SOURCE: “Human Nature: Variations on Equality,” in Jefferson and Nature: An Interpretation, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988, pp. 56-87.

[In the following essay, Miller discusses Jefferson's views on human nature and equality. While Jefferson believed in the moral equality of all humankind, he felt that certain groups—blacks, Indians, and women—were not culturally, physically, or intellectually equal to white males.]

As a natural historian, Jefferson distinguished one species from another by grouping individuals according to their “prominent and invariable” similarities. On this basis, the basis of comparative anatomy, the distinguishing nature of the human species was clear. But the important question was not What are humans physically? but What is human nature itself? What seems most invariable about people is precisely their variability, the great range of individual and social differences among mankind. These variations in temperament and culture unfortunately make it a difficult, perhaps impossible, task to define “human nature” with much assurance or consensus. But such obstacles have seldom hindered pronouncements on the subject, and they did not hinder Jefferson.

As with physical nature, Jefferson never developed his ideas on human nature systematically, and he avoided many of the theoretical difficulties of the ideas that he did consider. His views on humankind have a tenor to them but not a rigor. Entering the discussion on human nature at several points, he wrote on the two most important and intertwined issues of the day, slavery and race. He took positions on human aggression and human affections, on the family, and on the role of women in society. He offered an environmentalist key to human nature in the United States. He explored the ways in which society might improve upon natural human traits through a code of manners to facilitate our conduct and by education to develop our talents and virtues. In considering most of these issues, Jefferson confronted, though at times he notably evaded, the axiom that he himself had penned, the “self-evident truth” that all men are created equal.¹

Equality is the central theme of Jefferson's view of human nature. As Merrill Peterson has stated, “Jefferson considered all men equals in the order of nature. … All men possessed an innate moral sense, the faculty of reason and essentially the same biological needs. Hence the doctrine of equality was grounded in the facts of natural history.”² But if equality is the theme, it is one that is not always clearly heard. Moreover, Jefferson's other lines of argument are as much counterpoint as variations. His “equality” is continually hedged with qualifications—about race, gender, talents, and the right to political opinions. In the abstract he appreciated at least some human variety:

Would the world be more beautiful were all our faces alike? were our tempers, our talents, our tastes, our forms, our wishes, our aversions and pursuits cast exactly in the same mould? If no varieties existed in the animal, vegetable, or mineral creation, but all move strictly uniform, catholic, and orthodox, what a world of physical and moral monotony would it be!³

Avoiding monotony is not the same as welcoming differences, however. “Minor differences of opinion,” he wrote, “like differences of face, are a law of our nature, and should be viewed with the same tolerance.”⁴ But these are only minor differences. When innate differences became major, they could upset social stability. In that case, Jefferson sometimes hoped to blot them out, either by altering the habits of those who practiced them (American Indians), expelling people from the community (emancipated blacks), or denying admission to those who disagreed with the nation's politics (antirepublicans). Even so, equality is the dominant theme, and because humans are the same natural species, there is, in general, a “nature” common to all of us.

Jefferson assumed that central to human nature is that man is a social creature. Man is “formed for society and endowed by nature with those dispositions which fit him for society.”⁵ Small islands are by nature without human habitation, he once said, because “man, being a gregarious animal, will not remain but where there can be a sufficient herd of his own kind to satisfy his social propensities.”⁶

Within society, Jefferson's position was summed up by Robert Burns at the close of the Scottish Enlightenment: “The social, friendly, honest man, / Whate'er he be, / ‘Tis he fulfils great Nature's plan, / And none but he!”⁷ With the significant exception that blacks and whites would not be able to live harmoniously in America, Jefferson also believed that nature created mankind not merely societal but also sociable. He realized that humans had powerful emotions that could lead to unhappiness or even destruction. But humans were also endowed with reason and moral sense, an innate sense of justice, compassion, generosity—traits more than sufficient to assure our happiness.⁸ Such was human nature that Jefferson seldom lacked grounds for optimism. Or such was his optimism that he claimed these traits to be part of human nature.

When human beings acted contrary to this vision, and they did so dismayingly often, Jefferson inclined either to hold the environment responsible—bad habits built up over years by the people or their government—or to treat the delict as an exception, an extreme in the range of human conduct.⁹ Nature thus provided a norm, and largely because of the American experience (always excepting slavery and race), the norm was cooperation.

An obvious challenge to this comforting view of human nature was warfare. With Hobbes in mind, Jefferson once noted that “some philosophers, observing [warfare] to be so general in this world, have mistaken it for the natural, instead of the abusive state of man.”¹⁰ If war had been the norm, then warfare would be natural, too. But this, despite much evidence, Jefferson could not accept. The “ferociousness of man” was simply among the “perversities of our nature.”¹¹ When war did occur, Jefferson rationalized it by one of two means, both applicable specifically to Europe. Either it had taken place in an environment oppressed by unnatural social institutions or it actually had some benefits. Europe, he once said, was a region “where war seems to be the natural state of man,” but in America war could be avoided, because the benevolent environment of the New World would produce social institutions to ameliorate our unnatural dispositions.¹² Or, if environmental differences did not explain war—and Jefferson once wrote that “human nature is the same on every side of the Atlantic and will be alike influenced by the same causes”¹³—perhaps some good could be said for it after all. When war came to Europe, perhaps it offered a Malthusian benefit. Since no animal but man works to destroy his own species, “we must conclude that it is in man alone that nature [in the form of warfare] has been able to find a sufficient barrier against the too great multiplication of other animals and of man himself.”¹⁴

While warfare was the most important unpassed test of Jefferson's sanguine view, it was only an example of a central issue that he was no more successful resolving than others have been. What is the effect of the environment on our presumed innate nature? By which of two kinds of nature, innate or environmental, universal or particular, is mankind either combative or friendly? No one of Jefferson's turn of mind would choose one exclusively and reject the other. Nor was he willing to settle the matter merely by saying that it is innate in humans to be greatly affected by external nature. Rather, he struck one or another balance between the two “natures” as they appeared to fit his facts or his hopes. On the one hand, he was a universalist. Human nature consists of certain characteristics that are the same everywhere. This was the pattern of human nature modeled on Newton and natural philosophy. On the other hand, he was an environmentalist. A pluralist by the evidence of his senses, he believed that humans differ from one another because their environments differ. On this account his guide to human nature was Montesquieu.

A single human nature may have been the greater aim of the Enlightenment and Jefferson, but if only because it takes more space to discuss variety than it does to point out uniformity, Jefferson's writings appear to emphasize environmentalism. With respect to his own “country,” for instance, his indefatigable investigations led to the expected conclusion: “When we consider how much climate contributes to the happiness of our condition by the fine sensation it excites and the productions it is the parent of, we have reason to value highly the accident of birth in such a one as that of Virginia.”¹⁵ But his environmentalist sensitivity was far wider than his own habitat and personal preference.

For a European friend, Jefferson attempted to correlate human nature according to region of the United States, asserting that the traits he noted were so accurate that in their blending from north to south “an observing traveler … may always know his latitude by the character of the people among whom he finds himself.”¹⁶ In this field guide to human nature in America (see table), Jefferson lists nine parallel traits

TRAITS OF AMERICANS

NORTHERNERS

cool

sober

laborious

persevering

independent

jealous of their own liberties and just to others

interested

chicaning

superstitious and hypocritical in their religion

SOUTHERNERS

fiery

voluptuary

indolent

unsteady

independent

zealous for their own liberties, but trampling on those of others

generous

candid

without attachment or pretensions to any religion but that of the heart

Source: TJ to marquis de Chastellux, 2 September 1785, BC. VIII. 468. The emphasis for “independent” is supplied.

for the northern and southern states. Eight of these traits form pairs of opposites. But the middle one, the peculiarly American and Jeffersonian one, is the same for both regions: independence. The lesson is that since independence does not distinguish one part of the country from another, it is the unifying national characteristic, distinguishing human nature in the United States from human nature in the rest of the world.

Except for independence, Jefferson claims that human nature among (white) Americans varies with predictable regularity according to the environment, in this case the latitude they live in. The eye is drawn at once to two southern characteristics: slavery is treated not among the vices but as a qualification of a virtue; and southern religion is disarmingly presented as Jefferson's own understanding of natural morality. Although he does not explicitly attribute all the differences between North and South to differences in climate, this is a fair inference from the comments with which he qualified the table. He conceded that the warmth of (Tidewater?) Virginia “unnerves and unmans both body and mind.” He noted that “peculiar circumstances” have interfered with the character expected for New York on the basis of climate alone. And he remarked that Pennsylvania, while too cold for his own comfort, was nevertheless an optimum environment, because there “the two characters seem to meet and blend to form a people free from the extremes both of vice and virtue.”¹⁷

That Jefferson knew his mirrorlike scheme was fanciful when applied with any specificity is evident from observations he prepared only a few months later. Explaining why Rhode Island differed in character from Connecticut, he affirmed that the reason was environmental but that latitude had nothing to do with it. Rhode Island, he said, was a seaport state and therefore dominated by merchants. In Connecticut, a state with a large “interior country,” farmers predominated, and farmers are more virtuous than those who live by the sea.¹⁸ This is environmentalism that is both more sophisticated and more true to Jefferson's temperament. It defines environment not by latitude but by expanse. It then ties that to political economy and, finally, derives social character from political economy.¹⁹

Jefferson's most energetic effort to link environmentalism and human nature was his attempt to justify America against European claims that the New World was inferior to the Old.²⁰ He was moved to enter this controversy out of a blend of patriotism and scientific curiosity, the former certainly the more significant provocation. Comparisons between the New World and the Old had been made since the earliest European exploration of the Western Hemisphere. The comparisons began with climate, passed through the vegetable and animal kingdoms, and culminated in human beings. Jefferson's advantages in battling his European adversaries were, first, his knowledge, resources, and incentive accurately to depict the true condition of nature in North America and, second, the success of the American Revolution, which inevitably diminished the cogency of European attacks, most of which had preceded the war and implicitly assumed Britain's superiority to the colonies.²¹

