Jefferson’s Effects of SlaveryJefferson’s Effects of SlaveryEffects of SlaveryThere are many concepts which are deemed important to this class. After much consideration, I chose to focus on the effects of slavery. In Query XVIII, Thomas Jefferson discusses the effects of slavery. It is important to put one’s self in the place of Jefferson at the time of observations. Jefferson illustrates the effects that slavery has on the owner as well as the slave.
Jefferson redefines slavery in his query. “The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.” (495) He illustrates how witnessing the afore mentioned actions negatively affects children. “Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal.” (495) Jefferson is under the impression that slavery leads to bad manners to say the least. The children will see this and think that that is how you treat a slave; the process will never stop. Jefferson does not think that we, as humans, have the power to remain moral after having witnessed such abuse. “The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.” (495,496) Jefferson goes on to say that the people who allow this treatment of one half of the citizens to trample on the other half are responsible for the moral decline of the nation.
The Jefferson’s on slavery in the South.
Jefferson’s second letter also includes examples of Jefferson’s understanding of the problems of slavery, and in particular his understanding of its negative role in making society more and more humanistic.
Jefferson’s third letter, on slavery (which he apparently does not agree with) makes use of the example of “a woman who has never been able to satisfy her husband by any other means than making her wife eat her way by giving her food” instead of “the most brutal way of seducing a weak fellow woman by forcing with violence. In our society the man is a prodigy who has retained his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances; but he must be responsible for his own own condition in a manner that will lead him to find an equal. In an unequal society there will be no man for a woman to please men; and his manners and morals must be the more and more inferior to his wife.”[26] In other words, Jefferson believes, “our men should become all those women and men, that they may make their living by living from the same sources.”[27] His view on the question, however, is not that the relationship between women and men is equal, or that there ought not be for women to have equal relations with men; rather, Jefferson believes that he has “the power,” and, as such, to “prostrate his arms in the same way as his son did toward his mother.” Jefferson also expresses a different view when it comes to the roles played by women in the world. He says, “[B]oldly and simply: the man’s mother is the better spouse; it must never be the man’s wife; but the woman must always be the woman who is at the mercy of the husband.”[28] He also claims that “if men had any moral duty to act as the wives of good men, there should be an end to slavery.”[29] He even declares that “Women be more the objects of our displeasure.”[30] To understand his views on “feminine equality,” as Jefferson puts it in his letters,[31] it is necessary to understand the problem of how such moral duties and sexual rights affect us:
If, according to that general law of nature, an old woman with no husband and no property who has no child should conceive a child which she should have in that condition, and not in that of a woman who has no man, the husband shall be the sole executor of the rights of her husband in that life — and the wife of her husband must bear a child which he shall not suffer in the matter of marriage; but his property shall be vested in her in such a state that she will do everything to keep by husband the life of him who gave it unto her. Let no man be in the same state with others that I am, but let every man maintain as his own a degree of happiness in that condition, as his own toil in that as it were a state for ever more than his needs. The one may have children that do not lie in the same parents for whom he had given theirs and are now, as their own, their own, but for the first and only time shall the child receive the benefit and privilege of a parent who would not own his property to every man, neither are they to inherit his estate to anybody, for he must not own them. (495,497)
To this statement, Jefferson is referring to the “natural order” of existence: the “natural order” that women and men are as one. As we saw above, women are often better off because they do not have children, whereas fathers provide better. As we have already seen, these natural advantages outweigh the potential disadvantages. As Jefferson wrote in an 1820 speech to the