Annette Gordon-Reed’s new essay about Jefferson’s contradictions is well worth your time.

We live in an era when Blacks and Whites, despite the end of de jure segregation, tend to live in different neighborhoods, go to different churches and schools, and socialize within their own racial groups. Thomas Jefferson’s world was quite dissimilar. He interacted with African Americans on a daily basis, in the most intimate circumstances, from the beginning of his life to the end. This is because he was born into a slave society.

A Black woman was almost certainly young Thomas’s earliest nursemaid, and an enslaved Black woman was likely his wet nurse. Later, when his wife, Martha, had difficulty nursing their first child, the “good breast of milk” of the enslaved Ursula Granger allowed the child to thrive. In his old age Jefferson recalled that his earliest memory was of being handed up on a pillow to an enslaved person on horseback before their family made a journey from their home at Shadwell, Virginia, to Tuckahoe, where they lived for several years during his early childhood. Enslaved people were his primary attendants during his final days. They may have been the last people he saw before he died.

No prominent member of the Founding Fathers engaged more directly, and some would argue more disastrously, with the subject of race than Thomas Jefferson. The man who wrote what has come to be called the American Creed, the Declaration of Independence, proclaiming the “self-evident” truth “that all men are created equal,” enslaved hundreds of people of African descent over the course of his life, even as he wrote extremely critical words about the institution and believed himself to be antislavery. How could this be? How could a person hold such contradictory positions?

The thing of course is that Jefferson knew he was hypocrite at the time. He barely even defended himself about this. But like a lot of people, he had to reconcile his life choices with the fact that he really, really, really wanted to be seen as a Nice Guy.

He did so again more famously in his first draft of the Declaration of Independence, in words that were excised by members of the Continental Congress who feared offending the southern delegates. Given the uses that have been made of his words in the preamble to the Declaration, it is maddening to think of what could have been made of his characterization of Africans as “men” and “people” who had the “sacred rights of life and liberty” taken away.

How could a person write that passage, along with other trenchant criticisms of slavery, and then fail to advance the cause of abolition in the newly constituted United States? The only plausible explanation is that Jefferson’s attitude about the institution of slavery as it was practiced in the Americas—that is to say, racially based slavery—was shaped by his attitude toward Black people. Jefferson simply did not feel a sense of urgency about ending a form of oppression to which Black people were peculiarly subjected. Nor did he imagine that the interests of Black people in escaping from that oppression should ever override the thoughts and feelings of his White neighbors. They could not be asked to give anything up on behalf of Black people.

It was one thing to champion the rights of White men and women in his pamphlet and to risk execution by writing and signing the Declaration of Independence and participating in an armed revolt against king and country. The freedom and self-determination of White colonists demanded such action and sacrifice; the freedom and self-determination of people of African descent did not. In our desire to take the notion of contingency seriously—and, perhaps, in our tendency to imagine the people of that era as more open to persuasion on the questions of slavery and race than they actually were—we may too quickly dismiss Jefferson’s assessment of how unready his fellow Virginians and other White southerners were to give up their way of life and how hostile they were to the Black people in their midst.

There is little reason to believe that Virginians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries could have been persuaded to forsake the institution of slavery. As dispiriting as it may be, we have to at least consider that Jefferson was right on this point. It is very likely that, had he decided to press the case for emancipation to the extent that we wish he had, he would not have maintained the important base of support that helped propel him from state politics to the forefront of national politics.

Thomas Jefferson saw himself as, and desperately wanted to be seen as, a progressive—a man of the future always on the lookout for the new improvements that science and the education of the general population would bring. During his late-in-life correspondence with John Adams, he wrote that he liked “the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.” In that same letter, he predicted that the United States would take the lead in standing guard against the “returns of ignorance and barbarism,” because “old Europe” would still be under the influence of old-world structures and beliefs. Jefferson, it seems, had believed since his youth in the inevitability of progress. He was enormously influenced by the Enlightenment, and considered Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke his “trinity of the three greatest men the world has ever produced.”

His correspondence with Benjamin Banneker, an African American astronomer and almanac writer, is particularly significant. In 1791 Banneker sent Jefferson a copy of his almanac and requested his aid in dealing with the issue of slavery and improving the status of Black people in the United States. Banneker noted that Jefferson had a reputation as one who would be amenable to his entreaty. Jefferson responded quickly, thanking Banneker for the almanac and saying that he had forwarded it to the Marquis de Condorcet. Jefferson’s cordial response—he signed off as “Your most obedt. humble servant”—drew derision from enemies, who said that he had demeaned himself with the respectful valediction and that he was gullible in believing that Banneker had done the work for the almanac on his own. This last charge got to Jefferson. He attempted to backtrack by suggesting that Banneker had received help in preparing his almanac. Perhaps because he was so sure of his status, and because it reinforced his view of himself as a fair-minded individual, Jefferson never had a problem extending small courtesies like the use of honorifics like Mr. or Mrs. to people of color. Members of his cohort took these things more seriously than he did.

Although there is no written record of his involvement, Jefferson insisted over the course of his life that he was partly responsible for introducing early legislation in the House of Burgesses to strike blows against slavery. Given his record otherwise, there is no reason to doubt him. But even more important is the fact that Jefferson wanted to be associated with antislavery efforts. He could easily have emphasized other achievements or, like most of his fellow Virginians, not associated himself with the question at all, and still accomplish everything he did. This indicates that he knew the institution was a problem and would be seen as a problem for succeeding generations. He wanted people in his time and in the future to see him as having been on the right side of that issue.

Finally of course, there’s the massive issue of his relationship with Sally Hemings and this really gets at the core of not just Jefferson, but America, as Gordon-Reed concludes:

The lack of information about Jefferson’s hidden family was planned, and that is tragic. His relationship to the young country’s racial predicament was more than what he wrote down; it was also a matter of blood. The omission of this truth from the record that he made is deeply revealing. What Jefferson kept out of his writing goes to the heart of the American story.

This div height required for enabling the sticky sidebar