As Black History Month draws to a close, it’s important to remember the long road blacks had to travel to emancipation. Nothing illustrates this better than the correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Edward Coles, his young Virginia neighbor.
United States history owes Edward Coles a debt, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, he was the man who brought about the reconciliation of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams in the twilight of their lives. In 1811, Coles was serving as President James Madison’s private secretary when he visited John Adams in Massachusetts. Adams recalled his tense final meeting with Thomas Jefferson, his successor as President, after Adams’ bitter defeat. When Coles mentioned gently that Jefferson spoke of him with kindness, Adams blurted, “I always loved Jefferson, and still love him.” Assured of Jefferson’s affection and respect, Adams put aside his bitterness and wrote Jefferson a letter. The correspondence between the two elder statesmen is a priceless record of their later lives, and a national treasure.
The second reason the U.S. owes Edward Coles a debt came later. In August 1814, Coles, still only 27, wrote Jefferson a letter. Coles was a slave owner but was deeply troubled about it. He wanted to free his slaves, but under Virginia law, the emancipated slaves would be required to leave the state after one year, with no money, property, rights, or prospects of making a living. To Coles, that was a bleak prospect.
He wrote to Jefferson to seek his help in “devising and getting into operation some plan for the great gradual emancipation of slavery.” Mentioning the “renowned Declaration of which you were the immortal author,” Coles suggested that Jefferson could use his influence to try to bring about more humane slavery laws in Virginia, up to and including outlawing slavery altogether. If such laws could not be brought about, Coles wrote, he might have to leave Virginia, taking his slaves with him.
Jefferson’s reply was revealing of his personality, his circumstances and his history. While drafting Declaration of Independence in 1776, Jefferson condemned the British crown for the slave trade, saying King George III “has waged cruel war against human nature itself…captivating & carrying [blacks] into slavery.” Jefferson also condemned the King for “inciting American Negroes to rise in arms against their masters.” This language was dropped from the Declaration before passage, at the request of Southern delegates. In 1778, the Virginia legislature passed a bill Jefferson introduced to ban further importation of slaves into the state; he said it “stopped the increase of the evil by importation, leaving to future efforts its final eradication.”
The key word was “future.” In the present, Jefferson relied upon slave labor for making a living, and in his later years, that living was surprisingly modest. With his farms struggling and debt soaring, slaves were the biggest asset Thomas Jefferson owned next to his homes and land—and he simply could not afford to think about emancipating them. He may have shuddered in writing at the evils of the slave trade and the moral repugnance of slavery, but Jefferson’s hypocrisy on the topic is well known. He had done little to support the actual abolition of slavery.
In his reply to Coles, Jefferson was true to form. He praised Coles for his idealism, but held out little hope that change was possible anytime soon. Recalling past political battles in the Virginia House of Burgesses, Jefferson told Coles that anyone who proposed an end to slavery was “denounced as an enemy to his country, and was treated with the grossest indecorum.” The younger generation was no better. “Your solitary but welcome voice is the first which has brought this to my ear, and I have considered the general silence which prevails on this subject as indicating an apathy unfavorable to every hope.” He discouraged Coles from leaving Virginia, saying instead that Coles should simply treat his slaves well and wait for a better time.
Coles was disappointed that Jefferson declined to support his cause, but he was not persuaded that waiting was the proper course. By April 1819, Coles had secured an appointment as Register of the Illinois Land Office. He boarded his ten slaves onto flatboats and headed down the Ohio River, until they reached the new state of Illinois. There he purchased enough land to set his slaves up as farmers and free men.
Coles recalled the morning that he gathered his slaves around him and announced that they were now free to do as they pleased. “In breathless silence they stood before me, unable to utter a word, but with countenances beaming with expression which no words could convey, and which no language can now describe.” After helping Coles get his own farm started, virtually all of his former slaves settled near him, each man now working 160 acres of his own.
Talk of legalizing slavery in Illinois prompted Coles to declare himself a candidate for governor in 1822. Coles won a tight race, becoming the second governor of Illinois. He immediately challenged the state’s political elite to eliminate the Black Codes and the indenture laws that created de facto slavery. In 1824, the issue was put to a popular referendum, the first such vote in U.S. history. Coles’s leadership prevailed, and Illinois remained free.
To close, here are perhaps the most eloquent words ever written on why waiting for gradual emancipation and civil rights would never have worked. This was written on another April, almost 150 years later, from a Birmingham jail.
We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”
We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”–then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.