Notes On The State Of Virginia Essay

America is a country with historical scars that will never truly heal as racial tensions continue to gradually increase. However, these tensions often lead back to the establishment of the United States and its origins, which was slavery. The anger of many African Americans is the result of years of oppression and submission. To understand the oppression and submission that African labor have experienced, Thomas Jefferson’s “Notes on the State of Virginia,” from 1781, discussed how slavery challenges the morality of humanity and its ethics. In addition, the “Rules of Highland Plantation,” by Bennet H. Barrow from 1838, not only supports the perspective of Jefferson, but also provides a glimpse of how slaves were subjugated by their masters

Thomas Jefferson’s “Notes on the State of Virginia” from 1781 establishes the “[deep] rooted prejudices entertained by the whites [and the] ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained” (Jefferson 128). He established an ethos that called the American public’s attention to how African American were treated and affected by the prejudice of white men in order for them to make profit. Even then, the “injuries” that the slaves and their future descendants have sustained also paved way to more grave issues that still persists in modern society today such as police brutality. Jefferson also wanted the American public to question the general “opinion, that [African labor were] inferior in the faculties of reason and imagination, must be hazarded with great diffidence”, and yet “the whole commerce between master and slave [was] a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions” (129) shaped Jefferson’s perspective on slavery. In other words, in the view of Thomas Jefferson, he believed that the overall opinion of African Americans threatened the constitutionality of the United States and the ethics and values that the Declaration of Independence established. Jefferson saw that slavery was a racial-based capitalistic system that had little reason to thrive and flourish because the ethics and values that the United States

With regards to Bennet H. Barrow’s “Rules of Highland Plantation” from 1838, however, it provided a first hand account of how slaves should be treated in the plantation and that the majority of plantation owners had absolute authority over their slaves. Barrow stated that the “very security of the plantation [required] that a general and uniform control over the people of it should be exercised” (Barrow 206). Having boundless control over a group of people, in Barrow’s mind, displayed his priority towards the protection of his profits rather than the overall morale of his slaves. However, the most important rule that Barrow stressed was that he did not allow “Negroes marrying out of the plantation [for it created] a feeling of independence, from being, of right, out of the control of the masters for a time.” (Barrow 206) The specific rule that Barrow enforced displays the increasing dependency on slavery and its perceived benefits to the American economy, but it also outlined the symbiotic relationship between master and