Avakian on Jefferson: A Critical Reading Part 2

Jefferson carved into the Lakota's sacred black hills

Jefferson in the Sioux's Black Hills

This is the second of a three-part series written for Kasama.

The author writes in Part 1: ”The Revolutionary Communist Party describes Bob Avakian’s latest essay, Communism and Jeffersonian Democracy, as an ‘unsparing critique of the history…of American society.’ Having ‘engaged’ Away With All Gods! six months ago, I’d like to respond to this seriously as well.”

by Pavel Andreyev

Misunderstanding the Louisiana Purchase

“In reality,” Avakian declares, “Jefferson’s agrarian society turned out to be a society based on slavery and ruled by slaveowners.” This overstatement ignores the sections of U.S. society that were in fact based on yeoman agriculture. [22]

But Avakian proceeds undeterred:

“One striking example that a number of people have pointed to in this regard is the Louisiana Purchase (the purchase by the United States government of the Louisiana Territory from the French in 1803).”

Notice the fuzziness of the wording: “in this regard” Avakian isn’t merely noting what all American historians recognize — that parts of the Louisiana Territory became slave states.

Avakian is broadly hinting without having to be too specific that Jefferson purchased the territory with the expansion of slavery in mind. Note too that this is in fact the only example he gives to substantiate the allegation that “Jefferson consistently acted in the interests of the…slaveholding class.” And note that while he peppers his talk with references to Isaac Kramnick, R. Laurence Moore, Edmund S. Morgan, and David Brion Davis on Jefferson’s ideas and questions of race in Virginia, he cites no scholar on this topic of the Louisiana Purchase whatsoever.

Avakian continues:

“Having suffered significant military setbacks—and dramatically so in the attempt to put down the armed rebellion of slaves in Haiti which had been initiated under the leadership of Toussaint L’Ouverture—Napoleon Bonaparte, ruler of France, reckoned that he couldn’t easily hold on to this territory in the Americas, and so Jefferson, then President of the United States, stepped in to quickly grab up this territory. In this he acted primarily in the interests of the slaveowners and in order to spread the slaveowning system into the new territories acquired through this act—not to develop an agrarian society based on a multitude of small farmers. This is just one example of many that could be cited which clearly illustrate that Jefferson consistently acted in the interests of the slaveowning class—in conflict with the interests not only of the slaves but also of the yeoman in the South, as well as the rising capitalist class centered in the North.” [23] [emph. added]

Avakian doesn’t mention that Jefferson’s intention was actually far more limited. He wanted the U.S. to purchase the port of New Orleans, which had recently passed from the Spanish to the French. At the head of the Mississippi River, this port was vital to the provisioning of territories claimed by the U.S. west of the Appalachian Mountains. Since Napoleon’s France — overextended militarily in Europe, facing defeat at the hands of slave rebels in its colony of Haiti — was in need of hard cash, it is quite understandable why Jefferson would engage in negotiations for a transfer of sovereignty over New Orleans.

The expansion of slavery was not the motive.

The motive indeed was the supply of goods to the yeomen — that class idealized by Jefferson — settling in the expanding frontier. (These small farmers, it must be noted, were expanding at the expense of those already there. We need to always recognize that the U.S. was built on the two pillars of genocidal “Indian removal” and slavery. But the specific issue here is not the nature of white settlement but the historical causality behind the acquisition of the Louisiana Territory, which Avakian simply gets wrong.)

Mr. Jefferson’s Lost Cause

U.S. negotiators James Monroe and Robert Livingston had been instructed to offer as much as $ 10 million for the port and did not expect that the French would offer the entire Louisiana Territory to the U.S. for $ 15 million. The deal, that is, fell into their lap.

But Jefferson was in fact ambivalent about signing the agreement with France. His Federalist opponents argued that the purchase was unwise and required Congressional assent, and he himself questioned whether he as president even had the constitutional authority to authorize the transfer. But he did authorize it, and the agreement was ratified by Congress.

Did he do so “primarily…to spread the slaveholding system”? I doubt any historian specializing in this period of U.S. history would suggest that was Jefferson’s principal motive. Indeed Howard Zinn, whom the RCP seems to appreciate, emphasizes Jefferson’s belief that some Native American tribes could be relocated there.[24] Slavery had been practiced in what became the state of Louisiana in 1812 under the Spanish and French, and continued to be practiced when the region was added to the U.S. The same was the case with Mississippi (made a state in 1817).

But Jefferson, eleven years after leaving office, strongly opposed the 1820 “Missouri Compromise” that expanded slavery beyond Louisiana to what became the states of Missouri (1821) and Arkansas (1836) within the territory purchased from France. He wrote that “like a fire bell in the night, [it] awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union.”

Jefferson didn’t in fact, Avakian’s claim notwithstanding, want to see “the slaveholding system” expanded in the U.S. and indeed thought its expansion likely to tear the republic apart.

