2023/11/21

Thomas Jefferson and slavery - Wikipedia

Thomas Jefferson and slavery - Wikipedia

Thomas Jefferson and slavery

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This article is part of
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Thomas Jefferson
Early life and political career
3rd President of the United States
First term
Second term
Post-presidency
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Thomas Jefferson's signature

Seal of the President of the United States

Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, owned more than 600 slaves during his adult life. Jefferson freed two slaves while he lived, and five others were freed after his death, including two of his children from his relationship with his slave (and sister-in-law) Sally Hemings. His other two children with Hemings were allowed to escape without pursuit. After his death, the rest of the slaves were sold to pay off his estate's debts.

Privately, one of Jefferson's reasons for not freeing more slaves was his considerable debt,[1] while his more public justification, expressed in his book Notes on the State of Virginia, was his fear that freeing enslaved people into American society would cause civil unrest between white people and former slaves.

Jefferson consistently spoke out against the international slave trade and outlawed it while he was president. He advocated for a gradual emancipation of all slaves within the United States and the colonization of Africa by freed African Americans.[2][3][4] However, he opposed some other measures to restrict slavery within the U.S., and also criticized voluntary manumission.[5]

Early years (1743–1774)[edit]

Advertisement placed by Jefferson in the Virginia Gazette offering a reward to whoever returns his escaped slave, 1767.
Monticello

Thomas Jefferson was born into the planter class of a "slave society", as defined by the historian Ira Berlin, in which slavery was the main means of labor production.[6] He was the son of Peter Jefferson, a prominent slaveholder and land speculator in Virginia, and Jane Randolph, granddaughter of English and Scots gentry.[7] In 1757, when Jefferson was 14, his father died, and so he inherited 5,000 acres (20 km2) of land, 52 slaves, livestock, his father's notable library, and a gristmill.[8][9] This property was initially under control of his guardian, John Harvie Sr.[10] He assumed full control over these properties at age 21.[11] In 1768, Thomas Jefferson began construction of a neoclassical mansion known as Monticello, which overlooked the hamlet of his former home in Shadwell.[7] As an attorney, Jefferson represented people of color as well as whites. In 1770, he defended a young mixed-race male slave in a freedom suit, on the grounds that his mother was white and freeborn. By the colony's law of partus sequitur ventrem, that the child took the status of the mother, the man should never have been enslaved. He lost the suit.[12] In 1772, Jefferson represented George Manly, the son of a free woman of color, who sued for freedom after having been held as an indentured servant three years past the expiration of his term. (The Virginia colony at the time bound illegitimate mixed-race children of free women as indentured servants: until age 31 for males, with a shorter term for females.)[13] Once freed, Manly worked for Jefferson at Monticello for wages.[13]

In 1773, the year after Jefferson married the young widow Martha Wayles Skelton, her father died. She and Jefferson inherited his estate, including 11,000 acres, 135 slaves, and £4,000 of debt. With this inheritance, Jefferson became deeply involved with interracial families and financial burden. As a widower, his father-in-law John Wayles had taken his mixed-race slave Betty Hemings as a concubine and had six children with her during his last 12 years.[14]

These additional forced laborers made Jefferson the second-largest slaveholder in Albemarle County. In addition, he held nearly 16,000 acres of land in Virginia. He sold some people to pay off the debt of Wayles' estate.[7] From this time on, Jefferson owned and supervised his large chattel estate, primarily at Monticello, although he also developed other plantations in the colony. Slavery supported the life of the planter class in Virginia.[15]

In collaboration with Monticello, now the major public history site on Jefferson, the Smithsonian opened on the National Mall an exhibit, Slavery at Jefferson's Monticello: The Paradox of Liberty, (January – October 2012) at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. It covered Jefferson as a slaveholder and the roughly 600 enslaved people who lived at Monticello over the decades, with a focus on six enslaved families and their descendants. It was the first national exhibit on the Mall to address these issues. In February 2012, Monticello opened a related new outdoor exhibition, Landscape of Slavery: Mulberry Row at Monticello, which "brings to life the stories of the scores of people—enslaved and free—who lived and worked on Jefferson's 5,000 acre plantation."[16]

Shortly after ending his law practice in 1774, Jefferson wrote A Summary View of the Rights of British America, which was submitted to the First Continental Congress. In it, he argued Americans were entitled to all the rights of British citizens, and denounced King George for wrongfully usurping local authority in the colonies. In regard to slavery, Jefferson wrote "The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies, where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state. But previous to the enfranchisement of the slaves we have, it is necessary to exclude all further importations from Africa; yet our repeated attempts to effect this by prohibitions, and by imposing duties which might amount to a prohibition, have been hitherto defeated by his majesty's negative: Thus preferring the immediate advantages of a few African corsairs to the lasting interests of the American states, and to the rights of human nature, deeply wounded by this infamous practice."[17]

Revolutionary period (1775–1783)[edit]

Further information: American Revolutionary War and United States Declaration of Independence
In the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson accused King George III of forcing the slave trade onto the American colonies and encouraging slave revolts.

In 1775, Thomas Jefferson joined the Continental Congress as a delegate from Virginia when he and others in Virginia began to rebel against the Royal Governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore. Trying to reassert British authority over the area, Dunmore issued a Proclamation in November 1775 that offered freedom to slaves who abandoned their Patriot masters and joined the British.[18] Dunmore's action led to a mass exodus of tens of thousands of forced laborers from plantations across the South during the war years; some of the people Jefferson held as slaves also took off as runaways.[19]

The colonists opposed Dunmore's action as an attempt to incite a massive slave rebellion. In 1776, when Jefferson co-authored the Declaration of Independence, he referred to the Lord Governor when he wrote, "He has excited domestic insurrections among us," though the institution of slavery itself was never mentioned by name at any point in the document.[20][21] In the original draft of the Declaration, Jefferson inserted a clause condemning King George III for forcing the slave trade onto the American colonies and inciting enslaved African Americans to "rise in arms" against their masters:

He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

— BlackPast, The Declaration of Independence and the Debate Over Slavery[22]

The Continental Congress, however, due to Southern opposition, forced Jefferson to delete the clause in the final draft of the Declaration.[23][24][25][26][27] Jefferson did manage to make a general criticism against slavery by maintaining "all men are created equal."[23] Jefferson did not directly condemn domestic slavery as such in the Declaration, as Jefferson himself was a slaveowner. According to Finkelman, "The colonists, for the most part, had been willing and eager purchasers of slaves."[28] Researcher William D. Richardson proposed that Thomas Jefferson's use of "MEN" in capital letters would be a repudiation of those who may believe that the Declaration was not including slaves with the word "Mankind".[29]

That same year, Jefferson submitted a draft for the new Virginia Constitution containing the phrase "No person hereafter coming into this country shall be held within the same in slavery under any pretext whatever." His proposal was not adopted.[30]

In 1778 with Jefferson's leadership and probably authorship, the Virginia General Assembly banned importing people to be used as slaves into Virginia. It was one of the first jurisdictions in the world to ban the international slave trade, and all other states except South Carolina eventually followed prior to the Congress banning the trade in 1807.[31][32][33]

As governor of Virginia for two years during the Revolution, Jefferson signed a bill to promote military enlistment by giving white men land, "a healthy sound Negro ... or £60 in gold or silver."[34] As was customary, he brought some of the household workers he held in slavery, including Mary Hemings, to serve in the governor's mansion in Richmond. Facing a British invasion in January 1781, Jefferson and the Assembly members fled the capital and moved the government to Charlottesville, leaving the workers enslaved by Jefferson behind. Hemings and other enslaved people were taken by the British as prisoners of war; they were later released in exchange for captured British soldiers. In 2009, the Daughters of the Revolution (DAR) honored Mary Hemings as a Patriot, making her female descendants eligible for membership in the heritage society.[35]

In June 1781, the British arrived at Monticello. Jefferson had escaped before their arrival and gone with his family to his plantation of Poplar Forest to the southwest in Bedford County; most of those he held as slaves stayed at Monticello to help protect his valuables. The British did not loot or take prisoners there.[36] By contrast, Lord Cornwallis and his troops occupied and looted another planation owned by Jefferson, Elkhill in Goochland County, Virginia, northwest of Richmond. Of the 30 enslaved people they took as prisoners, Jefferson later claimed that at least 27 had died of disease in their camp.[37]

While claiming since the 1770s to support gradual emancipation, as a member of the Virginia General Assembly Jefferson declined to support a law to ask that, saying the people were not ready. After the United States gained independence, in 1782 the Virginia General Assembly repealed the slave law of 1723 and made it easier for slaveholders to manumit slaves. Unlike some of his planter contemporaries, such as Robert Carter III, who freed nearly 500 people held slaves in his lifetime, or George Washington, who freed all the enslaved people he legally owned, in his will of 1799, Jefferson formally freed only two people during his life, in 1793 and 1794.[38][39] Virginia did not require freed people to leave the state until 1806.[40] From 1782 to 1810, as numerous slaveholders freed enslaved people, the proportion of free blacks in Virginia increased dramatically from less than 1% to 7.2% of blacks.[41]

Following the Revolution (1784–1800)[edit]

Some historians have claimed that, as a Representative to the Continental Congress, Thomas Jefferson wrote an amendment or bill that would abolish slavery. But according to Finkelman, "he never did propose this plan" and "Jefferson refused to propose either a gradual emancipation scheme or a bill to allow individual masters to free their slaves."[42] He refused to add gradual emancipation as an amendment when others asked him to; he said, "better that this should be kept back."[42] In 1785, Jefferson wrote to one of his colleagues that black people were mentally inferior to white people, claiming the entire race was incapable of producing a single poet.[43]

