War, Peace, and Black Banishment During the American Revolution

During the War for Independence, Jefferson crafted a series of Virginia laws that paired Black freedom with Black exile. While he sought to broaden manumission by empowering individual enslavers to free their human property, he simultaneously mandated that newly freed people “must depart the commonwealth” within a year or be forced “out of the protection of the laws” and re-enslaved. The focus for Jefferson was on the fact of banishment, rather than the fate of formerly enslaved people after their expatriation. But just a few years later in 1781, Jefferson adopted a different emphasis in his Notes on the State of Virginia. While continuing to insist that Black and white people could not live together, he proposed that Black children born after the passage of his emancipation law should be brought up and educated at the “public expense,” then “colonized” as young adults to Africa or the West Indies and supplied by the state of Virginia with arms, animals, and agricultural tools. In supplying this assistance, white Americans would acknowledge that African Americans were “a free and independant[sic] people.” I argue that Jefferson’s shift in emphasis was a consequence of the successful but fragile outcome of the Revolutionary war. Anxious that the enemy nation (Britain) would reject peace terms and jeopardize U.S. independence, Jefferson suggested that the act of declaring Black nationhood was an expression of the state’s capacity to enact peace. Conferring Black nationhood and forging diplomatic relations offered proof of the state’s willingness and ability to forge peace with a former wartime enemy. It also played a role in anchoring new understandings of statecraft in an era in which the idea of the nation state was inchoate and in which the ability of the United States to sustain its independence was far from certain.