In a footnote, Avakian cites Roger G. Kennedy’s Mr. Jefferson’s Lost Cause as evidence that Jefferson wasn’t really serious about promoting the interests of yeomen but rather furthering the interests of slave-owners. Actually, what Kennedy concludes is that Jefferson as president didn’t fight hard enough against slave-owners’ interests, although it’s questionable given the powers of the chief executive in the political framework of the time he could have possibly prevailed. He portrays Jefferson sympathetically as a “Hamlet” guilty of “timidity” rather than an eager proponent of slave-owners’ interests. [25]

Slavery the Key to Jefferson’s Political Fortunes?

Avakian continues:

“[W]ith regard to Jefferson himself, not only his economic status but also his political fortunes, including his election to the presidency, depended on slavery, and in particular the ‘three-fifths’ provision in the Constitution of the United States…”

This refers to the three-fifths provision of disproportionate electoral representation adopted in 1787: Article I, Section. 2: Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons. “Other persons” here plainly refers to slaves. Leaders of the Southern states wanted all their slaves counted in order to boost their number of Congressional seats, while the Northerners wished to keep the South’s representation at a minimum. By a political compromise (that Jefferson actually didn’t have much to do with), the Southern states (more specifically, the wealthy whites within them) wound up with less representation in the Congress than they would have liked and more than the Northern states would have liked by virtue of the fact that three-fifths the number of slaves were counted for tax and representation purposes.

Historian Garry Wills whom Avakian cites argues Jefferson might have lost the presidential election of 1800 if the slave states hadn’t been given disproportionate representation as a result of this provision. [26] But UCLA historian Joyce Appleby argues:

“The three-fifths provision was not the only compromise affecting the democratic vote. The most enduring gives every state a two vote bonus in the Electoral College for their senators. Had the two vote bonus been eliminated and slaves not counted at all, the outcome would probably have been a one vote victory for Jefferson.”[27]

Jefferson

To say that Jefferson’s election “depended upon slavery” and insinuate that he was personally happy about slavery is (again) a stretch. But Avakian, more bent upon iconoclasm than cautious weighing of evidence and historical objectivity, doesn’t seem to mind.

So how did Jefferson, father of the “Jeffersonian democracy” that Avakian contemptuously dismisses, relate to the phenomenon of slavery so central to Virginian realities from his childhood?

He was, as we all know, a slave-owner. (Avakian’s tone of moral outrage at this fact would be more appropriate if he were addressing people learning this for the first time. As it is, he seems to almost be “talking down” to his audience.) Jefferson owned about 200 slaves and probably had children by one of them, Sarah Hemings. He inherited 52 slaves from his father, and 135 more in 1774 from his father-in-law. Although he didn’t engage in commercial slave trading for profit, he sold many to wipe out inherited debt.

On occasion Jefferson purchased slaves from other owners to keep them united with spouses that he owned. “Nobody feels more strongly than I do,” he wrote in 1807, “the desire to make all practicable sacrifices to keep man and wife together who have imprudently married out of their respective families.” (“Families” here refers to plantations, and “those marrying out” to slaves who’d partnered with those owned by other masters who might relocate them arbitrarily.) In that year he purchased the wife of his blacksmith Moses so that the two might remain together. It is well known that Jefferson was deeply conflicted in his own mind about the institution of slavery. He questioned it, the way he questioned a lot of things, including religion.[28 ] As mentioned above, as a member of the Virginian legislature Jefferson proposed slavery’s abolition. He attacked slavery not only in his draft of the Declaration of Independence but in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1781) and many other writings.

In the Notes he suggests that “the spirit…of the slave [is] rising from the dust…I hope preparing, under the auspices of heaven, for a total emancipation…” He expressed hope that this would take place “with the consent of the masters, rather than by their extirpation.” He of course wrote as a master who could imagine his own class’s “extirpation” at the hands of those seeking “total emancipation.”

Jefferson proposed the Ordinance of 1784, including a clause that slavery be prohibited in the land between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River (Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee and Kentucky). When a single vote in Congress defeated the ordinance, Jefferson declared in a letter to Jean Nicholas de Meunier in 1786, “The voice of a single individual … would have prevented this abominable crime from spreading itself over the new country. Thus we see the fate of millions unborn hanging on the tongue of one man, and Heaven was silent in that awful moment!” [29]

Slavery: A Hideous Blot

Jefferson’s personal letters meanwhile indicate a genuine sense of guilt and unease about the existence of slavery in the new republic.

