Notes on the State of Virginia: An Annotated Edition by Thomas Jefferson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Notes on the State of Virginia: An Annotated Edition by Thomas Jefferson Cara Rogers Notes on the State of Virginia: An Annotated Edition. By Thomas Jefferson. Edited and with an introduction and notes by Robert Pierce Forbes. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2022. Pp. lx, 348. Paper, $20.00, ISBN 978-0-300-22687-4.) Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia will never attract as much attention as the Declaration of Independence, but it is nonetheless a monumental work for scholars of American political thought, science, literature, race, slavery, and more. This new edition of Notes, edited by Robert Pierce Forbes, is an important accomplishment because it is the first to thoroughly incorporate footnotes referencing Jefferson’s original manuscript, allowing readers to trace changes from that initial draft to the first printed edition of 1785. Notes had a complicated journey to publication, and Forbes’s introduction will aid readers in moving beyond Jefferson’s overly simplistic descriptions of his work to better understand its true complexity. Forbes’s work also sharply differs from previous scholarly editions of Notes by arguing that Jefferson deliberately “used Notes to revise the Declaration’s great truth that ‘all men are created equal,’” prompting a new and lasting wave of racism and strengthening the institution of slavery (p. lx). In a somewhat confusing account of Jefferson’s changing position on equality, Forbes claims that young Jefferson held antislavery views, but that he later “felt he had no other choice” but to “decouple” the “stirring pronouncements of the Declaration . . . from Virginia’s enslaved African Americans” (pp. xlv, xliv). According to Forbes, Jefferson made this choice partly to save himself from potential charges of hypocrisy, and partly because of the 1772 Somerset decision, in which an English judge ruled that “slavery was incompatible with natural law” (p. xlv). Although the Somerset case ultimately had no legal effect on slavery in the independent American republic, Forbes implies that [End Page 343] Jefferson needed to bolster his right to own human beings because of rising antislavery sentiment in Europe. Therefore, in the “Laws” chapter of the Notes, Jefferson rhetorically reduced Black Americans to the position of animals in order to subtly justify their continued enslavement. Moreover, Forbes asserts that Notes presented the “earliest plan for the removal and colonization of Black Americans” (p. xix). There are three problems with Forbes’s claims. First, earlier colonization plans included a 1773 proposal by four enslaved men in Massachusetts and another by the Rhode Island antislavery minister Samuel Hopkins (see Nicholas Guyatt, Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation [New York, 2016]). Second, there is evidence that Jefferson continued to oppose slavery during and after the publication of Notes—such as his authorship of an antislavery constitution for Virginia in 1783 and his ambitious (but never fully implemented) attempt to utilize tenant farming as a way to transition enslaved people to freedom in the late 1780s (see Cara Rogers, “The French Experiment: Thomas Jefferson and William Short Debate Slavery, 1785–1826,” American Political Thought 10 [Summer 2021]: 327–62). Finally, a careful comparison of the different versions of Notes suggests that Jefferson revised his remarks on race and slavery after receiving a prescient critique from fellow naturalist Charles Thomson, who commented that Notes “‘might seem to justify slavery’” (p. 298). Thomson suggested that Jefferson delete every remark on racial inferiority; Jefferson instead softened his conclusions, moving from statements of fact to speculation and adding several harsh condemnations of Virginians who owned enslaved people. Rather than using his Notes to alter the antislavery implications of the Declaration of Independence, then, Jefferson used the work to appeal to the sensibilities of racist Virginians, offering them the option of colonization while insisting that slavery was incompatible with republican government. After all, he asked, “can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God?” (p. 250). Scholars should continue to investigate the various iterations of Notes in order to provide further insight into Jefferson’s views; Forbes’s edition will aid in the...