Jefferson chose as his chief antagonist the comte de Buffon, not because Buffon's charges against the New World were the most extreme, but because his reputation was the greatest. Jefferson respected Buffon—“the best informed Naturalist who has ever written”—and was therefore willing, indeed gratified, to use Buffon's own figures on European animals to refute the charges of American inferiority in that realm. Defining “inferiority” as “animals of lower weight,” Jefferson compiled an extensive list of animals in three tables—animals native to both continents, animals native to only one, and animals domesticated in both. He then demonstrated that on the basis of comparative weights, the American animals were not inferior. They at least held their own against the European.²²

It is easy to read into Jefferson's discussion a sense of having reversed the argument of the Europeans: that far from being degenerate with respect to fauna, the New World was in fact superior to the Old. But Jefferson does not assert this and wants only to show that the New World was not inferior. Equality was enough. Jefferson's aim is not based solely on modesty or difficulty of proof, however. By aiming only so far as parity between the hemispheres, he leaves the two halves of the globe similar to one another, as if nature had endowed the continents equally—“as if both sides [of the Atlantic] were not warmed by the same genial sun; as if a soil of the same chemical composition was less capable … ; as if the fruits and grains from that soil and sun yielded a less rich chyle.”²³ He thus permitted a uniform concept of nature to reign even while showing off an environmentalist one.

Parity between the hemispheres was relatively easy to demonstrate if all that was needed was quantitative data about animals. The greater challenge was human beings. Was human nature different and defective in the New World? Jefferson's probes into this subject led him into complexity and controversy that have not yet diminished. Here, too, his knowledge was much greater than that of the European naturalists, though it was far from sufficient (a point he recognized). What was more important, his interpretation of the data had to contend with pronounced personal and cultural predilections.²⁴

As to his own kind of human beings, white Americans, Jefferson was plain-spoken and confident. European colonists, later citizens of the United States, displayed as much natural genius as could reasonably be expected in a recently settled and sparsely populated land. While a Shakespeare under these circumstances was unlikely, America had produced in George Washington a refutation of “that wretched philosophy … which would have arranged him among the degeneracies of nature.” And there was Franklin, “than whom no one of the present age has made … more ingenious solutions of the phenomena of nature.”²⁵ As he generalized later, there are “seeds of genius which nature sows with even hand through every age and country, and which need only soil and season to germinate.”²⁶ Not only did the United States raise up talent in individuals but the health and growth of the population as a whole matched that of Europe. As the American Philosophical Society under Jefferson hoped to show from the census of 1800, “the duration of human life in this portion of the earth will be found at least equal to what it is in any other, and that its population increases with a rapidity unequalled in all others.”²⁷

More difficult for Jefferson to treat was the nature of the American Indian.²⁸ Buffon had written that the Indian was no exception “to the general fact that all living nature has become smaller” in America.²⁹ Smaller meant inferior, and the Indian's inferiority was complete: he was feeble, insensitive, cowardly, without vivacity or intellectual activity, and—the cause of it all—defective in sexual capacity. “Nature, by refusing him the power of love,” Jefferson quoted Buffon, “has treated him worse and lowered him deeper than any animal.” “For the honor of human nature”—“for the honor of American nature,” he might have added—Jefferson was pleased to tell the world this was not so.³⁰

In defending the Indian, Jefferson relied on both universal and environmental conceptions of nature, showing temperaments of both an Enlightenment scientist and an American nationalist. The tangle into which he was led by these mixtures of arguments and temperaments is evident in his explanations of the Indians' bravery and the number of children borne by Indian women.

The idea of bravery among the Indians, Jefferson says, is not, as with the whites, based on valor in the field, with its high risk of injury. Bravery to the Indian means the destruction of an enemy by stratagem, which risks no injury to oneself. How did the Indians come by their conception? At first Jefferson says through their education, an environmental supplement to their original nature. But then he confesses that he is not sure: “Or perhaps this [stealth] is nature, while it is education which teaches us to honor force more than finesse.”³¹

The same ambivalence appears in his explanation why Indian women bear fewer children than white women. The original explanation, in the first edition of Notes on Virginia, left the matter open: “Whether their raising fewer children proceeds from scarcity of food at certain seasons, from the labours and hazards to which their women are exposed, or from a sterility peculiar to their race, seems not well ascertained.”³² Not many months later, however, he had made up his mind and chose environmentalism: “They raise fewer children than we do. The causes of this are to be found, not in a difference of nature, but of circumstance.”³³ Here as elsewhere (but far less so with Afro-Americans), Jefferson posited human equality by nature. But he was pressed by either evidence or cultural assumptions to cope with either difference or inequality. Which was truly natural, the theme or the variations? How does one know?

When he was not ambivalent, Jefferson adopted either of two strategies regarding differences between Indians and whites. The first was to deny the initial European claim, for instance, on the Indians' affection towards children, their friendship, or their “vivacity and activity of mind.”³⁴ The second was to explain the differences as a concomitant of the Indians' stage of civilization. That all societies pass through the same stages of development depending on their mode of subsistence was an accepted doctrine in eighteenth-century thinking. Skirting the dispute between environmental and innate nature, it also makes some anthropological sense. Jefferson accepted a form of it, particularly in his public policy of urging the Indians to give up one stage—hunting—and move quickly, willingly or not, to the next stage—farming.³⁵ At the end of his remarks against Buffon, however, Jefferson merely noted that it had taken northern Europe sixteen centuries after the introduction of the alphabet “before a Newton could be formed,” so we must not yet condemn the Indians “as wanting genius.” There are indeed “varieties in the race of man,” he said, but the species itself is the same everywhere. One may doubt, he concluded, “whether nature has enlisted herself as a Cis or Trans-Atlantic partisan.”³⁶

Like the animals, the Indians illustrated the excellence of nature on the American continent. And since nature was no partisan between continents, and human nature was everywhere the same, the amalgamating of the white and red races in America was perfectly acceptable. It was not central to this argument that amalgamation also satisfied the needs of Jeffersonian farmers eager to make use of Indian hunting lands or that it led to the destruction of Indian culture: “The ultimate point of rest and happiness for them is to let our settlements and theirs meet and blend together, to intermix, and become one people … [T]his is what the natural progress of things will … bring on, and it will be better to promote than to retard it.”³⁷ In speeches to Indians (whom he always called “my children”) Jefferson assured his listeners that white Americans had become like themselves, “grown out of this land,” and were thus “united in one family with our red brethren.” “You will mix with us by marriage,” he said. “Your blood will run in our veins, and will spread with us over this great island.”³⁸

Jefferson's presumptions about Indians—that they and the whites were by nature the same, that any apparent deficiencies of the Indians were offset by superior traits or could be accounted for by the environment or stage of development—and his hope that the two branches of the human race would eventually become one people contrast starkly with his views on Afro-Americans. No greater flaw has been found in Jefferson's character, in his statements, and in his actions or in his failure to act than with regard to blacks and slavery. Since he owned slaves all his life, one may either charge him with a hypocrisy unmatched among American moralists or accept his anguish over slavery as real. Even in the latter case, because of what he so eloquently wrote about equality, more has been expected of him than of any other American of his time. If so, the disappointment in Jefferson felt by abolitionists in the nineteenth century and students today is a measure as much of their hopes as of their dismay. But the flaws remain, and despite his torment Jefferson was unable to absolve himself or lessen the agonies of later generations.³⁹

The overriding issue to be explored is exactly the relation between slavery and race. Had a race been enslaved because it was inferior, or held to be so? or had a race acquired the appearance of inferiority, or become inferior, because it was enslaved? How, in short, did blacks come to be what Jefferson nearly always saw them as, inferior to whites? Was it by nature of the race or by the environment of slavery? And if by environment, was it slavery by itself, or slavery peculiar to the United States?

On a crucial point Jefferson never deviated: slavery violated the natural right of humans to liberty. On this point it is instructive to contrast his views with those of Aristotle, whose writings on society he much admired. Aristotle had seen that slavery was practiced throughout the Mediterranean area, and he therefore assumed that it was a practice natural to mankind. But if slavery is natural to mankind, the uncertain reasoning continued, persons must exist who are “natural slaves.” Aristotle recognized that not all slaves in social fact were slaves by nature, but the latter really existed. Slaves by nature were people of unusually diminished rational and moral capacity, not fit for citizenship in the state.⁴⁰ Jefferson's contrary position, against slavery by nature, is illuminated by this argument. First, the natural slaves whom Aristotle hypothesized were defective individuals in the mass of mankind, while the social slaves whom Jefferson dealt with were known by the color of their skin. It would have been obvious to Jefferson that since in the United States only African blacks were enslaved, and enslaved without having been judged individually as wanting in reason, Aristotle's argument was unrealistic.⁴¹

Next, three powerful traditions of moral equality had developed since the age of Aristotle, undermining his argument and affecting Jefferson's. The first was that of Roman law, influenced by the Stoics. According to it, slavery might exist by the law of nations and by domestic positive law, but it violated the law of nature. In this tradition, in a court case of 1770 concerning slavery Jefferson invoked a “natural law of liberty,” both on its own and as an aid to interpreting the positive law of Virginia.⁴² Second, no matter how reticent Jefferson was about religious doctrine, he was affected by the equalitarian ethos of Christianity. Not only deism pronounced that all men were created equal. Third, the emphasis on equality in contemporary natural rights doctrine necessarily applied to the holding of slaves in America. This is what Jefferson alluded to in his list of American traits in asserting that southerners were “zealous for their own liberties, but trampling on those of others.”⁴³

Finally, unlike Aristotle, Jefferson lived in a world where slavery was not practiced everywhere, including, in his lifetime, in much of the United States. There was, in addition, an active American opposition to slavery, especially among the Quakers, whose social principles he held in esteem.⁴⁴ And knowledge of his own slaves provided convincing personal evidence that slavery existed by custom, law, and force, and not by nature. On every count, then, the Aristotelian doctrine that slavery was natural was unthinkable in Jefferson's intellectual universe.

