Jefferson’s friend William Short took Buffon’s ideas quite seriously. In a 1798 letter to Jefferson, he noted how blacks in the United States were becoming lighter. He admitted that this was partly due to mixing with whites, but he felt that climate mattered as well. In posing a possible scenario, he came close to endorsing Buffon’s idea of regeneration: “Suppose a black family transplanted to Sweden, may we not presume . . . that in a sufficient number of succeeding generations, the color would disappear from meer effect of the climate?”41
It was more than a theory. Jefferson was practicing race mixing under his own roof, fathering several children with his quadroon slave Sally Hemings. What is striking about this relationship is Hemings’s pedigree: her mother, Elizabeth, was half white, and her father was John Wayles, Jefferson’s English-born fatherin-law. Jefferson’s children with Sally were the fourth cross, making them perfect candidates for emancipation and passing for white. Two of the children, Beverly and Harriet, ran away from Monticello and lived as free whites, while Madison and Eston were set free in Jefferson’s will and later moved to Ohio. Eston’s offspring also intermarried with whites.42
On his plantation, Jefferson had little difficulty in breeding slaves as chattel. He counted slave children in cold terms as “increase,” and considered his female slaves to be more valuable than males. Men might raise food, but it was quickly consumed; women produced children that could be sold as stock. He did not shrink from saying, “I consider the labor of a breeding woman as no object, and a child raised every 2. years is of more profit than the crop of the best laboring man.” Women were meant to breed, for “providence has made our interests & duties coincide perfectly.”43
The impulse to breed played an equally significant part in Jefferson’s agrarian republic. His trust of the people rested on his belief that a new kind of leadership class was bound to emerge in the United States. He laid out this theory in a series of letters he exchanged with John Adams in 1813. It was Adams who opened the friendly debate by mentioning the long human history of upholding the idea of the “Wellborn.” To prove his point, he quoted the ancient Greek poet-philosopher Theognis: “When we want to purchase Horses, Asses, or Rams, We inquire for the Wellborn. And every one wishes to procure from the good breeds. A good man does not care to marry a Shrew, the Daughter of a Shrew, unless They give him a great deal of money with her.” His contention was that men marry for money more than the desire for producing healthy offspring.
Adams returned to this favorite theory that men are driven by vanity and ambition. Put a hundred men in a room, he conjectured, and soon twenty-five will use their superior talents, their cunning, to take control. This impulse would inevitably lead all kinds of men to divide into classes, and he was confident that the United States had not evolved beyond being ruled by this passion for distinction. By the eighteenth century, “wellborn” was synonymous with the landed aristocracy. Adams reminded Jefferson of the powerful families in Massachusetts and Virginia who were bound together through kinship and property. He observed that he and Jefferson were products of the desire to marry well. Jefferson’s lineage on his mother’s side linked him to one of the First Families of Virginia, the Randolphs, and Abigail Adams, by pedigree, was a Quincy.44
Jefferson was unconvinced. He interpreted Theognis differently, believing that the poet was making an ethical argument. He was actually chastising humanity for marrying the “old, ugly, and vicious” for reasons of wealth and ambition, while they more sensibly bred domestic animals “to improve the race.” As Jefferson saw it, humans were animals guided by the overriding impulse (as Buffon said) of sexual desire. Nature made sure that humans would propagate the race, implanting in them lust mixed with love, through the “oestrum.” The oestrum was the state of female animals in heat, and provided the capacity for sexual arousal; in Notes, he wrote that “love was the peculiar oestrum of poets.” Sexual desire, in this way, would produce what Jefferson called a “fortuitous concourse of breeders.” He meant that desire was the real engine of breeding, and according to the law of averages, unconscious lust would outflank even unbridled greed.45
Jefferson’s model of breeding generated an “accidental aristocracy” of talent. Class divisions would form through natural selection. Men would marry women for more than money; they would consciously and unconsciously choose mates with other favorable traits. It was all a matter of probability: some would marry out of sheer lust, others for property, but the “good and wise” would marry for beauty, health, virtue, and talents. If Americans had enough native intelligence to distinguish the natural aristoi from the pseudo-aristoi in choosing political leaders, then they had reasonable instincts for selecting spouses. A “fortuitous concourse of breeders” would produce a leadership class—one that would sort out the genuinely talented from the ambitious men on the make.46
The question that Jefferson never answered was this: What happened to those who were not part of the talented elite? How would one describe the “concourse of breeders” living on the bottom layer of society? No matter how one finessed it, rubbish produced more rubbish, even if a select few might be salvaged. If the fortuitous breeders naturally rose up the social ladder, the unfortunate, the degenerate remained mired in the morass of meaner sorts.
In all of his musings on class, Jefferson rarely used the word “yeoman.” He preferred “cultivator” or “husbandman.” One time that he did use the term was in an 1815 letter to William Wirt. Born to a Maryland tavernkeeper, Wirt was one of Jefferson’s apprentices whom he took under his wing, and he rose to become a noted attorney. He was one of the natural aristocracy of talent, and one of the beneficiaries of Jefferson’s patronage. In 1815, Wirt was putting the finishing touches on the biography of Patrick Henry, and he asked Jefferson to paint a social picture of eighteenth-century Virginia. Conjuring a potent topographical metaphor, Jefferson contended that the colony had had a stagnant class system, whose social order resembled a slice of earth on an archeological dig. The classes were separated into “strata,” which shaded off “imperceptibly, from top to bottom, nothing disturbing the order of their repose.”
Jefferson divided the top tier of supposed social betters into “Aristocrats, half breeds, pretenders.” Below them was the “solid independent yeomanry, looking askance at those above, yet not ventured to jostle them.” On the bottom rung he put “the lowest feculum of beings called Overseers, the most abject, degraded and unprincipled race.” Overseers were tasked to keep slaves engaged in labor on southern plantations. By pitting the honest yeomanry against the “feculum” of overseers, Jefferson harshly invoked the old English slur of human waste. That wasn’t enough. He portrayed overseers as panderers, with their “cap in hand to the Dons”; they were vicious men without that desirable deposit of virtue, who feigned subservience in order to indulge the “spirit of domination.” Jefferson endowed his Virginia class of overseers with the same vices that he attributed to those toiling in manufacturing. The twirling distaff at the workbench had been replaced with the slave driver’s whip.47