At various points Jefferson called slavery an “abominable crime,” “moral depravity,” and a “hideous blot.” In a letter to de Meunier he wonders whether the “God of justice” will end slavery “by diffusing light and liberality among [the slaves’] oppressors,” or by “His exterminating thunder” (i.e., the annihilation of the slave-owners by the oppressed). All this implies that, had his fellow-slave-owners agreed to end the “peculiar institution,” Jefferson would have gladly let go of it as well. But they didn’t, and he didn’t. Well this is indeed a “hideous blot” on Jefferson’s own historical reputation! Moral qualms don’t absolve Jefferson from the guilt applying to his entire class.

But can we not say further that slave ownership is a blot on any slaveowner, anytime and anywhere in world history since slavery began some 6000 years ago or so? This includes not just some of the leading figures in societies where slavery was the dominant form of class exploitation, like ancient Greece and Rome, but figures in medieval Europe (where Carolingian kings, Viking chieftains, and Venetian doges owned slaves) and in the early modern and modern periods as well.

Within that historical category of slave-owners, there are some who, to borrow the language of Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto “played a most revolutionary part.” We need to distinguish between someone like Julius Caesar, head of the “populares” faction in ancient Rome, and his opponent Cicero (whom Engels called “the most contemptible scoundrel in history”).[30] And we need to distinguish between Jefferson and fellow Virginian George Fitzhugh, a genuine propagandist for slavery.

We can’t end the discussion of a historical figure’s significance by noting that he or she owned slaves, or owned estates worked by serfs bound to the soil, or profited from the labor-power of wage-workers. We need, that is, to try to be dispassionate, objective historical materialists.

We can condemn Jefferson for his hypocrisy, and his moral weakness. He placed his personal financial situation ahead of his (all too abstract and passive) stand against slavery, once it was clear that slavery would remain pervasive in his state. But details — such as the fact that he sometimes declined to emancipate slaves due to the fact that Virginian law required that such people be evicted from the state — are not unimportant. Avakian does not make a convincing case that Jefferson acted “consistently” and “primarily” to serve slave-owners’ interests but rather offers a good example of the instrumentalist distortion of history (if not indignant posturing).

Next in Part 3: Jefferson as (Eighteenth-Century, Bourgeois) Rebel

Footnotes

[22] Shouldn’t one note that—along with some sections of the south—the largely agrarian society in Massachusetts (including Maine), Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire, New York (including Vermont), and New Jersey was not “based on slavery” and “ruled by slaveowners”? Are such details unimportant?

[23] Avakian earlier notes (accurately) how Jefferson idealized the yeoman or small independent farmer as the bulwark of the Republic. Here he attempts to demonstrate hypocrisy on Jefferson’s part and suggest that he was actually more interested in advancing the interests of slave-owners than the yeomen.

Avakian calls the contrast between Jefferson’s emphasis on the yeoman and his supposed higher loyalty to fellow slave-owners one of three “ironies” in Jefferson’s position. The second is his belief that “the yeomen…had to be led” by intellectuals such as himself. Avakian is concerned to distinguish Jefferson’s opinion from Lenin’s view that the working class requires a party to lead it and bring it revolutionary consciousness “from without” (although he doesn’t really develop the point). The “third irony” Avakian posits is that yeoman-based society would have led to emergence of elites anyway, in part due to variations in the productivity of the land they cultivated. But while Jefferson may have been naïve about the historical possibilities of capitalism, it’s hard to find “irony” in that naïveté. Rather there is a consistent idealism, and no hint of a secret agenda to advance the cause of slavery.

[24] Zinn, p. 126

[25] Roger G. Kennedy, Mr. Jefferson’s Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, Slavery and the Louisiana Purchase (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), esp. pp. 239-41. (The title of the book itself indicates Kennedy’s sense of Jefferson’s motives.) One might also note the comment of one reviewer that “Jefferson did not see, as Kennedy does, that the interests of the small freeholders he claimed to champion and the great planters were inimical to one another.” Leonard J. Sadosky, in The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 61, no. 3 (July 2004)

[26] Garry Wills, Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Power (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 2003), pp. 62-72. It should by the way be noted that Wills, as Avakian noted many years ago, is a big admirer of Jefferson. See Avakian, Democracy: Can’t We Do Better Than That? (Chicago: Banner Press, 1986), p. 105, note 18

[27] http://www.hoover.org/multimedia/uk/2993311.html

[28] Jefferson is the only president out of 43 who was not, and did not claim to be, a Christian. In a famous letter to his nephew, he urged him to “question with boldness even the existence of God.” He dismissed much of the Bible as myth, describing the ethical content of Jesus’ sayings as a “diamond” in a “dunghill” of unbelievable narrative. One wonders why Avakian, given his campaign against “Christian fascism” and religion in general, doesn’t factor this into an historical analysis of Jefferson.

[29] Boyd, Julian P., Charles T. Cullen, John Catanzariti, Barbara B. Oberg, et al, eds. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950-), vol. 10, p. 58

[30] Quoted by Michael Parenti, The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People’s History of Ancient Rome (New York: The New Press, 2003)

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