If slavery violated all the imperatives of nature—natural liberty, natural equality, natural law, and natural right—why did Jefferson both maintain slaves himself and not work actively to bring slavery to an end? Several approaches to this central tragedy in Jefferson's moral life have been proposed. One is that he could not see how to extricate himself from his social and economic setting. This is the argument from environmentalism, personal satisfaction, cultural conservativism, or economic class. Another approach is to recognize that he tried, perhaps through the 1780s, to find “acceptable” ways to end slavery in Virginia, but when he was unsuccessful, he became discouraged and no longer spoke out. A third possibility, to be treated shortly, is that he found African Americans inferior to European Americans and that this racism gave enough support to slavery to retain it, short of emancipation followed by compulsory removal.

When a person leads as manifestly a split life as Jefferson did with regard to slavery, this may well be evident in his use of language. So it is with Jefferson's use of “nature” in writing about slavery. There can be no doubt that by every test of Jeffersonian thinking, slavery violated the requirements of nature. But although he spoke of the institution as a “great political and moral evil,” a “moral and political depravity,” an “abominable crime,” and a “hideous blot,” he nearly never stated in simple terms that American chattel slavery was a violation of natural right or natural law.⁴⁵ He got only as close as “human nature.”

In his Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774) he speaks of the “natural right” of the colonists against Britain, but he characterizes the slave trade only as an “infamous practice” that violates the “rights of human nature.”⁴⁶ In his draft for the Declaration of Independence, in a clause that the Continental Congress deleted, he charged the king with having “waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty.” But these are not the same as natural rights. In Notes on the State of Virginia he said he looked forward to the time of a “complete emancipation of human nature” but did not say that slavery violated natural law or right.⁴⁷ On the eve of the abolition of the slave trade, when he was president, he still spoke, not of natural rights, but of the “violation of human rights which have been so long continued on the unoffending inhabitants of Africa.”⁴⁸ Human rights are presumably natural rights, but Jefferson again avoided the precious term. He edged up to it after he left the presidency, but circuitously and in a parenthetical phrase. Speaking against the impressment of sailors by the British navy, he wrote privately: “And has not the British seaman, as much as the African, been reduced to this bondage by force, in flagrant violation of his own consent, and of his natural right in his own person?”⁴⁹

What explains this unaccustomed shyness with the language of nature? A likely explanation is that Jefferson found “natural right” and the others so precious that he could not admit that he himself stood in violation of the truths they conveyed. “Nature” had become so sacred to him that “moral depravity” was a comfortable term by comparison. It may be, too, that Jefferson hesitated to denominate slavery a violation of natural law or right because he also recognized natural rights on the side of slave owners, and natural rights should hardly be in conflict with one another.

One possible conflict in this area was that of a natural right to slaves as property. But Jefferson rejected it, if only obliquely. He was not among those who believed that property could be acquired by natural law in the first place and maintained by natural right. Therefore, while acknowledging that a “right of property is founded in our natural wants,” it was not to be enjoyed through violating “similar rights of other sensible beings,” that is, the natural rights of Africans.⁵⁰

But if a right to property was not a countervailing natural right, what about a right to self-preservation? Here Jefferson did have an argument for retaining slavery, at least an implicit one. He hoped for emancipation, but only if it were gradual and, more telling, only if it were accompanied by the compulsory removal of freedmen from the United States. In the absence of appropriate emancipation, however, he would retain slavery on the basis of a natural law of self-preservation. In blunt language (which still avoided “nature”): “Justice is in one scale, self-preservation in the other.”⁵¹ Unfortunately for the slaveholders, the natural law of self-preservation on their side was met by the equal logic of a natural right of rebellion on the other. No one expressed the probability of a slave revolt more unnervingly than Jefferson himself. In a plea containing a variety of uses of “nature,” it is the unprecedented evocation of the supernatural that is the best indication of his distress:

If a slave can have a country in this world, it must be any other in preference to that … in which he must lock up the faculties of his nature … [C]an the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest. But it is impossible to be temperate and to pursue this subject through the various considerations of policy, of morals, of history natural and civil.⁵²

Throughout his life Jefferson offered one argument after another about race or slavery. But to no avail. No matter where he turned, he had to face what his granddaughter wrote after her honeymoon journey to New England. Despite “such great gifts of Nature” as the South's soil and climate, she said, “the canker of slavery … diseases the whole body” of the region. In reply, the eighty-two-year-old Jefferson conceded: “One fatal stain deforms what nature had bestowed on us of her fairest gifts.”⁵³

But was the fatal stain slavery, or was it race? Was the problem of slavery unsolved because of the problem of race? What was the problem of race? In handling these questions Jefferson could have looked to two comparative sources he knew well, ancient slavery and contemporary Indians. When he tried the first, he decided that because slaves in antiquity were not black and antiquity had some superior humans in slavery, it was race rather than slavery that accounted for inferior blacks in America. He did not ask how the ancient and modern slave societies differed or how color itself had led to the psychosocial branding of American slaves as inferior. Regarding the Indians, he simply ignored them when it came to understanding Afro-Americans.

To follow Jefferson's thinking about race, it is necessary to understand the eighteenth-century dispute over the origins of mankind. Although he never addressed the controversy directly, his views are not difficult to construct. The dispute was between a monogenetic and a polygenetic origin. It asked whether humans were originally one race (or one species, or one genus) and only afterwards, because of the environment, came to look and act as different groups or whether mankind was originally created in the racial divisions in which we find ourselves today. In short, what is meant by saying that separate races exist by nature?

The answer to this question, if it could be found, was of great moment in Jefferson's age. It would affect the validity of a portion of Christian belief, as well as the orderliness of the natural world and the details of the doctrine of a chain of being.⁵⁴ Jefferson was not interested in the theory of a single creation of mankind from the point of view of Christian doctrine. But because his own Creator and the single act of creation for all nature were also theological ideas, he presumably supported monogenesis on theological grounds. The scientific justification for monogenesis likewise appealed to him. A degree of imagination was required to overcome what the senses saw—a variety of races. But the effort was worthwhile because a single-species origin of man retained an order in universal nature and left to particular nature the accident of racial diversity. Monogenesis also accorded with the economy of nature. Why posit multiple creation when no facts are contradicted by a single creation?

The idea of a chain of being raised two problems with respect to the races of man. First, what defined a link in the chain? were the races sufficiently separate to be different links rather than simply variations of a single link called Homo sapiens? By the accepted scientific definition, two individuals belonged to the same species if their offspring were fertile. Since the races of mankind could intermix for reproductive purposes, they were by this account only varieties of the same species and therefore a single link in the chain. Second, one link or more, the very idea of the chain of being contributed to thinking about differences between races. Against this, however, the hierarchical ordering of the chain was ill-suited to an equalitarian America, and Jefferson did say that if blacks should be found intellectually inferior to whites, no matter what the source, whether innate nature or the environment of slavery, such inferiority should be “no measure of their rights.”⁵⁵

But accepting the monogenetic origins of race did less to ameliorate Jefferson's racialism than might be supposed. He simply transferred the issue and its problems from species to “varieties in the race of man, distinguished by their powers both of body and mind” and let different races be different varieties.⁵⁶ At the level of varieties, it is still helpful, however, to contrast the views of Jefferson with the views of two northerners who also maintained the monogenetic doctrine, Benjamin Rush, Jefferson's scientific and humanitarian friend in Philadelphia, and Samuel Stanhope Smith, a political opponent but a respected scientist and theologian.⁵⁷

The northerners were far more disposed than the Virginian to explain racial variations by external rather than internal nature. All three men faced what Smith called “the apparent dullness of the negro,” but the northerners had some distance from a slave society and knew free Negroes, while Jefferson largely inhabited the world of plantation slavery. It was as if the environment itself had determined whether a person held an environmentalist theory.

In 1787 Smith declared that an “atrocious despotism” first in Africa and then in the American South condemned Negroes “to perpetual sterility of genius.”⁵⁸ In the same year, in Notes on Virginia, Jefferson argued the opposite course. Though he left formally undecided the ultimate source of racial difference—“whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstance”—he nearly always claimed that differences between the two varieties of the human species were differences “by nature.”⁵⁹

Jefferson never suggested about blacks, or in the context of slavery, as Smith did, that “genius … requires freedom” to flourish. Rather than focus on the environment of blacks under slavery in America, he asserted universal characteristics. He wrote about the “real distinctions which nature has made,” “the difference [in color] fixed in nature,” “physical distinctions proving a difference of race,” “inferiority … not the effect merely of their condition of life,” “nature … which has produced the distinction,” and the need to keep the races “as distinct as nature has formed them.”⁶⁰ After language such as this, few differences between the races were left to be attributed to the environment.

Jefferson's recital of natural racial characteristics, it should be said, carried with it no intention to justify slavery. Its place and purpose in the Notes was to support legislation that would emancipate slaves contingent on their being colonized outside the United States. Since forcible, even induced, expatriation would normally be unthinkable to Jefferson, his argument understandably emphasized natural rather than environmental differences between the races: people who were different from one another by nature ought to be, and should want to be, in different homelands.⁶¹

Jefferson pronounced on the particular traits of blacks in no well-ordered fashion, but it appears that he meant to cover characteristics of the race under two triparte schemes: first, under body, heart, and mind; second, as a subset of mind. Of these categories the body was the most obvious, and to Jefferson it was also the most obviously defective. Blacks simply lacked beauty. Their countenance, he claimed, was one of “eternal monotony.” Jefferson was certain that blacks had a high degree of sexual ardor, which was a matter of the body, but this was not accompanied by the proper disposition of the heart, “a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation.”⁶²

When he turned to the heart directly, by which he meant morality, Jefferson found Negroes generally to rank high. The reason was that blacks, like all human beings—even unbeautiful and unintelligent ones—were endowed with a natural moral sense. Praising the blacks' integrity, benevolence, gratitude, and “unshaken fidelity” (presumably to their masters), Jefferson excused any disposition on their part to act immorally (for instance by stealing) as the predictable consequence of enslavement.⁶³ Since morality was a natural characteristic, environmental influences might affect how it was realized in action, but they could never eradicate it. Why the environment could account for deviations in the effects of human nature with regard to morality yet not with regard to the mind or the body Jefferson did not say.

