Notes on the State of Virginia
Thomas Jefferson
[1781-1782 / Written in answer to "Queries
proposed to the Author by a Foreigner of Distinction, then residing
among us."]
QUERY VI
A notice of the mines and other subterraneous riches; its trees,
plants, fruits, etc. ...Before we condemn the Indians of this
continent as wanting genius, we must consider that letters have not
yet been introduced among them. Were we to compare them in their
present state with the Europeans North of the Alps, when the Roman
arms and arts first crossed those mountains, the comparison would be
unequal, because, at that time, those parts of Europe were swarming
with numbers; because numbers produce emulation, and multiply the
chances of improvement, and one improvement begets another. Yet I
may safely ask, How many good poets, how many able mathematicians,
how many great inventors in arts or sciences, had Europe North of
the Alps then produced? And it was sixteen centuries after this
before a Newton could be formed....
So far the Count de Buffon has carried this new theory of the
tendency of nature to belittle her productions on this side the
Atlantic. Its application to the race of whites transplanted from
Europe, remained for the Abbe Raynal. "On doit etre etonne (he
says) que Amerique n'ait pas encore produit un bon poete, un habile
mathematicien, un homme de genie dans un seul art, ou seule science."
(7. Hist. Philos. p. 92, ed. Maestricht, 1774.) "America has
not yet produced one good poet." When we shall have existed as
a people as long as the Greeks did before they produced a Homer, the
Romans a Virgil, the French a Racine and Voltaire, the English a
Shakespeare and Milton, should this reproach be still true, we will
inquire from what unfriendly causes it has proceeded, that the other
countries of Europe and quarters of the earth shall not have
inscribed any name in the roll of poets. But neither has America
produced "one able mathematician, one man of genius in a single
art or a single science." In war we have produced a Washington,
whose memory will be adored while liberty shall have votaries, whose
name shall triumph over time, and will in future ages assume its
just station among the most celebrated worthies of the world, when
that wretched philosophy shall be forgotten which would have
arranged him among the degeneracies of nature. In physics we have
produced a Franklin, than whom no one of the present age has made
more important discoveries, nor has enriched philosophy with more,
or more ingenious solutions of the phenomena of nature. We have
supposed Mr. Rittenhouse second to no astronomer living; that in
genius he must be the first, because he is self-taught. As an artist
he has exhibited as great a proof of mechanical genius as the world
has ever produced. He has not indeed made a world; but he has by
imitation approached nearer its Maker than any man who has lived
from the creation to this day. As in philosophy and war, so in
government, in oratory, in painting, in the plastic art, we might
show that America, though but a child of yesterday, has already
given hopeful proofs of genius, as well as of the nobler kinds,
which arouse the best feelings of man, which call him into action,
which substantiate his freedom, and conduct him to happiness, as of
the subordinate, which serve to amuse him only. We therefore
suppose, that this reproach is as unjust as it is unkind: and that,
of the geniuses which adorn the present age, America contributes its
full share. For comparing it with those countries where genius is
most cultivated, where are the most excellent models for art, and
scaffoldings for the attainment of science, as France and England
for instance, we calculate thus: The United States contains three
millions of inhabitants; France twenty millions; and the British
islands ten. We produce a Washington, a Franklin, a Rittenhouse.
France than should have half a dozen in each of these lines, and
great Britain half that number, equally eminent. It may be true that
France has; we are but just becoming acquainted with her, and our
acquaintance so far gives us high ideas of the genius of her
inhabitants. It would be injuring too many of them to name
particularly a Voltaire, a Buffon, the constellation of
Encyclopedists, the Abbe Raynal himself, We therefore have reason to
believe she can produce her full quota of genius. The present war
having so long cut off all communication with Great Britain, we are
not able to make a fair estimate of the state of science in that
country. The spirit in which she wages war, is the only sample
before our eyes, and that does not seem the legitimate offspring
either of science or of civilization. The sun of her glory is fast
descending to the horizon. Her philosophy has crossed the Channel,
her freedom the Atlantic, and herself seems passing to that awful
dissolution whose issue is not given human foresight to scan....
