Jefferson and the slave owners

MR. JEFFERSON’S LOST CAUSE: LAND, FARMERS, SLAVERY, AND THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE

By Roger G. Kennedy

Oxford, $30, 350 pages, illus.

REVIEWED BY BILL MURCHISON

In “Mr. Jefferson’s Lost Cause,” Roger Kennedy thrusts under our noses another one of history’s What-If’s. What if Thomas Jefferson had practiced what he preached? That is to say, had Jefferson committed himself to entrench in the West the kind of yeoman farmers he was always extolling, might the spread of slavery have been arrested and the War Between the States averted?

As it was, according to Mr. Kennedy, our third president gave the slave-owning planter class its way: He backed its desire for expansion of slave territory. From east to west the planters moved as fragile soil wore out; the peculiar institution of slavery moved right along with them.

“Had [Jefferson] exerted himself, the Southern land might have become a seed-bed for family farmers.” Likewise: “The plantation system might have been constrained before it became so proud as to lead its leaders to sunder the Union.”

Instead, “the planters’ lust for land was slaked, and those among them who had worn out the productivity of their soil for their chosen staple crops were provided new land to wear out and new markets for the sale of their surplus slaves.”

Clearly there are things here worth talking about. Whether they warrant the grand-theme approach is another matter. Retrospective theories always look neat and clean on paper. It is worth bearing in mind that the circumstances out of which such theories grow were in the beginning the stuff of daily life, often with consequences unforseeable past sundown.

Mr. Kennedy, director emeritus of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, as well as a former director of the National Park Service, would obviously agree that Jefferson and his contemporaries never asked themselves the precise question: “Will our land policies avert Gettysburg and Cold Harbor?” For all that, he writes at times as though the men of that day should have forseen what was coming.

The planters were getting the upper hand. Couldn’t somebody have done something? Why, especially, did not the philosopher of yeoman-agrarianism — Jefferson himself (if you exclude John Taylor of Caroline) — do something?

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