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Primary source: Thomas Jefferson to Edward Coles, letter, 1814.
Caption: Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), in this letter to Edward Coles (1786–1868), maintained that emancipation was a task for the younger generation.
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. . . The love of justice and the love of country plead equally the cause of these people [slaves], and it is a moral reproach to us that they should have pleaded it so long in vain, and should have produced not a single effort, nay I fear not much serious willingness to relieve them & ourselves from our present condition of moral & political reprobation. From those of the former generation who were in the fulness of age when I came into public life, which was while our controversy with England was on paper only, I soon saw that nothing was to be hoped. Nursed and educated in the daily habit of seeing the degraded condition, both bodily and mental, of those unfortunate beings, not reflecting that that degradation was very much the work of themselves & their fathers, few minds have yet doubted but that they were as legitimate subjects of property as their horses and cattle. The quiet and monotonous course of colonial life has been disturbed by no alarm, and little reflection on the value of liberty. And when alarm was taken at an enterprize on their own, it was not easy to carry them to the whole length of the principles which they invoked for themselves. . . . I had always hoped that the younger generation receiving their early impressions after the flame of liberty had been kindled in every breast, & had become as it were the vital spirit of every American, that the generous temperament of youth, analogous to the motion of their blood, and above the suggestions of avarice, would have sympathized with oppression wherever found, and proved their love of liberty beyond their own share of it. . . . This enterprise [emancipation] is for the young; for those who can follow it up, and bear it through to its consummation. It shall have all my prayers, & these are the only weapons of an old man. . . .
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Thomas Jefferson to Edward Coles, Monticello, 25 August 1814, at http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/P/tj3/writings/brf/jefl232.htm.
Courtesy of Faculty of Arts at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands.
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