On March 1, 1784, in defiance of southern slave society, Jefferson submitted to the Continental Congress the Report of a Plan of Government for the Western Territory.[44] "The provision would have prohibited slavery in all new states carved out of the western territories ceded to the national government established under the Articles of Confederation."[45] Slavery would have been prohibited extensively in both the North and South territories, including what would become Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee.[44] His Ordinance of 1784 would have prohibited slavery completely by 1800 in all territories, but was rejected by the Congress by one vote due to an absent representative from New Jersey.[45][44] On April 23, Congress accepted Jefferson's 1784 Ordinance, but removed the clause prohibiting slavery in all the territories. Jefferson said that southern representatives defeated his original proposal. Jefferson was only able to obtain one southern delegate to vote for the prohibition of slavery in all territories.[44] The Library of Congress notes, "The Ordinance of 1784 marks the high point of Jefferson's opposition to slavery, which is more muted thereafter."[46][47] In 1786, Jefferson bitterly remarked "The voice of a single individual of the state which was divided, or of one of those which were of the negative, would have prevented this abominable crime from spreading itself over the new country. Thus we see the fate of millions unborn hanging on the tongue of one man, & heaven was silent in that awful moment!"[48] Jefferson's Ordinance of 1784 did influence the Ordinance of 1787, that prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territory. It would also serve as inspiration and citation for future attempts to restrict slavery's domestic expansion. In 1848, senator David Wilmot cited it while trying to build support for the Wilmot Proviso, which would have banned slavery in territory captured during the Mexican–American War. In 1860, Presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln cited it to make his case that banning slavery in the federal territories was constitutional.[49] But the effect of Jefferson's nearly accomplished plan to ban slavery outright in any new state would have been a huge and likely fatal blow to the institution.[44]

In 1785, Jefferson published his first book, Notes on the State of Virginia. In it, he argued that blacks were inferior to whites and this inferiority could not be explained by their condition of slavery. He also stated that these arguments were not certain (see section on this book below). Jefferson stated emancipation and colonization away from America would be the best policy on how to treat blacks and added a warning about the potential for slave revolutions in the future: "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever: 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."[50]

From the 1770s on, Jefferson wrote of supporting gradual emancipation, based on slaves being educated, freed after 18 for women and 21 for men (later he changed this to age 45, when their masters had a return on investment), and transported for resettlement to Africa. All of his life, he supported the concept of colonization of Africa by American freedmen. The historian Peter S. Onuf suggested that, after having children with his slave Sally Hemings, Jefferson may have supported colonization because of concerns for his unacknowledged "shadow family".[51] In addition, Onuf asserts that Jefferson believed at this point that slavery was "equal to tyranny".[52]

The historian David Brion Davis stated that in the years after 1785 and Jefferson's return from Paris, the most notable thing about his position on slavery was his "immense silence".[53] Davis believed that, in addition to having internal conflicts about slavery, Jefferson wanted to keep his personal situation private; for this reason, he chose to back away from working to end or ameliorate slavery.[53]

As U.S. Secretary of State, Jefferson issued in 1795, with President Washington's authorization, $40,000 in emergency relief and 1,000 weapons to French slave owners in Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti) in order to suppress a slave rebellion. President Washington gave the slave owners in Saint Domingue (Haiti) $400,000 as repayment for loans the French had granted to the Americans during the American Revolutionary War.[54]

On September 15, 1800, Virginia governor James Monroe sent a letter to Jefferson, informing him of a narrowly averted slave rebellion by Gabriel Prosser. Ten of the conspirators had already been executed, and Monroe asked Jefferson's advice on what to do with the remaining ones.[55] Jefferson sent a reply on September 20, urging Monroe to deport the remaining rebels rather than execute them. Most notably, Jefferson's letter implied that the rebels had some justification for their rebellion in seeking freedom, stating "The other states & the world at large will for ever condemn us if we indulge a principle of revenge, or go one step beyond absolute necessity. They cannot lose sight of the rights of the two parties, & the object of the unsuccessful one."[56] By the time Monroe received Jefferson's letter, twenty of the conspirators had been executed. Seven more would be executed after Monroe received the letter on September 22, including Prosser himself, but an additional 50 defendants charged for the failed rebellion would be acquitted, pardoned, or have their sentences commuted.[57]

As President (1801–1809)[edit]

In 1800, Jefferson was elected as President of the United States over John Adams. He won more electoral votes than Adams, aided by southern power. The Constitution provided for the counting of slaves as three fifths of their total population, to be added to a state's total population for purposes of apportionment and the electoral college. States with large slave populations, therefore, gained greater representation even though the number of voting citizens was smaller than that of other states. It was due only to this population advantage that Jefferson won the election.[58][59]

Moved slaves to White House[edit]

Jefferson brought slaves from Monticello to work at the White House.[a] He brought Edith Hern Fossett and Fanny Hern to Washington, D.C., in 1802 and they learned to cook French cuisine at the President's House by Honoré Julien. Edith was 15 years old and Fanny was 18.[63][64] Margaret Bayard Smith remarked of the French fare, "The excellence and superior skill of his [Jefferson's] French cook was acknowledged by all who frequented his table, for never before had such dinners been given in the President's House".[65] Edith and Fanny were the only slaves from Monticello to regularly live in Washington.[66] They did not receive a wage, but earned a two-dollar gratuity each month.[63] They worked in Washington for nearly seven years and Edith gave birth to three children while at the President's House, James, Maria, and a child who did not survive to adulthood. Fanny had one child there. Their children were kept with them at the President's House.[65]

Haitian independence[edit]

Further information: Haitian Revolution
Jefferson feared a violent slave revolt, that was taking place in Haiti, could spread into the United States.

After Toussaint Louverture had become governor general of Saint-Domingue following a slave revolt, in 1801 Jefferson supported French plans to take back the island.[67] He agreed to loan France $300,000 (~$6.08 million in 2021) "for relief of whites on the island."[68] Jefferson wanted to alleviate the fears of southern slave owners, who feared a similar rebellion in their territory.[69] Prior to his election, Jefferson wrote of the revolution, "If something is not done and soon, we shall be the murderers of our own children."[68]

By 1802, when Jefferson learned that France was planning to re-establish its empire in the western hemisphere, including taking the Louisiana territory and New Orleans from the Spanish, he declared the neutrality of the US in the Caribbean conflict.[70] While refusing credit or other assistance to the French, he allowed contraband goods and arms to reach Haiti and, thus, indirectly supported the Haitian Revolution.[70] This was to further US interests in Louisiana.[68]

That year and once the Haitians declared independence in 1804, President Jefferson had to deal with strong hostility to the new nation by his southern-dominated Congress. He shared planters' fears that the success of Haiti would encourage similar slave rebellions and widespread violence in the South. Historian Tim Matthewson noted that Jefferson faced a Congress "hostile to Haiti", and that he "acquiesced in southern policy, the embargo of trade and nonrecognition, the defense of slavery internally and the denigration of Haiti abroad."[71] Jefferson discouraged emigration by American free blacks to the new nation.[68] European nations also refused to recognize Haiti when the new nation declared independence in 1804.[72][73][74] In his short biography of Jefferson in 2005, Christopher Hitchens noted the president was "counterrevolutionary" in his treatment of Haiti and its revolution.[75]

Jefferson expressed ambivalence about Haiti. During his presidency, he thought sending free blacks and contentious slaves to Haiti might be a solution to some of the United States' problems. He hoped that "Haiti would eventually demonstrate the viability of black self-government and the industriousness of African American work habits, thereby justifying freeing and deporting the slaves" to that island.[76] This was one of his solutions for separating the populations. In 1824, book peddler Samuel Whitcomb, Jr. visited Jefferson in Monticello, and they happened to talk about Haiti. This was on the eve of the greatest emigration of U.S. Blacks to the island-nation. Jefferson told Whitcomb that he had never seen Blacks do well in governing themselves, and thought they would not do it without the help of Whites.[77]

Virginia emancipation law modified[edit]

In 1806, with concern developing over the rise in the number of free black people, the Virginia General Assembly modified the 1782 slave law to discourage free black people from living in the state. It permitted re-enslavement of freedmen who remained in the state for more than 12 months. This forced newly freed black people to leave enslaved kin behind. As slaveholders had to petition the legislature directly to gain permission for manumitted freedmen to stay in the state, there was a decline in manumissions after this date.[78][79]

Ended international slave trade[edit]

Jefferson banned the international slave trade on March 2, 1807.

In 1808, Jefferson denounced the international slave trade and called for a law to make it a crime. He told Congress in his 1806 annual message, such a law was needed to "withdraw the citizens of the United States from all further participation in those violations of human rights ... which the morality, the reputation, and the best interests of our country have long been eager to proscribe." Congress complied and on March 2, 1807, Jefferson signed the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves into law; it took effect 1 January 1808 and made it a federal crime to import or export slaves from abroad.[80][81]

By 1808, every state but South Carolina had followed Virginia's lead from the 1780s in banning importation of slaves. By 1808, with the growth of the domestic slave population enabling development of a large internal slave trade, slaveholders did not mount much resistance to the new law, presumably because the authority of Congress to enact such legislation was expressly authorized by the Constitution,[82] and was fully anticipated during the Constitutional Convention in 1787. The end of international trade also increased the monetary value of existing slaves. Jefferson did not lead the campaign to prohibit the importation of slaves.[83] Historian John Chester Miller rated Jefferson's two major presidential achievements as the Louisiana Purchase and the abolition of the international slave trade.[84]

Retirement (1810–1826)[edit]

In 1819, Jefferson strongly opposed a Missouri statehood application amendment that banned domestic slave importation and freed slaves at the age of 25 believing it would destroy or break up the union.[85] By 1820, Jefferson, objected to what he viewed as "Northern meddling" with Southern slavery policy. On April 22, Jefferson criticized the Missouri Compromise because it might lead to the breakup of the Union. Jefferson said slavery was a complex issue and needed to be solved by the next generation. Jefferson wrote that the Missouri Compromise was a "fire bell in the night" and "the knell of the Union". Jefferson said that he feared the Union would dissolve, stating that the "Missouri question aroused and filled me with alarm." In regard to whether the Union would remain for a long period of time Jefferson wrote, "I now doubt it much."[86][87] In 1823, in a letter to Supreme Court Justice William Johnson, Jefferson wrote "this case is not dead, it only sleepeth. the Indian chief said he did not go to war for every petty injury by itself; but put it into his pouch, and when that was full, he then made war."[88]

