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Jefferson's Wolf: A Founding Father's Troubling Answer to the Problem of Slavery
A decisive reassessment of Thomas Jefferson’s long-debated views on slavery, showing that his chief antislavery strategy was racial the removal of emancipated Black people from the United States.
Toward the end of his life, Thomas Jefferson made his most famous statement about American slavery: “We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him safely, nor let him go.” Presenting abolition as both necessary and perilous, the phrase has long been relied upon to explain an apparent despite publicly opposing slavery for four decades, Jefferson had made no progress toward Black freedom in his political career by the time he died in 1826. Nor had he done so in his expansive household, where he enslaved more than 600 people, including Sally Hemings and the four children he fathered with her.
Christa Dierksheide and Nicholas Guyatt argue that the key to understanding Jefferson’s antislavery position is his commitment to racial exclusion. Jefferson believed that the principal reason to abolish slavery was the threat of a massive slave revolt, but he viewed the presence of free Black people in the new nation as no less dangerous. To avert racial violence, Jefferson argued, the gradual abolition of slavery had to be paired with Black exile. Even when challenged by white and Black contemporaries with more expansive views of American belonging, Jefferson held fast to his vision for a white republic.
Neither an egalitarian antiracist nor a proslavery apologist, Jefferson became the most influential advocate for racial separation in the early United States. Charting the evolution of his thought across the nation’s formative decades, Jefferson’s Wolf is a surprising and provocative account of the problem of slavery in the founding era.
Toward the end of his life, Thomas Jefferson made his most famous statement about American slavery: “We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him safely, nor let him go.” Presenting abolition as both necessary and perilous, the phrase has long been relied upon to explain an apparent despite publicly opposing slavery for four decades, Jefferson had made no progress toward Black freedom in his political career by the time he died in 1826. Nor had he done so in his expansive household, where he enslaved more than 600 people, including Sally Hemings and the four children he fathered with her.
Christa Dierksheide and Nicholas Guyatt argue that the key to understanding Jefferson’s antislavery position is his commitment to racial exclusion. Jefferson believed that the principal reason to abolish slavery was the threat of a massive slave revolt, but he viewed the presence of free Black people in the new nation as no less dangerous. To avert racial violence, Jefferson argued, the gradual abolition of slavery had to be paired with Black exile. Even when challenged by white and Black contemporaries with more expansive views of American belonging, Jefferson held fast to his vision for a white republic.
Neither an egalitarian antiracist nor a proslavery apologist, Jefferson became the most influential advocate for racial separation in the early United States. Charting the evolution of his thought across the nation’s formative decades, Jefferson’s Wolf is a surprising and provocative account of the problem of slavery in the founding era.
272 pages, Hardcover
First published May 5, 2026
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August 28, 20267.25 out of 10.
The “wolf” of the title was the Missouri Compromise of 1820 that admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as free and limited the expansion of chattel slavery. Jefferson wrote a friend “In the gloomiest moment of the revolutionary war…I have never had any apprehensions equal to what I feel from this source” (p. 1). Throughout his life and writings, Jefferson never wavered in his professed belief that slavery must end, yet he owned 600+ people and at his death freed only a handful, the rest were auctioned off when Monticello and his other holdings were sold, tearing apart families. (And even his “beneficence” to those few was flawed: Joseph Fossett, for example, was freed in Jefferson’s will but not his wife or children. Fossett managed to buy his wife Edith and two younger children with the help of friends and free blacks, but his elder son Peter remained a slave for another 23 years.)
In Jefferson’s Wolf, Dierksheide and Guyatt argue that Jefferson couldn’t conceive of ending slavery without also separating white from black and making the United States a purely white nation (the former slaves would be deported, Africa being the preferred destination). It’s sobering to realize that the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence would support the MAGA party’s current efforts to exclude all but white Christians (defined by a certain sect of Christianity) from the United States.
Jefferson was never able to conceive of a solution to his dilemma, his “wolf,” despite devoting a great deal of thought and effort to bring it about. He not only ran up against the impracticability of his schemes but also against the opposition of pro-slavery politicians and businessmen as well as blacks themselves and abolitionists.
I would strongly recommend Jefferson’s Wolf. I would equally strongly recommend reading it in tandem with Gary Wills’ Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, which presents a more sympathetic portrait of Jefferson (as I recall) and different take on his thoughts on slavery.
The “wolf” of the title was the Missouri Compromise of 1820 that admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as free and limited the expansion of chattel slavery. Jefferson wrote a friend “In the gloomiest moment of the revolutionary war…I have never had any apprehensions equal to what I feel from this source” (p. 1). Throughout his life and writings, Jefferson never wavered in his professed belief that slavery must end, yet he owned 600+ people and at his death freed only a handful, the rest were auctioned off when Monticello and his other holdings were sold, tearing apart families. (And even his “beneficence” to those few was flawed: Joseph Fossett, for example, was freed in Jefferson’s will but not his wife or children. Fossett managed to buy his wife Edith and two younger children with the help of friends and free blacks, but his elder son Peter remained a slave for another 23 years.)
In Jefferson’s Wolf, Dierksheide and Guyatt argue that Jefferson couldn’t conceive of ending slavery without also separating white from black and making the United States a purely white nation (the former slaves would be deported, Africa being the preferred destination). It’s sobering to realize that the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence would support the MAGA party’s current efforts to exclude all but white Christians (defined by a certain sect of Christianity) from the United States.
Jefferson was never able to conceive of a solution to his dilemma, his “wolf,” despite devoting a great deal of thought and effort to bring it about. He not only ran up against the impracticability of his schemes but also against the opposition of pro-slavery politicians and businessmen as well as blacks themselves and abolitionists.
I would strongly recommend Jefferson’s Wolf. I would equally strongly recommend reading it in tandem with Gary Wills’ Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, which presents a more sympathetic portrait of Jefferson (as I recall) and different take on his thoughts on slavery.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews