Henry Wiencek > Quotes

“Genealogy becomes a mania, an obsessive struggle to penetrate the past and snatch meaning from an infinity of names. At some point the search becomes futile – there is nothing left to find, no meaning to be dredged out of old receipts, newspaper articles, letters, accounts of events that seemed so important fifty or seventy years ago. All that remains is the insane urge to keep looking, insane because the searcher has no idea what he seeks. What will it be? A photograph? A will? A fragment of a letter? The only way to find out is to look at everything, because it is often when the searcher has gone far beyond the border of futility that he finds the object he never knew he was looking for.”
― Henry Wiencek, The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White

“Of one slave Carter wrote, “dismembering will reclaim him.… I have cured many a Negro of running away by this means.” This horrible practice, legalized in 1705, evidently became widespread, with much resultant butchery; it received further legal blessing in the tightening of the slave laws in 1723, when the Virginia Assembly absolved owners and surgeons of manslaughter if such “dismembering” resulted in the slave’s death. The lawmakers assumed that no sane man would deliberately destroy his own very valuable property. It is hideous to imagine that doctors would participate in such medical atrocities, but they did.”
― Henry Wiencek, An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America

“In the West Indies and South America, slaves were worked to death and replaced with fresh imports, but in the continental North American colonies of Great Britain the situation was the opposite. By about 1710, as Morgan notes, “Virginia’s slave population began to grow from natural increase, an unprecedented event for any New World slave population.…In 1700 Virginia had 13,000 slaves; in 1730, 40,000; in 1750, 105,000, of whom nearly 80 percent were Virginia born.”
― Henry Wiencek, An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America

“The failure of emancipation to take root during the war is one of the great What ifs of the Revolution. Another is: What if blacks had not fought for the American cause? What if a slave had not saved Colonel William Washington’s life, with the result that his cavalry charge dissolved and the Battle of Cowpens had become a British victory? As the historian Thomas Fleming speculates, both North and South Carolina might well have gone over to the British. What if Glover’s regiment of Massachusetts sailors had not had the manpower to complete the evacuation of Washington’s army before the fog lifted in New York—and Washington himself, waiting for the last boat, had been captured? *”
― Henry Wiencek, An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America

“Lafayette had a powerful insight, detecting in slaveholders a combination of “prejudices, Habits, and Calculations.”26 This combination acted as their engine, in place of a conscience. Racism ratified their power, as did the dispensations of Providence. They were precursors of the Ayn Rand protagonist of the twentieth century.”
― Henry Wiencek, Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves

“Rand herself composed a sentence that could have come from the pen of a Southern planter: “The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all their brains.”
― Henry Wiencek, Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves

“The fertility of the slave mothers meant that Virginia planters, including Washington, could “grow” their own labor force. One of Washington’s distant cousins wrote to his manager in 1759, “the Breeding wenches most particularly, you must instruct the overseers to be kind and indulgent to.” Thomas Jefferson’s calculation of the economics of plantation slavery was chillingly blunt: “a woman who brings a child every two years [is] more profitable than the best man of the farm.”
― Henry Wiencek

“Many writers on slavery today have emphasized the “agency” of the enslaved people, insisting that we pay heed to the efforts of the slaves to resist their condition and assert their humanity under a dehumanizing system. But as slaves gain “agency” in historical analyses, the masters seem to lose it. As the slaves become heroic figures, triumphing over their condition, slave owners recede as historical actors and are replaced by a faceless system of “context” and “forces.” So we end up with slavery somehow afloat in a world in which nobody is responsible.”
― Henry Wiencek, Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves

“blacks had natural rights, and slavery abrogated those rights; emancipation was desirable; emancipation was imminent; emancipation was impossible until a way could be found to exile the freed slaves; emancipation was impossible because slaves were incompetent; emancipation was just over the horizon but could not take place until the minds of white people were “ripened” for it.”
― Henry Wiencek, Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson & His Slaves

“We simply cannot believe Jefferson’s complaints about his slaves, which fit into his pattern of shifting blame to others for his own mistakes and weaknesses. During his presidency Jefferson averred that the slave’s “burden on his master [is] daily increasing,” yet as the economic historian Steven Hochman has found, “during his presidency Jefferson’s nailery and his farms provided an income that should have met reasonable expectations. The debit side of Jefferson’s balance sheet was where he had his problems”
― Henry Wiencek, Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves

