Similarities Between Jefferson And Frederick Douglass

Jefferson and Douglass: Notes and Narrative

Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia is a strange and weedy document. Like any literary work of historical importance, its textual terrain can be viewed and interpreted in various ways depending on context and point of view. To Jefferson admirers, Notes reads like a clear-eyed statistical treatise of demographics and topology with occasional philosophical flourishes of the first water produced by one of the most highly cultivated minds of the American Enlightenment. To others, Notes reads like a pseudo-scientific swamp of odious comparisons, racial bigotry and specious rationalizations that would seem in some ways to presage “Mein Kampf.” or the minutes of a Klu Klux Klan meeting.

The

In Slavery and the Founders, Paul Finkelman quotes John Hope Franklin as pointing out that Jefferson’s theories about race “became indisputable dogma within a decade after his death (Slavery and the Founders, 110). Even if Douglass had not read Jefferson words directly he would, by the time he became associated with Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, have been likely aware of David Walker’s Appeal in Four Articles in which Walker ask, in apparent reference to the Notes, has not “Mr. Jefferson declared to the world, that we are inferior to the whites, both in the endowments of our bodies and of minds? (Walker,

By describing the negation of filial affection in this way, Douglass actually creates an affirmation of an abiding and deep emotional attachment to his mother – albeit in absentia. On a subliminal level, the reader (or oratorical audience) actually visualizes a Madonna and child tableau in which the infant Douglass does indeed enjoy the “soothing presence”, the “tender and watchful care” of maternal love (my italics). By creating this visual in the reader’s mind and then moving forward to explain that it was “a common custom” to separate mother and child, Douglass highlights the unnatural brutality of slave culture in a way that tables and statistics (like those used by Jefferson in Notes) never could. Furthermore, in response to Jefferson’s notion that afflictions “with them… are soon forgotten”, we only have to cite Douglass’ testament retold in “My Bondage and My Freedom” in which he elaborates on the special connection that humans, as well as all mammals and primates, eco-critically speaking, have with