Microphone

But among Jefferson's descriptions of rivers and seaports, mountains and climate, he expressed his views on the inhabitants of the new land.

 People from America, Europe and Africa.

 I advanceth as a suspicion only that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites.

 And the endowments both of body and mind.

Microphone

 It is possible to make the argument that Thomas Jefferson is the first person to truly articulate a theory of race in the United States.

 And in effect, he has to do so.

 He has said in the Declaration of Independence that we are all created equal.

 Well, if, in fact, we're all created equal, and if, in fact, we're entitled to our liberty, then how can he possibly own 175 slaves and going up to about 225 slaves at the peak of his slavehold?

Microphone

 It notes Jefferson's words appeared to justify slavery at a time when many were admonishing the Founding Fathers for espousing freedom.

 while continuing to support a system of human bones.

 The power, they had to because, how can promote liberty, freedom, democracy, on the hand, and the system of slavery, and exploitation, of peoples who are non white, on the other.

 And the way you do that is to say,

 Yeah, but you know, there's something different about these people.

Microphone

 This whole business of inalienable rights, that's fine, and only applies to certain people.

 In the moment when we become a nation is critical for our understanding of both American nationality and race, we accept the notion that all men are created equal, but then perhaps some of those people who are enslaved are not quite men.

Microphone

 That is, we'll keep our ideas of American nationality, but will write certain people out of the human family.

 The suspicions of black racial inferiority, raised by Jefferson, had evolved over time.

 Shaped in part by an intense need for labor in the American colonies.

Microphone

 In 1619, when the first Africans arrived in Virginia, religion and wealth, not physical...

 Blackness and whiteness were not yet sheer categories of identity.

 They were more likely to distinguish between Christians and Evans than they were between our people's cars.

 They regarded a person's status in life as somehow more fundamental than what color they were or what their particular background was.

Microphone

 The different ways in which those hierarchies of social class and social power became filled in with the content of race, so that the lowest class would be a black class, and the highest class would be some particularly pale white class.

 That was a very gradual process.

 For the first 50 years in the American colonies, most of the laborers were European indentured servants, many toiling on tobacco plantations in wretched conditions.

Microphone

 With fewer Europeans braving the treacherous journey across the Atlantic, planters facing a potential labor shortage, turned to the transatlantic slave trade, and gradually replaced invention servants with African slaves.

 They found what they considered an endless labor supply.

 People who could be readily identified, and so when they ran away, they couldn't just meld into the population like Native Americans could.

Microphone

 People who knew how to grow tobacco, people who knew how to grow rice. From their standpoint, the ideal labor source.

 Colony by colony, new laws made slavery, permanent, and inheritable for black people.

 And for the first time, the word white, rather than Christian or Englishman, began appearing in colonial statues.

 To what extent, you could say this was actually a conscious strategy, or what extent was the result of a number of unthinking decisions that resulted in this, but it did buttress a kind of social structure.

Microphone

 As Africans, slavery increased, lower class Europeans would...

 Bout dungeons responsible for policing the growing slave population.

 The ordinary white people are not gonna be complicit, just unless they get something out of them.

 My belief is that payoff was in a certain status prestige recognition, ego enhancement that ordinary white people could derive from racism.

Microphone

 And so there was a kind of bargain struck.

 In any of the European descendant poor whites, began to identify themselves, if not directly with the rich whites, certainly with being white.

 And here you get the emergence of this idea of a white race as a way to distinguish themselves from those dark skinned people who they associate with perpetual slavery.

 Slavery became identified with Africans. Blackness and slavery went together.

Microphone

 That gave the white American the idea that Africans were a different kind of people.

 There's a racial divide emerging that people begin to see as natural.

 That's part of where the idea of race comes from, is just in the tendency for people to see existing power relationships, as having some sort of natural quality to them.

Microphone

 By the time Jefferson sat down to write notes on the state of Virginia in 1781, a plantation economy dependent on slavery was deeply entrenched.

 Slavery had become so widespread that to many whites it seemed the natural state for black people.

 But when Jefferson turned his attention to Indians in notes, one of their natural about them was their status as a free people, brave warriors protecting their lands.

Microphone

 This led Jefferson to suspect that Indians were not much different from Europeans.

 Their vivacity and activity of mind is equal to ours in the same situation.

 We shall probably find that they are formed in mind, as well as in body, on the same module with the Homo sapiens Europaus.

 The original knew the Indians was that they were naturally white people, and they looked slightly brown, because of exposure to the sun, and because of the way they treated their skin.

Microphone

 Jefferson felt that, among many people at that time, felt that the Indians were good human material, and the problem was, it was not race, but culture.

 That the Indians were savages, but they could be civilized.

