s well as whites. Nor was he a mere
doctrinaire. As he revolted from the abstract injustice of slavery, so
its concrete abuses as he saw them, filled him with horror. He wrote: "I
tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just." He described
what he had seen. "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 submission on the
other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it, for man is an
imitative animal.... 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 rein to the worst of passions; and thus nursed,
educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it
with odious peculiarities."

But Jefferson shared a common belief of his time, that it was futile to
hope to "retain and incorporate the blacks into the State." He wrote:
"Deep-rooted prejudices of the whites, ten thousand recollections of
blacks of injuries sustained, new provocations, the real distinction
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 one or the other race." So he looked for a remedy
to emancipation followed by deportation. But he hesitated to affirm any
essential inferiority in the negro race. He wrote: "The opinion that
they are inferior in the faculties of reason and imagination must be
hazarded with great diffidence." Later he wrote that "they were gaining
daily in the opinions of nations, and hopeful advances are making toward
their re-establishment on an equal footing with other colors of the
human family."

Jefferson was more than a theorist; he was skillful to persuade men, and
to organize and lead a party. His general tendency was "along the line
of least resistance,"--the summoning of men to free themselves from
oppressive restraint; and he was highly successful until he called on
them for severe self-sacrifice, when his supporters were apt suddenly to
fail him. Virginia gladly followed his lead in abolishing primogeniture
and entail, and overthrowing the Established Church. She even consented,
in 1778, to abolish the African slave-trade, being then in little need
of more slaves than she possessed. In 1779 he planned a far more radical
and costly project--a general emancipation. All slaves born afte