Thomas Jefferson, slavery and Haiti: New book explores history’s ‘race makers’
As a young lawyer, the man who would become America’s third president defended freedom-seeking slaves, drafted legislation to legalize their path to liberation and even entertained the idea of doing away with slavery.
Yet when rebellion erupted in France’s richest colony, Saint-Domingue, the same “enlightened” thinker reacted with horror at the prospect of Black self-emancipation and the rise of what he called “a nation of ‘cannibals’“ whose revolt on what is present-day Haiti might spill across their borders.
Unable to bear the thought, Thomas Jefferson, then secretary of state in the newly formed United States, urged President George Washington to back “the beleaguered French colonists.”
Over the years, the United States would provide more than $700,000 to assist French planters in suppressing the insurrection on the island of Hispaniola, shared by the Dominican Republic. At the same time, American merchants profited by trading goods, including livestock, lumber, guns and ammunition, with the insurrectionist rebels.
In the end, the former slaves prevailed, and Haiti, after a decisive battle on Nov. 18, 1803, against Napoleon’s troops, emerged as the hemisphere’s second republic, after the United States. But the contradictions embedded in American foreign policy would mirror those of Jefferson himself: a slaveholding planter who became a leading American figure of the Enlightenment even as he advanced Black inferiority.
Jefferson’s legacy, new book on history of race
As the United States prepares to celebrate in July the 250th anniversary of its founding, the legacy of the man who penned “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence will once more invite scrutiny, along with his views on slavery.
Less explored is how Jefferson’s views about Black people, and by extension those held by the nation he helped found — was shaped by European naturalists, travel writers, classifiers, anatomists, doctors and even a king.
Among them were the physician and writer François Bernier, considered one of the first to classify humans into categories using the word “race;” the botanist Carl Linnaeus, who sorted humanity into varieties; the French writer Voltaire, who despite his progressive reputation promoted the view that Africans were “a particular species” destined to be chattel; and Jean-Baptiste Labat, the priest in Martinique whose name became synonymous with the tortuous treatment of enslaved Africans and seeped into the French-Creole lexicon: The word perelèba — Father Labat — means someone who is mean-spirited.
They are among 13 figures— along with Jefferson and French monarch Louis XIV, whose “Code Noir” established the legal framework for slavery in Haiti and other French colonies — featured in a new book by scholar Andrew S. Curran on how the concept of race emerged during the 18th century Enlightenment period.
These “race makers,” as Curran describes them, are featured in his new book “Biography of a Dangerous Idea: A New History of Race.” Through their stories Curran shows that “the invention of race was not a scientific inevitability,” but rather fabricated by specific individuals, in specific contexts for specific reasons.
“It was driven by people who shaped the idea of race, normalized it, lived it and often profited from it,” said Curran, who has authored two previous works including “Who’s Black and Why? A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race” with Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.
“Race did not spread because it was scientifically persuasive,” Curran said. “It spread because it served very human interests.”
Curran, a professor of humanities at Wesleyan University in Connecticut and an expert on 18th-Century France, examines the race question by delving into the writings of the period, and showing how xenophobia and limited encounters shaped the debate.
In the case of Jefferson, Curran said the Francophile president was influenced not just by plantation life, but by European race theory.
“I was stunned to discover that he owned nearly all of the European race theorists I discuss. Their books were on his shelves,” Curran said.
Jefferson is not the main character of the book; his story is told at the end, including his relationship with Sally Hemings, the enslaved Black woman he owned and who, according to scholars, bore him at least six children.
America’s anniversary celebration, Haiti linkage
In the walk-up to July, Black history advocates have been worried that the history of racism and the role of Black history will face further erasure as President Donald Trump himself seeks to rewrite American history. What Curran’s work shows, however, is that racism and Black history are intricately linked.
In addition to pointing out the U.S.’s “inconsistent stance” and changing position on the Haitian revolution, he notes how Jefferson was also indebted to Saint-Domingue for what he deemed to be “the greatest accomplishment of his two presidencies: the purchase of France’s Louisiana Territory.” The 1803 sale, which Napoleon made to help finance his campaign in Saint-Domingue, doubled the size of the U.S. at the time.
In summarizing Jefferson’s views on race, Curran says like many of his peers, the founding father “had accepted the racialization of humanity, particularly the degradation of Black Africans, as fact. Worse yet, Jefferson [had] woven this dangerous idea into the fabric of a new nation.”
Curran will be the guest speaker at the Prologue Society on March 11 at Temple Israel in Miami. Ahead of his visit he spoke to the Miami Herald about “Biography.”