“He had to backtrack immediately to account for the most famous and most acclaimed poet in America, Phillis Wheatley, who was, very unfortunately for Jefferson’s argument, unquestionably black. She had been brought to Boston as an enslaved African at the age of about six, learned English and Latin as a child, and began writing poetry as a teenager. Her published works earned accolades on both sides of the Atlantic. Among her admirers were Voltaire, who praised Wheatley’s “very good English verse,” George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and even the naval hero John Paul Jones, who addressed her as “the celebrated Phillis the African favorite of the Nine [Muses] and Apollo” when he sent her some of his own verses. Dr. Rush cited her as a proof of black ability, listing her accomplishments when he wrote in 1775, “We have many well attested anecdotes of as sublime and disinterested virtue among them as ever adorned a Roman or a Christian character.”14 Franklin went to see Wheatley when she was in London, a literary celebrity on book tour. The acclaim irked Jefferson: “The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.”15”
― Henry Wiencek, Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson & His Slaves

“Forgotten also is Jefferson’s blunt rationalization for enslaving African-Americans. Augustus John Foster, who visited Jefferson at Monticello in 1807, reported that “he considered them to be as far inferior to the rest of mankind as the mule is to the horse, and as made to carry burthens.”
― Henry Wiencek, Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves

“A peculiar gravity kept the white and black Hairstons at Cooleemee. Judge Hairston's grandfather had abandoned the house after the Civil War, but misfortune brought his family back to it. They had no other place to go. When the white Hairstons returned, so did the blacks. Thrown back together by necessity, the Hairstons acted out, in microcosm, the long aftermath of slavery.”
― Henry Wiencek, The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White

“We know how much corn they [i.e., the enslaved people on Hairston plantations] ate, but do not know how they felt to see the sun rise.”
― Henry Wiencek, The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White

“Among the completely contradictory points he advanced about slaves and slavery, we have: the institution was evil; blacks”
― Henry Wiencek, Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson & His Slaves

“The terrible suffering among the freed slaves during Reconstruction has been overshadowed, in popular literature and film, by the fall of the white planters, exemplified by the figure of Scarlett O'Hara.”
― Henry Wiencek, The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White

“His family, it seemed evident, had enslaved their own flesh and blood for generations. It had happened so far back in the past that the whites had been able to forget it, and even among the blacks it was only a dim memory—so dim that it had only the frail substance of a phantom, a voice that whispered only faintly in the roll of begats carried in the memories of the elders.”
― Henry Wiencek, The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White

“Perceiving England to be overpopulated by poor people, the British government encouraged the transportation of the indigent, unemployed, and criminals. Official thinking changed around 1700, when the government began to see a necessity to preserve the supply of cheap labor in the home country. The result of this policy change can be seen in the Virginia immigration figures: the 1680s saw the annual arrival of 1,500–2,000 white indentured servants, whereas only a hundred or so were arriving each year by 1715. Virginia had to make up the difference with slaves.”
― Henry Wiencek

“Deeply reluctant to judge a Founder as wanting in moral force, modern commentators retreat to a range of adjectives such as ‘flawed,’ ‘human,’ ‘contradictory,’ ‘paradoxical,’ ‘compartmentalized,’ while preserving for [Thomas] Jefferson what [one] historian...calls ‘a fundamental core of naïve innocence.’* But at Jefferson’s core there lay a fundamental belief in the righteousness of his power. Jefferson wore racism like a suit of armor, knowing that it would always break the sharpest swords of the idealists.”
― Henry Wiencek

“They [i.e., freed slaves] lived in an atmosphere of extreme hostility and suspicion, with the status of “outlaws,” in the oldest meaning of that term—which did not originally mean “criminals,” but people outside the protection of the law. They could not get justice; they and their relatives were murdered while the killers went free; their right to marry whom they chose was abrogated; by force and violence they lost the right to vote; and when they sought to improve their lot through education, their teachers were threatened and a schoolhouse was destroyed.”
― Henry Wiencek, The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White