QUERY XIV
The administration of justice and description of the laws? 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. To these objections, which are
political, may be added others, which are physical and moral. The
first difference which strikes us is that of color. Whether the
black of the negro resides in the reticular membrane between the
skin and scarf-skin, or in the scarf-skin itself; whether it
proceeds from the color of the blood, the color of the bile, or from
that of some other secretion, the difference is fixed in nature, and
is as real as if its seat and cause were better known to us. And is
this difference of no importance? Is it not the foundation of a
greater or less share of beauty in the two races? Are not the fine
mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by
greater or less suffusions of color in the one, preferable to that
eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immovable
veil of black which covers the emotions of the other race? Add to
these, flowing hair, a more elegant symmetry of form, their own
judgment in favor of the whites, declared by their preference of
them, as uniformly as is the preference of the Oranootan for the
black woman over those of his own species.
The circumstance of superior beauty, is thought worthy attention
in the propagation of our horses, dogs, and other domestic animals;
why not in that of man? Besides those of color, figure, and hair,
there are other physical distinctions proving a difference of race.
They have less hair on the face and body. They secrete less by the
kidneys, and more by the gland of the skin, which gives them a very
strong and disagreeable odor. This greater degree of transpiration,
renders them more tolerant of heat, and less so of cold than the
whites. Perhaps, too, a difference of structure in the pulminary
apparatus, which a late ingenious experimentalist has discovered to
be the principal regulator of animal heat, may have disabled them
from extricating, in the act of inspiration, so much of that fluid
from the outer air, or obliged them in expiration, to part with more
of it. They seem to require less sleep. A black after hard labor
through the day, will be induced by the slightest amusements to sit
up till midnight, or later, though knowing he must be out with the
first dawn of the morning. They are at least as brave, and more
adventuresome. But this may perhaps proceed from a want of
forethought, which prevents their seeing a danger till it be
present. When present, they do not go through it with more coolness
or steadiness than the whites. They are more ardent after their
female; but love seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a
tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation. Their griefs are
transient. Those numberless afflictions, which render it doubtful
whether heaven has given life to us in mercy or in wrath, are less
felt, and sooner forgotten with them. In general, their existence
appears to participate more of sensation than reflection. To this
must be ascribed their disposition to sleep when abstracted from
their diversions, and unemployed in labor. An animal whose body is
at rest, and who does not reflect, must be disposed to sleep of
course. Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and
imagination, it appears to me that in memory they are equal to the
whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be
found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of
Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and
anomalous. It would be unfair to follow them to Africa for this
investigation. We will consider them here, on the same stage with
the whites and where the facts are not apochryphal on which a
judgment is to be formed. It will be right to make great allowances
for the difference of conditions, of education, of conversation, of
the sphere in which they move. Many millions of them have been
brought to, and born in America. Most of them, indeed, have been
confined to tillage, to their own homes, and their own society; yet
many have been so situated, that they might have availed themselves
of the conversation of their masters; many have been brought up to
the handicraft arts, and from that circumstance have always been
associated with the whites. Some have been liberally educated, and
all have lived in countries where the arts and sciences are
cultivated to a considerable degree, and all have had before their
eyes samples of the best works from abroad. The Indians, with no
advantages of this kind, will often carve figures on their pipes not
destitute of design and merit. They will crayon out an animal, a
plant, or a country, so as to prove the existence of a germ in their
minds which only wants cultivation. They astonish you with strokes
of the most sublime oratory; such as prove their reason and
sentiment strong, their imagination glowing and elevated. But never
yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level
of plain narration; never saw even an elementary trait of painting
or sculpture. In music they are more generally gifted than the
whites with accurate ears for tune and time, and they have been
found capable of imagining a small catch. Whether they will be equal
to the composition of a more extensive run of melody, or of
complicated harmony, is yet to be proved. Misery is often the parent
of the most affecting touches in poetry. Among the blacks is misery
enough, God knows, but no poetry. Love is the peculiar oestrum of
the poet. Their love is ardent, but it kindles the senses only, not
the imagination. Religion, indeed, has produced a Phyllis Whately;
but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under
her name are below the dignity of criticism. The heroes of the
Dunciad are to her, as Hercules to the author of that poem. Ignatius
Sancho has approached nearer to merit in composition; yet his
letters do more honor to the heart than the head. They breathe the
purest effusions of friendship and general philanthropy, and show
how great a degree of the latter may be compounded with strong
religious zeal. He is often happy in the turn of his compliments,
and his style is easy and familiar, except when he affects a
