Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Stamped from the Beginning, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Discrimination, Racist Ideas, and Ignorance
Segregationists and Assimilationists vs. Antiracists
Media, Institutions, and the Transmission of Knowledge
The Invention of Blackness and Whiteness
The Illogic of Racism
Summary
Analysis
Just before leaving office at the end of his second presidential term, Jefferson receives a book by the abolitionist scientist Henri Gregoire entitled An Enquiry Concerning the Intellectual and Moral Faculties, and Literature of Negroes. The book features a travel narrative describing “glorious Black nations”; while Gregoire insists that he is not advocating a view of racial equality between white and Black people, he presents the assimilationist view that Black people could successfully be incorporated into white society. Jefferson has begun speaking against slavery in public and oversaw the passing of a law banning illegal slave traders in 1807. However, because there were no stipulations as to how the law would be enforced, it ended up being “empty and mostly symbolic.”
This passage serves as a reminder that even those who are adamant in their opposition to slavery are often still paralyzed with fear and confusion about what a post-slavery society would look like. These anxieties tend to get displaced into conversations about whether Black people would be “capable” of handling freedom and integrating into society. Yet the truth is that it is white people who are proving themselves to be incapable of living among Black people as equals and building a flourishing society together.
Themes
In fact, ending the international slave trade actually benefits enslavers by driving up the price placed on those they hold in bondage. Writing a response to Gregoire, Jefferson repeats the line that no one in the world wants to see Black people advance more than he does. Back in Europe, opinions about Black people are being transformed by a new “exhibit”: a Khoi woman named Sarah Baartman, whose buttocks became an object of fanatical fixation for the French public.
The fact that ending the slave trade is actually profitable for enslavers is another reminder to be skeptical about narratives of racial progress. The end of the slavery trade might seem like an important step toward abolition and in some senses it is—however, in another sense, it is actually an intensification and solidification of slavery.
Themes
A segregationist anatomist who at the time is “Europe’s most distinguished intellectual,” Georges Cuvier, spends days observing Baartman. After she dies in December 1815, Cuvier manages to obtain her body and dissects it, removing her genitals to be preserved. Cuvier then concludes that the Khoi people are closer relations of monkeys than white humans. Parts of Baartman’s body remain on display until 1974. She is finally buried in South Africa, her homeland, in 2002.
Baartman’s story is one of the most disturbing in the long and brutal history of anti-Black racism. The violent “scientific” fascination with her body causes her to be horrifically dehumanized in both life and death, illuminating how sinister the pursuit of (racist) knowledge can be.
Themes
By 1809, the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations have taken to purchasing enslaved people and capturing fugitives. Meanwhile, across the country enslaved people are revolting, in some cases explicitly drawing inspiration from the Haitian Revolution. These rebellions are met with brutal retaliation. By the time Jefferson leaves office, it is clear that slavery is massively expanding, not declining. Facing fierce criticism from Europeans, leaders in America begin defending slavery as a temporary necessary evil. When Jefferson leaves office in 1809, he is a millionaire (in today’s terms) yet also has “a mountain of debt.” He settles happily into retirement, indulging his passion for science. He shies away from opportunities to publicly stand against slavery, claiming this is due to his old age.
It may seem as if Jefferson is not as responsible for the continuation of slavery as a furiously vocal proslavery segregationist. Yet by deliberately delaying the question of abolition throughout his career only to retire and blame his old age for his reluctance to discuss the matter, it’s possible that Jefferson did more to hinder abolition than a proslavery advocate. While proslavery advocates at least make their position clear (and thereby open the possibility of debate), Jefferson demanded patience while making false promises, sapping abolitionism of its momentum.
Themes
Get the entire Stamped from the Beginning LitChart as a printable PDF.
