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After two hundred years of experience, we today can say unquestionably that Jefferson's assessment of the blacks was mistaken. Individual blacks have proven that they are just as capable of intellectual and artistic achievement as whites, and in certain areas perhaps even more so. To his credit, we must recognize that Jefferson put forth his theories of black innate inferiority as tentative only, based on his own observation and experience with them, and reserving always the possibility that he could be mistaken. When Rayner writes, "The Indians, on the other hand, with none of the advantages above named...." he, along with Jefferson, overlooks the one overriding advantage that impacts on every aspect of the life and thought of man -- FREEDOM! The Indian, to some degrees greater than even the white man, was free to explore and develop his own being with a minimum of social oppression -- a fact that Jefferson clearly noted in his discussions of their social structure.Hence we must conclude that Thomas Jefferson, the apostle of liberty and the most profound enemy of tyranny and oppression of mind and spirit, himself underestimated the effect of freedom on the life of man, especially with respect to the blacks. But we cannot be too harsh in condemning him for this error. After all, he was openly investigating the question and basing his tentative conclusions on an unbiased, reasonable assessment of the data he had available to him at the time. Any other objective investigator would almost certainly have reached the same tentative conclusions, based on the same data. Those conclusions are recognized by later observers to be mistaken because we now have better data.