Tadeusz Kościuszko

In 1798, Jefferson's friend from the Revolution, Tadeusz Kościuszko, a Polish nobleman and revolutionary, visited the United States to collect back pay from the government for his military service. He entrusted his assets to Jefferson with a will directing him to spend the American money and proceeds from his land in the U.S. to free and educate slaves, including Jefferson's, and at no cost to Jefferson. Kościuszko revised will states: "I hereby authorise my friend Thomas Jefferson to employ the whole thereof in purchasing Negroes from among his own or any others and giving them Liberty in my name." Kosciuszko died in 1817, but Jefferson never carried out the terms of the will: At age 77, he pleaded an inability to act as executor due to his advanced age[89] and the numerous legal complexities of the bequest—the will was contested by several family members and was tied up in the courts for years, long after Jefferson's death.[90] Jefferson recommended his friend John Hartwell Cocke, who also opposed slavery, as executor, but Cocke likewise declined to execute the bequest.[91] In 1852 the U.S. Supreme Court awarded the estate, by then worth $50,000, to Kościuszko's heirs in Poland, having ruled that the will was invalid.[92]

Jefferson continued to struggle with debt after serving as president. He used some of his hundreds of slaves as collateral to his creditors. This debt was due to his lavish lifestyle, long construction and changes to Monticello, imported goods, art, and lifelong issues with debt, from inheriting the debt of father-in-law John Wayles to signing two 10,000 notes late in life to assist dear friend Wilson Cary Nicholas, which proved to be his coup de grace. Yet he was merely one of numerous others who suffered crippling debt around 1820. He also incurred debt in helping support his only surviving daughter, Martha Jefferson Randolph, and her large family. She had separated from her husband, who had become abusive from alcoholism and mental illness (according to different sources), and brought her family to live at Monticello.[93]

In August 1814, the planter Edward Coles and Jefferson corresponded about Coles' ideas on emancipation. Jefferson urged Coles not to free his slaves, but the younger man took all his slaves to the Illinois and freed them, providing them with land for farms.[94][95]

In April 1820, Jefferson wrote to John Holmes giving his thoughts on the Missouri compromise. Concerning slavery, he said:

there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would, to relieve us from this heavy reproach [slavery] ... we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.[96][97]

Jefferson may have borrowed from Suetonius, a Roman biographer, the phrase "wolf by the ears", as he held a book of his works. Jefferson characterized slavery as a dangerous animal (the wolf) that could not be contained or freed. He believed that attempts to end slavery would lead to violence.[98] Jefferson concluded the letter lamenting "I regret that I am now to die in the belief that the useless sacrifice of themselves, by the generation of '76. to acquire self government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be that I live not to weep over it." Following the Missouri Compromise, Jefferson largely withdrew from politics and public life, writing "with one foot in the grave, I have no right to meddle with these things."[88]

In 1821, Jefferson wrote in his autobiography that he felt slavery would inevitably come to an end, though he also felt there was no hope for racial equality in America, stating "Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people [negros] are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them. It is still in our power to direct the process of emancipation, and deportation, peaceably, and in such slow degrees, as that the evil will wear off insensibly; and their places be, pari passu, filled up by free white laborers. If, on the contrary, it is left to force itself on, human nature must shudder at the prospect held up."[99]

The U.S. Congress finally implemented colonization of freed African American slaves by passing the Slave Trade Act of 1819 signed into law by President James Monroe. The law authorized funding to colonize the coast of Africa with freed African American slaves. In 1824, Jefferson proposed an overall emancipation plan that would free slaves born after a certain date.[100] Jefferson proposed that African-American children born in America be bought by the federal government for $12.50 and that these slaves be sent to Santo Domingo.[100] Jefferson admitted that his plan would be liberal and may even be unconstitutional, but he suggested a constitutional amendment to allow congress to buy slaves. He also realized that separating children from slaves would have a humanitarian cost. Jefferson believed that his overall plan was worth implementing and that setting over a million slaves free was worth the financial and emotional costs.[100]

Posthumous (1827–1830)[edit]

At his death, Jefferson was greatly in debt, in part due to his continued construction program.[101] The debts encumbered his estate, and his family sold 130 slaves, virtually all the members of every slave family, from Monticello to pay his creditors.[102][103][104][105][106] Slave families who had been well established and stable for decades were sometimes split up. Most of the sold slaves either remained in Virginia or were relocated to Ohio.[107]

Jefferson freed five slaves in his will, all males of the Hemings family. Those were his two natural sons, and Sally's younger half-brother John Hemings, and her nephews Joseph (Joe) Fossett and Burwell Colbert.[108][109] He gave Burwell Colbert, who had served as his butler and valet, $300 for purchasing supplies used in the trade of "painter and glazier". He gave John Hemings and Joe Fossett each an acre on his land so they could build homes for their families. His will included a petition to the state legislature to allow the freedmen to remain in Virginia to be with their families, who remained enslaved under Jefferson's heirs.[108]

Jefferson freed Joseph Fossett in his will, but Fossett's wife (Edith Hern Fossett) and their eight children were sold at auction. Fossett was able to get enough money to buy the freedom of his wife and two youngest children. The remainder of their ten children were sold to different slaveholders. The Fossetts worked for 23 years to purchase the freedom of their remaining children.[110]

Born and reared as free, not knowing that I was a slave, then suddenly, at the death of Jefferson, put upon an auction block and sold to strangers.

— Peter Fossett[111]

In 1827, the auction of 130 slaves took place at Monticello. The sale lasted for five days despite the cold weather. The slaves brought prices over 70% of their appraised value. Within three years, all of the "black" families at Monticello had been sold and dispersed.[112]

Sally Hemings and her children[edit]

Main article: Jefferson–Hemings controversy

For two centuries the claim that Thomas Jefferson fathered children by his slave, Sally Hemings, has been a matter of discussion and disagreement. In 1802, the journalist James T. Callender, after being denied a position as postmaster by Jefferson, published allegations that Jefferson had taken Hemings as a concubine and had fathered several children with her.[113] John Wayles held her as a slave, and was also her father, as well as the father of Jefferson's wife Martha. Sally was three-quarters white and strikingly similar in looks and voice to Jefferson's late wife.[114]

In 1998, in order to establish the male DNA line, a panel of researchers conducted a Y-DNA study of living descendants of Jefferson's uncle, Field, and of a descendant of Sally's son, Eston Hemings. The results, published in the journal Nature,[115] showed a Y-DNA match with the male Jefferson line. In 2000, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation (TJF) assembled a team of historians whose report concluded that, together with the DNA and historic evidence, there was a high probability that Jefferson was the father of Eston and likely of all Hemings' children. W. M. Wallenborn, who worked on the Monticello report, disagreed, claiming the committee had already made up their minds before evaluating the evidence, was a "rush to judgement", and that the claims of Jefferson's paternity were unsubstantiated and politically driven.[116]

Since the DNA tests were made public, most biographers and historians have concluded that the widower Jefferson had a long-term relationship with Hemings,[117] and fathered at least some and probably all of her children.[118][119] A minority of scholars, including a team of professors associated with the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society, maintain that the evidence is insufficient to conclude Thomas Jefferson's paternity, and note the possibility that other Jeffersons, including Thomas's brother Randolph Jefferson and his five sons, who were alleged to have raped enslaved women, could have fathered Hemings' children.[120][121] Jefferson allowed two of Sally's children to leave Monticello without formal manumission when they came of age; five other slaves, including the two remaining sons of Sally, were freed by his will upon his death. Although not legally freed, Sally left Monticello with her sons. They were counted as free whites in the 1830 census.[122][123] Madison Hemings, in an article titled, "Life Among the Lowly", in small Ohio newspaper called Pike County Republican, claimed that Jefferson was his father.[124][125]

Monticello slave life[edit]

Isaac Jefferson, 1845, was a slave blacksmith at Monticello.

Jefferson ran every facet of the four Monticello farms and left specific instructions to his overseers when away or traveling. Slaves in the mansion, mill, and nailery reported to one general overseer appointed by Jefferson, and he hired many overseers, some of whom were considered cruel at the time. Jefferson made meticulous periodical records on his slaves, plants and animals, and weather.[126][127] Jefferson, in his Farm Book journal, visually described in detail both the quality and quantity of purchased slave clothing and the names of all slaves who received the clothing.[128] In a letter written in 1811, Jefferson described his stress and apprehension in regard to difficulties in what he felt was his "duty" to procure specific desirable blankets for "those poor creatures" – his slaves.[129]

Some historians have noted that Jefferson maintained many slave families together on his plantations; historian Bruce Fehn says this was consistent with other slave owners at the time. There were often more than one generation of family at the plantation and families were stable. Jefferson and other slaveholders shifted the "cost of reproducing the workforce to the workers' themselves". He could increase the value of his property without having to buy additional slaves.[130] He tried to reduce infant mortality, and wrote, "[A] woman who brings a child every two years is more profitable than the best man on the farm."[131]

Jefferson encouraged the enslaved at Monticello to "marry". (The enslaved could not marry legally in Virginia.) He would occasionally buy and sell slaves to keep families together. In 1815, he said that his slaves were "worth a great deal more" due to their marriages.[132][page needed] "Married" slaves, however, had no legal protection or recognition under the law; masters could separate slave "husbands" and "wives" at will.[133]

