Parenting & Family Quote by Thomas Jefferson

Jefferson doesn’t romanticize slavery here; he anatomizes it as a daily machine for manufacturing tyranny. The line turns on a brutal idea: slavery isn’t only an economic arrangement, it’s a pedagogy. “Commerce” is the tell. He frames human bondage as a kind of transactional ecosystem, a routine exchange in which cruelty and fear become the currency. That choice of word drips with indictment while also revealing how normalized the practice was among the genteel classes who preferred to think of themselves as enlightened.

The rhetoric escalates in pairs: “boisterous passions” and “unremitting despotism” on one side, “degrading submissions” on the other. It’s not just that masters dominate; domination becomes a habit of mind, a posture, an emotional style. And the enslaved are forced into the corrosive counter-habit: survival through abasement. Jefferson’s point is psychologically modern: power deforms everyone it touches, including the supposedly free.

The sharpest subtext arrives with “Our children.” This is less a plea for the enslaved than a warning to the republic’s heirs. He’s speaking to slaveholders as anxious parents and would-be citizens, arguing that slavery leaks into the broader culture, teaching kids to rehearse despotism at home and carry it into public life. Context matters: this comes from Notes on the State of Virginia, where Jefferson could diagnose slavery as a moral and civic poison even as he remained entangled in it. The intent isn’t absolution; it’s a political forecast. A nation that trains its children in mastery shouldn’t expect to stay democratic.