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and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both mind and body . . . This unfortunate difference in color and perhaps in faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.”
    Jefferson doubted that the freed blacks could live peacefully in the same country with their former masters. “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, will divide us into parties and produce convulsions, and probably never end but in the extermination of one or the other race.” Ultimately, Jefferson concluded, freed blacks would have to be resettled in a foreign country to avoid inevitable bloodshed.
    Another obstacle to white–black relations, Jefferson continued, was the Negroes’ “immoveable veil of black” which tended to “eternal monotony” from an aesthetic point of view. Blacks had “several engaging if somewhat childlike qualities,” but they had little ability for reflection or forethought. In reason they were “much inferior” to the whites and in imagination “dull, tasteless and anomalous.” While sexually more ardent than whites, their affections were “neither tender nor lasting.”
    When he penned these lines, Jefferson thought he was writing for only a single individual, or a group of individuals in the French government. After he became American ambassador to France in 1784, he showed Notes on Virginia to several friends in Paris, and they persuaded him to publish the book in a limited edition of one hundred copies. From there it was an all-too-predictable step to an edition published in London in1787. Authors had no copyright protection in the eighteenth century. American editions soon followed and Notes became one of the most quoted and debated books ever written. For many whites, especially in the South, Jefferson’s words elevated their already negative opinion of blacks to the level of confirmed truth. 9

CHAPTER 5
    The Forgotten Emancipator
    No matter how much he grew in his appreciation and understanding of blacks as human beings, George Washington remained aware that slavery could not be eliminated without endangering the still-fragile American union. As president, he devoted most of his time and energy to establishing the new office as a key factor in this political enterprise. The nation swarmed with people hostile to a strong executive, and they soon found a leader in Thomas Jefferson, who had been in Paris as America’s ambassador when the new national charter was created. Although Jefferson had agreed to serve as Washington’s secretary of state, he had deep reservations about the wisdom of the new Constitution. He would have preferred simply to update the Articles of Confederation.
    When President Washington declared America neutral in the war that erupted between England and Revolutionary France in 1793, Jefferson formed a pro-French political party. His followers were soon attacking the president savagely in newspapers and pamphlets. Pro-French mobs surged through the streets of Philadelphia to demonstrate in front of Washington’s residence. In a letter to a European friend, Jefferson described the presidentas a “Samson who had allowed himself to be shorn by the harlot, England.” One Jeffersonian journalist, James Thomson Callender, offered a toast at a public dinner “to the speedy death of President Washington.” 1
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    In the midst of this foreign policy turmoil, over the Allegheny Mountains came an even starker threat to disunion—the upheaval in western Pennsylvania that many people called “The Whiskey Rebellion.” The name was in some respects a misnomer. The western counties had long had a surly relationship to the distant state and federal