Thomas Jefferson recorded his strategy for employing children in his Farm Book. Until the age of 10, children served as nurses. When the plantation grew tobacco, children were at a good height to remove and kill tobacco worms from the crops.[134] Once he began growing wheat, fewer people were needed to maintain the crops, so Jefferson established manual trades. He stated that children "go into the ground or learn trades." When girls were 16, they began spinning and weaving textiles. Boys made nails from age 10 to 16. In 1794, Jefferson had a dozen boys working at the nailery.[134][b] The nail factory was on Mulberry Row. After it opened in 1794, for the first three years, Jefferson recorded the productivity of each child. He selected those who were most productive to be trained as artisans: blacksmiths, carpenters, and coopers. Those who performed the worst were assigned as field laborers.[136] While working at the nailery, boys received more food and may have received new clothes if they did a good job.[134]

James Hubbard was an enslaved worker in the nailery who ran away on two occasions. The first time Jefferson did not have him whipped, but on the second Jefferson reportedly ordered him severely flogged. Hubbard was likely sold after spending time in jail. Stanton says children suffered physical violence. When a 17-year-old James was sick, one overseer reportedly whipped him "three times in one day". Violence was commonplace on plantations, including Jefferson's.[137] Henry Wiencek cited within a Smithsonian Magazine article several reports of Jefferson ordering the whipping or selling of slaves as punishments for extreme misbehavior or escape.[138]

The Thomas Jefferson Foundation quotes Jefferson's instructions to his overseers not to whip his slaves, but noted that they often ignored his wishes during his frequent absences from home.[139] According to Stanton, no reliable document portrays Jefferson as directly using physical correction.[140] During Jefferson's time, some other slaveholders also disagreed with the practices of flogging and jailing slaves.[141]

Slaves had a variety of tasks: Davy Bowles was the carriage driver, including trips to take Jefferson to and from Washington D.C. or the Virginia capital. Betty Hemings, a mixed-race slave inherited from his father-in-law with her family, was the matriarch and head of the house slaves at Monticello, who were allowed limited freedom when Jefferson was away. Four of her daughters served as house slaves: Betty Brown; Nance, Critta and Sally Hemings. The latter two were half-sisters to Jefferson's wife, and Sally bore him 6 children. Another house slave was Ursula Granger, whom he had purchased separately. The general maintenance of the mansion was under the care of Hemings family members as well: the master carpenter was Betty's son John Hemings. His nephews Joe Fossett, as blacksmith, and Burwell Colbert, as Jefferson's butler and painter, also had important roles. Wormley Hughes, a grandson of Betty Hemings and gardener, was given informal freedom after Jefferson's death.[126] Memoirs of life at Monticello include those of Isaac Jefferson (published, 1843), Madison Hemings, and Israel Jefferson (both published, 1873). Isaac was an enslaved blacksmith who worked on Jefferson's plantation.[142][143]

The last surviving recorded interview of a former slave was with Fountain Hughes, then 101, in Baltimore, Maryland in 1949. It is available online at the Library of Congress and the World Digital Library.[144] Born in Charlottesville, Fountain was a descendant of Wormley Hughes and Ursula Granger; his grandparents were among the house slaves owned by Jefferson at Monticello.[145]

Notes on the State of Virginia (1785)[edit]

Main article: Notes on the State of Virginia

In 1780, Jefferson began answering questions on the colonies asked by French minister François de Marboias. He worked on what became a book for five years, having it printed in France while he was there as U.S. minister in 1785.[146] The book covered subjects such as mountains, religion, climate, slavery, and race.[147]

Views on race[edit]

In Query XIV of his Notes, Jefferson analyses the nature of Blacks. He stated that Blacks lacked forethought, intelligence, tenderness, grief, imagination, and beauty; that they had poor taste, smelled bad, and were incapable of producing artistry or poetry; but conceded that they were the moral equals of all others.[148][149] Jefferson believed that the bonds of love for blacks were weaker than those for whites.[150] Jefferson never settled on whether differences were natural or nurtural, but he stated unquestionably that his views ought to be taken cum grano salis;

The opinion, that they are inferior in the faculties of reason and imagination, must be hazarded with great diffidence. To justify a general conclusion, requires many observations, even where the subject may be submitted to the Anatomical knife, to Optical glasses, to analysis by fire or by solvents. How much more then where it is a faculty, not a substance, we are examining; where it eludes the research of all the senses; where the conditions of its existence are various and variously combined; where the effects of those which are present or absent bid defiance to calculation; let me add too, as a circumstance of great tenderness, where our conclusion would degrade a whole race of men from the rank in the scale of beings which their Creator may perhaps have given them. To our reproach it must be said, that though for a century and a half we have had under our eyes the races of black and of red men, they have never yet been viewed by us as subjects of natural history. I advance it, therefore, as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind. It is not against experience to suppose that different species of the same genus, or varieties of the same species, may possess different qualifications.[148]

In 1808, French abolitionist Henri Grégoire sent Jefferson a copy of his book, An Enquiry Concerning the Intellectual and Moral Faculties and Literature of Negroes. In the book, Grégoire responded to and challenged Jefferson's arguments of Black inferiority in Notes on the State of Virginia by citing the advanced civilizations Africans had developed as evidence of their intellectual competence.[151][152] Jefferson replied to Grégoire that the rights of African Americans should not depend on intelligence and that Black people had "respectable intelligence".[153] Jefferson wrote of Black people that,

but whatever be their degree of talent it is no measure of their rights. Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others. On this subject they are gaining daily in the opinions of nations, and hopeful advances are making towards their re-establishment on an equal footing with the other colors of the human family.[153][154]

Dumas Malone, Jefferson's biographer, explained Jefferson's contemporary views on race as expressed in Notes were the "tentative judgements of a kindly and scientifically minded man". Merrill Peterson, another Jefferson biographer, claimed Jefferson's racial bias against African Americans was "a product of frivolous and tortuous reasoning ... and bewildering confusion of principles." Peterson called Jefferson's racial views on African Americans "folk belief".[155]

In a reply (in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 10, 22 June-31 December 1786, ed. Julian P. Boyd p. 20-29) to Jean Nicolas DeMeunier's inquiries concerning the Paris publication of his Notes On The State of Virginia (1785) Jefferson described the Southern slave plantation economy as "a species of property annexed to certain mercantile houses in London": "Virginia certainly owed two millions sterling to Great Britain at the conclusion of the [Revolutionary] war. ... This is to be ascribed to peculiarities in the tobacco trade. The advantages [profits] made by the British merchants on the tobaccoes consigned to them were so enormous that they spared no means of increasing those consignments. A powerful engine for this purpose was the giving good prices and credit to the planter, till they got him more immersed in debt than he could pay without selling his lands or slaves. They then reduced the prices given for his tobacco so that let his shipments be ever so great, and his demand of necessaries ever so economical, they never permitted him to clear off his debt. These debts had become hereditary from father to son for many generations, so that the planters were a species of property annexed to certain mercantile houses in London." After the Revolution this subjection of the Southern plantation economy to absentee finance, commodities brokers, import-export merchants and wholesalers continued, with the center of finance and trade shifting from London to Manhattan where, up until the Civil War, banks continued to write mortgages with slaves as collateral, and foreclose on plantations in default and operate them in their investors' interests, as discussed by Philip S. Foner.[156]

Support for colonization plan[edit]

In his Notes Jefferson wrote of a plan he supported in 1779 in the Virginia legislature that would end slavery through the colonization of freed slaves.[157][158] This plan was widely popular among the French people in 1785 who lauded Jefferson as a philosopher. According to Jefferson, this plan required enslaved adults to continue in slavery but their children would be taken from them and trained to have a skill in the arts or sciences. These skilled women at age 18 and men at 21 would be emancipated, given arms and supplies, and sent to colonize a foreign land.[157] Jefferson believed that colonization was the practical alternative,[159] while freed blacks living in a white American society would lead to a race war:

It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expense of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.[160]

Criticism for effects of slavery[edit]

In Notes Jefferson criticized the effects slavery had on both white and African-American slave society.[161] He writes:

There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do. If a parent could find no motive either in his philanthropy or his self-love, for restraining the intemperance of passion towards his slave, it should always be a sufficient one that his child is present. But generally it is not sufficient. The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances. And with what execration should the statesman be loaded, who permitting one half the citizens thus to trample on the rights of the other, transforms those into despots, and these into enemies, destroys the morals of the one part, and the amor patriae of the other.

Evaluations by historians[edit]

According to James W. Loewen, Jefferson's character "wrestled with slavery, even though in the end he lost." Loewen says that understanding Jefferson's relationship with slavery is significant in understanding current American social problems.[162]

Important 20th-century Jefferson biographers including Merrill Peterson support the view that Jefferson was strongly opposed to slavery; Peterson said that Jefferson's ownership of slaves "all his adult life has placed him at odds with his moral and political principles. Yet there can be no question of his genuine hatred of slavery or, indeed, of the efforts he made to curb and eliminate it."[163] Peter Onuf stated that Jefferson was well known for his "opposition to slavery, most famously expressed in his ... Notes on the State of Virginia."[164] Onuf, and his collaborator Ari Helo, inferred from Jefferson's words and actions that he was against the cohabitation of free blacks and whites.[165] This, they argued, is what made immediate emancipation so problematic in Jefferson's mind. As Onuf and Helo explained, Jefferson opposed the mixing of the races not because of his belief that blacks were inferior (although he did provisionally believe this) but because he feared that instantly freeing the slaves in white territory would trigger "genocidal violence". He could not imagine the blacks living in harmony with their former oppressors. Jefferson was sure that the two races would be in constant conflict. Onuf and Helo asserted that Jefferson was, consequently, a proponent of freeing the Africans through "expulsion", which he thought would have ensured the safety of both the whites and blacks. Biographer John Ferling said that Thomas Jefferson was "zealously committed to slavery's abolition".[166]

Starting in the early 1960s, some academics began to challenge Jefferson's position as an anti-slavery advocate having reevaluated both his actions and his words.[167][168] Paul Finkelman wrote in 1994 that earlier scholars, particularly Peterson, Dumas Malone, and Willard Randall, engaged in "exaggeration or misrepresentation" to advance their argument of Jefferson's anti-slavery position, saying "they ignore contrary evidence" and "paint a false picture" to protect Jefferson's image on slavery.[169]

