Authors

Annette Gordon-Reed, Harvard University

The Enlightenment in Early America

Abstract

The founding of the United States of America is often said to have been the product of Enlightenment ideals that emphasized reason, individual liberty, and notions of progress. During this same era, however, racially based slavery, which confounded reason, denied individual liberty to millions, and challenged ideas about progress, existed in all of the colonies of North America.

The third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, embodied this seeming contradiction at the heart of the American founding. The principal author of the American Declaration of Independence enslaved hundreds of people over the course of his long life.

This Article argues that a bedrock verity of the Enlightenment influenced Jefferson’s thinking on these matters, specifically the tendency to emphasize the importance of categories. In the world of Enlightened science, everything had a place—scientific phenomena, plants, ideas, even people. In this view, human beings of African descent were placed at the bottom of what was seen as inevitable hierarchy, justifying treating them as an exception to the rules about the natural liberty of mankind. Whether this circumstance would continue indefinitely was an open question, though Jefferson posited that time might ameliorate the situation. As scholars have noted, there was a dark side to Enlightenment thinking.

Comments

This article was created from the 2024 George Wythe Lecture given at William & Mary Law School.

Repository Citation

Annette Gordon-Reed, The Enlightenment in Early America, 66 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 671 (2025), https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmlr/vol66/iss3/3

Publication Information

66 William & Mary Law Review 671-691 (2025)