Jeffersonian Democracy and Slavery

Unlike the majority of the northeastern Federalists, many Democratic-Republicans holding federal office during President Jefferson's era were plantation slaveowners. In the minds of Jeffersonians, yeomen only could be white (and male). It was thought that because these white men had been born and raised in a system of freedom and republicanism, they had cultivated the virtues necessary to manage their own liberties. Slaves, on the other hand, were considered uneducated, unenlightened, and simple people who could not be expected to understand the virtues of self-reliance or political freedom; they instead needed the guidance of the white farmer to manage their lives and affairs. In the minds of the Democratic-Republicans, this paradoxical cycle of master-slave relations was in no way antithetical to republican principles and individual freedom.

Jefferson considered slavery culturally important—as it was in democratic Greece and other societies of antiquity—and viewed it as central to the "Southern way of life." In agreement with many of his contemporaries, Jefferson believed slavery served to protect black people, whom he viewed as inferior or incapable of taking care of themselves. His republican worldview stressed the austerity, self-reliance, and independence engendered by small-scale agricultural farming but neglected to highlight and justify the brutal and coercive system of chattel slavery that formed the basis for large-scale plantation production. His worldview was further complicated by his personal intimate relationship with Sally Hemings, one of his household slaves.

The Haitian Revolution  

The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) began as a slave insurrection in the French colony of Saint-Domingue and culminated in the abolition of slavery in the French Antilles and the founding of the Haitian republic. It is generally considered the most successful slave rebellion to have occurred in the Americas and was a defining moment in the history of Africans in the "New World."

Portrait of General Toussaint Louverture

General Toussaint Louverture is the most widely known leader of the Haitian Revolution.

Jeffersonians resisted antislavery and abolition vigorously, pointing to the violence of the revolution in Haiti as justification for keeping Africans enslaved in the United States. In fact, after a slave revolt in Saint-Domingue in 1801, Jefferson supported French plans to retake the island and loaned France $300,000 "for relief of whites on the island." By offering aid to France, Jefferson demonstrated his firm support of the institution, proved the government's willingness to protect slaveowners' human property, and helped alleviate the worry of Southern slave owners in the United States who feared a rebellion similar to the one in Haiti. 

After Haiti achieved independence in 1804, Jefferson grappled with Southern and congressional hostility toward the new black republic under the leadership of Haitian revolutionary, Jean-Jacques Dessalines. Jefferson shared planters' fears that the success of the rebellion in Haiti would encourage similar slave rebellions and widespread violence in the South. The United States officially joined with other European nations in a policy of nonrecognition of Haiti and a boycott on Haitian trade after Dessalines declared himself emperor 1804. Jefferson also discouraged the emigration of free blacks in America to Haiti.

Modification of the Virginia Emancipation Law

In 1806, with concern developing over the rise in the number of free black people in the United States and the success of the Haitian Revolution, the Virginia General Assembly modified the 1782 slave law to permit the re-enslavement of freedmen who remained in the state for more than twelve months after manumission. This discouraged free blacks from living in the state, thereby forcing them to leave enslaved kin behind. To gain permission for manumitted freedmen to stay in the state, slaveholders were required to petition the legislature directly. This new law led to an overall decline in manumissions in the state.

End of the U.S. Slave Trade

In March of 1807, Jefferson signed a bill ending the importation of slaves into the United States. By 1808, every state but South Carolina had followed Virginia's lead in banning the importation of slaves. With the growth of the domestic slave population contributing to the development of a large internal slave trade, slaveholders did not mount much resistance to the new law. Most slave owners also believed that a domestic slave population was less dangerous than an imported one; captured Africans appeared more openly rebellious than African Americans who were born in American bondage and molded from birth in the Southern plantation slave system. 

During the next few decades, as vast new lands in the Southwest were developed for the farming of short-staple cotton (a commodity made viable by the invention of the cotton gin), the demand for—and value of—domestic slaves in the United States increased. More than one million African-American slaves would be sold and transported from the Upper South and coastal areas to the Deep South, and such forced migrations frequently broke enslaved families apart.