In 2012, author Henry Wiencek, highly critical of Jefferson, concluded that Jefferson tried to protect his legacy as a Founding Father by hiding slavery from visitors at Monticello and through his writings to abolitionists.[170] According to Wiencek's view Jefferson made a new frontage road to his Monticello estate to hide the overseers and slaves who worked the agriculture fields. Wiencek believed that Jefferson's "soft answers" to abolitionists were to make himself appear opposed to slavery.[170] Wiencek stated that Jefferson held enormous political power but "did nothing to hasten slavery's end during his terms as a diplomat, secretary of state, vice president, and twice-elected president or after his presidency."[170]

According to Greg Warnusz, Jefferson held typical 19th-century beliefs that blacks were inferior to whites in terms of "potential for citizenship", and he wanted them recolonized to independent Liberia and other colonies. His views of a democratic society were based on a homogeneity of white working men. He claimed to be interested in helping both races in his proposal. He proposed gradually freeing slaves after the age of 45 (when they would have repaid their owner's investment) and resettling them in Africa. (This proposal did not acknowledge how difficult it would be for freedmen to be settled in another country and environment after age 45.) Jefferson's plan envisioned a whites-only society without any blacks.[25]

Concerning Jefferson and race, author Annette Gordon-Reed stated the following:

Of all the Founding Fathers, it was Thomas Jefferson for whom the issue of race loomed largest. In the roles of slaveholder, public official and family man, the relationship between blacks and whites was something he thought about, wrote about and grappled with from his cradle to his grave.[171]

Paul Finkelman claims that Jefferson believed that Blacks lacked basic human emotions.[172]

According to historian Jeremy J. Tewell, although Jefferson's name had been associated with the anti-slavery cause during the early 1770s in the Virginia legislature, Jefferson viewed slavery as a "Southern way of life", similar to mainstream Greek and antiquity societies. In agreement with the Southern slave society, Tewell says Jefferson believed that slavery served to protect blacks, whom he viewed as inferior or incapable of taking care of themselves.[173]

According to Joyce Appleby, Jefferson had opportunities to disassociate himself from slavery. In 1782, after the American Revolution, Virginia passed a law making manumission by the slave owner legal and more easily accomplished, and the manumission rate rose across the Upper South in other states as well. Northern states passed various emancipation plans. Jefferson's actions did not keep up with those of the antislavery advocates.[158] On September 15, 1793, Jefferson agreed in writing to free James Hemings, his mixed-race slave who had served him as chef since their time in Paris, after the slave had trained his younger brother Peter as a replacement chef. Jefferson finally freed James Hemings in February 1796. According to one historian, Jefferson's manumission was not generous; he said the document "undermines any notion of benevolence."[174] With freedom, Hemings worked in Philadelphia and traveled to France.[175]

In contrast, a sufficient number of other slaveholders in Virginia freed slaves in the first two decades after the Revolution so that the proportion of free blacks in Virginia compared to the total black population rose from less than 1% in 1790 to 7.2% in 1810.[176]

See also[edit]

Notes[edit]

  1. ^ He offered James Hemings, his former slave freed in 1796, the position of White House chef. Hemings refused, although his kin were still held at Monticello. (Hemings later became depressed and turned to drinking. He committed suicide at age 36, perhaps in a fit of inebriation.)[60][61][62]
  2. ^ Jefferson's nail factory was in competition with the Virginia State Penitentiary and Catharine Flood McCall's Alexandria blacksmith shop and nail factory, the latter of which was staffed by enslaved and free laborers. The Penitentiary, staffed by inmates, became profitable in 1807 from prisoner-made nails and other products. By 1815, it undercut McCall's and Jefferson's businesses, both of which ultimately closed down.[135]

References[edit]

