History has it that it was in a small rental room on the southwest corner of 7th and Market Streets in Philadelphia that Thomas Jefferson, then 33, wrote the document that would formalize America’s separation from Great Britain: the Declaration of Independence.
Written in June 1776, it contains these memorable lines: “We hold the following truths to be self-evident: all men are created equal, they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. » The revolutionary text affirmed in the same breath, the breaking of the link of dependence with imperial Great Britain and the creation of an unprecedented political regime: a liberal democracy.
The hidden side of Thomas Jefferson
What is less taught in American history textbooks is that Jefferson wrote this text with the assistance of a slave, a 14-year-old boy named Robert Hemings. The founding father owned hundreds of slaves and had at least six children with one of them.
A member of the elite planters of the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson had inherited at the age of 21 a gigantic estate and the slave labor force who worked there in the tobacco and wheat fields. About a decade later, after his marriage, he had acquired two more plantations and further expanded his “human stock”. Some were far away in the fields, others were his private servants and accompanied him even on his trips to France.
This black-skinned heritage was the source of his wealth and status. A lawyer for pleasure, he was fundamentally a patriarchal owner who made his property grow, governor of a state whose power came from the plantations.
However, this educated man, who wanted to make the young nation a child of the Enlightenment, explained in his texts that he fundamentally abhorred slavery, he condemned the “despotism” of the master and the “degrading submission” of the slave. He knew himself to be the representative of a practice from another age and had no doubt that it would soon disappear once Americans were ready to fully embrace their modernity.
The people who expelled the English King George III and decried tyranny would renounce this archaic vice. Until then, his splendid Monticello estate would remain a thriving plantation thanks to the labor of unfree men and women.
Selling and buying innocent people
The Declaration of Independence and the young country born thanks to it were reflections of this profound contradiction. In the original version of the founding text, Jefferson wrote that among the many crimes committed by the British was the “execrable commerce” of buying and selling innocent men. But the members of Congress gathered in Philadelphia rejected this passage, too controversial for certain delegates from the South who, like the Virginian, lived off the toil and dehumanization of African descendants.
Jefferson nevertheless managed to maintain the formula on the inalienable right “to the pursuit of happiness” instead of the “right to the protection of property”. Happiness then referred to the Stoic notion of self-improvement as discipline and virtue. But it was also a synonym of freedom for the millions of chained slaves.
The principle of responsibility, mixed with an undeniable cynicism, kept Jefferson away from any real attempt to abolish slavery. Unlike George Washington, another slave owner, he did not even emancipate his own captives.
Once president of the United States, and despite repeated requests from his friend the Marquis de La Fayette, he maintained the status quo for fear that disorder, injustice and chaos would result from the recognition of the freedom of blacks. Like so many white Americans, he was terrified by the idea that natural and inalienable rights applied to the new free men, that they were demanding equality, the right to public space and, horresco referens (“I shudder as I tell it”), the right to have intimate relationships with white men and women.
From slavery to civil war
For Jefferson as for so many members of the American elite, including the president who ended slavery for good (Abraham Lincoln in 1865), the best option was to send black Americans back somewhere in Africa or elsewhere. They would be free and equal among themselves, but far from white Americans. It was then up to blacks themselves to refuse this Faustian pact and to establish the Declaration as a promise of universal emancipation. It was they who, from then on, revealed its revolutionary potential.
In some ways, Thomas Jefferson did not live up to his text. His silence prepared the tacit support of the United States Constitution adopted in 1787 for slavery and allowed southern slave planters to dictate their terms to the entire country.
They were the ones who kept slavery at the heart of the political, cultural and economic system of the United States until the second half of the 19th century to the point of leaving an indelible mark on it. The great tragic irony is that Jefferson’s initial compromise at the time of the Declaration of Independence was rooted in the compelling desire to create a country, a union, a united people.
Less than a century later, the great American civil war would tear this country apart, irreparably shattering its facade of unity, for lack of being able to otherwise resolve the unbearable contradiction of a slave democracy.
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