Quotes from Henry Wiencek

Forgotten also is Jefferson's blunt rationalization for enslaving African-Americans. Augustus John Foster, who visited Jefferson at Monticello in 1807, reported that "he considered them to be as far inferior to the rest of mankind as the mule is to the horse, and as made to carry burthens.

blacks had natural rights, and slavery abrogated those rights; emancipation was desirable; emancipation was imminent; emancipation was impossible until a way could be found to exile the freed slaves; emancipation was impossible because slaves were incompetent; emancipation was just over the horizon but could not take place until the minds of white people were "ripened" for it.

In the West Indies and South America, slaves were worked to death and replaced with fresh imports, but in the continental North American colonies of Great Britain the situation was the opposite. By about 1710, as Morgan notes, "Virginia's slave population began to grow from natural increase, an unprecedented event for any New World slave population.…In 1700 Virginia had 13,000 slaves; in 1730, 40,000; in 1750, 105,000, of whom nearly 80 percent were Virginia born.

Lafayette had a powerful insight, detecting in slaveholders a combination of "prejudices, Habits, and Calculations."26 This combination acted as their engine, in place of a conscience. Racism ratified their power, as did the dispensations of Providence. They were precursors of the Ayn Rand protagonist of the twentieth century.

Rand herself composed a sentence that could have come from the pen of a Southern planter: "The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all their brains.

Among the completely contradictory points he advanced about slaves and slavery, we have: the institution was evil; blacks

The terrible suffering among the freed slaves during Reconstruction has been overshadowed, in popular literature and film, by the fall of the white planters, exemplified by the figure of Scarlett O'Hara.

We know how much corn they [i.e., the enslaved people on Hairston plantations] ate, but do not know how they felt to see the sun rise.

A peculiar gravity kept the white and black Hairstons at Cooleemee. Judge Hairston's grandfather had abandoned the house after the Civil War, but misfortune brought his family back to it. They had no other place to go. When the white Hairstons returned, so did the blacks. Thrown back together by necessity, the Hairstons acted out, in microcosm, the long aftermath of slavery.

His family, it seemed evident, had enslaved their own flesh and blood for generations. It had happened so far back in the past that the whites had been able to forget it, and even among the blacks it was only a dim memory—so dim that it had only the frail substance of a phantom, a voice that whispered only faintly in the roll of begats carried in the memories of the elders.