  1. ^ Sloan offset (1995), Principle and Interest: Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Debt, p. 14
  2. ^ Howe, Daniel W. (1997), Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln, p. 74
  3. ^ William Cohen, "Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Slavery," Journal of American History 56, no. 3 (1969): 503–26, p. 510
  4. ^ Jackson Fossett, Dr. Judith (June 27, 2004). "Forum: Thomas Jefferson". Time. Archived from the original on July 6, 2004. Retrieved December 4, 2010.
  5. ^ John B. Boles, "Thomas Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty," pp. 117, 2017
  6. ^ Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998, pp. 7–13
  7. ^ Jump up to:a b c Thomas Jefferson, edited by David Waldstreicher, Notes on the State of Virginia, pp. 214, 2002
  8. ^ Malone, TJ, 1:114, 437–39
  9. ^ McLoughlin, Jefferson and Monticello, 34.
  10. ^ Woods, Edgar (1901). Albemarle County in Virginia. Charlottesville, Virginia. p. 225.
  11. ^ Malone, 1948, pp. 437–40.
  12. ^ Halliday (2001), Understanding Thomas Jefferson, pp. 141–42
  13. ^ Jump up to:a b "Indentured Servants", Monticello, accessed 25 March 2011
  14. ^ "John Wayles", Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia, Monticello, accessed 10 March 2011. Sources cited on page: Madison Hemings, "Life Among the Lowly," Pike County Republican, March 13, 1873. Letter of December 20, 1802 from Thomas Gibbons, a Federalist planter of Georgia, to Jonathan Dayton, states that Sally Hemings "is half sister to his [Jefferson's] first wife."
  15. ^ Halliday (2001), Understanding Thomas Jefferson, p. 143
  16. ^ "Mulberry Row". Slavery at Monticello. Archived from the original on 2012-05-04. Retrieved 2012-04-06.
  17. ^ "Avalon Project - Summary View of the Rights of British America".
  18. ^ Russell, David Lee (2000-11-01). David Lee Russell, The American Revolution in the Southern Colonies, 2000, pp. 63, 69. McFarland. ISBN 9780786407835. Retrieved 2012-02-19.
  19. ^ John Hope Franklin, "Rebels, Runaways and Heroes: The Bitter Years of Slavery", Life, November 22, 1968
  20. ^ Becker (1922), Declaration of Independence, p. 5.
  21. ^ The Spirit of the Revolution, John Fitzpatrick, 1924, p. 6
  22. ^ "(1776) the Deleted Passage of the Declaration of Independence •". 10 August 2009.
  23. ^ Jump up to:a b Forret 2012, p. 7.
  24. ^ Thomas Jefferson, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1, 1760–1776, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1950) 417–18
  25. ^ Jump up to:a b Greg Warnusz (Summer 1990). "This Execrable Commerce – Thomas Jefferson and Slavery". Retrieved 2009-08-18.
  26. ^ 4 December 1818 letter to Robert Walsh, in Saul K. Padover, ed., A Jefferson Profile: As Revealed in His Letters. (New York, 1956) 300
  27. ^ John Chester Miller, The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery, (New York: Free Press, 1977), 8
  28. ^ Finkleman (2008), 379+
  29. ^ Richardson, William D. “Thomas Jefferson & Race: The Declaration & Notes on the State of Virginia.” Polity, vol. 16, no. 3, 1984, pp. 447–466.
  30. ^ "Jefferson and Slavery".
  31. ^ Historians report "in all likelihood Jefferson composed [the law] although the evidence is not conclusive"; John E. Selby and Don Higginbotham, The Revolution in Virginia, 1775–1783 (2007), p 158.
  32. ^ "October 1778 – ACT I. An act for preventing the farther importation of Slaves". Retrieved 2009-07-24.
  33. ^ Dubois, 14; Ballagh, A History of Slavery in Virginia, 23.
  34. ^ John Chester Miller, The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery, New York: Free Press, 1977, p. 24
  35. ^ American Spirit Magazine, Daughters of the American Revolution, January–February 2009, p. 4
  36. ^ Stanton 2000, pp. 56–57.
  37. ^ Places: "Elkhill", Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia, Monticello, accessed 10 January 2012
  38. ^ Paul Finkelman, "Thomas Jefferson and Antislavery: The Myth Goes On," Virginia Magazine of History & Biography, 1994
  39. ^ "May 1782 – ACT XXI. An act to authorize the manumission of slaves". Retrieved 2009-07-23.
  40. ^ "An ACT to amend the several laws concerning slaves" (1806), Virginia General Assembly.
  41. ^ Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619–1865, New York: Hill and Wang, pp. 73, 77, 81
  42. ^ Jump up to:a b Finkelman (1994), pp. 210–11
  43. ^ Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), p. 187.
  44. ^ Jump up to:a b c d e Rodriguez, Junius P. (1997). The Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery, Volume 1; Volume 7. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, Inc. p. 380.
  45. ^ Jump up to:a b William Merkel, "Jefferson's Failed Anti-Slavery Proviso of 1784 and the Nascence of Free Soil Constitutionalism," Seton Hall Law Review, Vol. 38, No. 2, 2008
  46. ^ "The Thomas Jefferson Timeline: 1743–1827". Retrieved December 8, 2010.
  47. ^ "Resolution on Western Territory Government". March 1, 1784. Retrieved December 8, 2010.
  48. ^ "Extract from Thomas Jefferson's Observations on Jean Nicolas Démeunier's Article on the United States prepared for the Encyclopédie Méthodique, [22 June 1786] [Quote] | Jefferson Quotes & Family Letters".
  49. ^ "Abraham Lincoln's Cooper Union Address".
  50. ^ "Jefferson's notes on Slavery < 1776-1785 < Documents < American History from Revolution to Reconstruction and beyond".
  51. ^ Onuf, Peter S., "Every Generation Is An 'Independent Nation': Colonization, Miscegenation and the Fate of Jefferson's Children", William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. LVII, No.1, January 2000, JSTOR, accessed 10 January 2012 (subscription required)
  52. ^ Onuf, Peter. “‘To Declare Them a Free and Independent People’: Race, Slavery, and National Identity in Jefferson's Thought.” Journal of the Early Republic, vol. 18, no. 1, 1998, pp. 1–46.
  53. ^ Jump up to:a b David Brion Davis, Was Thomas Jefferson Anti-Slavery?, New York: Oxford University Press, 1970, p. 179
  54. ^ Alfred Hunt, Haiti's Influence on Antebellum America, p. 31
  55. ^ "Letter from James Monroe to Thomas Jefferson (September 15, 1800) – Encyclopedia Virginia".
  56. ^ "Letter from Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe (September 20, 1800) – Encyclopedia Virginia".
  57. ^ Merkel, William G. (2003). "To See Oneself as a Target of a Justified Revolution: Thomas Jefferson and Gabriel's Uprising". American Nineteenth Century History. 4 (2): 1–31. doi:10.1080/14664650312331294294. S2CID 143290561. SSRN 959676.
  58. ^ Finkelman (1994), p. 206
  59. ^ Finkelman, Paul, qtd. in Rosin, Michael L., "The Three-Fifths Rule and the Presidential Elections of 1800 and 1824," University of St. Thomas Law Journal, 2018, Vol. 15:1, p. 161. Retrieved 28 Jul 2021. Finkelman quote: "Thomas Jefferson’s victory in the election of 1800 would be possible only because of the electoral votes the southern states gained on account of their slaves." Rosin's article debates the merits of the argument put forth by Finkelman and others, including John Adams himself and modern scholars.
  60. ^ "The Thomas Jefferson Timeline: 1743–1827". Library of Congress, American Memory Project. Retrieved December 9, 2010.
  61. ^ Finkelman, Paul (April 1994). "Thomas Jefferson and Antislavery: The Myth Goes On". The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography. 102 (2): 193–228. JSTOR 4249430.
  62. ^ Goodman, Amy (January 20, 2009). "Jesse Holland on How Slaves Built the White House and the U.S. Capitol". Democracy Now!. Retrieved 17 May 2015.
  63. ^ Jump up to:a b "Edith Hern Fossett". www.monticello.org. Retrieved January 19, 2020.
  64. ^ Rhodes, Jesse (July 9, 2012). "Meet Edith and Fanny, Thomas Jefferson's Enslaved Master Chefs". Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved January 19, 2020.
  65. ^ Jump up to:a b Mann, Lina. "Slavery and French Cuisine in Jefferson's Working White House". The White House Historical Association. Retrieved January 19, 2020.
  66. ^ Gordon-Reed, Annette; Onuf, Peter S. (2016-04-13). "Most Blessed of the Patriarchs": Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination. W. W. Norton & Company. pp. PT63. ISBN 978-1-63149-078-1.
  67. ^ Matthewson (1995), p. 214
  68. ^ Jump up to:a b c d Scherr (2011), pp. 251+.
  69. ^ Matthewson (1995), p. 211
  70. ^ Jump up to:a b Matthewson (1995), p. 221
  71. ^ Matthewson (1996), p. 22
  72. ^ Wills, Negro President, p. 43
  73. ^ Finkelman, Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson, p. 121.
  74. ^ Shafer, Gregory (January–February 2002). "Another Side of Thomas Jefferson". The Humanist. 62 (1): 16.
  75. ^ Ted Widmer, "Two Cheers for Jefferson": Review of Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America, New York Times, 17 July 2005, accessed 19 April 2012. Quote: Hitchens "gives us a measured sketch that faults Jefferson for his weaknesses but affirms his greatness as a thinker and president."... "To his credit, Hitchens does not gloss over Jefferson's dark side. There is a dutiful bit on Sally Hemings, and some thoughtful ruminations on the Haitian revolution, which revealed how counterrevolutionary Jefferson could be."
  76. ^ Arthur Scherr, "Light at the End of the Road: Thomas Jefferson's Endorsement of Free Haiti in His Final Years", Journal of Haitian Studies, Spring 2009, p. 6
  77. ^ Peden, William (1949). "A Book Peddler Invades Monticello". The William and Mary Quarterly. 6 (4): 631–36. doi:10.2307/1916755. JSTOR 1916755.
  78. ^ Dumas Malone, Jefferson and His Time: Volume Six, The Sage of Monticello (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1981), p. 319.
  79. ^ Stroud, A Sketch of the Laws Relating to Slavery, pp. 236–37
  80. ^ William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1904). The Suppression of the African Slave-trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870. Longmans, Green. pp. 95–96.
  81. ^ Jim Powell (2008). Greatest Emancipations: How the West Abolished Slavery. St. Martin's Press. p. 250. ISBN 9780230612983.
  82. ^ U.S. Const. art. I, s. 9, cl. 1,
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  119. ^ Slavery at Jefferson's Monticello: Paradox of Liberty Archived 2017-03-14 at the Wayback Machine, Exhibit 27 January – 14 October 2012, Smithsonian Institution, accessed 15 March 2012
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  122. ^ Paul Finkelman, (1981), pp. 37–38, 41–45.
  123. ^ Gordon-Reed, 1997, p. 209
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  127. ^ Malone (2002), Jefferson: A Reference Biography, p. 13
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  131. ^ Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, 1998, pp. 126–27
  132. ^ Halliday
  133. ^ Washington, Reginald (Spring 2005). "Sealing the Sacred Bonds of Holy Matrimony Freedmen's Bureau Marriage Records". Prologue Magazine. 7 (1). Retrieved 2011-02-15.
  134. ^ Jump up to:a b c "The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson". Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved 2021-05-09.
  135. ^ Garrett, Alexi (4 June 2020). "Jefferson's Competition in the Nail Selling Business". Mount Vernon and the University of Virginia at Charlottesville. Retrieved 2021-10-19.
  136. ^ Stanton 1993, pp. 153–55.
  137. ^ Stanton 1993, p. 159.
  138. ^ Wiencek, Henry (October 2012). "The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson: A new portrait of the founding father challenges the long-held perception of Thomas Jefferson as a benevolent slaveholder". Smithsonian Magazine. Smithsonian.com. Retrieved 21 March 2017.
  139. ^ National Museum of African American History and Culture in Partnership with the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello. "Life at the Monticello Plantation: Treatment". Slavery at Jefferson's Monticello – Paradox of Liberty: Exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African American History and Culture, January 27 – October 14, 2012. Charlottesville, Virginia: Monticello.org. Archived from the original on March 11, 2012. Retrieved 2012-02-11. Stating that it was his "first wish" that his slaves be "well treated," Jefferson struggled to balance humane treatment with a need for profit. He tried to minimize the then-common use of harsh physical punishment and used financial incentives rather than force to encourage his artisans. He instructed his overseers not to whip slaves, but his wishes were often ignored during his frequent absences from home.
  140. ^ Stanton 1993, p. 158.
  141. ^ Kolchin (1987), Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom, p. 292; Wilstach (1925), Jefferson and Monticello, p. 130
  142. ^ Isaac Jefferson, Memoirs of a Monticello Slave, 1951; reprint Ford Press, 2007
  143. ^ Gordon-Reed, Annette (1999). Annette Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, 1997, p. 142. University of Virginia Press. ISBN 9780813918334. Retrieved 2012-02-19.
  144. ^ "Interview with Fountain Hughes, Baltimore, Maryland, June 11, 1949", American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, World Digital Library, accessed 26 May 2013
  145. ^ "Hughes (Hemings)", Getting Word, Monticello Foundation, accessed 26 May 2013
  146. ^ Wilson, Douglas L. (2004). "The Evolution of Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia. Contributors". The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography. 112 (2): 98–.
  147. ^ Jefferson, Thomas (1955). William Peden (ed.). Notes on the State of Virginia. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. pp. 139–42, 162. ISBN 0-7391-1792-0.
  148. ^ Jump up to:a b Jefferson, Thomas. "Query XIV". Notes on Virginia.
  149. ^ Gossett, Thomas F. Race: The History of an Idea in America, OUP, 1963, 1997. p. 42.
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  151. ^ "Abbe Gregoire", Digital Collections, South Carolina State University
  152. ^ Donatus Nwoga, Humanitarianism and the Criticism of African Literature, 1770–1810, Research in African Literatures, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Autumn, 1972), pp. 171
  153. ^ Jump up to:a b Jefferson (February 25, 1809).
  154. ^ "Letter of February 25, 1809 from Thomas Jefferson to French author Monsieur Gregoire," from The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (H. A. Worthington, ed.), Volume V, p. 429. Citation and quote from Morris Kominsky, The Hoaxers, pp. 110–11.
  155. ^ Halliday (2001), Understanding Thomas Jefferson, pp. 175, 176
  156. ^ Philip S. Foner, Business & Slavery: The New York Merchants & the Irrepressible Conflict (University of North Carolina, 1941) p. 3-6.
  157. ^ Jump up to:a b Weincek (2012), Master of the Mountain Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves, pp. 53–54
  158. ^ Jump up to:a b Joyce Oldham Appleby and Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Thomas Jefferson, pp. 77–78, 2003
  159. ^ Weincek (2012), Master of the Mountain Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves, p. 54
  160. ^ "Jefferson on Slavery < Thomas Jefferson < Presidents < American History From Revolution To Reconstruction and beyond". www.let.rug.nl. Rutgers University. Retrieved 16 January 2023.
  161. ^ Jefferson, Thomas (1785). Notes on the State of Virginia. Prischard and Hall. pp. 172–173.
  162. ^ Loewen, James W. (2007-10-16). Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong. Simon & Schuster. pp. 311, 312. ISBN 978-0-7432-9629-8. Retrieved 2010-03-25.
  163. ^ Merrill D. Peterson. "Jefferson, Thomas"; American National Biography Online (2000)
  164. ^ Peter Onuf, "Jefferson, Thomas," in Macmillan Encyclopedia of World Slavery (1998), vol. 1, p. 446
  165. ^ Helo, Ari and Peter S. Onuf. "Jefferson, Morality, and the Problem of Slavery". In The Mind of Thomas Jefferson, edited by Peter S. Onuf, pp. 236–70. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2007.
  166. ^ Ferling (2000), Setting the World Ablaze, p. 161
  167. ^ Robert McColley, Slavery and Jeffersonian Virginia, Urbana, 1964, p. 124
  168. ^ William Cohen, "Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Slavery" in The Journal of American History volume 56, No. 3 (Dec. 1969), p. 505
  169. ^ Paul Finkelman, "Thomas Jefferson and Antislavery: The Myth Goes On", The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 102, No. 2, April 1994, pp 199, 201]
  170. ^ Jump up to:a b c Wiencek (2012), Master of the Mountain Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves, pp. 267–68
  171. ^ Annette Gordon-Reed, "Thomas Jefferson: Was the Sage a Hypocrite?", cover story, TIME, 4 July 2004, accessed 23 February 2012
  172. ^ Finkelman, Paul (2012-12-01). "The Monster of Monticello". The New York Times. p. A25. Archived from the original on 2012-12-04. Retrieved 2012-12-02. Destroying families didn't bother Jefferson, because he believed blacks lacked basic human emotions.
  173. ^ Tewell (Summer 2011), p. 235
  174. ^ Finkleman (1994), Thomas Jefferson and Antislavery, pp. 193+
  175. ^ "The Thomas Jefferson Timeline: 1743–1827". Retrieved December 9, 2010.; Finkleman (1994), Thomas Jefferson and Antislavery, pp. 193+
  176. ^ Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619–1865, p. 81

