Jefferson's Response to Darwin's Challenge about Slavery

Dear Sir:

Your last welcome favor has been duly received and I hasten to acknowledge and respond to your inquiry.  Indeed I welcome the opportunity to explain my thoughts, as well as my actions with regard to the Negro race and the blight of slavery upon my generation of Americans.  First, you have done me the honor of familiarizing yourself with my statements on the subject.  I believed then and now, with all my heart, that no man should have the ownership of another.  In my younger days I sought, by various means, to find a solution to that immoral institution.  There was no man on earth who would have been willing to sacrifice more than I to relieve us from that heavy reproach in any practicable way.  But as it was, we had the wolf by the ears, and we could neither hold him nor safely let him go.  Justice was in one scale and self-preservation in the other.  In order to make you appreciate fully the dilemma we faced, you would have to be transported to that time and place.

In my Notes on Virginia, in response to Query XIV, I set forth a plan for emancipation and migration, proposing therein a date after which no one would be born into slavery and that in due time, after educating and preparing them for independent living, all would be given passage to another colony, under the protection of the United States.  It was my belief then, and I never received sufficient evidence to change it, despite my wishes, that the deep rooted prejudices of the whites, the recollection by the blacks of past injuries, the real, natural distinctions between the races, and other circumstances would produce convulsions that would probably never end but in the extermination of one or the other race.  It is my strongest desire and my fervent prayer that now, with the wolf having been set free by the Civil War in America, I may be proven wrong.  The prospect is not made more salutary, however, by the means by which this event has come to pass.  War and its attendant sufferings can only deepen the prejudices and the hostility of the vanquished.

Before I passed from the scene of the living, it was my belief and constant counsel that until such time as a workable plan of emancipation and expatriation could be implemented, we should continue, with those whom fortune had thrown on our hands, to feed and clothe them well, to protect them from ill usage, to require only such reasonable labor as would be performed voluntarily by free men, and be led by no repugnancies to abdicate them and our duties to them.  This counsel I followed throughout my life.  In so doing, I was ever mindful of the duties imposed upon me as I saw them and as I stated in my last letter to you:  A moral instinct arising from a duty to and love for others.

When I previously wrote to you that my supreme delight was in the field of science, and that I envied your ability to devote all your energy and creativity to that noble pursuit, I was referring to the difference between the tranquility of your quest for pure knowledge and the turbulence of public life into which I could not seem to avoid being thrown.  This is not to say that your career has been devoid of controversy, by any means.  I do not doubt that the storms you have weathered to this date are not the only ones that your theories and conclusions will spawn.  But you have been able to pursue scientific knowledge for its own sake, as an end in itself, while my life in the public arena has been filled with compromise.  My first draft of the Declaration of Independence included clauses condemning slavery. They were stricken from the final document by the majority.  As a young man, I proposed legislation that would have ended the ownership of humans as property, but it did not receive sufficient support from the other delegates to the Virginia Legislature to become law.  During my presidency, we were able to enact a law, which prohibited trafficking in slavery.  This may seem a small step but it was all we were able to do at that time, given the constraints of democratic government.  I therefore was obliged to leave to the next generation the completion of the job.  One Revolution for each generation seems to be all that it can successfully handle.

Your own work, sir, speaks persuasively of the process by which species adapt to their natural surroundings and, by natural selection, the species is “improved.”  Such improvement, you lead us to believe, takes many generations.  But that improvement by alteration to surrounding conditions would be no improvement at all if the creature were to be uprooted and placed in a totally different environment.  Here he would be forced to compete for survival with members of his species who have been equally “improved” by natural selection to fit their natural surroundings and enhance their opportunities to survive and thrive.  The transported creature would be at an extreme disadvantage in the other’s environment, would it not?  This was the plight of the African, brought against his will to live in a society dominated by white men of European descent.  Indeed it was inhumane to force such people to work as slaves at the arbitrary bidding of their white masters, regardless of their own desires, of their talents or particular skills, which had been inbred through many generations of natural selection to improve their abilities to cope with life in tribal Africa.  They were not equipped, however, to take their place in the society into which they had been transplanted, without many generations of adaptation to it.  Neither were they likely to be aided in the process of adaptation by a continuation of involuntary servitude unless wise and far-seeing “Masters,” of great vision and integrity took it upon themselves to prepare those unhappy people for a time when they would be thrown into that world to survive on their own. 

These were the only alternatives which presented themselves: (1) Emancipation and
Migration; or (2) Education and Assimilation.  I failed at the former because I could not summon enough support and will among my contemporaries to make the necessary sacrifices.  As legislator, as President, and in all my public roles, I did all that I could to accomplish this goal of returning the creature to his natural habitat.   Failing that, I did only what one man could do.  I saw that those whom Providence had placed in my care were fed and clothed, expected to do only a reasonable amount of work in exchange for their sustenance, treated fairly, and that they learned skills of carpentry, masonry, animal husbandry, agriculture, and some drafting and architecture.  In this way, I hope to have aided their transition into the alien environment to which they had been transported.

As you see, I was forced to compromise in this matter, which, like so many others in life, did not lend itself to absolutes.  I could have made the grand gesture of setting free all of these people and have been praised by many righteous and well-intentioned people for that act.  In my failure to do so, however, my conscience is clear.  I followed the moral precept to which I previously referred, of deciding a course of action based upon the sum of good it would do for the whole.  I suppose this may seem to you like a long apology but I am indeed grateful for the opportunity to explain to so great a mind as yours, the factors which led to the actions taken, and those not taken as well.  I believe that your scientific training and experience will be beneficial in reaching an understanding of a time and location that you did not experience first-hand.

 If I may indulge myself further to refer back to your response to my ethical musings, I like very much the suggestion that Nature has implanted in us a moral sense (my words to you) by means of natural selection (your words) under which the species has learned that social, even altruistic, behavior is beneficial to the perpetuation of the species.  This would be in accord with my belief that a lack of the moral sense in a human being is an imperfection more degrading than any physical deformity.  But it is a deformity, and is an aberration in the species.  The cure for this infirmity, when it is found to exist, is education; and we can be said to owe to our species the development of this moral sense to do good for the whole of mankind in pursuit of its perpetuation.

I look forward with great hope for the continuation of our correspondence.  I hope that upon reflection you may continue to hold me in some measure of the esteem in which I do most sincerely hold you, my dear sir.

Respectfully,

                                                                                    Thomas Jefferson