Thomas Jefferson's Argument Of Slavery

Thomas Jefferson thought the African Americans were creative and wise in some areas and deficient in others in others. He felt that the blacks were at least as brave as and more adventuresome than the whites, but he assumed that that their actions could be of want of forethought, which prevents them from seeing danger until its present. When danger is present he believes that they do not go through it with more coolness or steadiness than whites. Their griefs are temporary. He thought the blacks would have taken advantage of the conversations of their masters and the handicraft arts that the blacks had been brought up to, and from that situation they have always been associated with the whites. Some blacks have been generously educated and …show more content…
Jefferson explained some of the most important reasons why freedom never received serious consideration in southern legislatures. One of the most remarkable adjustments proposed was to free all slaves born after passing the act. The bill reported by the revisers does not itself contain this proposition; but an amendment containing it was prepared, to be offered to the legislature whenever the bill should be taken up, and further directing, that they should continue with their parents to a certain age , then be brought up, at the public expense, to labor, arts or sciences, according to geniuses, till the females should be eighteen, and the males twenty-one years of age, when they should be colonized to such place as the circumstances of the time should reduce most proper, sending then out with arms, implements of household and of the handicraft arts, feeds, pairs of the useful domestic animals, and to declare them free and independent people, and extend to them our alliance and protection, till they have acquired strength; and to send vessels at the same time to other parts of the world for an equal number of white inhabitants; to encourage whom to transfer hither, proper encouragements were to be