This new form of racial progress envisioned the United States as a white ethnostate that avoided what Jefferson argued would be a never-ending race war. Black people should “be brought up” until “the females should be eighteen, and the males twenty-one years of age, when they should be colonized to such place as the circumstances of the times should render most proper.” To replace them, the nation should “send vessels…to other parts of the world for an equal number of white inhabitants,” Jefferson wrote.
