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16. "Notes on Virginia"
e are now hurried from the scenes of war and confusion to a delightful interval in Mr. Jefferson's life in which he recurred with eagerness to the pursuits of science.
During the early part of the turbulent year of 1781, while disabled from active employment by the fall from his horse, he found sufficient leisure to compose his celebrated "Notes on Virginia." This was the only original publication in which he ever embarked; nor was the work prepared with the most distant intention of committing it to the press. Its history is a little curious.
M. de Marbois of the French legation in Philadelphia, having been instructed by his government to obtain such statistical accounts of the different States of the Union as might be useful for their information, addressed a letter to Mr. Jefferson containing a number of queries relative to the State of Virginia. These queries embraced an extensive range of objects and were designed to elicit a general view of the geography, natural productions, government, history, and laws of the commonwealth. Mr. Jefferson had always made it a practice when traveling to commit his observations to writing and to improve every opportunity, by conversations with the inhabitants and by personal examination, to enlarge his stock of information on the physical and moral condition of the country.
These memoranda were on loose pieces of paper, promiscuously intermixed, and difficult of arrangement when occasion required the use of any particular one. He used the present opportunity, therefore, to digest and embody the substance of them in the order of M. de Marbois' queries so as to gratify the wishes of the French government and arrange them for his own convenience. Some friends to whom they were occasionally communicated in manuscript requested copies, but their volume rendering the business of transcribing too laborious, he proposed to get a few printed for their private gratification. He was asked such a price, however, as exceeded in his opinion the importance of the object and abandoned the idea. Subsequently, on his arrival in Paris in 1784, he found the printing could be obtained for one-fourth part of what had been required in America. He thereupon revised and corrected the work and had two hundred copies printed under the modest title which it bears. He gave out a very few copies to his particular friends in Europe, writing in each one a restraint against its publication, and the remainder he transmitted to his friends in America. A European copy having fallen into the hands of a Paris bookseller on the death of its owner, the bookseller engaged a hireling translation and sent it into the world in the worst form possible. "I never had seen," says the author, "so wretched an attempt at translation. Interverted, abridged, mutilated, and often reversing the sense of the original, I found it a blotch of errors from beginning to end." (Autobiography, 1821. ME 1:91) Under these circumstances, he was urged in self-defense to comply with the request of a London bookseller to publish the English original, which he accordingly did. By this means, it soon became the property of the public and advanced to a high degree of popularity. The work has since been translated into all the principal tongues of Europe and ran through a large number of editions in England, in France (where the celebrated Abbe Morellet published a translation of the Notes in 1786), and in America.
Under the query relative to the several charters of the State and its present form of government, Mr. Jefferson presents a compact statistical view of the colony from the first settlement under the grant of Queen Elizabeth in 1584 down to the time at which he writes, gives an outline of the existing constitution, and enumerates what he considers its capital defects.
A brief notice of these defects and the remedies which he proposed will explain more fully, as was promised, the opinions of Mr. Jefferson on the constitution of Virginia, being the first republican charter ever known. In the appendix to the volume under notice is inserted a new constitution prepared by himself in 1783, when it was expected the Assembly of Virginia would call a convention for remodeling the old one -- an event which he long and vainly desired to see. This draught corresponds in all its main features with the one prepared by him while in Congress in 1776 and transmitted to the convention in Virginia then sitting for that purpose, though received too late to be adopted.
Among the palpable defects of the existing establishment he enumerates:
1. The want of universal suffrage -- or rather, such an extension of the elective franchise as would give a voice in the government to all those who pay and fight for its support. This is the vital principle of a pure democracy, and Mr. Jefferson appears to have been the first politician of whom we have any information who ventured forth publicly as its advocate. Possessed of a large estate himself and gratified with the enjoyment of every honor, no personal ambition could be supposed to enter into his motives, and his opinion was received with great deference. The principle has since been incorporated with greater or less modifications into the constitutions of almost all the States. The predominance of the landed influence, family aristocracy, and a general repugnance to risking innovations have hitherto retained the freehold qualification in Virginia, though its rigor has been modified by amendments. The success of the experiment, wherever it has been tried, has abundantly tested the soundness of the principle.