Bibliography[edit]

Main article: Bibliography of Thomas Jefferson

Academic journals[edit]

  • Finkelman, Paul. "Regulating the African slave trade," Civil War History 54.4 (2008): 379+.
  • Matthewson, Tim. "Jefferson and Haiti", The Journal of Southern History, 61 (1995)
  • Pasley, Jeffrey L. "Politics and the Misadventures of Thomas Jefferson's Modern Reputation: a Review Essay," Journal of Southern History 2006 72(4): 871–908. ISSN 0022-4642 Fulltext in Ebsco.
  • Scherr, Arthur. "Jefferson's 'Cannibals' Revisited: A Closer Look at His Notorious Phrase," Journal of Southern History 77.2 (2011): 251+
  • Tewell, Jeremy J. "Assuring Freedom to the Free: Jefferson's Declaration and the Conflict over Slavery," Civil War History (Mar 2012) 58#1 pp. 75–96.

Primary[edit]

External links[edit]

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Namgok Lee - 내가 이해하는 영성靈性과 명상. 인간의 뇌는 여전히 신비의 영역. 영성은 이성理性... | Facebook

Namgok Lee - 내가 이해하는 영성靈性과 명상. 인간의 뇌는 여전히 신비의 영역. 영성은 이성理性... | Facebook:

Namgok Lee

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내가 이해하는 영성靈性과 명상.
인간의 뇌는 여전히 신비의 영역.
영성은 이성理性 ㆍ감성感性 등과 별개의 영역이 아니라 이 둘(좌뇌와 우뇌)을 조화 융합하는 것.
명상은 이를 고도화하는 활동.
좌뇌와 우뇌는 역사의 진행과 함께 번갈아가며 불균형 속에서 진화해오며, 상호 영향.
뇌는 전체 역사의 반영이며, 인간의 역사는 뇌의 진화의 반영.
고대의 부흥이 탈근대를 의미하는 것은 아님.
'영성靈性이 있는 정치政治'라는 말을 음미하면서.
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2023/11/20

신유학의 연구 방법 반성 / 손영식

신유학의 연구 방법 반성 / 손영식

한국연구원

신유학의 연구 방법 반성 / 손영식


나는 45년 넘게 중국 철학을 연구했다. 나의 연구 방법은 첫째, “한문 원전을 읽자, 남이 쓴 논문은 2차 자료일 뿐이다.” 둘째, 나의 상식과 이성의 관점에서 보자. 나는 학부에서 주로 서양 철학을 배웠고, 현대 자연과학을 나름 잘 알고 있다. 그리고 한국에 살고 있다. 이것이 나의 상식과 이성을 구성한다.


1. 성현(聖賢)과 노예적 이성


이런 관점에서 내가 가장 이해하지 못 했던 것은 공자의 술이부작(述而不作 잇되 짓지 않음)의 태도이다. 이 결과는 과거 철학자의 말을 무조건 진리로 인정하는 것이다. 이를 비판하여 풍우란은 진시황 이전을 자학(子學 제자백가의 학문), 이후를 경학(經學)으로 구분한다. 경학은 제자백가의 학설을 경전으로 모시고 훈고와 고증을 하는 것이다. 지적인 노예 상태이다.


나는 언젠가 수업에 학생들에게 물었다. 너희들이 볼 때 나와 퇴계 이황은 누가 더 나은가?


맹자는 군주 천명론을 주장한다. 어떤이가 왕이 되는 것은 ‘하늘의 명령’(天命)을 받았기 때문이라 한다. 이는 서양 근대의 왕권 신수설과 비슷한 신화적인 황당한 이야기이다. 문제는 과거 기나긴 중국 및 한국 역사 전체에 공화정을 주장함은 커녕, 소개한 학자가 단 하나가 없다는 사실이다. 심지어는 ‘공화정(共和政)’을 뜻하는 한자 낱말 자체가 없다. (중국어에는 ‘딸’에 해당되는 낱말도 없다.) ‘共和’라는 말은 주나라 때 왕이 없어지자, 共과 和라는 신하가 대신 다스렸다는 일화에서 나왔다. 공화정은 ‘republic’의 번역어이고, 그것은 ‘res publica’(대중, 국민)이라는 말에서 나왔다. 나라는 왕의 소유가 아니라 국민 대중의 소유라는 것이다.


‘왕정’ 대신 ‘공화정’이라는 생각은 하기 어려울 것도 없다. 서양은 그리스 시대부터 널려 있던 생각이다. 그런데 중국은 왜 그 많은 학자 가운데 단 하나도 거론하는 자가 없었는가? 분서갱유와 같은 황제 독재 국가의 탄압 때문이기도 하지만, 가장 큰 이유는 맹자에게 ‘노예화된 학자’들의 탓이다. 맹자의 말은 무조건 진리인가? 성현은 나와 급이 다른 인간인가?





2. 철학→신화로 퇴행


원래 인류의 지성은 신화→철학→과학으로 발전했다. 그러나 신유학 연구는 주희가 철학 체계를 세운 뒤에 철학→신화로 퇴행했다. 신화는 세상의 모든 것을 신의 변신으로 설명한다. 왜 비가 오는가? 우사(雨師)가 비를 내린다. 철학은 ‘신’을 ‘형상과 질료’, ‘원인과 결과’로 분리시키고 논리적으로 설명한다. 과학은 경험적 증거, 수학적 기술(記述)에 근거한다.


주희의 성리학은 난해한 용어로 무장한 형이상학이다. 그것에 눌린 결과 의인법적 사고에 빠진다. 2011년에 어떤 분이 쓰신 논문을 예로 들어보자.





“그 格物·物格의 순간이 바로 본래 ‘하나’에서 근원한 인식 주체의 理와 인식 대상의 理가 아무런 매개체[氣質]의 장애 없이 만나, 본래 하나[一理]임이 인식되는 순감임을 뜻한다. 그 순간에 氣質은 완벽하게 理의 통제 하에서 理의 잠재성을 온전히 구현하는 도구로 작용되므로 ···”





낯선 난해성을 떠나 그냥 읽어 보자. 그러면 의인법적 사고가 돋보인다. “인식 주체의 리(理)와 인식 대상의 리(理)가 만난다”, 그 둘은 “본래 하나이다”, “기질은 리의 통제 아래”, “기질은 리의 잠재성을 구현하는 도구” - 이런 구절에서 ‘理, 기질’ 등의 형이상학적 개념들은 마치 ‘사물’인 것 같기도 하고, ‘사람’인 것 같기도 하다. 추상적 개념의 이런 ‘사물화 의인화’는 이미 이황의 “理發, 理動, 理到”(리가 드러난다, 움직인다, 도착한다)는 개념에도 있다. 그 이전에 주희는 리(理)가 “情意 計度 操作”(감정과 의지, 헤아림, 행위)가 없다고 한다.


‘리(理) 기(氣)’ 같은 추상적 형이상학적 개념은 사물도 아니고 사람과 같은 행위자도 아니다. 그 런데 마치 사물-사람인 것처럼 말한다. 이는 사유의 미성숙을 뜻한다.





3. 철학→문학으로 변질


이런 ‘사물화 의인화’의 원인 가운데 하나는 ‘비유를 증명’으로 간주하는 중국 철학의 고질병 때문이다. 맹자는 사람이 본래 ‘인(仁 사랑)’을 가졌다고 하면서, 우물에 빠지는 어린애를 보면 누구나 무조건 구해 주려는 ‘측은히 여기는 마음’을 예로 든다. 이는 ‘인(仁)’이라는 사랑의 예를 하나 든 것에 불과하다. 예를 들었다고 그런 사랑이 있다는 것이 증명된 것이 아니다. 예를 들기로 치자면, 빠지려는 어린애가 안 빠지면 발로 차서 빠뜨리고, 건져내고 나서 그 부모에게 구한 댓가를 요구하는 사람도 있다. - 그런 반대 예를 들 수 있다.


이황은 기대승과 4단과 7정에 대해서 치열하게 논쟁하면서 “사단(四端) = 리발기수(理發氣隨 리가 드러나면 기가 따름), 칠정(七情) = 기발리승(氣發理乘 기가 드러나면, 리가 올라탐)”이라 한다. 덧붙여서 리와 기의 관계를 “사람이 말(馬)에 올라탐”에 비유한다. 주희는 리와 기를 장군과 졸병에 비유한다. 이렇다 보니 요즘 학자들은 리와 기를 부부 관계에 비유하기도 한다. - 도대체 형이상학적 개념을 가지고 추상적 논리적 사유를 할 생각을 하지 않는다.