Jefferson next assessed the intelligence of blacks according to the Baconian faculties of memory, reason, and imagination. He held that the memory of blacks was as good as that of whites; that their imagination, except in music, was deplorable; and that they were “in reason much inferior.” Since reason for Jefferson was the highest distinguishing quality of intelligence, and intelligence the highest trait of human beings, the low grade that the blacks made in it tended to push them near the outer edge of the circle of the human species. Indeed, Jefferson was sometimes so concerned to confirm his judgment that blacks were inferior in intelligence that he attacked evidence of black talent as spurious and the undeniable productions of black writers as mediocre.⁶⁴

Even though Jefferson clearly believed that blacks were intellectually inferior to whites at the time, he sometimes held out the possibilities that he had not gathered enough data or that improved circumstances would result in higher-quality reasoning. Acknowledging the receipt of Benjamin Banneker's almanac, he replied to the black surveyor: “Nobody wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren talents equal to those of the other colors of men, and that the appearance of a want of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence, both in Africa and America.”⁶⁵ Yet in the face of his detailed and flat statements about natural differences between races, neither such a note, which would hardly have been sent if it had not praised, nor the caution with which Jefferson concluded his discussion in Notes on Virginia—“the opinion that [blacks] are inferior in the faculties of reason and imagination, must be hazarded with great diffidence”—is unlikely to impress many readers.⁶⁶

What, then, can be made of Jefferson's views on nature, slavery, and race? First, slavery in any form violated man's rights by nature, rights based on the equal moral creation of all human beings. Second, blacks did not seem to be equally endowed with whites in body and mind. This condition could be explained according to either of two understandings of nature. Between them Jefferson strongly tended towards the view of internal nature, which held that blacks were inherently inferior. But he acknowledged that external nature might account for it. External nature in this case did not include the natural environment of America, but it did include the African background, about which Jefferson knew nothing; the consequences on blacks of the attitudes of whites; and above all, slavery, of whose effects Jefferson was by turns acutely conscious and incomprehensibly neglectful. Not choosing between the two ideas of nature, however, his inquiry into what human nature was for blacks remained unanswered.

The contrast is so great between Jefferson's distaste for Negroes and his affection for American Indians, who by any anthropological guideline were culturally no more like whites than the Africans were, that a final word needs to be said on the comparison.⁶⁷ The two races were distinguishable to Jefferson by three important characteristics: enslavement, indigenousness, and skin color. While Jefferson never blamed slavery on the slaves, he often seemed more concerned with the impact of slavery on the whites than with a life of enslavement for the blacks. His loathing of slavery was genuine, but it rested more on philosophy than on empathy. In the case of the Indians, however, he overflowed with empathy, and the trait he most admired was the opposite of enslavement, the Indians' sense of freedom (as he understood it). Second, the Indians were natives of America. They had original possession of the land and therefore certain rights regarding it that Afro-Americans could never attain. Further, Jefferson identified the human nature of America with its natural history, thus establishing a bond with the Indians that was inconceivable with the Africans.

But it was skin color, the physical emblem of the difference between the two nonwhite races, that concerned Jefferson most. He recognized color as a natural, not accidental, difference between blacks and Indians. But because of the largely uncomplimentary views of blacks built up through Western history; perhaps an ordinary human disposition to be uneasy about what appears the opposite of one's own condition; the impossibility of disentangling race from slavery in his own experience and therefore the possible transference of the degrading results of slavery to the color of the enslaved race; and his personal penchant to simplify reality into two positions, Jefferson was a ready carrier of racialism, if not of racism. To all of this the Indians stood in stark contrast. Often ennobled in both Enlightenment and Romantic thought, they were not enslaved, not aliens, and—crucially—not black. With respect to the Indians, Jefferson saw “fine mixtures of red and white,” and he took literally, or thought white Americans should make literal, the idea of “red brothers”—under a great white father.⁶⁸ But as to blacks, “Their amalgamation with the other color produces a degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence in the human character can innocently consent.”⁶⁹

Thus with regard to human nature and race, as also with regard to much of physical nature, Jefferson had only the most limited success in looking beyond his own horizon. He failed seriously to consider the comparative situations of Indians and blacks, scarcely undertaking to contrast the freedom of the one to the slavery of the other, the indigenous habitation of the one to the uprooted life of the other, the social cohesion of the one to the deliberate social fragmenting of the other, the independent government of the one to the absence of any civic bonds of the other. Unfortunately, such undisputed differences did not impress themselves on his mind, and his inadequate use of particular nature to understand race never matched his liberal use of universal nature to understand slavery.

Skin color is one of the two large, recognizable, and permanent kinds of distinctions that exist among humans. The other is gender. Jefferson devoted far more thought to the matter of race than he did to the possible separate natures of men and women, and he was even more a creature of his time and place on the subject of gender than he was on race. His views on gender differences must be drawn as much from the facts of his biography as from the scattered comments in his writing.⁷⁰ The death of his wife when she was thirty-three and of his younger daughter at age twenty-five were the great sorrows of his life, strengthening his sense of the importance of family and his own responsibility for the proper upbringing of children. He raised his two daughters and presided over the raising of most of his grandchildren. To judge from his letters, there were few women whose intelligence commanded his respect. These included his elder daughter Martha, Abigail Adams, and Madame de Tessé, a relative of Lafayette's, with whom he shared a love of botany.⁷¹ For the most part it can be said of Jefferson that he was affectionate towards female relatives, flirtatious with Maria Cosway, whom he met with her husband in Paris, and cordial with all others.

Jefferson kept company with his class in Virginia in holding that human society was divided into two realms, public and private; that men were the inhabitants of the public realm, and women of the private; and that nature had ordained it this way. About women and the family, in contrast to the races of mankind, Jefferson found no moral puzzles and engaged in no intellectual disputes. About the family certainly it was not possible to dispute Locke, who wrote that parents were “wisely ordained by nature to love their children.”⁷² For Jefferson, the domestic sphere posed no challenges. “By a law of our nature,” he wrote, “we cannot be happy without the endearing connections of a family.”⁷³ And once a family existed, it was best characterized by the vow that he and his daughter Martha regularly exchanged with one another, that of “natural affection.”⁷⁴

Jefferson remarked on natural affection in a number of contexts. He noted that the precivilized practices of infanticide or selling a child into slavery violated the law under which parents show natural affection for their children.⁷⁵ He recommended King Lear, a play surely about natural affection and the play by Shakespeare that uses the word “nature” more than any other, as impressing “a lively and lasting sense of filial duty … on the mind of a son or daughter.”⁷⁶ In calling for an end to primogeniture, he wrote that the subdivision of property among one's children should “go hand in hand with the natural affections of the human mind.”⁷⁷ On his return to Monticello after the presidency, Jefferson told his neighbors that he had come home to enjoy “the endearments of family love, which nature has given us all.”⁷⁸

Within the family, Jefferson expected the woman to bear and raise children, educate them, superintend the household, and provide comfort for her husband. The first of these roles was poetically put by Jefferson the botanist to his granddaughter: “The flowers come forth like the belles of the day, have their short reign of beauty and splendor, and retire like them to the more interesting office of reproducing their like.”⁷⁹

Jefferson's stay in France prompted comments, often quite strong, on a natural place for men and women in the economy. When he saw men taking on tasks he considered assigned by nature to women (shoemaking, upholstering, housecleaning) and the reverse (women becoming porters, sailors, and farmers), he called it “a great derangement in the order of things,” words he might have used to describe a river that had reversed its normal direction of flow.⁸⁰ In politics it was the same. It was nature, Jefferson claimed, that “marked infants and the weaker sex for the protection, rather than the direction of government.”⁸¹ Because of their natural weakness in both body and mind, Jefferson presumed that women would neither vote nor hold public office. He therefore criticized the influence of women in French politics, satisfied that in Virginia such influence did not “extend beyond the domestic line.”⁸² As he candidly noted once to his secretary of the treasury, “The appointment of a woman to public office is an innovation for which the public is not prepared, nor am I.”⁸³

Jefferson's ill-digested observations about women paralleled his confusion about both Indians and blacks regarding which “nature” one should give credence to, an original nature or a developed one, a universal nature or a particular one. Condemning “barbarous people” for submitting their women to drudgery, Jefferson held that “civilization … replaces women in the enjoyment of their natural equality.”⁸⁴ But, one asks, why should people wish to escape their “natural equality”? Perhaps the answer is that there exist universal natural goals that, attainable through the stages of civilization, are more basic than particular natural conditions. It is the goal rather than the condition that is more true to the meaning of nature. Nature as environment is an obstacle in the way of realizing innate human nature, and some features of original human nature must be revised if we are to reach our potential.