2. Inequality of representation. This deformity pervaded the first republican charter of Virginia to an astonishing degree. Mr. Jefferson detects and exposes the evil in a strong light, by a tabular statement of the relative number of electors and representatives in each county, and calls the attention of his countrymen to the subject in an impressive manner. According to his statement, the county of Warwick, with only one hundred electors, had an equal representation with the county of Loudon, having 1700 electors; and taking the State at large, 19,000 men in one part were enabled to give law to upwards of 30,000 in the remaining part. This defect was remedied by a later revision of the constitution.
3. The Senate is necessarily too homogeneous with the House of Delegates. Being chosen by the same electors, at the same time, and out of the same subjects, the choice falls of course on the same description of men, defeating thereby the great purpose of establishing different houses of legislation, which is to introduce the influence of different interests or different principles.
4. The want of a sufficient barrier between the legislative, judiciary, and executive powers of the government. The concentration of these in the same hands constituted, in his opinion, the precise definition of despotism. By the constitution of Virginia, they all resulted to the same body, the legislature, though they were exercised by different bodies. He proclaims a solemn warning against this heresy and invokes an immediate application of the remedy, urging that the time to guard against corruption and tyranny is before they shall have seized the heads of the government and been spread by them through the body of the people.
5 and 6. Finally, as objections of the greatest magnitude, Mr. Jefferson argued that the constitution itself was a mere legislative ordinance, enacted at a critical time for a temporary purpose, not superior to the ordinary legislature, but alterable by it, and that the Assembly possessing the right, as they did, of determining a quorum of their own body, might convert the government into an absolute despotism at any moment by consolidating its powers and placing them in the hands of a single individual. To the joint operation of these two defects, aided by the inauspicious temper of the times, he ascribed the infatuated attempt of the legislature in 1776, repeated in 1781, to surrender the liberties of the people into the hands of a dictator. He concludes his remarks upon the constitution by a solemn appeal to the people for their speedy interposition:
"Our situation is indeed perilous, and I hope my countrymen will be sensible of it, and will apply, at a proper season, the proper remedy; which is a convention to fix the constitution, to amend its defects, to bind up the several branches of government by certain laws, which, when they transgress, their acts shall become nullities; to render unnecessary an appeal to the people, or in other words, a rebellion, on every infraction of their rights, on the peril that their acquiescence shall be construed into an intention to surrender those rights." (Notes on Virginia, 1782. ME 2:178)
nder the enquiry concerning the administration of justice, etc., the author presents a view of the judicial system of Virginia, framed, indeed, by himself in 1776, with a description of the laws. He alludes to the Revised Code as a work which had been "executed by three gentlemen," glances at the most important reformations which it introduced, but carefully conceals every circumstance which might indicate his participation in that structure of republican jurisprudence. In commenting upon the provisions recommended in this code for the future disposition of the blacks, the genius of the author appears again in its favorite element. He insists upon colonization to a distant country as the only safe and practicable mode of ultimate redemption, and urges strong reasons of policy as well as necessity against their being retained in the State and incorporated among the race of whites. "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." (Notes on Virginia, 1782 ME 2:192) To these distinctions, which are political, he adds many others, which are physical and moral. But space is not allowed us to pursue the subject or to follow the author through his investigation of the question, Whether the blacks and the Indians are inferior races of beings to the whites? Making all due allowances for the difference of condition, education, etc., between the blacks and whites, still the evidences were too strong, in his opinion, not to admit doubts of the intellectual equality of the two species. Of the former, 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, have lived in countries where the arts and sciences are cultivated to a high degree, and have had before their eyes samples of the best workmanship and of the noblest intelligence. "But never yet," he adds, "could I find a black that had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration, nor seen even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture." Still, it was not against experience to suppose that different species of the same genus, or varieties of the same species, might possess different qualifications. The Indians, on the other hand, with none of the advantages above named, will often carve figures on their pipes not destitute of design and merit so as to prove the existence of a germ in their minds which only wants cultivation. They will astonish you with strokes on the most sublime oratory such as prove their reason and sentiment strong, their imagination glowing and elevated. [comment]
On the whole, therefore, he advanced it as his opinion that the Indians are equal to the whites in body and mind, and as a problem only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race or made so by time and circumstances, are inferior to them. To justify a conclusion in the latter case required observations which eluded the research of all the senses; it should therefore be hazarded with extreme caution, especially when such conclusion would degrade a whole race of men from the rank in the scale of beings which their Creator may, perhaps, have assigned them. The difference of color, feature, inclination, etc., is sufficient to warrant the presumption that they were designed for a separate existence; but it furnishes no evidence of the right to enslave and torment them as mere brutes. "Will not a lover of natural history then," he concludes, "one who views the gradations in all the races of animals with the eye of philosophy excuse an effort to keep these in the department of man as distinct as nature has formed them?"