Shandean fabrication of words. But his imagination is wild and
extravagant, escapes incessantly from every restraint of reason and
taste, and, in the course of its vagaries, leaves a tract of thought
as incoherent and eccentric, as is the course of a meteor through
the sky. His subjects should often have led him to a process of
sober reasoning; yet we find him always substituting sentiment for
demonstration. Upon the whole, though we admit him to the first
place among those of his own color who have presented themselves to
the public judgment, yet when we compare him with the writers of the
race among whom he lived and particularly with the epistolary class
in which he has taken his own stand, we are compelled to enrol him
at the bottom of the column. This criticism supposes the letters
published under his name to be genuine, and to have received
amendment from no other hand; points which would not be of easy
investigation. The improvement of the blacks in body and mind, in
the first instance of their mixture with the whites, has been
observed by every one, and proves that their inferiority is not the
effect merely of their condition of life. We know that among the
Romans, about the Augustan age especially, the condition of their
slaves was much more deplorable than that of the blacks on the
continent of America. The two sexes were confined in separate
apartments, because to raise a child cost the master more than to
buy one. Cato, for a very restricted indulgence to his slaves in
this particular, took from them a certain price. But in this country
the slaves multiply as fast as the free inhabitants. Their situation
and manners place the commerce between the two sexes almost without
restraint. The same Cato, on a principle of economy, always sold his
sick and superannuated slaves. He gives it as a standing precept to
a master visiting his farm, to sell his old oxen, old wagons, old
tools, old and diseased servants, and everything else become
useless. "Vendat boves vetulos, plaustrum vetus, feramenta
vetera, servum senem, servum morbosum, et si quid aliud supersit
vendat." Cato de re rustica, c. 2. The American slaves cannot
enumerate this among the injuries and insults they receive. It was
the common practice to expose in the island Aesculapius, in the
Tyber, diseased slaves whose cure was like to become tedious. The
emperor Claudius, by an edict, gave freedom to such of them as
should recover, and first declared that if any person chose to kill
rather than to expose them, it should not be deemed homicide. The
exposing them is a crime of which no instance has existed with us;
and were it to be followed by death, it would be punished capitally.
We are told of a certain Vedius Pollio, who, in the presence of
Augustus, would have given a slave as food to his fish, for having
broken a glass. With the Romans, the regular method of taking the
evidence of their slaves was under torture. Here it has been thought
better never to resort to their evidence. When a master was
murdered, all his slaves, in the same house, or within hearing, were
condemned to death. Here punishment falls on the guilty only, and as
precise proof is required against him as against a freeman. Yet
notwithstanding these and other discouraging circumstances among the
Romans, their slaves were often their rarest artists. They excelled
too in science, insomuch as to be usually employed as tutors to
their master's children. Epictetus, Terence, and Phaedrus, were
slaves. But they were of the race of whites. It is not their
condition then, but nature, which has produced the distinction.
Whether further observation will or will not verify the conjecture,
that nature has been less bountiful to them in the endowments of the
head, I believe that in those of the heart she will be found to have
done them justice. That disposition to theft with which they have
been branded, must be ascribed to their situation, and not to any
depravity of the moral sense. The man in whose favor no laws of
property exist, probably feels himself less bound to respect those
made in favor of others. When arguing for ourselves, we lay it down
as a fundamental, that laws, to be just, must give a reciprocation
of right; that, without this, they are mere arbitrary rules of
conduct, founded in force, and not in conscience; and it is a
problem which I give to the master to solve, whether the religious
precepts against the violation of property were not framed for him
as well as his slave? And whether the slave may not as justifiably
take a little from one who has taken all from him, as he may slay
one who would slay him? That a change in the relations in which a
man is placed should change his ideas of moral right or wrong, is
neither new, nor peculiar to the color of the blacks. Homer tells us
it was so 2600 years ago.
Emisu, ger t' aretes apoainutai euruopa Zeus
Haneros, eut'an min kata doulion ema elesin.
Od. 17. 323.
Jove fix'd it certain, that whatever day
Makes man a slave, takes half his worth away.
But the slaves of which Homer speaks were whites. Notwithstanding
these considerations which must weaken their respect for the laws of
property, we find among them numerous instances of the most rigid
integrity, and as many as among their better instructed masters, of
benevolence, gratitude, and unshaken fidelity. 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
Creater 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. Will not a lover of natural history then, one who
views the gradations in all the races of animals with the eye of
philosophy, excuse an effort to keep those in the department of man
as distinct as nature has formed them? This unfortunate difference
of color, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the
emancipation of these people. many of their advocates, while they
wish to vindicate the liberty of human nature, are anxious also to
preserve its dignity and beauty. Some of these, embarrassed by the
question, 'What further is to be done with them?' join themselves in
opposition with those who are actuated by sordid avarice only. Among
the Romans emancipation required but one effort. The slave, when
made free, might mix with, without staining the blood of his master.
