In my latest book review for The Objective Standard, I look at a new scholarly edition of Thomas Jefferson's book Notes on Virginia. Alas, as is the fashion nowadays, the book goes out of its way to try to find nefarious motives behind Jefferson's writing of the book, even when simpler, more obvious explanations are probably correct. Excerpt:
Forbes...is not content with saying that Jefferson’s ideas on race reflected majority attitudes [about race]. He claims Jefferson created those attitudes. In his eyes, the Sage of Monticello used Notes as “an opportunity” to “decouple” black people from the equality principle and to establish “a rhetoric of authority that explicitly rejects appeals to reason, logic, or law.” In other words, Jefferson was consciously fashioning a “subtl[y] brillian[t]” stratagem for depriving black people of their claim to liberty.
This is an extraordinary assertion, and Forbes does not prove it. Instead of dispassionately seeking to understand Jefferson as he understood himself, Forbes’s argument rests largely on his own characterizations of Jefferson’s wording based on 21st-century attitudes. For example, he claims in one footnote that Jefferson’s repeated misspelling of Phillis Wheatley’s name was “an intentional slight, not a slip.” He offers no proof of this, and the reality is that Jefferson had idiosyncratic spelling habits, as did many of his contemporaries; he persisted in some errors his entire life (he never did figure out the difference between “its” and “it’s,” for example). Even if Jefferson had intended this as an insult, variant spelling of names was so common that his readers would not have recognized it. Forbes relies on dubious literary inferences, too, such as similarities between Jefferson’s word choices and those of other writers, when these are probably just coincidences. For example, Jefferson referred in one passage to the “eternal monotony” of black complexions—a phrase also used by British loyalist John Shebbeare while criticizing pro-American writer Richard Price for repeatedly characterizing King George III’s treatment of colonists as “slavery.” Shebbeare complained of Price’s “eternal monotony” in using this word, likening it to “the drone of a Scotch bagpipe.” In 1784, while Jefferson was writing Notes, Price published a second pamphlet, which again praised the American Revolution but condemned the enslavement of blacks. “It is hard not to conjecture,” Forbes concludes, “that reading Price’s pointed critique of American slavery in his [second] pamphlet triggered in Jefferson thoughts of Price’s [first] pamphlet and the ‘eternal monotony’ of its metaphors of slavery.”
But this is surely reading too much into Jefferson’s use of these two words. Shebbeare made no reference to black slavery when using the phrase “eternal monotony,” and Price’s commentary on slavery in his second pamphlet was only one paragraph long. It’s more probable that Jefferson adapted the phrase “eternal monotony” from Alexander Pope’s translation of The Odyssey—which referred to the “unhappy race” of dead souls in Hades, “whom endless night invades”—or from Thomas Gray—who used the line “closed his eyes in endless night” in a 1768 poem. Jefferson was a fan of both poets but appears never to have mentioned Shebbeare.
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