Jefferson abandoned antislavery advocacy while enjoying a plantation funded by slave labor

Evidence

Loving retirement, Jefferson placed books on top of newspapers. He did not have to leave Monticello, and he rarely did. He had a plantation to run, which relied on slave labor to pay off his debts, or rather, pay for the luxuries he loved. He put science, not politics, at the center of his affairs, emerging as America’s celebrity scholar in the 1810s. The requests for advice and data and the reviewing of manuscripts seemed endless. “From sunrise to one or two o’clock, and often from dinner to dark, I am drudging at the writing table,” Jefferson complained to John Adams. He was not updating Notes, though. By 1813, he had lost all drive to reproduce his ideas. … Jefferson had also lost all drive to support the cause of antislavery. In 1814, Edward Coles, the personal secretary of President James Madison, asked Jefferson to arouse public sentiment against slavery. Jefferson balked, using the excuse of old age. The seventy-one-year-old advised Coles to reconcile himself with enslavement and only promote emancipation in a way that did not offend anyone. Ironically, the inoffensive solution that Jefferson offered in Notes, and that he tried to execute once as president, was about be adopted by a new generation. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 380

Categorization

• XREF: Directly tests the reader’s key discomfort: Jefferson, the iconic voice for equality, retreating to comfortable assimilationist/gradualist gradualism — connects to the reader’s project of placing historical figures in Kendi’s three-way scheme.
• QUESTION: Kendi frames this as a loss of drive, but the reader’s goal is testing the policy-before-ideas inversion — does Jefferson’s retreat suggest his egalitarian ideas were always subordinate to his material investment in slavery?