Gordon-Reed notes that in the latter half of his life, Jefferson resigned himself to the fact that slavery would not be abolished in his lifetime, and certainly not through any endeavor led by him. He believed that the project of emancipation would be carried out by another generation, and that he and his revolutionary colleagues had done their part by emancipating the colonies from Great Britain and creating the world’s first constitutional republic, a place where these questions would even be able to be grappled with in the first place.
