ion, which
must weaken their respect for the laws of property, we find among them
numerous instances of the most rigid integrity; and as many as among their
better instructed masters, of benevolence, gratitude, and unshaken
fidelity.

"The opinion that they are inferiour in the faculties of reason and
imagination, must be hazarded with great diffidence. To justify a general
conclusion requires many observations, even where the subject may be
submitted to the anatomical knife, to optical glasses, to analysis by fire
or solvents: how much more, then, when it is a faculty, not a substance,
we are examining; where it eludes the research of all the senses; where
the conditions of it's existence are various, and variously combined;
where the effects of those which are present or absent bid defiance to
calculation; let me add too, in a circumstance where our conclusions would
degrade a whole race of men from the rank in the scale of beings, which
their Creator may perhaps have given them! To our reproach it must be
said, though for a century and a half we have had under our eyes the races
of black and red men, they have never yet been viewed by us as subjects of
natural history. I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the
blacks[Footnote: Where Jefferson makes use of the word _Black_, in
this extract, it is rigidly confined to the _Negroes_ originally from
the coast of Africa, or their descendants.], whether originally a distinct
race, or made so by time and circumstances, are inferiour to the whites in
the endowments both of body and mind."

* * * * *

_Boston, December 29th, 1796._

DEAR FRIEND,

Upon my arrival here, I had once more the mortification to find myself in
the neighbourhood of the yellow fever, which had lately been imported. The
uncommon, early, and severe north-west winds entirely prevented it from
spreading; a fortunate circumstance for the inhabitants of Boston, as,
from the narrowness of their streets, great population, and other
circumstances, it must have been very fatal, had it not been by this means
destroyed.

In order to give you the most regular account of this disorder I could
procure, I must repeat several circumstances from former letters.

The yellow fever, which has lately been so fatal, is a _new disorder_,
first brought to the West Indies, in a slave-ship from the coast of
Africa, late in the year 1792. It spread rapidly from island to island,
a