But with us a second is necessary, unknown to history. When freed,
he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture....
QUERY XVII.
The different religions received into that State?
The first settlers in this country were emigrants from England, of
the English Church, just at a point of time when it was flushed with
complete victory over the religious of all other persuasions.
Possessed, as they became, of the powers of making, administering,
and executing laws, they showed equal intolerance in this country
with their Presbyterian brethren, who had emigrated to the northern
government. The poor Quakers were flying from persecution in
England. They cast their eyes on these new countries as asylums of
civil and religious freedom; but they found them free only for the
reigning sect. Several acts of the Virginia assembly of 1659, 1662,
and 1693, had made it penal in parents to refuse to have their
children baptized; had prohibited the unlawful assembling of
Quakers; had made it penal for any master of a vessel to bring a
Quaker into the State; had ordered those already here, and such as
should come thereafter, to be imprisoned till they should abjure the
country; provided a milder punishment for their first and second
return, but death for their third; had inhibited all persons from
suffering their meetings in or near their houses, entertaining them
individually, or disposing of books which supported their tenets. If
no execution took place here, as did in New England, it was not
owing to the moderation of the church, or spirit of the legislature,
as may be inferred from the law itself; but to historical
circumstances which have not been handed down to us. The Anglicans
retained full possession of the country about a century. Other
opinions began then to creep in, and the great care of the
government to support their own church, having begotten an equal
degree of indolence in its clergy, two-thirds of the people had
become dissenters at the commencement of the present revolution. The
laws, indeed, were still oppressive on them, but the spirit of the
one party had subsided into moderation, and of the other had risen
to a degree of determination which commanded respect.
The present state of our laws on the subject of religion is this.
The convention of May 1776, in their declaration or rights, declared
it to be a truth, and a natural right, that the exercise of religion
should be free; but when they proceeded to form on that declaration
the ordinance of government, instead of taking up every principle
declared in the bill of rights, and guarding it by legislative
sanction, they passed over that which asserted our religious rights,
leaving them as they found them. The same convention, however, when
they met as a member of the general assembly in October, 1776,
repealed all acts of Parliament which had rendered criminal the
maintaining any opinions in matters of religion, the forbearing to
repair to church, and the exercising any mode of worship; and
suspended the laws giving salaries to the clergy, which suspension
was made perpetual in October, 1779. Statutory oppressions in
religion being thus wiped away, we remain at present under those
only imposed by the common law, or by our own acts of assembly. At
the common law, heresy was a capital offence, punishable by burning.
Its definition was left to the ecclesiastical judges, before whom
the conviction was, till the statute of the 1 El. c. 1 circumscribed
it, by declaring, that nothing should be deemed heresy, but what had
been so determined by authority of the canonical scriptures, or by
one of the four first general councils, or by other council, having
for the grounds of their declaration the express and plain words of
the scriptures. Heresy, thus circumscribed, being an offence against
the common law, our act of assembly of October 1777, gives
cognizance of it to the general court, by declaring that the
jurisdiction of that court shall be general in all matters at the
common law. The execution is by the writ De haeretico comburendo. By
our own act of assembly of 1705, if a person brought up in the
Christian religion denies the being of a God, or the Trinity, or
asserts there are more gods than one, or denies the Christian
religion to be true, or the scriptures to be of divine authority, he
is punishable on the first offence by incapacity to hold any office
or employment ecclesiastical, civil, or military; on the second by
disability to sue, to take any gift or legacy, to be guardian,
executor, or administrator, and by three years' imprisonment without
bail. A father's right to the custody of his own children being
founded in law on his right of guardianship, this being taken away,
they may of course be severed from him, and put by the authority of
a court into more orthodox hands. This is a summary view of that
religious slavery under which a people have been willing to remain,
who have lavished their lives and fortunes for the establishment of
their civil freedom. The error seems not sufficiently eradicated,
that the operations of the mind, as well as the acts of the body,
are subject to the coercion of the laws. But our rulers can have no
authority over such natural rights, only as we have submitted to
them. The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not
submit. We are answerable for them to our God.
The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as
are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to
say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor
breaks my leg. If it be said, his testimony in a court of justice
cannot be relied on, reject it then, and be the stigma on him.
