Similarities Between Jefferson And Frederick Douglass

Jefferson and Douglass: Notes and Narrative

Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia is a strange and weedy document. Like any literary work of historical importance, its textual terrain can be viewed and interpreted in various ways depending on context and point of view. To Jefferson admirers, Notes reads like a clear-eyed statistical treatise of demographics and topology with occasional philosophical flourishes of the first water produced by one of the most highly cultivated minds of the American Enlightenment. To others, Notes reads like a pseudo-scientific swamp of odious comparisons, racial bigotry and specious rationalizations that would seem in some ways to presage “Mein Kampf.” or the minutes of a Klu Klux Klan meeting.

The

man who wrote in the Declaration that the equality of mankind “is self evident” also wrote in the Query XIV section of the Notes that African-Americans could never claim a “share of beauty” because they are not sufficiently hirsute and because of the “eternal monotony” of their skin color and the “immovable veil of blackness” they posses (Thomas Jefferson, 148). Moreover, the “Master of Monticello” derided the slaves who were the foundation of plantation as lacking in intellectual capacity with having no real emotional depth. What’s more, because of an apparent kidney condition, they urinated less and sweated more “which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odour (148)”
Such was the racial climate that Frederick Douglass was born into, eight or nine years before Jefferson’s death on the fourth of July in 1826.

In Slavery and the Founders, Paul Finkelman quotes John Hope Franklin as pointing out that Jefferson’s theories about race “became indisputable dogma within a decade after his death (Slavery and the Founders, 110). Even if Douglass had not read Jefferson words directly he would, by the time he became associated with Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, have been likely aware of David Walker’s Appeal in Four Articles in which Walker ask, in apparent reference to the Notes, has not “Mr. Jefferson declared to the world, that we are inferior to the whites, both in the endowments of our bodies and of minds? (Walker,

12).”
In many ways, the incidents in the Narrative serve as Douglass’ answer to the racist ideology as propagated by Jefferson in the Notes. Two examples of birth and death will illustrate this point. Let’s begin with conception. Douglass states that his mother was black and his father was white and, not only white but, it was whispered, the plantation-master. That the author of the Narrative was uncertain of his exact paternity (or, famously, uncertain of his exact age) reinforces Douglass wry proto-ecocritical comment that “[g]enealogical trees do not flourish among slaves.” In any case, by the simple fact that Douglass’ father was white, we see that it was not “oranootans”, as Jefferson asserts, but rather the Caucasian males that lusted after black women. Indeed, shades of Sally Hemmings both in terms of skin-color and apparitions must have abounded on the Jefferson estate.
When Douglass speaks of his mother in the Narrative, it might seem, at first glance, to lend credence to Jefferson’s notion that for blacks the “numberless afflictions” of daily life “are less felt, and sooner forgotten with them.” Indeed, Douglass writes of his mother’s death almost stoically:
Never having enjoyed, to any considerable extent, her soothing presence, her tender and watchful care, I received the tidings of [her] death with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger (Frederick Douglass, 3).
Yet this passage is an example of Douglass rhetorical genius.

By describing the negation of filial affection in this way, Douglass actually creates an affirmation of an abiding and deep emotional attachment to his mother – albeit in absentia. On a subliminal level, the reader (or oratorical audience) actually visualizes a Madonna and child tableau in which the infant Douglass does indeed enjoy the “soothing presence”, the “tender and watchful care” of maternal love (my italics). By creating this visual in the reader’s mind and then moving forward to explain that it was “a common custom” to separate mother and child, Douglass highlights the unnatural brutality of slave culture in a way that tables and statistics (like those used by Jefferson in Notes) never could. Furthermore, in response to Jefferson’s notion that afflictions “with them… are soon forgotten”, we only have to cite Douglass’ testament retold in “My Bondage and My Freedom” in which he elaborates on the special connection that humans, as well as all mammals and primates, eco-critically speaking, have with

maternity:
It has been a life-long, standing grief to me, that I knew so little of my mother; and that I was so early separated from her. The counsels of her love must have been beneficial to me. The side view of her face is imaged on my memory, and I take few steps in life, without feeling her presence; but the image is mute, and I have no striking words of her’s treasured up. (Frederick Douglass, xx)
In the sphere of pastoralism, it is with no trace of irony that Jefferson’s opines in Query XIX with a philosophical flourishes that:
Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God…Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phaenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example. (Jefferson, 175)
That the “chosen people” laboring in the earth on his behalf were his slaves seem not to have germinated in the brain of the great thinker. In his sublime faith in the virtues of the soil, the slave-master of Monticello left rooted in the American psyche a type of pastoralism in the form of a mythic version of agrarian governance: a nation of farmers versus a nation of commerce and manufacture. It is an ideology that echoes down into our own times where we find competing versions of the “real” American: the heartland versus the city. For Jefferson, the city was the center of vice; for Douglas the city was salvation. In the narrative he writes: “A city slave is almost a freeman, compared with a slave on the plantation.”
He is much better fed and clothed, and enjoys privileges altogether unknown to the slave on the plantation. There is a vestige of decency, a sense of shame, that does much to curb and check those outbreaks of atrocious cruelty so commonly enacted upon the plantation. He is a desperate slaveholder, who will shock the humanity of his non-slaveholding neighbors with the cries of his lacerated slave.
In this statement we find the seeds of a rhetoric that would feed the growth of the great northern Black migration of the twentieth century.
Douglass is indeed eloquent in response to the dehumanization of Blacks as expressed in Jefferson’s Notes. But claiming the privileges and dignities of freedom and enjoying all the opportunities of an urbanized existence were goals not unexpected in ex-slaves especially in someone of Douglass obvious talents and ambition. However, assuming that Douglass did indeed read Jefferson’s Notes, I’d like to propose, as a final point, that Jefferson makes a statement that I believe would have rile the proud Douglass to the extreme. In the infamous Query XIV, Jefferson writes of the Native Americans who he calls “Indians”:
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...”
As perhaps the most famous speaker of his day, universally renowned for his “sublime oratory,” reading this invidious comparison, Douglass must have sustained a spiritual body blow more excruciating and deep than any overseer’s lash -- for it struck at the core of his livelihood, intellectual attainments, and leadership in the abolitionist movement. But as with his confrontation with Covey, Douglass fights back and produces a freedom document in his Narrative beside which the Notes on the State of Virginia seem but a “plain narration.”