Post by Holly Brewer / Redsky

Here’s an image of page 3. The word MEN in all caps and italics refers to people captured and abducted in Africa and brought to England’s colonies in America. Match that up with page one, not only passages about “all men are created equal” but about rights. This is Jefferson’s handwriting.

P. 3 of rough draft of declaration of Independence. Transcript here: https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/declara/ruffdrft.html

jul 21, 2025, 5:26 pm • 4 1 • view

This is great - the antislavery draft is such an interesting source and the handwriting point is a wonderful one. I still find it very hard to read even the draft generously given what TJ wrote 4-5 years later in Notes.

Excerpt from Notes on the State of Virginia, Chapter (Query) XIV, where Jefferson advances scientific racism. Can be found at https://archive.org/details/notesonstateofvir00jeff/page/134/mode/2up?view=theater

jul 21, 2025, 10:33 pm • 0 0 • view

But elsewhere in the notes he also had a gradual abolition plan and separate reflections that god would stand with the enslaved in case of a rebellion. It begins: “I tremble when I reflect that god is just…”

jul 22, 2025, 1:16 am • 1 0 • view

Our exchange got me to thinking that I needed to look at recent writings on the Notes, and sure enough there is this fantastic paper by Cara Rogers (you may well know the paper) that I found really helpful on TJ's drafting of Notes and esp on slavery and race. 1/ muse.jhu.edu/pub/285/arti...

jul 22, 2025, 1:04 pm • 1 0 • view

It nicely traces how the contradictions came up in drafting, how TJ's thinking of different audiences affected his choices, and on what sources he was working with. Just great stuff. 2/

jul 22, 2025, 1:04 pm • 1 0 • view

An example. Here is Rogers on critical feedback TJ got on the scientific racism passage suggesting he omit it, and some changes he made (although also choosing to retain it). 3/

After completing his 1783–1784 draft of the Notes, Jefferson sent a copy to Charles Thomson, asking for feedback. Thomson penned a lengthy commentary, portions of which Jefferson liked so much he simply quoted them verbatim in his Notes. One long section on Native Americans Jefferson added as another appendix. But Thomson’s most profound observation was only one sentence long: “And though I am much pleased with the dissertation on the difference between the Whites & blacks & am inclined to think the latter a race lower in the scale of being yet for that very reason & because such an opinion might seem to justify slavery I should be inclined to leave it out.” In other words, although Thomson claimed to agree with Jefferson’s conclusions, he worried that those who were proslavery would read this section as a tacit endorsement. Jefferson should therefore take care to make his opposition to slavery explicit, and he should remove the entire section on race. As an antislavery Irishman-turned-Pennsylvanian, Thomson clearly did not suffer from a “general blindness to the biopolitics of representation.”47 Unfortunately, Jefferson did not leave out the entire dissertation on race, as Thomson suggested. Instead, he added hundreds of new words that had three effects: first, Jefferson softened his stance on Black people’s inferiority; second, he strengthened his arguments in behalf of

emancipation linked to colonization; and third, he directed pointed critiques at Virginia’s slaveholding culture. As we have seen, some of Jefferson’s insistence on colonization may have been in response to his fellow slaveholders’ arguments regarding the potential negative effects of having free Black people in Virginia. Thomson’s suggestion seems to have pushed Jefferson even further in his understanding of how slaveholding Virginians would read hiswork, and he added sections thatmore specifically rebutted claims such as those made in the Virginia Gazette’s proslavery editorials in the summer of 1782. When he first wrote his fair copy draft, Jefferson described a permanent racial hierarchy: African peoples’ “inferiority is not the effect merely of their condition of life,” he said; differences between white and Black races were “fixed in nature.” But after receiving Thomson’s critique, he added this crucial sentence: “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.” No longer certain, and no longer solely emphasizing biological or polygenist arguments (to hold that Black people were “originally a distinct race” would mean that they were created separately from white people), Jefferson now opened the door to the possibility that Black people were “made distinct” by circumstances. And if circumstances had produced a change, then changed circumstances could result in racial equality being regained.48

jul 22, 2025, 1:04 pm • 2 0 • view

She also discusses how TJ revised Query XVIII, “Manners” where the "tremble for my country" passage you point to comes - showing how he was probably also responding to recently published pro-slavery arguments (Rogers 198-200). 4/

