Hi Guys!
So in class, we went over "Notes on The State of Virginia" in which Jefferson writes about his view on slaves. It really surprised me that he would think of executing the experiments that he wrote about. One of them was lighting both an African and a English man on fire. The idea itself seemed horrendous, especially the fact that he wanted to burn them alive and observe it as well. This would have been to see if they would burn differently. Perhaps if he wanted to watch that happen, wouldn't it have been better to watch a cremation of two dead people instead of killing people? That in itself seemed off to me. The words that he used describe slaves insinuated that he thought them sub-human or non-human. Maybe the Deist part of his mind only thought scientifically but, he only spoke about slaves as if they were his personal scientific experiment. He talked about how, when playing music, slaves tended to have a better ear for it. They could play instruments almost perfectly after being taught. Most of the time, according to Jefferson, they would even play better than English people. Did that mean that he believed that they were intelligent? If so, why did he propose so many horrible experiments to find out if one race was superior to the other? Did it have to do with an inferiority complex rooting from the beginning of slavery and the original Puritan values?
~Keerthana Akella
So in class, we went over "Notes on The State of Virginia" in which Jefferson writes about his view on slaves. It really surprised me that he would think of executing the experiments that he wrote about. One of them was lighting both an African and a English man on fire. The idea itself seemed horrendous, especially the fact that he wanted to burn them alive and observe it as well. This would have been to see if they would burn differently. Perhaps if he wanted to watch that happen, wouldn't it have been better to watch a cremation of two dead people instead of killing people? That in itself seemed off to me. The words that he used describe slaves insinuated that he thought them sub-human or non-human. Maybe the Deist part of his mind only thought scientifically but, he only spoke about slaves as if they were his personal scientific experiment. He talked about how, when playing music, slaves tended to have a better ear for it. They could play instruments almost perfectly after being taught. Most of the time, according to Jefferson, they would even play better than English people. Did that mean that he believed that they were intelligent? If so, why did he propose so many horrible experiments to find out if one race was superior to the other? Did it have to do with an inferiority complex rooting from the beginning of slavery and the original Puritan values?
~Keerthana Akella
I'm not sure if he ever stated if he thought one race was more intelligent, but I believe he proposed the experiments because, if I remember correctly, Deists thought that studying the world around them helped to understand their Creator. So, he may have considered them for religious reasons, or, more disturbingly, he may have just wanted to know what would happen.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Chavez in that he was creating these experiments for religious reasons rather than an inferiority complex. I also feel that he legitimately thought something different would occur from burning a slave compared to burning a white man.
ReplyDeleteKeerthana, I agree with you that Jefferson's mode of thought strikes us as disturbing. We talked through the QARE in Lit about that ways in which Olaudah Equiano was both African and European. In his tone and approach to the subject of his early and rather brutal initiation into Western society, do you see any signs of that scientific detachment that Jefferson embraces?
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