Jefferson liaison, it was Jefferson’s Notes that preoccupied black and white abolitionists alike, containing as it did too many adamant allegations of black mental inferiority to be ignored. In fact, his statements acted as catalysts in sparking refutations of his opinions. The heated debate of black capacity and of the black’s place in nature would continue well into the twentieth century.
Jefferson kept a commonplace book. It was edited and published by Gilbert Chinard in 1928. One of Jefferson’s favorite citations from Horace, included therein, reads as follows:And, again, you cannot yourself bear to be in your company for an hour, you cannot employ your leisure aright, you shun yourself, a runaway vagabond, seeking now with wine, and now with sleep, to escape anxiety. In vain that black consort dogs and follows your flight.
If anxiety—figured here as “that black consort”—dogged Jefferson’s steps relentlessly, then it can also be said that Mister Jefferson is the consort who has dogged African-American politics and letters. No Founding Father has been the subject of more speeches, essays, and books in the African-American tradition than Thomas Jefferson. No other figure has been more reviled yet, paradoxically, more revered; and no other figure has had a greater shaping impact upon both the discourse of black rights and the evolution of the African-American literary tradition than Thomas Jefferson.
The transformation of Jefferson’s image into that of a motivator took its most curious and ironic form in the work of David Walker, whose Appeal in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in particular, and very expressly, to those of the United S
tates of America was published in Boston in 1829. It was, the scholar Peter P. Hinks tells us, “one of the nineteenth century’s most incisive and vivid indictments of American racism and the insidious undermining it wrought on the black psyche.”
Walker was never a slave; he was born to a free black woman in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1796. In 1825 he moved to Boston, where he established a second-hand clothing business. Walker became the “principal agent” of Freedom’s Journal, the nation’s first black newspaper, first published in New York in 1827. We can get a sense of Walker’s tone and content from the following passage:We, (coloured People of these United States), are the most degraded, wretched, and abject set of beings that ever lived since the world began . . . and the white Christians of America, who hold us in slavery, (or, more properly speaking, pretenders to Christianity), treat us more cruel and barbarous than any heathen nation did among people whom it had subjected.
Walker’s relation to Jefferson was complex. Writing just three years after Jefferson’s death—but forty-four years after Jefferson had written “Query XIV”—Walker walked a fine line between expressing his admiration for Jefferson’s mind and the Declaration of Independence, in particular, yet refuting Jefferson’s insinuations that blacks were not of the human family. Walker asked his readers if they realized “that Mr. Jefferson was one of as great a characters as ever lived among the whites?” And as such, Walker was determined to prove Mr. Jefferson wrong. Indeed, Jefferson’s words, he continued, were not Jefferson’s fault entirely, but were in part the fault of black people themselves. Refute the message “by your own actions,” Walker argued, but don’t shoot the messenger. Jefferson was wrong, but he was not the devil. No, Jefferson is “a man of such great learning, combined with such excellent natural parts.” Indeed, he continued, Jefferson was sui generis: “a much greater philosopher the world has never afforded.” It was precisely for that reason that his estimation carried such weight: Now I ask you candidly, my suffering brethren in time, who are candidates for the eternal worlds, how could Mr. Jefferson but have given the world these remarks respecting us, when we are so submissive to them, and so much servile deceit prevail among ourselves—when we so meanly submit to their murderous lashes, to which neither the Indians nor any other people under Heaven would submit? No, they would die to a man, before they would suffer such things from men who are no better than themselves, and perhaps not so good. Yes, how can our friends but be embarrassed, as Mr. Jefferson says, by the question, “What further is to be done with these people?” For while they are working for our emancipation, we are, by our treachery, wickedness and deceit, working against ourselves and our children—helping ours, and the enemies of god, to keep us and our dear little children in their infernal chains of slavery!!! Indeed, our friends cannot but relapse and join themselves “with those who are actuated by sordid avarice only!!!!” For my own part, I am glad Mr. Jefferson has advanced his positions for your sake; for you will either have to contradict or confirm him by your own actions, and not by what our friends have said or done for us; for those things are other men’s labors, and do not satisfy the Americans, who are waiting for us to prove to them ourselves that we are men, before they will be willing to admit the fact; I pledge you my sacred word of honour. That honor, that Mr. Jefferson’s remarks respecting us, have sunk deep into the hearts of millions of the whites, and never will be removed this side of eternity. For how can they, when we are confirming him every day, for our groveling submissions and treachery?
The Trials of Phillis Wheatley Page 3