 Jefferson and his contemporaries were also influenced by European enlightenment thinkers, who believe that education and environment could improve people.

 But when Jefferson wrote about the Indians, he had little direct contact with them.

Microphone

 Most Virginia tribes had been pushed west, or killed off by war and European diseases.

 Those in direct conflict with the Indians, those who were crossing the mountains to Kentucky or Tennessee, didn't think of the Indians in an enlightenment view.

 They thought of Indians as savages who were trying to destroy peaceful settlers coming in, and thought they should be driven out or exterminated.

Microphone

 There was an error encroaching my population.

 We wanted our land.

 As a people, we were hunters, as, you know, as anthropologists would describe us as hunters and gatherers.

 We saw ourselves as equal people, we were free people.

 We had always been free people.

 Many Indians fought to maintain their freedom and land.

 Within a decade of independence.

Microphone

 Wars with frontier tribes like the Shawnee, Miami, Kickapoo, and others.

 threaten the stability of the young nation.

 The United States decided that the cheapest, easiest way to avoid an Indian war along its entire frontier, and also to acquire Indian land, was to civilize the Indians.

 Civilization included Christian religion.

Microphone

 It included an English education and commercial agriculture.

 If you could convert Indians from hunters into farmers, if you could confine them to a small acreage, then you would have all this surplus land, which could be open to white settlement.

 Civilization policy was actually designed to assimilate us into America.

Microphone

 It was ultimately to make us farmers to live like the colonists lived. The civilization policy was to make us brown white men.

 In notes on the state of Virginia, Jefferson implied Indians could be assimilated into American society.

 But he did not support assimilating black people.

 He wrote a deep rooted prejudices, entertained by the whites, and of physical and moral differences separating the groups.

Microphone

 Jefferson seems to have thought about it as a Virginia plantation owner, who has been brought up among slaves, and who, it is part of heart, I would suppose, finds it difficult to conceive that those slaves are fully as equal.

 It was through those eyes that the man who wrote the nation's credo, all men are created equal.

 The fourth, as a suspicion only, that the blacks are inferior to the whites, and the endowments both of body and mind.

Microphone

 This difference is not simply a product of circumstance.

 It's not simply a product of the environment, but Jefferson broaches this possibility that it is something much deeper, something innate.

 We would say, in our own language, Jefferson didn't have this language, we would say genetic.

 But he says we will not be able to know this until science gives us the answers.

 So he calls on science.

 He accepts American science on the path of trying to figure out what it is scientifically that makes blacks inferior to whites.

Microphone

 And, of course, if that's the question the scientist asks, then that's the question the scientist will answer.

 And so, from that moment on, you start to build a case that is specifically geared to tell the world that these people are different.

 Theories of a race are used to do that.

 In the next century, as the nation expanded, so would ideas about human difference.

Microphone

 Science and slavery would help focus the nation's attention on the nature of black people.

 But land would propel Native Americans into the racial spotlight.

 Arising nation spread over a wide and fruitful land, traversing all the seas with the rich productions of their industry.

Microphone

 advancing rapidly to destinies beyond the reach of mortal eye.

 The hopes expressed by Jefferson in his first inaugural address were partially realized two years later in 1803.

 when the United States purchased the Louisiana territory from France.

 doubling the size of the country.

 Jefferson believed that the United States had a great future because it could expand through space.

Microphone

 That the agrarian ideal of American independence could be maintained by expanding the country westward.

 Obviously, there are very big problems with this.

 The land was not empty.

 One did overrun Indians.

 At the time of the Louisiana purchase, dozens of Indian tribes populated the vast U territory west of the Mississippi, and some Indian nations, like the Cherokee, still own massive tracts of land in the southeast.

Microphone

 Indians in the South lived in the region in which wealth was very firmly grounded in land.

 Planters needed land on which to grow tobacco, grow cotton, grow other staple props.

 Indians occupied that land.

 Indians owned that land.

 And consequently, Indians were under constant pressure for that land.

 In response to this pressure I defeats on the battlefield.

Microphone

 Some tribes, like the Cherokee, embrace the government civilization policy, the first year down in the 1790s.

 They would prot to test Jefferson's words.

 We shall all be Americans.

 Your blood will run in our veins and will spread with us over this great continent.

 Most people consider the Cherokees to be the great success story of the civilization policy.

 The Cherokees were able very quickly to transform, at least on a superficial level, their culture.

Microphone

 The Turkey's made many accomplishments that led their supporters to proclaim them to be civilized Indians.

 One of the largest tribes in America, the Cherokees, had lived in small villages and parts of what is now Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, the Carolinas, Alabama, and Georgia.

 By 1819, they had signed treaties ceding over 90% of their land in the United States.

Microphone

 With the civilization policy, many territories had switched from being hun