Thomas Jefferson did propose a frontal attack on slavery in Notes on the State of Virginia, a plan he would endorse for the rest of his life: the mass schooling, emancipation, and colonization of Africans back to Africa. Jefferson, who enslaved Blacks at Monticello, listed “the real distinctions which nature has made,” that is, those traits that he believed made free Black incorporation into the new nation impossible. Whites were more beautiful, he wrote, as shown by Blacks’ “preference of them.” He was paraphrasing Edward Long (and John Locke) in the passage—but it was still ironic that the
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