Race and the Moral Foundation of the American Republic: Another Look at the Declaration and the Notes on Virginia

Abstract

In the Declaration of Independence, as well as in his public writings and private correspondence, Thomas Jefferson articulated principles and expressed opinions which have the utmost relevance for racial justice. In this paper I propose to explore the implications of Jefferson's views as expressed in the Declaration and to compare them with what he says about slavery and the black race elsewhere, especially in the Notes on the State of Virginia. In what follows I will argue that the Declaration's assertion of self-evident practical truths points to a kind of moral reasoning which is incompatible with the so-called method Jefferson employs in examining blacks as a race (as distinct from his views on slavery) in the Notes. And against the prevailing scholarly tendency to diminish the importance of the Declaration as a statement of our deepest political principles (Arendt 1963; Pocock 1975; Wood 1969) or to interpret it in novel and unconvincing ways (Wills 1978), I will argue that the self-evident truths of the Declaration are morally superior to Jefferson's so-called scientific attempt to derive values from facts, which is his ill-conceived and contradictory project in Query #14 of the Notes. In the most important studies of this question to date, regardless of how they interpret Jefferson's treatment of race, scholars have tended to stress the basic consistency of Jefferson's positions in the Declaration and the Notes. Thus, for example, Daniel Boorstin, in his early influential study, The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson, argues that all of Jefferson's works are informed by the Enlightenment faith that science and reason will bring about