Not only for women but for society, civilization becomes responsible for the institutions that enable the best in human nature to prosper. It was on this ground that Jefferson, the champion of what was natural, argued on behalf of social manners, which he knew to be artificial. Despite appreciating diversity and some unevenness in human nature, his higher value here was social harmony. To preserve and foster this harmony, our uneven natures must be smoothed out, at least on the surface. This can be accomplished by attention to the shared habits of social intercourse. By temperament, by the traditions of the Virginia aristocracy, by his experience in French society, and, when he was a diplomat, by profession, Jefferson was a master of social convention. Politeness, Jefferson explained to his grandson, who was having difficulty adjusting to Philadelphia, where he had been sent to study, “is artificial good humor, it covers the natural want of it, and ends by rendering a substitute nearly equivalent to the real virtue.”⁸⁵

If politeness was necessary inside of society, it was even more necessary between societies, where there were no shared rules of decorum by nature. Attempting to soothe the feelings of the French minister to the United States, Jefferson wrote about a special class of artificial good humor, diplomatic behavior. Disputes over protocol, he acknowledged, could not be absolutely determined, for “they have no foundation in reason.” They were “arbitrary and senseless in their nature, … decided by every nation for itself.” He offered a theoretical suggestion for avoiding such disputes. If there must be diplomatic protocol at all in a new country like the United States, it should be made to depend “on some circumstance founded in nature, such as the age or stature of the parties.”⁸⁶

A second and more serious improvement on human nature that Jefferson attended to was education. His plans for several institutions of learning, from primary school to the university, have been treated earlier with regard to the place of nature in the curriculum. But education was also founded in qualities of human nature, and one of its chief purposes was to train a “natural aristocracy.”

Jefferson's mature and most public statement on the educability of man appears in the Rockfish Gap Report of 1818, issued by the Commission for the University of Virginia, of which he was chairman. In justifying the educational system proposed for the state, the commission declared:

We should be far … from the discouraging persuasion that man is fixed, by the law of his nature, at a given point; that his improvement is a chimera, and the hope delusive of rendering ourselves wiser, happier or better than our forefathers were. As well might it be urged that the wild and uncultivated tree, hitherto yielding sour and bitter fruit only, can never be made to yield better; yet we know that the grafting art implants a new tree on the savage stock, producing what is most estimable both in kind and degree. Education, in like manner, engrafts a new man on the native stock, and improves what in his nature was vicious and perverse into qualities of virtue and social worth.⁸⁷

How should one understand the extended simile that Jefferson the horticulturalist employs? Jefferson had compared human and physical nature before, as when he wrote his granddaughter that young women are like “flowers [which] come forth as the belles of the day.” But that example may be taken as a literary flourish. In the Rockfish Gap Report he had in mind something more substantial. Since humans are as much nature as plants are, there are principles that, if carefully formulated, apply equally to both. Simile and analogy are not mere decorations of argument here. They are vehicles that convey truths about the interconnectedness of nature. Just as grafting in horticulture improves on physical nature, so, “in a like manner,” does education on human nature. Just as an untended tree is neither good on its own nor productive for others, so is an untrained intellect incomplete both for oneself and for society.⁸⁸ A related feature of the passage is its unkind and seemingly un-Jeffersonian view of human nature—“vicious and perverse.” But perhaps the degree to which we are vicious ordinarily is not so significant if the prospects for our improvement are quite substantial.⁸⁹

At heart, Jefferson's educational plans were designed to ensure not that individuals would be improved but that society would be well governed. For this purpose, he proposed that persons of talent, a natural aristocracy, be elevated to positions of leadership through publicly supported education. Without such education, people of lesser worth would come to political power by a combination of their own misdirected drives and the ignorance of the remainder of the populace.

Jefferson's ideas on education in Virginia went back at least to the Revolution. At that time, as part of his work towards revising the state's laws generally, he brought bills before the legislature that as a group were intended to finish off the “pseudoaristocracy” in Virginia. Among these was the “Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge” (1779). This bill proposed a plan to educate the general population so that they would “know ambition under all its shapes” and thereby be able to protect themselves from the subversion of their natural rights; and so that they would at the same time educate as governors and guardians of their natural rights “those persons, whom nature hath endowed with genius and virtue … without regard to wealth, birth or other accidental condition or circumstance.”⁹⁰ It is better, Jefferson said in the bill (which was not enacted), that “children whom nature hath fitly formed and disposed to become useful instruments for the public … should be sought for and educated at the common expense of all, than that the happiness of all should be confided to the weak or the wicked.”

Thus, Jefferson wished to maintain a republican government by aristocratic means. But both, he claimed, compiled with the principles of nature. What was natural about the educational system was that it reflected the random distribution of innate talent and virtue in society. If this seems undemocratic because it picks only the best, Jefferson would reply that it is nature that is undemocratic in producing differences in human talent and virtue. More important, in practice the system is based on an initial equal chance for all, has no socially imposed barriers to admission, is universal in its coverage in the elementary years, is financed by the public, and, above all, intends to ensure the long-term happiness of the whole people. Almost half a century after drafting the bill, he still referred to a “natural aristocracy of talents and virtue [to be prepared by education] at the public expense, for the care of the public concerns.”⁹¹

Although the idea of a natural aristocracy was, when he first used it, associated with leadership in a republican society, and although the system of education he proposed in connection with the idea was a practicable one, Jefferson eventually allowed the idea to escape its educational mooring, and when it did, it met several difficulties. As a branch of his thinking on human nature, the idea of a natural aristocracy is displayed in a single burst of intellectual energy in a letter to John Adams of October 1813, the longest he ever wrote to his friend in Massachusetts.⁹²

The concept of a natural aristocracy, with no reference to education, was common in eighteenth-century Britain, but hardly with the meaning that Jefferson ultimately gave it. British society, based on orders and ranks, gave currency to the idea of a natural aristocracy, which was akin to the idea of a chain of being. Jefferson must have found the idea in the literature he read when young, and in his own early uses of the term outside education he echoed this Augustan heritage.⁹³ In a letter to James Madison, for instance, he used the term “natural aristocrats,” apparently without irony, in a way exactly opposite to his later meaning.⁹⁴ John Adams, on the other hand, appeared in print in the 1780s with the well-considered conservative meaning of the term that he maintained in his later correspondence with Jefferson.⁹⁵ When the two men finally contested the idea, therefore, Jefferson had given less thought to it than Adams, and it is probably this as much as any problems inherent in the idea of a natural aristocracy that accounts for the weakness in his argument.

Jefferson opens his discussion with interpretations of two classical writers who justified sexual union either to achieve immortality for the human species or, by selective interbreeding, to improve the species. As to the first, he responds: “But nature, not trusting to this moral and abstract motive, seems to have provided more securely for the perpetuation of the species by making it the effect of the oestrum [i.e., sexual heat] implanted in the constitution of both sexes.” As to the second, neither the oestrum (an “unhallowed impulse”) nor wealth and ambition (other unedifying impulses mentioned by the ancients) leads to the interbreeding needed to produce a genuine natural aristocracy. Nor, Jefferson continues, has mankind made any deliberate attempt by intermarriage to improve the beauty, health, understanding, or virtue of the species. Of course it could do this, he says (affirming a patriarchal society and displaying an ignorance of genetics), “for experience proves that the moral and physical qualities of man, whether good or evil, are transmissible in a certain degree from father to son.” But because “the equal rights of man” will not permit a “privileged Solomon” to determine mating among humans, the theory is an impractical one and must be discarded.

Jefferson therefore accepts the idea of an “accidental aristoi,” still natural but the result of “the fortuitous concourse of breeders,” that is, husband and wife as they come together according to the conventions of society. It is their children, the accidental aristocrats, rather than any deliberately produced offspring, who will form the natural aristocracy of society. There was a time, Jefferson asserts, when the characteristics of such an aristocracy included strength, beauty, “good humor, politeness and other accomplishments.” But now the leading traits are simply virtue and talents, moral and intellectual worth. A natural aristocracy thus stands in opposition to an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth. Jefferson then explains how to diminish the power of wealth and birth and increase the influence of the “veritable aristoi.”⁹⁶

Jefferson's theory raises issues about both nature and aristocracy. Most important is the need to explain how there can be both natural aristocracy and natural equality. Natural equality cannot mean that people are born with equal capabilities, for that would contradict the idea of a natural aristocracy at the start and violate ordinary observation as well. Rather, the best understanding of natural equality is that all persons are born with equal moral rights. But if people have equal moral rights, what aspect of us nevertheless permits the formation of a natural aristocracy? Perhaps it lies in our possession of virtues and talents or, more accurately, in our potential to develop them. The moral sense (to be treated more fully in the next chapter) is common to everyone. But like eyesight, or perhaps a sense for music, people are randomly endowed with better or worse versions of it. Virtues are like talents in forming an aristocracy. Just as society should want to develop musical or inventive capabilities where they exist, or make the best use of people with excellent vision, so it should want to develop the virtue of those people whose potential for public integrity is especially high.

A natural equality in virtue, however, is a minimum that everyone shares. Or perhaps instead of a minimum it is a norm, and those who exceed the natural norm are members of the natural aristocracy. It is to society's advantage to discover these people, to give them the chance to develop their capacity, and to place them in public office. If this is the meaning of Jefferson's argument, then he seems to have turned Aristotle upside down. While there are no natural slaves, there are natural aristocrats. At the same time, Jefferson seems to adopt a modified version of Plato (a connection he would not have appreciated): society should be governed by its naturally best people and should devise a way of ensuring that this will happen.

A second approach to reconciling natural equality with natural aristocracy is to hold that the initial equality refers not to moral rights but to opportunity. Jefferson never speaks of equality of opportunity, but that is what his educational system would provide. Is there, then, a natural right to it? Jefferson never claimed there was, and it could hardly be the necessary consequence of naturally unequal endowments. Yet he may have believed that the right existed, because he was Aristotelian enough to assume that every creature ought, by nature, to fulfill its distinctive, inherent capabilities. If some people, by their potential talents or virtues, were more able than others to benefit from education, then they deserved by nature the chance to develop them.

