Jefferson’s Pillow: The Founding Fathers
and the Dilemma of Black Patriotism, by
Roger Wilkins, stressed the importance of investigating the environment,
culture, and emotional consciousness of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington,
James Madison and George Mason in order to gain an understanding of Americas
collective story and identity. But perhaps most importantly, the book showed that
the structure of the American identity was founded on slavery and the
accumulation of wealth and power for an elite group of male masters. All four
men, Jefferson, Washington, Madison, and Mason achieved great economic status
because of the “slave society [which] had been made possible by the perfection
of the systematic international trade in slaves” (Wilkins 13). During the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Africa, Europe, and the Western Hemisphere
created international commerce through the buying and selling of slaves. The
African body became a commodity or object, which only received worth through
labor. Due to the theories of race during the Enlightenment, the social
development of racial slavery was justified because of thoughts surrounding “white
stood for purity and beauty, and black for evil and filth” (Wilkins 16).
Jefferson, Washington, Madison, and Mason regarded black human beings as exotic
and non-Christian; therefore, they tolerated and overlooked the unequal
treatment of slaves to build wealth and power in their young nation. By the mid
1700’s, the enslavement of Africans became Americas “economic machine” for the
wealthy members of society (Wilkins 13). The social dynamic between slave and
master was inherently unequal and as the economic dependency on slavery
increased in America, so did the violence against slaves. The slaves, who
helped generate economic production and supplied cheap and efficient labor,
knew they were fully human, but the masters used violence to instill fear to keep
the slaves oppressed and obedient. Jefferson, Washington, Madison, Mason, and
other men relied on the wealth and power generated by slaves because the
mass-production of the tobacco crop, which drove the nations economy, required
intense work. Unfortunately, slaves served as tools for their masters. They
were perceived as only products, property, and ultimately a source of wealth in
America. The enslavement of Africans turned into the economic endeavor of
commodification, or the process of objectification. As a means to push back
against commodification and enslavement, “slaves wanted some acknowledgement of
their humanity” (Wilkin 22). While trying to retain a sense of humanity, slaves
turned to subjectivity to disrupt the structural ranking and ordering of human
beings in the American society. Recorded history is primarily focused on the
societal members with money and power, but to fully understand the complex
American identity it is imperative to recognize the multiple groups that make
up the entire society, who were less documented, but equally as instrumental in
the development of this country.
