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Jefferson on Black Education

Knowing that Jefferson intimately linked education to liberty and governance, recent students (except one) concur that when Jefferson wrote about education and its ends, he had in mind whites only. James Carpenter writes that “as for [the education of] Black children, he was painfully silent” (Carpenter). Johann N. Neem notes that the elementary schools Jefferson contemplated at the base of his educational pyramid were for “every white Virginian” and that his curriculum was “for all white Virginians” (Neem 61, 62, 63). Jennings L. Wagoner Jr. says that Jefferson’s “sweeping scheme for publically supported education was closed to African Americans” (Wagoner 143). M. Andrew Holowchak accepts that Jefferson “did not include blacks in his system of education” (Holowchak xvii). Paul Finkelman waves away any discussion of the subject by simply saying that Jefferson “opposed both emancipation and black education” (Finkelman 225). But these scholars are simply wrong, and ignore or discount the conclusions a century ago of Carter G. Woodson. And as solid as Woodson is, even he overlooks what this essay brings to the front, that Jefferson for decades had in mind more education for free blacks or those enslaved destined to be free than anyone has noticed. It has, of course, been known since Woodson’s time at least that Jefferson had consistently in mind some limited education that would benefit enslaved blacks who might someday be free, an education that would give them vocational skills as well as moral guidance and help sustain social order and stability until their ultimate removal from the United States. A webpage at Monticello, for example, “The Question of Slave Education,” cites a letter (August 26, 1796) from Jefferson to the Quaker abolitionist Robert Pleasants about education for the enslaved: