LAUSR

Although most scholars are aware that, at least in theory, Thomas Jefferson opposed slavery for most of his life, even the leading Jefferson experts have not attempted to discover whether any specific writers inspired or influenced his antislavery views, apparently accepting them as part of what Carl Becker called the ‘climate of opinion’. This article reveals that the French philosophe, Charles, Baron de Montesquieu, likely influenced his antislavery attitudes. Jefferson formed these ideas during his first years in politics, as revealed by numerous excerpts from Montesquieu’s discussions of slavery in Spirit of Laws included in Jefferson’s Legal Commonplace Books (textual selections and abstracts he jotted down). Jefferson’s legal defence of slaves’ lawsuits for freedom, the antislavery statements in his book, Notes on the State of Virginia, and his legislative proposals against slavery as a state assemblyman in the 1770s and congressman during the 1780s perhaps emerged from Spirit of Laws’ doctrines.