In his section on "Manners," (XVIII) Jefferson harshly criticizes the effects of slavery on both masters and slaves. He condemns slavery in scathing language.
He notes first that slavery turns the slaveowners into harsh despots and forces the slaves to behave in a degraded and abject way. As Jefferson puts it:
The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.
Worse, the children of slaveowners become "tyrants" at a young age as they watch and imitate their parents' cruel treatment of the slaves, learning immoral lessons from earliest youth. Most become depraved:
The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.
Jefferson goes so far as to say slavery "destroys" morals in the slaveowners.
Jefferson also states that slavery makes slaveowners lazy (their "industry [is] destroyed"), for who, especially in a warm climate, will work if they have somebody else to labor for them? Slavery, on the other side, renders the slaves angry and resentful, and breeds in them a wish to be anywhere else in the world rather than under the thumb of the slaveowner. Jefferson also argues that slavery damages the principles of liberty on which the young United States has been founded, for it undermines
a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God.
As far as Jefferson is concerned, slavery is an unequivocally evil institution that ruins morality and does grave damage to everyone involved with it, slave and master alike. As he writes:
Indeed I tremble for my country when reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever ...
Jefferson has been, for his entire life, part of this cruel system and has seen up close the terrible damage it inflicts.
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