When the measure of their tears shall be full

It is a mystery to the modern mind how man in his shrouded past should have behaved so differently and abysmally than our own enlightened selves. We wonder, and yet do not imagine how future, perhaps more enlightened men, might look back at us in appalled astonishment at the depravity of our own present day behavior.

Our discourse is full of such anachronistic thinking. One example of this post facto indictment our forefathers is hurled against the Founding Fathers and how they could possibly have accommodated the institution of slavery in our Constitution, a document otherwise such a beautiful articulation of the hopes and freedoms of all mankind. The standard answer is that the Founding Fathers were hemmed in by circumstance, that they knew that slavery was an intolerable abdication of principle, and yet that they could only achieve so much in the face of the institutional conditions of the time. That they advanced the cause of freedom as far as they thought they could given that they had to persuade rather than impose. That they were wise to not let the best be the enemy of the good.

True as that might be, and I do believe it to be broadly correct, it is still an unpleasant acknowledgement. It feels like excuse-making. We want to have been perfect from the beginning even if that is never really an option. We evolve into our better selves and it is only the totalitarian mind which insists otherwise.

I knew of writings of various Founding Fathers against the institution of slavery, Washington, Jefferson, Jay in particular, all of them trying to thread the needle between the highest aspirations in the document and what the power institutions of the thirteen states could be persuaded to accept.

But I have never seen this letter from Jefferson. Jefferson is clarifying to a French correspondent (Jean Nicolas Démeunier, the letter is dated June 26, 1786) the circumstances of the Virginia state constitution which had not included an emancipation clause.

The Virginia state constitution, authored primarily by George Mason, James Madison, and with contributions from Thomas Jefferson, perhaps the three greatest ambassadors of the ideas of the Age of Enlightenment, has often been seen as a rough draft of the later Constitution of the United States.

Demeunier was preparing an entry on the United States for the French Encyclopedia ("Etats Unis de l'Amerique," Dictionnaire d'Economie politique et diplomatique, l'Encyclopedie methodique) and had, in correspondence, asked Jefferson about the absence of an emancipation clause in a constitution otherwise infused by the ideas of the age of enlightenment. Jefferson's reply:

M. de Meusnier, where he mentions that the slave-law has been passed in Virginia, without the clause of emancipation, is pleased to mention that neither Mr. Wythe nor Mr. Jefferson were present to make the proposition they had meditated; from which people, who do not give themselves the trouble to reflect or enquire, might conclude hastily that their absence was the cause why the proposition was not made; and of course that there were not in the assembly persons of virtue and firmness enough to propose the clause for emancipation. This supposition would not be true. There were persons there who wanted neither the virtue to propose, nor talents to enforce the proposition had they seen that the disposition of the legislature was ripe for it. These worthy characters would feel themselves wounded, degraded, and discouraged by this idea. Mr. Jefferson would therefore be obliged to M. de Meusnier to mention it in some such manner as this.

‘Of the two commissioners who had concerted the amendatory clause for the gradual emancipation of slaves Mr. Wythe could not be present as being a member of the judiciary department, and Mr. Jefferson was absent on the legation to France. But there wanted not in that assembly men of virtue enough to propose, and talents to vindicate this clause. But they saw that the moment of doing it with success was not yet arrived, and that an unsuccesful effort, as too often happens, would only rivet still closer the chains of bondage, and retard the moment of delivery to this oppressed description of men. What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment or death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment be deaf to all those motives whose power supported him thro’ his trial, and inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose. But we must await with patience the workings of an overruling providence, and hope that that is preparing the deliverance of these our suffering brethren. When the measure of their tears shall be full, when their groans shall have involved heaven itself in darkness, doubtless a god of justice will awaken to their distress, and by diffusing light and liberality among their oppressors, or at length by his exterminating thunder, manifest his attention to the things of this world, and that they are not left to the guidance of a blind fatality.