The unhappy influence of slavery upon the manners and morals of the people is forcibly portrayed in a succeeding chapter.
"The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this and learn to imitate it, for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do. If a parent could find no motive either in his philanthropy or his self-love, for restraining the intemperance of passion towards his slave, it should always be a sufficient one that his child is present. But generally it is not sufficient. The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances. And with what execration should the statesman be loaded, who, permitting one half the citizens thus to trample on the rights of the other, transforms those into despots, and these into enemies, destroys the morals of the one part, and the amor patriae of the other. For if a slave can have a country in this world, it must be any other in preference to that in which he is born to live and labor for another: in which he must lock up the faculties of his nature, contribute as far as depends on his individual endeavors to the evanishment of the human race, or entail his own miserable condition on the endless generations proceeding from him." (Notes on Virginia, 1782. ME 2:225)
The freedom with which Mr. Jefferson expressed his strictures on slavery and the constitution of Virginia was the reason, it appears, for his confining the work originally to his confidential friends. In his letters to them accompanying the gift of a copy, he uniformly explains the motives by which he was actuated in restraining its circulation. In presenting a copy of the work to General Chastellux, he thus writes:
"I have been honored with the receipt of your letter of the 2nd instant and am to thank you, as I do sincerely, for the partiality with which you receive the copy of the Notes on my country. As I can answer for the facts therein reported on my own observation and have admitted none on the report of others which were not supported by evidence sufficient to command my own assent, I am not afraid that you should make any extracts you please for the Journal de Physique, which come within their plan of publication. The strictures on slavery and on the constitution of Virginia are not of that kind, and they are the parts which I do not wish to have made public, at least till I know whether their publication would do most harm or good. It is possible that in my own country, these strictures might produce an irritation which would indispose the people towards the two great objects I have in view; that is, the emancipation of their slaves and the settlement of their constitution on a firmer and more permanent basis. If I learn from thence that they will not produce that effect, I have printed and reserved just copies enough to be able to give one to every young man at the College. It is to them I look, to the rising generation, and not to the one now in power, for these great reformations." (Emphasis added. June 7, 1785. ME 5:3)
In transmitting copies to his friends in America, he expressed the same lofty reasons, of which the following in a letter to Mr. Monroe is a sample.
"I send you by Mr. Otto a copy of my book... I have taken measures to prevent its publication. My reason is that I fear the terms in which I speak of slavery and of our constitution may produce an irritation which will revolt the minds of our countrymen against reformation in these two articles and thus do more harm than good. I have asked of Mr. Madison to sound this matter as far as he can, and, if he thinks it will not produce that effect, I have then copies enough printed to give one to each of the young men at the College and to my friends in the country." (June 17, 1785. ME 5:14)
he remainder of this justly celebrated treatise is occupied with useful details and learned dissertations under the following heads of enquiry:
- The colleges, public establishments, and mode of architecture in Virginia.
- The measures taken with regard to the estates and possessions of Tories during the war.
- The different religions received into the State.
- The particular manners and customs of the people.
- The present state of manufactures, commerce, and agriculture.
- The usual commodities of export and import.
- The weights, measure, and currency in hard money, with the rates of exchange with Europe.
- The public income and expenses.
- The histories of the State, the memorials published under its name while a colony, and a chronological catalogue of its State papers since the commencement of the revolution.
Perhaps the most celebrated portion of the whole work is that which contains the opinions of the author on the subject of FREE INQUIRY in matters of religion. The interest which all mankind feel on a point so vitally connected with the policy of our government and the freedom and happiness of its subjects will justify a liberal quotation here in concluding our remarks upon these invaluable "Notes." The sentiments of the writer, although generally esteemed heretical and well nigh impious at the time, are now as generally reputed orthodox and unquestionable.
"Reason and free enquiry 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 enquiry, Christianity could never have been introduced. Had not free enquiry 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 each 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 999 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 enquiry must be indulged; and how can we wish others to indulge it while we refuse it ourselves." (Notes on Virginia, 1782. ME 2:221)
The complete text of "Notes on Virginia" is available on the Internet at:
Notes on the State of Virginia
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© 1997 by Eyler Robert Coates, Sr.