이렇게 된 배경에는 장자가 있다. 그는 혜시와 공손룡의 명제를 궤변으로 낙인 찍는다. 물론 “하얀 말은 말이 아니다”, 돌의 “딱딱한과 하얀은 분리된다”와 같은 공손룡의 명제는 얼핏 궤변처럼 보일 수 있다. 그러나 공손룡은 그 명제들을 엄밀하게 논리적으로 증명한다.


장자는 이를 논리적 증명으로 반박하지 못 하고, 그 명제들을 궤변이라 낙인찍어 왕따시킨다. 그러면서 자신은 “수천리 크기의 붕새가 구만리 상공을 나름, 나비가 장자꿈을 꿈”과 같이 황당한 이야기를 한다. 이는 문학이라면 모를까, 철학이라면 말이 안 되는 것이다.


이후 중국에는 철학이 문학으로 변질된다. 공손룡의 논리적 추론과 증명은 사라지고, 비유 혹은 의인법과 같은 문학적 표현법이 증명과 추론을 대신한다. 이는 여전히 현재까지 살아 있는 학자들의 버릇이다.





4. 모순의 용인


철학을 버리고 문학으로 간 극단에는 모순의 용인이 있다.


형식 논리학에서 모순은 무조건 오류이다. 그러나 중국 철학에서는 모순의 용인을 넘어서서, 심지어는 모순이 심오한 진리인 것처럼 말한다. 어떤 연예인이 음주 단속에 걸리자, “술은 먹었지만, 음주 운전은 아니다” 라고 변명했다. 어떤 박사는 ‘인위적 실수’라는 말을 남기기도 했다. 인위(人爲)는 일부러 했다는 말이고, 실수는 일부러 하지 않은 것이다. - 이처럼 일상에서 보자면 모순은 웃기는 말이다. 그러나 중국 철학에서는 모순이어야 심오해진다.


율곡 이이는 리와 기의 묘합(妙合 묘하게 합해짐)을 말하자, 어떤 연구자는 이를 ‘리기 1원론’이라 한다. 1원론은 1이다. 리와 기는 2이다. 그러나 묘하게 합해져서 하나이다. ‘2=1’이라는 말인데, 이게 말이 되는가?


주희 이래 현재까지 대부분의 학자는 ‘관점주의’에 근거한다. - 리와 기의 관계는 ‘혼륜(渾淪 뒤섞음)’으로 보면 하나이고, ‘분개(分開 나눔)’으로 보면 둘이다. 이런 관점에서 보면 이렇고, 저런 관점에서 보면 저렇다. 물론 문학적으로는 그럴 수 있다. 그러나 관점주의를 가지고 ‘하나=둘’ ‘같음=다름’이라 할 수 있는가? ‘관점이 다름’이 ‘모순’을 합리화시킬 수 있는가? 절대 그럴 수 없다.


철학 논리학을 버리고 문학 수사학으로 간 결과가 이렇게 참혹하다. 철학 잡지를 들여다 보면 널린 것이 모순의 용인이다. 어떤 연구자들은 ‘리일분수(理一分殊)’에 대해서 말한다.





理는 우주·자연에 보편적이되, 種마다 또는 개체마다 다른 법칙·규범이 되기도 한다.


사물들은 각기 지닌 차이와 다양성에도 불구하고, ‘하나의 리’(理一)를 부여받고 있다





보편 법칙과 개체마다 다른 법칙, 근원적 동일성과 현상적 다양성 – 이는 모순이다. 모순은 무조건 오류이다. 왜 이런 자각이 없을까? 이 모순을 해결할 추론은 하지 않는가? 이런 추론을 하지 않기 때문에 이 나라 학계에서는 ‘理一分殊’라는 말은 여전히 신비화된다.





5. 개념 정의가 없다.


‘朱子學 퇴계학 율곡학 남명학 다산학’ 같은 용어들이 대표적이다. 이는 ‘朱子+學’처럼 ‘고유명사+학’으로 된 말이다. 고유명사는 의미가 없다. 따라서 ‘朱子學’ 같은 말은 의미(내포)를 담고 있지 않다. 단지 ‘주자(朱熹)의 학설·학문’이라는 뜻이다. 문제는 주희가 초년과 말년에 학설이 다르다는 것이다. 게다가 주희의 어떤 저서를 보느냐에 따라서 주희의 이론을 제각기 다르게 규정할 수 있다. 결국 ‘주자학’이라는 말에 제각기 다른 의미를 부여하게 된다. 제각기 다른 의미를 부여한 ‘주자학’이라는 말에 대해서 상대는 그 의미를 알지 못 한다.


이처럼 객관적 의미가 규정되지 않는다면, 서로 토론하는 것 자체가 어렵다. 조선 중기에 “서경덕 조식 이황 이이”라는 걸출한 사상가들이 나온다. 그 넷은 완전히 서로 다른 이야기를 한다. 그런데 넷의 이론을 다 ‘주자학’이라 한다. - 이런 식으로 말하면, 사실상 그믐밤에 까마귀를 백로라고 하는 것과 다를 것이 없다. 이래서 무슨 발전이 있겠는가?


왜 굳이 ‘퇴계학’이라 할까? 이황의 이론을 ‘학문’ 수준까지 올려서 존숭하겠다는 문중적 관심이다. 우리는 ‘물리학’의 ‘학’과 ‘퇴계학’의 ‘학’이 다르다는 것을 안다.


* 신유학에 가장 기본적인 개념이 ‘理, 氣’이다. 이 말이 무엇을 뜻하는지 정의하고 규정하는 학자는 별로 없다. 그러니 학계에 합의된 정의는 없다. 다 안다고 치고, 앞의 인용문처럼 그냥 ‘理 氣’로 쓴다. (심지어 한글로 ‘이 기’라고 해서, 理는 ‘이’가 아니라 ‘리’로 쓰자고 제안했다.) 나는 논문을 읽을 때마다 늘 드는 의심이 있다. 도대체 이 글을 쓴 사람은 ‘理 氣’라는 개념을 제대로 알고 있는지, 아니 개념 규정이라도 하고 있는지 의심스러울 때가 많다.





6. ‘규율 규범 한계’가 없는 사유


1) 서양 근대에 물리학(자연과학)이 생길 때, 데카르트의 실체 개념이 작동한다. 그는 실체를 ‘물질 정신 신’의 셋으로 규정한다. 자연과학은 물질을 연구 대상으로 삼는다. 실체는 자체적으로 존립하는 것이다. 따라서 자연과학은 ‘물질을 물질만으로’ 설명해야 한다. 이는 가장 중요한 원칙이다. 신이나 초자연적 힘을 동원하면 자연 설명은 너무 쉽다. 그러나 그 모든 것을 배제하고, 물질적 자연은 오직 물질만으로 설명한다는 ‘지적 금욕주의’가 자연과학을 비약적으로 발전시킨다.


앞의 이유 때문에 중국 철학은 방만함 그 자체가 된다. “역사학은 증거로 말하고, 철학은 논리로 말하고, 문학은 상상력으로 말한다.” - 철학이 ‘논리’를 포기할 때, 한계도 없고, 근거도 없는 상상력에 빠지고, 문학으로 전락한다. 문제는 정말 재미없는 문학이라는 것이다.


2) 지적 금욕주의가 없는 방만함은 경학(經學)과 함께 간다. 성현의 말씀을 경전으로 모시고, 무조건 진리로 숭배하면서 훈고 고증을 한다. 금욕이 없기에, 훈고(訓誥 풀이)를 하기 위해서 마음대로 상상하고, 심지어는 원문 변조를 서슴지 않는다. 원문을 뜯어 고칠 것이면, 왜 훈고는 하는가? 그냥 자기 이야기로 자기 글을 쓰지.


객관적 현실을 연구 대상으로 삼을 때 사실 증거와 논리적 추론 증명이 필요하다. 그럴 때는 성현의 말씀도 검증할 수 있다. 서양 근대가 그러했다. 그러나 중국은 성현(聖賢)·선현(先賢)의 말씀과 가르침을 연구 대상으로 삼는다. 그 결과 논리적 추론을 버리고 문학적 상상력으로 나간다. 지적 금욕주의가 사라지고, 방만한 상상력만 난무하게 된다.


3) 자기 성장 보고서와 사소설 – ‘성현=진리’이다. 이렇다 보니 논문은 내가 성현을 이해했다는 성장 보고서가 된다. 결국 학문적 토론과 논쟁은 거의 없어진다. 남의 성장 보고서에 관심을 둘 이유가 없기 때문이다. 연구자는 자기의 성에 갇힌 1인 성주가 된다.





7. 철학 멸망의 시대


요즘 대학은 철저하게 장사 논리로 간다. 신입생 지원자가 줄어드는 철학 물리학과 같은 기초 학문은 과를 없애는 추세로 간다. 2010년을 경계로 전임 철학 연구자는 확 줄어든다. 철학이 교양 과목으로 그나마 대학에 남게 된다.


철학은 강자의 학문이다. 철학은 강자에게 필요하지, 약자에게 쓸모가 있는 것이 아니다. 약자는 강자의 철학을, 노예는 주인의 이성과 감성을 따르면 된다. 과거에 한국은 중국의 철학을 그대로 들여왔다. 그렇다면 현재도 우리의 철학이 필요 없는 것일까?


한국에서 철학은 밖으로는 물리적 축소에 직면해 있고, 안으로는 연구의 빈곤에 시달린다. 근 50년전 내가 처음 철학을 했을 때는 비록 나라가 혼란했지만, 철학은 활력이 있었다. 정년이 될 무렵 나는 많은 것을 취소 청산하는 자리에 있었다. 그리고 철학도 청산될까 두렵다.


우리가 물질적 힘으로 세계 1위를 할 수 없겠지만, 문화적으로는 최강국이 될 수도 있다. 이것이 김구 선생의 말이다. 그리고 한류가 휩쓰는 지금 한국은 문화 강국이 되어 있다. 그런데 철학이 없는 문화 강국이 지속 가능할까?






손영식(울산대 철학과 명예교수)






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