Constraint may make him worse by making him a hypocrite, but it will
never make him a truer man. It may fix him obstinately in his
errors, but will not cure them. Reason and free inquiry are the only
effectual agents against error. Give a loose to them, they will
support the true religion by bringing every false one to their
tribunal, to the test of their investigation. They are the natural
enemies of error, and of error only. Had not the Roman government
permitted free inquiry, Christianity could never have been
introduced. Had not free inquiry been indulged at the era of the
reformation, the corruptions of Christianity could not have been
purged away. If it be restrained now, the present corruptions will
be protected, and new ones encouraged. Was the government to
prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such
keeping as our souls are now. Thus in France the emetic was once
forbidden as a medicine, and the potato as an article of food.
Government is just as infallible, too, when it fixes systems in
physics. Galileo was sent to the Inquisition for affirming that the
earth was a sphere; the government had declared it to be as flat as
a trencher, and Galileo was obliged to abjure his error. This error,
however, at length prevailed, the earth became a globe, and
Descartes declared it was whirled round its axis by a vortex. The
government in which he lived was wise enough to see that this was no
question of civil jurisdiction, or we should all have been involved
by authority in vortices. In fact, the vortices have been exploded,
and the Newtonian principle of gravitation is now more firmly
established, on the basis of reason, than it would be were the
government to step in, and to make it an article of necessary faith.
Reason and experiment have been indulged, and error has fled before
them. It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth
can stand by itself. Subject opinion to coercion: whom will you make
your inquisitors? Fallible men; men governed by bad passions, by
private as well as public reasons. And why subject it to coercion?
To produce uniformity. But is uniformity of opinion desirable? No
more than of face and stature. Introduce the bed of Procrustes then,
and as there is danger that the large men may beat the small, make
us all of a size, by lopping the former and stretching the latter.
Difference of opinion is advantageous in religion. The several
sects perform the office of a censor morum over such other. Is
uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and
children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt,
tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch
towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make
one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support
roguery and error all over the earth. Let us reflect that it is
inhabited by a thousand millions of people. That these profess
probably a thousand different systems of religion. That ours is but
one of that thousand. That if there be but one right, and ours that
one, we should wish to see the nine hundred and ninety-nine
wandering sects gathered into the fold of truth. But against such a
majority we cannot effect this by force. Reason and persuasion are
the only practicable instruments. To make way for these, free
inquiry must be indulged; and how can we wish others to indulge it
while we refuse it ourselves. But every State, says an inquisitor,
has established some religion. No two, say I, have established the
same. Is this a proof of the infallibility of establishments? Our
sister States of Pennsylvania and New York, however, have long
subsisted without any establishment at all. The experiment was new
and doubtful when they made it. It has answered beyond conception.
They flourish infinitely. Religion is well supported; of various
kinds, indeed, but all good enough: all sufficient to preserve peace
and order; or if a sect arises, whose tenets would subvert morals,
good sense has fair play, and reasons and laughs it out of doors,
without suffering the State to be troubled with it. They do not hang
more malefactors than we do. They are not more disturbed with
religious dissensions. On the contrary, their harmony is
unparalleled, and can be ascribed to nothing but their unbounded
tolerance, because there is no other circumstance in which they
differ from every nation on earth. They have made the happy
discovery, that the way to silence religious disputes, is to take no
notice of them. Let us too give this experiment fair play, and get
rid, while we may, of those tyrannical laws. It is true, we are as
yet secured against them by the spirit of the times. I doubt whether
the people of this country would suffer an execution for heresy, or
a three years' imprisonment for not comprehending the mysteries of
the Trinity. But is the spirit of the people an infallible, a
permanent reliance? Is it government? Is this the kind of protection
we receive in return for the rights we give up? Besides, the spirit
of the times may altar, will altar. Our rulers will become corrupt,
or people careless. A single zealot may commence persecutor, and
better men be his victims. It can never be too often repeated, that
the time for fixing every essential right on a legal basis is while
our rulers are honest, and ourselves united. From the conclusion of
this war we shall be going down hill. It will not then be necessary
to resort every moment to the people for support. They will be
forgotten, therefore, and their rights disregarded. They will forget
themselves, but in the sole faculty of making money, and will never
think of uniting to effect a due respect for their rights. The
shackles, therefore, which shall not be knocked off at the
conclusion of this war will remain on us long, will be made heavier
and heavier, till our rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion.