Just before leaving office at the end of his second presidential term, Jefferson receives a book by the abolitionist scientist Henri Gregoire entitled An Enquiry Concerning the Intellectual and Moral Faculties, and Literature of Negroes. The book features a travel narrative describing “glorious Black nations”; while Gregoire insists that he is not advocating a view of racial equality between white and Black people, he presents the assimilationist view that Black people could successfully be incorporated into white society. Jefferson has begun speaking against slavery in public and oversaw the passing of a law banning illegal slave traders in 1807. However, because there were no stipulations as to how the law would be enforced, it ended up being “empty and mostly symbolic.”
In fact, ending the international slave trade actually benefits enslavers by driving up the price placed on those they hold in bondage. Writing a response to Gregoire, Jefferson repeats the line that no one in the world wants to see Black people advance more than he does. Back in Europe, opinions about Black people are being transformed by a new “exhibit”: a Khoi woman named Sarah Baartman, whose buttocks became an object of fanatical fixation for the French public.