Q and A with Curran on ‘Biography of a Dangerous Idea’
Q: You claim that race is one of the most influential “inventions” of the last 200 years. You also say that, paradoxically, the history of race is the greatest untold story. Why is this history so little discussed, especially in anthropology?
A: The invention of race science in the 18th and 19th centuries, not to mention the horrific racial ideologies of the 20th Century, is brutal terrain. It is hard to talk about, even now. I suspect there is an understandable disciplinary revulsion among anthropologists about the field’s early years, and that revulsion has inadvertently produced silence. As a result, this history is often left to a small circle of historians and an equally small public.
Q: What shocked you while writing this book?
A: How much these race theorists disagreed. They differed profoundly about what caused racial difference, what terminology to use, and even whether classification was possible. What united them was simpler and more disturbing: They all agreed race was real and that it could explain almost everything about the human species.
Q: The origin of race is often portrayed as deeply related to Europe’s understanding of Black Africans and slavery. However, you show how Louis XIV was also obsessed with excluding Jews and Protestants from French colonies.
A: Some 17th century decisions regarding Africans and Jews were driven less by race or pure profit than by religion. Under Louis XIV, who oversaw the expansion of the French Atlantic empire... slavery was embedded in a deeply Catholic vision of empire. The monarchy insisted that enslaved Africans be baptized and instructed in the faith. The logic was clear to many Catholics: earthly bondage in exchange for eternal salvation. That same religious framework shaped policy toward Jews. They were not yet understood as racial sub-humans, but as religious outsiders who did not fit Louis’s vision of a Catholic nation. The first article of the 1685 Code Noir did not concern slavery at all. It ordered the expulsion of Jews from the French Caribbean.
Q: What about the British?
A: Protestant empires such as Britain operated differently. British planters generally avoided baptizing enslaved Africans, fearing that Christian status might complicate absolute mastery. In that sense, British practices anticipated a more rigid racial logic closer to what we now recognize as modern racism.
Q: The ideas you describe had horrific power. Did the powerlessness of enslaved Africans and Blacks make them unable to fight these ideologies?
A: One of the most uplifting parts of this story is that Black writers fought back as soon as they gained access to a pen. Olaudah Equiano is the best-known of these authors, but there were dozens more. Fighting racism with ideas is different from fighting it with guns, as in Haiti, but it mattered. These writers inserted themselves into history and directly challenged the intellectual foundations of race.
Q: In the United States, Thomas Jefferson is often portrayed as embodying the worst racial ideas of that time. Did men like him hate Blacks?
A: I think Thomas Jefferson feared Black people more than he hated them. Though a plantation owner, he understood that slavery was morally wrong and philosophically incompatible with the ideals of the new republic. He wrote some of the era’s sharpest indictments of slavery and worried that divine justice would one day fall on slaveholders. But his solution was not abolition. It was removal. He imagined sending Black Americans westward, to the Caribbean, or back to Africa.
Q: How do you reconcile Jefferson’s racism with his long-term relationship with a Black woman, Sally Hemings?
A: It was tragically compatible. “Taking” a concubine, as Sally’s son later described it, was common on plantations, especially when the woman was of mixed ancestry. Sally Hemings was three-quarters white, the product of generations of sexual exploitation. Her grandmother and mother were Black. Her biological father was white and was also Jefferson’s father-in-law. In other words, Hemings was the half-sister of Jefferson’s deceased wife. The intimacy of this fact reveals the moral contortions generated by slavery.
Q: Who was your favorite person to write about and why?
A: I found Jefferson endlessly fascinating. He has been called a sphinx by his most famous biographer, and few American legacies are more contested. Architect, surveyor, inventor, political theorist, advocate of public education and religious liberty, enslaver, and race theorist! Tracing what he believed from year to year was also a challenge, even if he left 19,000 letters behind! Suffice it to say that Jefferson helped shape the United States for better and for worse.
Q: Why is this book pertinent now? Perhaps because of what it says about how societies come to believe harmful ideas?
A: Exactly. This book shows how culture, authority, ambition and financial interest can make speculative and destructive ideas seem natural and logical. That is why the story matters now. It helps explain how entire societies come to believe things later generations find horrifying. Understanding how race was made helps us understand how evil is rationalized.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: I hope readers come away with a deeper historical awareness and also a sense of responsibility. Once you see how contingent and constructed these racial ideas were, it becomes much harder to treat them as natural facts — and much harder to forget them.
Andrew Curran will appear at Temple Israel of Greater Miami, 137 NE 19th St., on March 11, 2026, from noon to 2 p.m., to discuss his new book. For tickets visit https://www.theprologuesociety.org/event-details/march-11th-luncheon-biography-of-a-dangerous-idea-by-andrew-s-curran
This story was originally published March 4, 2026 at 5:30 AM.