A final cluster of issues focuses on the meaning of “natural” in natural aristocracy. Adams had looked around and seen aristocracies throughout the world and throughout history. Like Aristotle on slavery, he therefore concluded that no matter how they were defined, aristocracies were natural.⁹⁷ On other matters Jefferson surely would have agreed with this method of describing and defining a natural object. It was the method of natural history applied to society. But in this case he took refuge in a different procedure in the study of natural history and separated what he thought to be the essence of natural aristocracies—talent (carefully defined) and virtue—from what he considered accidental or false about them. Since his purpose in identifying a natural aristocracy was strictly functional, namely, to serve society and provide republican government, the qualities he selected were perhaps appropriate. But they were far from complete, and Adams, at once recognizing this, found the theory inadequate. Noticing that people everywhere had talents, height, social class, and other traits, he wrote his friend: “Your distinction between natural and artificial aristocracy does not appear to me well founded. Birth and wealth are conferred on some men, as imperiously by nature, as genius, strength or beauty.”⁹⁸

Adams probed Jefferson's terminology further. What are talents, he asked. Isn't the notion of them conditioned by culture? “Fashion,” he wrote,

has introduced an indeterminate use of the word “talents.” Education, wealth, strength, beauty, stature, birth, marriage, graceful attitudes and motions, gait, air, complexion, physiognomy, are talents, as well as genius and science and learning. Any one of these talents, that in fact commands or influences true votes in society, gives to the man who possesses it, the character of an aristocrat, in my sense of the word.⁹⁹

Doubtless aware of what he was doing, Adams had completely scrambled the debate, for among his “talents” were items that Jefferson considered variously natural and important (genius), natural but unimportant (strength), artificial (wealth), and indispensable to the use of others (education). After this outburst, however, Adams calmly offered a compromise definition which greatly narrowed the difference between the correspondents, permitting them to join in opposing an artificial aristocracy. He proposed that such an aristocracy refer to a government under which “wealth and powers are made hereditary by municipal laws and political institutions.”¹⁰⁰ Jefferson could hardly disagree. But Adams's definition made plain once more a central difference between the two men. Adams founded social institutions on history and law, while Jefferson, despite conceptual and semantic difficulties, reached out to establish them on a presumed natural standard, even on one attached to an idea—aristocracy—that he normally rejected.

Thus ended Jefferson's formal exercise on natural aristocracy. It remains finally to discover what he actually had in mind under talents and virtues by nature. For this one must bring together several descriptions of men whom he considered “naturally endowed” with one talent or another. In most cases, predictably, he found that the unequal talents sown by nature could not be exercised without deliberate training and application. This was true especially in the arts, the area in which he found that such gifts as existed were the most natural of all. John Trumbull's “natural talents for [portraiture] seem almost unparalleled,” he wrote, but despite this “natural bias for the art,” it was perfectly reasonable that Trumbull come to Europe “to improve himself.”¹⁰¹ The art of war also had its natural talents, such as bravery, leadership, and endurance, but these, also, required training, or at least experience, in order to be complete.¹⁰² In preparing guidelines for the University of Virginia in the granting of honorary degrees, Jefferson appeared to favor the standard of nature fortified by “attention and application” to nature by itself or to some other measurement.¹⁰³

The great men of America whom Jefferson paraded against the European theory of New World degeneracy likewise were specially endowed by nature. But in their cases no special training was suggested, and in the case of the astronomer David Rittenhouse being self-taught was an added merit.¹⁰⁴ Franklin was an “ornament of human nature.” Rittenhouse was “one of Nature's best samples of the perfection she can cover under human form.” George Mason was “one of those strong, very rare intellects which are created only by a special effort of nature.” Of Washington: “never did nature and fortune combine more perfectly to make a man great.”¹⁰⁵

The remark on Washington is a reminder that Jefferson left room for Fortune as well as Nature in human affairs. It was Fortune that accounted for his regularly missing the chance to see a French diplomatic acquaintance. It was the “hand of fortune” that had directed the winds and weather to favor the British at Richmond in 1781. To the man who a few years later married his elder daughter Jefferson wrote: “Nature and fortune have been very liberal to you.”¹⁰⁶

But one can tell far less about humanity by consulting fortune rather than nature, and Jefferson hardly relied on fortune for intellectual nourishment. Instead, human nature, like physical nature, has its order and its rules. By nature, according to Jefferson, humans are social beings, normally disposed to harmony. Environments ordinarily influence the way our nature is acted out, but only a defective environment, especially poor government, will bring out the worst in us. By nature humans are morally equal to one another, although not all people, including entire discrete groups—Indians, blacks, and women—are necessarily equal culturally, physically, or intellectually. In an environment improved by society, through government, manners, or education, we can find the conditions for becoming the best that our human nature permits. Culture completes what nature has begun. Further, it is within culture that we exercise our values. And yet our values, Jefferson thought, are like our very being, comprehensible only by reference to nature itself.

Notes

1. For the cultural and intellectual context, see Merle Curti, Human Nature in American Thought, esp. chap. 3.

2. Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation, 94.

3. TJ to Charles Thomson, 29 January 1817, F.X.76. See also NVa.160 (uniformity of opinion no more desirable than uniformity of face and stature).

4. TJ to William Duane, 25 July 1811, LB.XIII.67.

5. TJ to William Green Munford, 18 June 1799, in Merrill D. Peterson, ed., Thomas Jefferson: Writings, 1064. See also TJ to Dupont de Nemours, 24 April 1816, F.X.22 (society “one of the natural wants with which man has been created”); and TJ to Peter Carr, 10 August 1787, BC.XII.15.

6. TJ to William Plumer, 31 January 1815, LB.XIV.235.

7. “Second Epistle to Lapraik” (1786).

8. See, e.g., TJ to Dupont de Nemours, 24 April 1816, F.X.24; and TJ to William Johnson, 12 June 1823, LB.XV.441.

9. For an example of the subnormal, see TJ to James Monroe, 15 July 1802, F.VIII.164 (the ingratitude of a political journalist “presents human nature in a hideous form”).

10. TJ to Samuel Kercheval, 12 July 1816, LB.XIII.40.

11. TJ to Noah Worcester, 26 November 1817, LB.XVIII.299.

12. TJ to David Bailey Warden, 26 December 1820, F.X.172 (note the “seems” in the clause).

13. NVa.121.

14. TJ to James Madison, 1 January 1797, F.VII.100. See also TJ to William Short, 20 August 1814, LB.XVIII.283; and TJ to John Adams, 1 June 1822, C.II.578 (“pugnacious humor of mankind seems to be the law of his nature, one of the obstacles to too great multiplication provided in the mechanism of the Universe”).

15. TJ to Martha Jefferson Randolph, 31 May 1791, BB.85.

16. TJ to marquis de Chastellux, 2 September 1785, BC.VIII.468.

17. Ibid.

18. TJ, “Answers to Démeunier's First Queries,” 24 January 1786, BC.X.16.

19. For a speculative discussion of environmentalism in reverse, the potential effect of human activities on physical nature, see TJ to Jean Baptiste Le Roy, 13 November 1786, BC.X.524-30.

20. See, generally, Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World; Henry Steele Commager and Elmo Giordanetti, Was America a Mistake? and Gilbert Chinard, “Eighteenth Century Theories of America as a Human Habitat.”

21. Jefferson was conscious that he was defending the environment of North America only, and not the entire Western Hemisphere. But this constraint seems to have been based as much on the possibility that allegations of inferiority were in fact justified for Latin America as on his own claim to be inadequately informed about the southern regions. See NVa.59, 273n83, and 276n104. Since the Frenchmen whom Jefferson was disputing had, on the other hand, paid rather little attention to British North America and had used evidence from Latin America to support their theories, the argument between them and Jefferson is to some extent at cross-purposes. By the time Notes on the State of Virginia appeared, Jefferson's principal opponents had modified a portion of their views. But both sides were serious about the issue, and the symbolism of Old World versus New was as important as any confrontation on particular facts. A diligent scholar has claimed that Jefferson “set up thirty-one false premises of the French naturalists and meticulously refuted each one.” Ruth Henline, “A Study of Notes on the State of Virginia as an Evidence of Jefferson's Reaction against the Theories of the French Naturalists,” 55 Va. Mag. Hist. & Biog. 233, 245 (1947).

22. NVa.55; the tables are on pp. 50-52. In support of his claims Jefferson secured the remains of several large American animals and triumphantly, if deferentially, conveyed them to Buffon: “I wish these spoils, Sir, may have the merit of adding any thing new to the treasures of nature.” TJ to Buffon, 1 October 1787, BC.XII.195. The reaction of the aging Buffon (he died several months later at eighty-one) is unrecorded. See Anna Clark Jones, “Antlers for Jefferson,” 12 New England Qtly. 333-48 (1939).

23. NVa.47 (chyle is a digestive fluid).

24. For the setting of Jefferson's ideas, see John C. Greene, American Science in the Age of Jefferson, chap. 12, “The Sciences of Man: Physical Anthropology.”

25. NVa.64.

26. TJ to William Duane, 4 August 1812, F.IX.365.

27. Quoted in Chinard, “America as a Human Habitat,” 49-50, from Early Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 1884, 293-94.

28. Jefferson discusses Indians in several places in Notes on Virginia, including an entire query, “Aborigines.” NVa.92-107. The argument with Buffon about Indians is in connection with “animal life.” NVa.58-64. Charles Thomson, in his commentary on these pages, repeatedly affirms Jefferson's judgment that it is manners and customs, not any “deficiency in nature,” that account for the traits of the Indians. NVa.200-201. Early chapters of Bernard W. Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction, examine in detail several of the topics mentioned in the text: environmentalism, deficiency, the noble savage. See also Greene, American Science in the Age of Jefferson, chap. 14. A gritty discussion is Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York, 1978).

29. NVa.58.

30. NVa.59.

31. Ibid.

32. NVa.274n86 (from the 1785 edition).

33. NVa.60.

34. NVa.58.

35. A four-stage theory of human development drawn mainly from what was known or believed about American Indians is the subject of Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage. Among the proponents of the theory discussed in the study are Lucretius, Locke, Montesquieu, and Kames. No Americans are mentioned, despite the Europeans' purported reliance on data from the New World.

