Thomas Jefferson: Liberty & Slavery

Jefferson and other members of the founding generation were deeply influenced by the 18th-century European intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment. Enlightenment philosophy stressed that liberty and equality were natural human rights. 

Colonial Americans argued that King George III and Parliament had denied them the basic rights of British citizens. Despite the pervasiveness of slavery in their society, the revolutionary generation envisioned a new American government that secured the rights and freedoms of its citizens. However, these rights and freedoms did not extend to slaves.

Jefferson's Education

Jefferson drew upon his education in law and Enlightenment philosophy when he wrote the Declaration of Independence (1776) and A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774), two treatises that grappled with liberty and slavery.

At the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, colonial Virginia’s capital, he studied mathematics, natural philosophy (science), and political philosophy with Scottish scholar William Small. Through Small, Jefferson was exposed to the leading thinkers of the Enlightenment, who believed rational thought and useful knowledge guaranteed the progress of humanity. Later, as a law student under prominent lawyer and jurist George Wythe, Jefferson absorbed the most important legal principles of the day.

A Summary View of the Rights of British America

Drawing upon Enlightenment criticism of unlawful authority, Jefferson wrote this essay for the Virginia delegation to the First Continental Congress. He accused King George III of imposing illegal control over Virginia’s political decisions, including its desire to restrict or outlaw slavery. Jefferson wrote, “The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies.”

Read a transcript of Jefferson's "A Summary View of the Rights of British America" »

The Declaration of Independence

In the Declaration, Jefferson eloquently announced the creation of the new American nation. He presented Americans as a self-governing people committed to the principles of liberty and equality in the face of British tyranny. “All men are created equal,” Jefferson wrote, and the importance of this ideal necessitated that “a people … advance from that subordination in which they have hitherto remained” in order to “institute new government.” 

But the founders’ vision did not include one-fifth of the American population: enslaved men, women, and children who labored in nearly every one of the “Free and Independent States.”

Jefferson and many other patriots believed slavery should be abolished in the new American nation. Emancipation would fulfill the ideal that "all men are created equal."

Yet over the course of his life Jefferson himself more than 610 people. He was unable to extricate himself from what he called the “deplorable entanglement” of slavery.

Jefferson spent much of his life wrestling with and proposing various solutions to this national problem. But slavery was not abolished, and he remained a slaveholder throughout his life.

Abolition of the Slave Trade

At the end of the 18th century, Jefferson and many other Americans believed that stopping the import of enslaved people from Africa and the Caribbean would hasten the end of slavery.

In 1807, three weeks before Britain abolished the Atlantic slave trade, President Jefferson signed a law prohibiting “the importation of slaves into any port or place within the jurisdiction of the United States."

Gradual Emancipation

Throughout his life, Jefferson privately endorsed a plan of gradual emancipation, by which all people born into slavery after a certain date would be freed and sent beyond the borders of the United States when they reached adulthood.

He published a short description of this plan in his book Notes on the State of Virginia.

Re-Colonization to Africa

Jefferson, along with many other Americans, combined plans for emancipation with colonization―moving freed slaves outside the U.S. "I have seen no proposition so expedient . . . as that of emancipation of those [slaves] born after a given day, and of their education and expatriation at a proper age," Jefferson wrote in 1814.

He eventually decided that Africa was the best destination.

Diffusion of Slavery

In 1819–20, the question of slavery's expansion into Missouri and other western territories was a matter of fierce political debate.

Jefferson and other southerners favored the "diffusion" of slaves in the west, believing that the spread of enslaved people over a larger geographic area would improve their situation and lead more swiftly to emancipation.

Slavery made the world Thomas Jefferson knew. The colonial society into which he was born—in 1743 in what became Albemarle County, Virginia—would not have existed without it. Enslaved people tilled his father’s tobacco fields, cured the tobacco and packed it for shipment, cooked and served the family’s meals, cared for Thomas Jefferson and his siblings, and accompanied him to the College of William and Mary. The profits from slave-based agriculture made his parents’ household and lifestyle, and his education and exposure to the colonial capital of Williamsburg, possible. Though Jefferson came to abhor slavery, his livelihood depended on it.

Enlightenment, Freedom, and Slavery

Slavery made the world Thomas Jefferson knew. The colonial society into which he was born—in 1743 in what became Albemarle County, Virginia—would not have existed without it. Enslaved people tilled his father’s tobacco fields, cured the tobacco and packed it for shipment, cooked and served the family’s meals, cared for Thomas Jefferson and his siblings, and accompanied him to the College of William and Mary. The profits from slave-based agriculture made his parents’ household and lifestyle, and his education and exposure to the colonial capital of Williamsburg, possible. Though Jefferson came to abhor slavery, his livelihood depended on it.

Racism in Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, 1781

In his only published book, Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson recorded information about the natural history, inhabitants, and political organization of Virginia, including his most extensive discussion of his views on race. Like many other 18th-century thinkers, Jefferson believed blacks were inferior to whites. He questioned whether their low status was due to inherent inferiority or to decades of degrading enslavement.

“You know that nobody wishes more ardently to see an abolition not only of the trade but of the condition of slavery: and certainly nobody will be more willing to encounter every sacrifice for that object.” -Thomas Jefferson to Brissot de Warville, February 11, 1788

Early in his public life, Jefferson was one of the first statesmen anywhere to take action to end slavery.

In 1778 he introduced a Virginia law prohibiting the importation of enslaved Africans. In 1784 he proposed a ban on slavery in the Northwest Territory, new lands ceded by the British in 1783.

The Northwest Ordinance outlined the admitting of new states into the Union and outlawed slavery in territories northwest of Kentucky and Virginia up the Mississippi River.

In Notes on the State of Virginia, published in 1785, he proposed a plan of gradual emancipation. But after 1785, while still holding his belief in the injustice of slavery, he was publicly silent.