Thomson was likely disappointed when Jefferson did not fully take his advice; Jefferson did not “expunge” the section on slavery in ancient Rome that Thomson worried would “comfort” American slaveholders “because,” as Thomson put it, “they do not treat [their slaves] as bad as others have done,” and Jefferson did not remove everything that supported white supremacy even though, in Thomson’s words, “such . . . opinion[s] might seem to justify slavery.”56 However, Jefferson did modify his conclusions in ways that seem designed to remove any doubt about his own antislavery views: he added “suspicion[s]” to replace white supremacist certainty; praisedAfricans’ morality; condemned slaveholders as thieves; and offered a sweeping critique of states that imagined they could remain both slaveholding and republican. By turning his attention to theways slavery corruptedmasters, turned innocent children into tyrants, and inevitably brought divine retribution, Jefferson rebuffed the claims of Virginians who believed slavery to be beneficial to both slaves and masters. He concurred with the critique of the Friend to Liberty, utilizing similar religious arguments, but he also addressed the foundational issue that prevented many white Virginians from imagining emancipation: their racist abhorrence of amalgamation. Colonization would solve all of Virginia’s problems, Jefferson said: it would serve as political restitution for the sins of slavery by forming a “free and independant” nation of former slaves, and it would preserve the “natural” division of the races.57

jul 22, 2025, 1:04 pm • 1 0 • view

There's a lot more in the paper. But I really appreciate being pushed to look harder at this. Rogers, like you, sees a pretty consistent antislavery human rights theme in Notes. And 5/

jul 22, 2025, 1:04 pm • 1 0 • view

...she and does a nice job of showing how Jefferson was working with that idea while also adopting the scientific racism of French encyclopedists. Ultimately she pushed against the "Jefferson's psyche" explanation, which I find a relief. 6/

jul 22, 2025, 1:04 pm • 0 0 • view

I still wonder about the tension between human rights (where antislavery would fit) and political/civil rights implementations that enacted the racism, and I see both in the Declaration. But I have a better understanding of how that's working, at least for TJ, if not for others in 1776. end/

jul 22, 2025, 1:04 pm • 0 0 • view

John Woolman's Journal has some similar reflections, foreshadowing dark things to come -- especially as he travels in the South. I've never been clear whether he meant imminent fears of slave revolts, or that long-term it wouldn't end well, or that God would judge harshly.

jul 22, 2025, 1:25 am • 2 0 • view

Also, the Declaration (not sure if this part is TJ) has a lot of "us" and "our" language in the specific rights/violations. I do not see the antislavery passage as including people of African descent in those first person plurals.

jul 21, 2025, 10:33 pm • 0 0 • view

I can see a generalized human rights liberty/life opening claim that (for TJ) incorporated all people, including Africans, but a more limited specification of rights-in-political-society that depends on membership, which would not include (not equally, if at all) Africans (or Native Americans).

jul 21, 2025, 10:33 pm • 0 0 • view

I am currently reading up on Jefferson and the Haitian Revolution, where he is similarly confounding and ends up choosing/acting poorly (non-recognition, embargo, etc) when presented with precisely the situation that made the antislavery version of the Declaration come to life fully.

jul 21, 2025, 10:33 pm • 1 0 • view

I’m not saying he shouldn’t have done differently in 1802, but there *were* widespread massacres of former slave owners in Haiti—and while on some level those are understandable too, it’s a different situation. We are talking about 1776 and claims to human rights. And the “men” part is clear.

jul 22, 2025, 12:19 am • 2 0 • view

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