36. NVa.63.

37. TJ to Benjamin Hawkins, 18 February 1803, LB.X.363.

38. TJ to the people of the Mandan Nation, 30 December 1806, LB.XVI.413; TJ to a group of Delawares, Mohicans, and Muncies, 21 December 1808, LB.XVI.452. Despite his regard and sympathy, Jefferson's actual policy towards Indians when he was president was the unyielding acquisition of Indian land for white settlement. See esp. TJ to William Henry Harrison, 27 February 1803, LB.369-73.

39. An analytic study of Jefferson, race, and slavery is Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black, 429-81. A chronological account with good contextual information is John Chester Miller, The Wolf by the Ears. Two further relevant studies are Robert McColley, Slavery and Jeffersonian Virginia (Urbana, 1964); and John P. Diggins, “Slavery, Race, and Equality.”

40. Aristotle's discussion of slavery is scattered throughout his Politics, but the “naturalness” of slavery is concentrated in 1252b and 1254a. For a quasi-Aristotelian interpretation of Jefferson on slavery see Jack P. Greene, All Men Are Created Equal: Some Reflections on the Character of the American Revolution (Oxford, 1976).

41. Although the Greeks and Romans recognized racial differences, skin color was a far less significant point of distinction to them than it became centuries later, and they identified neither themselves nor their slaves in a modern racial sense. See, generally, Frank M. Snowden, Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience (Cambridge, Mass., 1970).

42. TJ, “Argument in the Case of Howell vs. Netherland,” April 1770, F.I.373-81 (Jefferson lost the case). For a study of how natural law fared generally in cases on slavery, see Robert M. Cover, Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process (New Haven, 1975).

43. In American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975), Edmund S. Morgan investigates the “central paradox of American history” in the colony where it was most obvious. Morgan's unassertive conclusion is that “Virginians may have had a special appreciation of the freedom dear to republicans, because they saw every day what life without it could be like.” Pp. 4, 376. Jefferson plays a role in the study only near the end.

44. See, e.g., TJ to Edward Bancroft, 26 January 1788, BC.XIV.492.

45. NVa.87; TJ to Thomas Cooper, 10 September 1814, LB.XIV.184; TJ to Démeunier, 22 June 1786, BC.X.58; TJ to William Short, 8 September 1823, LB.XV.469.

46. TJ, Summary View (1774), BC.I.123, 130. The hesitant language in the Summary View and the Declaration, even recognizing that both documents were composed for the approval of others, may be compared with the language of James Otis writing in Massachusetts a decade earlier. Otis branded the slave trade “a shocking violation of the law of nature” and said that the colonists were “by the law of nature freeborn, as indeed all men are, white or black.” “The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved” (1764), in Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 1750-1776, ed. Bernard Bailyn, vol. I (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), 439.

47. NVa.87.

48. TJ, State of the Union Message, 2 December 1806, Pdvr.424.

49. TJ to Thomas Cooper, 10 September 1814, LB.XIV.183.

50. TJ to Dupont de Nemours, 24 April 1816, LB.XIV.490.

51. TJ to John Holmes, 22 April 1820, LB.XV.249. See also TJ to Rufus King, 13 July 1802, F.VIII.162 (“safety of society, under actual circumstances, obliges us to treat as a crime [that] which [the slaves'] feelings may represent in a far different shape”).

52. NVa.162-63. Further forebodings emerged at the time of the Missouri Compromise. See TJ to John Holmes, 22 April 1820, LB.XV.249 (“We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go”); and TJ, Autobiography (1821), KP.51 (“Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate, than that these people are to be free. … If [emancipation] is left to force itself on, human nature must shudder at the prospect held up”).

53. Ellen Randolph Coolidge to TJ, 1 August 1825, BB.454; TJ to Ellen Randolph Coolidge, 27 August 1825, BB.457.

54. This discussion draws on Jordan, White over Black, 482-511 (“The Negro Bound by the Chain of Being”); and John C. Greene, “The American Debate on the Negro's Place in Nature, 1780-1815.”

55. TJ to Henri Gregoire, 25 February 1809, F.IX.246.

56. NVa.63.

57. Rush was a Quaker with an abolitionist incentive to demonstrate intellectual equality among the races. Smith's purpose was to refute the polygenetic theory of Lord Kames by pointing to the scientific chaos that the adoption of such a theory would cause. It is possible that Jefferson's Kamesianism helped to mute his participation in the origins-of-mankind debate. At the same time, Smith upheld monogenesis through the story of Adam and Eve, a position Jefferson would not have taken. Jefferson's Virginia colleague in natural rights theory, George Mason, also argued on behalf of monogenesis.

58. Quoted in Jordan, White over Black, 443.

59. NVa.143.

60. NVa.138-43.

61. After a slave rebellion in Virginia, Jefferson, then president, suggested to James Monroe, then governor, that blacks might best be removed to the West Indies, where there was a climate “congenial with their natural constitution.” TJ to James Monroe, 24 November 1801, F.VIII.105.

62. NVa.138. He pointed to albinos as “an anomaly of nature,” but he found no beauty in “white Negroes,” either. NVa.70. Jefferson did not consider that slaves might have reasons other than race for appearing “monotonous,” such as shielding their emotions from their masters. Nor, when writing of the “immoveable veil of black,” did he pay attention to the existence of mulattoes, despite their presence at Monticello and his own interest in the mathematics of racial intermixture. TJ to Francis C. Gray, 4 March 1815, LB.XIV.267.

63. NVa.142. See also TJ to Edward Bancroft, 26 January 1788, BC.XIV.492 (“a man's moral sense must be unusually strong, if slavery does not make him a thief”).

64. He called the poetry of Phyllis Wheatley “compositions published under her name” and the writing of Ignatius Sancho “letters published under his name.” NVa. 140, 141. Compared with the literature of whites, Wheatley's poetry was “below the dignity of criticism,” and Sancho's letters were “at the bottom of the column.” He privately dismissed a volume of the “literature of Negroes” even though he sent a cordial note to the French bishop who had compiled the anthology. TJ to Joel Barlow, 8 October 1809, LB.XII.322; TJ to Henri Gregoire, 25 February 1809, F.IX.246.

65. TJ to Benjamin Banneker, 30 August 1791, LB.VIII.241. See also TJ to Condorcet, 30 August 1791, F.V.379 (hoping “that the want of talents observed in [blacks] is merely the effect of their degraded condition”); and TJ to Henri Gregoire, 25 February 1809, F.IX.246 (expressing his wish to see a “complete refutation of the doubts I have myself entertained and expressed on the grade of understanding alloted to [Negroes] by nature”). It should be noted that these comments were sent to intellectuals in France, where Jefferson's reputation was principally as a figure of the American Enlightenment. To Americans active in politics he spoke differently.

66. NVa.143.

67. For a stimulating discussion of the three races in Jefferson's thought see Jordan, White over Black, 475-81 (“A Dichotomous View of Triracial America”).

68. NVa.138.

69. TJ to Edward Coles, 25 August 1814, F.IX.478. Three decades earlier Jefferson had held a more tempered outlook, at least in writing to a French acquaintance: “I believe the Indian to be in body and mind equal to the whiteman. I have suspected the blackman, in his present state, might not be so. But it would be hazardous to affirm that, equally cultivated for a few generations, he would not become so.” TJ to marquis de Chastellux, 7 June 1785, BC.VIII.186.

70. Much has been made of Jefferson and women. Fawn Brodie places the speculation, of which there is a great deal, in scholarly order and accepts most of it. Thomas Jefferson, an Intimate History. An imagined account is Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings: A Novel (New York, 1979). Virginius Dabney, in The Jefferson Scandals (New York, 1981), rejects ideas of any liaisons. Winthrop Jordan offers a sophisticated view in White over Black, 461-75. The long intellectual tradition in which Jefferson formed his views is the subject of Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought (Princeton, 1981), esp. 114-27 (on Locke). The “two sphere” doctrine reflected in the title of Elshtain's book was held by the Ideologues, Jefferson's closest French associates. Merle Curti notes that Benjamin Franklin, “in holding that the female sex was no weaker than the male in reasoning ability,” disagreed with Jefferson. Human Nature in American Thought, 103. Jefferson's cultural milieu with respect to women is discussed in Isaac Rhys, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill, 1982), a study based on “the great cultural metaphor of patriarchy”; and in Jan Lewis, The Pursuit of Happiness: Family and Values in Jefferson's Virginia (New York, 1984).

71. Jefferson's daughter evidently did not insist on intellectual respect, however. See Martha Jefferson Randolph to TJ, 31 March 1797, BB.143 (“a mother's heart [is] of all things in nature the least subject to reason”). In addition to the women mentioned, Jefferson claimed to be impressed with the works of Mercy Otis Warren and an “unassuming lady” in England who wrote on chemistry. TJ to Mrs. Warren, 25 November 1790, BC.XVIII.78; TJ to William Short, 4 August 1820, LB.XV.258. Jefferson also respected the contribution of women to the economy, so long as it was at home. See TJ to John Thomson Mason, 18 August 1814, FB.489.

72. John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), sec. 28.

73. TJ to William Clark, 10 September 1809, LB.XII.311.

74. In the marriage settlement for his daughter, Jefferson refers to “the natural love and affection which he, the said Thos. bears to his daughter.” 21 February 1790, BB.49. Martha assured her father some years later that her marriage of over seven years, which she still called “new ties,” would never “weaken the first and best of nature.” Martha Jefferson Randolph to TJ, received 1 July 1798, BB.166. To Martha and her family Jefferson wrote from Washington a month before his first inauguration: “kiss the dear little objects of our natural love, and be assured of the constance and tenderness of mine to you.” TJ to Martha Jefferson Randolph, 5 February 1801, BB.196. Greater distance of blood relationship and even taking the British side in the Revolution did not modify Jefferson's bonds. He wrote to his mother's brother, who had been living in England for some years: “Tho' most heartily engaged in the quarrel … I retain the same affection for individuals which nature … calls for.” TJ to William Randolph, ca. June 1776, BC.I.410.

