The Trials of Phillis Wheatley Read Online Free PDF

conclusion that it is not slavery, but an inherent mental inferiority, that has prevented the existence of Epictetus’ black counterpart: “It is not [the blacks’] condition then, but nature which has produced the distinction.” Sidestepping the full consequences such allegations of inferiority would have, Jefferson retreated behind the shelter of “suspicion”: “I advance it, therefore, as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.”
    Unlike the American Indian, who is equal to the white in body, and whose mind is affected by external circumstances alone, the black is fundamentally different from the white. In reference to the Indians, Jefferson writes:
    To form a just estimate of their genius and mental powers, more facts are wanting, and a great allowance to be made for those
circumstances of their situation which call for a display find they are formed in mind as well as in body, on the same module with the Homo sapiens Europeans.
    Jefferson recognized the capability for “improvement,” especially mental improvement. He pointed to Europe, asking if the white person has not also shown, and needed time to show, progress in history:
    I may safely ask, how many good poets, how many able mathematicians, how many good inventors in arts and sciences, had Europe, north of the Alps, then produced? And it was sixteen centuries after [the Romans crossed the Alps] before a Newton could be formed.
    One must make allowance, maintained Jefferson, for the fact that the Indian is not called on to display his intelligence in the same way as the European. The Indian displays his capabilities
to the white person in the form of war, in speeches, and in drawings:
    The Indians . . . will often carve figures on their pipes not destitute of design and merit. They will crayon out an animal, a plant, or a country, so as to prove the existence of a germ in their minds which only wants cultivation.
    Jefferson argued that the Indian’s expressions of reason, sentiment, and imagination may be primitive, but they are potentially equal to those of whites. While other races and peoples advance and develop, the black will be unable to do so. Unlike his thinking on the Indian, Jefferson believed that there are “real distinctions which nature has made,” separating the blacks from the whites. Therefore, in the case of blacks, Jefferson disregarded the criteria by which he asserted Indian mental equality: he does not advocate making “a great allowance . . . for these circumstances
of their situation which call for a display of particular talents only.” For Thomas Jefferson, the black is a static element on the Great Chain of Being, and he will be left further down on the scala naturae as whites (and perhaps in sixteen centuries, the Indians) move up.
    Jefferson reaches these conclusions, in some part, from his reading of Phillis Wheatley’s poetry. Yes, he, concedes, she may very well have written these works, but they are derivative, imitative, devoid of that marriage of reason and transport that is, in his view, the peculiar oestrum of the poet. By shifting the terms of authenticity—from the very possibility of her authorship to the quality of her authorship—Jefferson indicted her for a failure of a higher form of authenticity. Having survived the tribunal of eighteen in 1772, Wheatley now finds her genuineness impugned by a larger authority, subjected to a higher test of originality and invention. And the complex rhetoric of authenticity would have a long, long afterlife.

    To be sure, Jefferson’s opinions generated scores of rebuttals: “reactions to Jefferson were immediate and they quickly proliferated,” says William Robinson, writing on Wheatley two centuries after the publication of the Notes . “Indeed, much of the