We are talking about a guy who actually put a great deal of thought into the matter and didn't just accept the common wisdom of the day about black inferiority.
If he figures that giving them a few generations of the same type of civilizing cultivation which whites had would pretty much eliminate all the differences between blacks and whites, that means that he doesn't see anything inherent to their nature which makes them inferior. It means that he sees them as not being able to have had the same tools which whites had to develop their potential.
"My doubts were the result of personal observation on the limited sphere
of my own State, where the opportunities for the development of their
genius were not favorable, and those of exercising it still less so. I
expressed them therefore with great hesitation; 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." --Thomas Jefferson to Henri
Gregoire, 1809.
He's saying here that even if there is some inferiority with blacks, for whatever reason, that's not a reason to deny them any rights. Then he enslaved them.
Even if we don't judge Jefferson by our modern standards, we can judge him by his own and by the statements that he made on the subject. He doesn't live up to the standards that he was promoting.
It's always seemed pretty clear to me that Jefferson was pulling a "Schindler's List." That is, he figured his slaves would have more freedom and better treatment under HIS ownership than they would being owned by anyone else. This, of course, goes with his assumption that setting them free wouldn't be to their advantage either, which may or may not have been true (he was, after all, a
very wealthy man in a position of power and influence).
We tend to think of slavery as an ultimately evil, deplorable, dehumanizing situation that anyone in their right mind would seek to escape from every second of every day. But this is myopic; Jefferson's slaves were BORN into slavery, it was what they knew, what they were familiar with, and as long as it was comfortable for them they wouldn't go too far out of their way to change their situation unless they had to. I strongly suspect that if they had asked him to set them free, he would have, and probably would have set them up in some pretty nice estates to boot. But they
didn't ask, and he probably never thought to bring it up.
That doesn't absolve him of hypocrisy. I think he knew that in their case he was double-dealing and not at all living up to his own ideals. He KNEW he was cheating. But then so do most men who commit gross infidelities.
A slave cannot refuse consent.
Of course she can. It's just that her owner faces no legal repercussions for
violating her consent. She can consent for any number of reasons; self-serving reasons, personal reasons, romantic reasons, economic reasons, or maybe just out of boredom. She can refuse to consent, also for any number of reasons. But it simply comes down to this: what did SHE choose, and did she make her intentions clear?
Black slaves were denied an education. They were not permitted to learn written language.
That rarely stopped them from learning it anyway. In fact, that was one of the more interesting observations in Frederick Douglass' autobiography: the mistress who originally taught him how to read eventually turned out to be one of the most cruel owners he ever had.
According to Douglass, slavery was as dehumanizing to the owner as it was to the slave. Having absolute control over the life of someone in a position of mandatory servitude has a disruptive effect on people's consciences; they become more and more cruel and insensitive, not just to their slaves, but even to one another. His opinion -- which I agree with -- is that cruelty is not inherent to human nature, but is instead a learned behavior. Slave owners had a LOT of practice with it, so much so that even benevolent owners wouldn't stay that way for long.
They knew enough to know that different species could not produce fertile offspring.
A significant number of slave owners were fully aware of the fact that some of their slaves were, in fact,
their own children. They kept them in chains anyway -- though maybe not as field hands -- just because that's just how it's supposed to be. And there's that dehumanizing effect again: you're willing to keep your own son as a slave and treat him like a common animal just because of who his mother was.
Jefferson is, if anything, guilty of the same pathos. He's willing to deny to his slaves that which he thinks is the fundamental right to to himself and all of his peers. As much as he loved them, benevolent as he may have been, even if the choice was the more convenient one for everyone involved, it is STILL the choice of cruelty over compassion.
