Frederick Douglass Ten Thousand Recollection

Notes of comparison: Jefferson and Douglass
“Ten Thousand Recollections”
In Query XIV from the “Notes on the State of Virginia”, which was part of our reading from an earlier lecture, Thomas Jefferson engages the question of “Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state” once they are freed. Put another way, the question becomes” why ex-slaves once freed must be colonized (e.g. kicked out of the country). The first reason he gives is: “Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites;” in other words, plain old racism. A second answer is more relevant to our reading of Frederick Douglass. Jefferson writes ominously about the “ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained.” The unstated suggestion is that “the blacks” once freed will exact a heavy (one might add, just) revenge

The sanguinary and horrifying whipping with the “cowskin” particularly -- are so commonplace that the phrase “earning one’s stripes” takes on a bloody and rueful meaning in slave culture.
Incidentally, the use by Jefferson of the indefinite article when discussing “the” blacks is an instance of linguistic racism and alienation that persists to this day.
“My father was a white man” versus “Real distinctions which nature has made”
In Notes, Jefferson’s ever-observing and pseudo-scientific eye is fond of making unfavorable comparison between Blacks and the Whites (unfavorable to Blacks, of course). Yet the fact that children were often born the product of a black women and a white man (primarily through rape) belies the notion that Jefferson’s “real distinctions” were valid. That Jefferson’s household was literarily “littered” with mixed-race children in his own image makes this fact particularly