75. TJ to John W. Eppes, 11 September 1813, LB.XIII.357; TJ to David Williams, 14 November 1803, LB.X.430.

76. TJ to Robert Skipwith, 3 August 1771, BC.I.77.

77. TJ to James Madison, 28 October 1785, BC.VIII.682.

78. TJ to the Inhabitants of Albemarle County, 3 April 1809, Pdvr.447.

79. TJ to Anne Randolph Bankhead, 26 May 1811, BB.400.

80. TJ, “Notes of a Tour into the Southern Parts of France,” 15 May 1787, BC.XI.446. See also TJ, “Memorandums on a Tour from Paris,” 19 April 1788, BC.XIII.27-28 (women “formed by nature for attentions, not for labor”).

81. TJ to John Hambden Pleasants, 19 April 1824, LB.XVI.28.

82. TJ to George Washington, 4 December 1788, BC.XIV.330. Jefferson was sharply challenged on such views by a leader of Philadelphia society, Mrs. Anne Willing Bingham. Mrs. Bingham to TJ, 1 June 1787, BC.XI.392-93.

83. TJ to Albert Gallatin, 13 January 1807, F.IX.7. For the provisions of Jefferson's draft constitutions for Virginia enfranchising men only, see BC.I.358 and BC.VI.296. For an explicit argument excluding women in a later state constitution, see TJ to Samuel Kercheval, 5 September 1816, LB.XV.72 (exclusion prevents “depravation of morals and ambiguity of issue”).

84. NVa.60; see, similarly, TJ, “Memorandums on a Tour from Paris,” 19 April 1788, BC.XIII.36n29 (“barbarous perversion of the natural destination of the two sexes” for Indian women to be obliged to perform certain physical labor).

85. TJ to Thomas Jefferson Randolph, 24 November 1808, BB.363. Jefferson may have been inspired to lecture his grandson by his daughter, the boy's mother, who had just been convinced by a French author that the rules of etiquette “derived from the most amiable and virtuous feelings of the heart.” Martha Jefferson Randolph to TJ, 18 November 1808, BB.360. But this reverses Jefferson's reasoning, for the daughter is claiming that etiquette is natural (from the heart), while he insists that it is artificial.

86. TJ to comte de Moustier, 17 May 1788, BC.XIII. 173. Although age and height are natural characteristics, they may not be randomly distributed among nations. Jefferson himself told an anecdote of Benjamin Franklin's about a group of tall Americans and short Frenchmen. LB.XVIII. 170-71.

87. TJ, Report of the Commissioners for the University of Virginia (Rockfish Gap Report), August 1818, PJ. 335-36. A facsimile of Jefferson's draft is reproduced in plate 10.

88. The model horticultural metaphor of an “art which does mend nature” is The Winter's Tale IV.iv. For Jefferson's acquaintances, education was as conveniently based on agriculture as on horticulture. See Benjamin Franklin, “Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania” (1751), in Classics in Education, ed. Wade Baskin (New York, 1966), 237 (the best capacities must be “well tilled and sowed with profitable seed”); and Martin S. Staum, Cabanis, 127 (Georges Cabanis held that the educational terrain must be “planted and cultivated carefully to improve the ‘wise dispositions’ of nature”).

89. Jefferson may also have written in this fashion out of regard for other members of the commission (James Madison, for instance), whose views of human nature were less favorable than his own.

90. TJ, A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge (drafted 1776; introduced into the legislature 1779), BC.II. 526-27. See also NVa.148 (educational plan of 1779 would select “youths of genius from among the poor … to avail the state of those talents which nature has sown as liberally among the poor as the rich, but which perish without use”); TJ to William Duane, 4 August 1812, LB.XIII. 180; and TJ, Act for Establishing Elementary Schools (sec. 41), sent to Joseph C. Cabell, 9 September 1817, LB.XVII. 440.

91. TJ to Joseph C. Cabell, 5 January 1825, F.IX. 501.

92. TJ to John Adams, 28 October 1813, C.II. 387-92. The quotations from Jefferson in the next paragraphs of the text are, unless otherwise stated, from this letter. The proximate cause of Jefferson's devising his theory was a barrage of comments on aristocracy in recent letters from Adams. Adams to TJ, 9 and 13 July, 14 August, 2 and 15 September 1813, C.II. 352, 355, 365-66, 371-72, 376-77. See also Adams to TJ, 1 March 1787, C.I. 177.

93. For instance, from Pope's Essay on Man (1734): “Order is Heav'ns first law, and this confest, / Some are, and must be, greater than the rest, / More rich, more wise.” IV. 49-51. And from James Thomson's Coriolanus (1749): “Who'er amidst the Sons / Of Reason, Valour, Liberty, and Virtue, / Displays distinguish'd Merit, is a Noble / Of Nature's own creating.” III.iii.

94. TJ to James Madison, 12 May 1792, F.VI. 251 (“the fashionable circles” of several cities consist of “natural aristocrats”).

95. John Adams, A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (1787-88), in The American Enlightenment, ed. Adrienne Koch, 260-63 (“Equality and Natural Aristocracy”).

96. Jefferson also caricatures an artificial aristocracy as “tinsel-aristocracy,” “pseudo-aristocracy,” and finally simply as “Pseudalists.” For an example of his sarcasm about the British, see NVa. 119 (reliance on the House of Lords would be “rational … if wisdom were hereditary”).

97. Adams's views were forcefully, if not tauntingly, put: “I say [the idea of the well-born] is the ordinance of God Almighty, in the constitution of human nature, and wrought into the fabric of the universe. Philosophers and politicians may nibble and quibble, but they never will get rid of it.” John Adams to TJ, 14 August 1813, C.II. 365.

98. John Adams to TJ, 15 November 1813, C.II. 400. If Jefferson had been willing to discuss birth as a part of aristocracy, he might have acknowledged himself a natural aristocrat on his father's side but an artificial aristocrat on his mother's. See TJ, Autobiography (1821), KP. 3, 4 (his father was “of a strong mind, sound judgment … and improved himself,” while his mother's family could “trace their pedigree far back”).

99. John Adams to TJ, 15 November 1813, C.II. 400.

100. Ibid. Many years earlier, before he had provoked Jefferson into the field, Adams had written that the influence of birth and wealth was inevitable but that so long as there was a “natural right … to an equal status before the laws,” no artificial aristocracy existed. Discourses on Davilla (1790), quoted in Benjamin Fletcher Wright, Jr., American Interpretations of Natural Law (Cambridge, Mass., 1931), 253.

101. TJ to Ezra Stiles, 1 September 1786, BC.X.317; TJ to comte Thevenard, 5 May 1786, BC.IX.456. On the decline of a need for hard work to succeed in the professions Jefferson wrote cuttingly: “Now men are born scholars, lawyers, doctors; in our day this was confined to poets.” TJ to John Tyler, 26 May 1810, F.IX.227.

102. Jefferson's thoughts on natural military talents arose in connection with the poor performance of the U.S. Army in the War of 1812. See TJ to William Duane, 4 August 1812, LB.XIII.180 (“the seeds of genius which nature sows … will develop themselves among our military men”); and TJ to Gen. Henry Dearborn, 17 March 1815, LB.XIV.288 (“officers of natural genius now starting forward from the mass”).

103. TJ, Rockfish Gap Report, August 1818, PJ.346. Cf. TJ to George Washington, 6 April 1784, BC. VII.84 (also on “nature and application”).

104. NVa.64.

105. TJ to Elias Shipman, 12 July 1801, F.VIII.69 (on Franklin); TJ to the American Philosophical Society, 28 January 1797, quoted in Gilbert Chinard, “Jefferson and the American Philosophical Society,” 267 (on Rittenhouse); Francis Coleman Rosenberger, ed., Virginia Reader (New York, 1948), 242 (on George Mason; quoted without source); TJ to Walter Jones, 2 January 1814, F.IX.449 (on Washington).

106. TJ to comte de Moustier, 3 December 1790, BC.XVIII.119; TJ to Henry Lee, 15 May 1826, F.X.388; TJ to Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr., 27 August 1786, BC.X.308-9. Congratulating his younger daughter on her engagements a number of years later, one that led to a difficult marriage, Jefferson left nature out: “I deem the composition of my family the most precious of all the kindnesses of fortune.” TJ to Maria Jefferson, 14 June 1797, BB.148.

Abbreviations

BB: Edwin Morris Betts and James Adam Bear, Jr., eds., The Family Letters of Thomas Jefferson. Columbia, Mo., 1966.

BC: Julian P. Boyd and Charles T. Cullen, eds. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. 21 vols. to date. Vols. 1-20 edited by Boyd; vol. 21 edited by Cullen. Princeton, 1950-. The Boyd-Cullen edition is used in this study wherever possible. After August 1791 (BC.XX) Jefferson's writings are cited to other sources.

C: Lester J. Cappon, ed. The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams. 2 vols. Chapel Hill, 1959.

F: Paul Leicester Ford, ed. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson. 10 vols. New York, 1892-99. This edition of Ford should be distinguished from the reissue of the text in twelve volumes under the title The Works of Thomas Jefferson (Federal Edition) in 1904-5.

LB: Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, eds. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson. Memorial Edition. 20 vols. Washington, D.C., 1904.

NVa: Thomas Jefferson. Notes on the State of Virginia. Edited by William Peden. Chapel Hill, 1954.

PJ: Merrill D. Peterson, ed. The Portable Thomas Jefferson. New York, 1975.

Works Cited

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