“The white slaves, among the Romans, were often their rarest artists; they excelled too in science, insomuch as to be usually employed as tutors to their masters’ children.  Epictetus, Terence, and Phoedrus, were slaves.  Whether further observation will, or will not, verify the conjecture, that Nature has been less bountiful to them, in the endowments of the head, I believe in those of the heart she will be found to have done them justice.  That disposition to theft, with which they have been branded, must be ascribed to their situation, and not to any depravity of the moral sense.  The man, in whose favour no laws of property exist, probably feels himself less bound to respect those made in favour of others.  When arguing for ourselves, we lay it down as a fundamental, that laws, to be just, must give a reciprocation of right; that without this, they are mere arbitrary rules of conduct, founded in force, and not in conscience.  And it is a problem which I give the master to solve, whether the religious precepts against the violation of property, were not formed for him, as well as his slave, and whether the slave may not as justifiably take a little from one who has taken all from him, as he would slay one that would slay him?

“That a change in the relation in which a man is placed should change his ideas of moral right and wrong, is neither new, nor confined to the blacks; Homer tells us, it was so 2600 years ago:—­’Jove fixed it certain, that whatever day makes a man a slave, takes half his worth away.’  But the slaves Homer speaks of were whites.

“But to return to the blacks.  Notwithstanding this consideration, which must weaken their respect for the laws of property, we find among them numerous instances of the most rigid integrity; and as many as among their better instructed masters, of benevolence, gratitude, and unshaken fidelity.

“The opinion that they are inferiour in the faculties of reason and imagination, must be hazarded with great diffidence.  To justify a general conclusion requires many observations, even where the subject may be submitted to the anatomical knife, to optical glasses, to analysis by fire or solvents:  how much more, then, when it is a faculty, not a substance, we are examining; where it eludes the research of all the senses; where the conditions of it’s existence are various, and variously combined; where the effects of those which are present or absent bid defiance to calculation; let me add too, in a circumstance where our conclusions would degrade a whole race of men from the rank in the scale of beings, which their Creator may perhaps have given them!  To our reproach it must be said, though for a century and a half we have had under our eyes the races of black and red men, they have never yet been viewed by us as subjects of natural history.  I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks[Footnote:  Where Jefferson makes use of the word Black, in this extract, it is rigidly confined to the Negroes originally from the coast of Africa, or their descendants.], whether originally a distinct race, or made so by time and circumstances, are inferiour to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.”