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"Huzza for massa Jefferson!" Quashee's Version of Jeffersonian Democracy
Christopher Hall
[1] James Thomson Callender was not the first person to link Thomas Jefferson with interracial sexual relations. It was, of course, Callender's Richmond Recorder article on September 1, 1802, that first specifically accused Jefferson of having interracial relations with a black woman named Sally Hemings and launched the infamous Jefferson-Hemings controversy. However, a few months earlier, on July 10, the Port-Folio, the leading Federalist periodical of the day, published a poem first generally linking Jefferson to interracial sexual relations. African slave poet "Quashee" responds to the Jeffersonian declaration that all men are created equal in a "logical" but perverted manner, playing upon the fear that the democratic ideal would provoke a slave rebellion -- the underlying message in the poem. In successive stanzas, Quashee defines freedom as the right to loaf, to housing and food equal to whites, to a white wife, to steal, to kill. In the words of the poem's chorus, "Huzza for massa Jefferson!" indeed. Long repressed desires are unleashed! In its savagely witty way, the poem points to the perennial mystery in Jefferson's famous words on equality: did the slaveowner mean those words to apply to his slaves? Or were they reserved for whites?
[2] This Port-Folio poem is without doubt a ferocious Federalist attack not only on Jefferson but the whole Democratic-Republican Party and its liberal democratic ideals. Callender later reprints this poem in his September 1 issue outing the Jefferson-Hemings relationship, thus positioning it in a context that focuses on its sexual content. These stanzas, in fact, eerily foreshadow Callender's revelations:
And why should one hab de white wife,
and me hab only Quangeroo?
Me no see reason for me life!
No! Quashee hab de white wife too.
For make all like, let blackee nab
De white womans . . . dat be de track!
Den Quashee de white wife will hab,
And massa Jef. shall have de black.
The Federalist spectre of complete social revolution following this sexual one is clearly announced in the short preface to the poem, where we are told that our joyous poet Quashee was hung simply for the "intention to rise, and commence a general massacre of the white inhabitants."
[3] Here was Quashee, a typical slave, using his own childishly simple logic to deduce from Jefferson's teachings that he should have the same rights as a white man. If the country were truly democratic, it would allow those who are unworthy and uneducated to have a role in the shaping of the legislation and policies that would determine the country's success and role in the world. The poem plays on the fear that slaves would take the ideal literally and demand to be treated with equality. If Quashee could easily figure out that he was being denied "certain unalienable rights," what is to stop all the uneducated slaves from having the same realization? Since "all men are created equal," Quashee should be allowed to marry (have sex with) a white woman, right? Yet nobody advocated that, much less Jefferson. And having such an idea and such a desire come expressed in unmistakable slave dialect was a form of profound mockery and insult to Jeffersonian ideals.
[4] In many states at the time interracial marriage was against the law, and the consequence for breaking such a law was severe. Not only were interracial sexual relations punishable, but also the values that were ingrained in this early 1800 society were such that it was unfathomable for deep meaningful relations of any kind to exist between the races. And such relations were especially morally deadly if the relations were between a black man and a white woman as imagined in this poem. That, to the overwhelming majority of people in America, was hideous rather than worthy of a huzza.
[5] It is ironic that in just a few months time from the publication of the Port-Folio poem, Jefferson will be accused of having sexual relations with an enslaved African American woman, just as the poem envisions. Callender and the Federalists clearly saw that the political power in the scandal for them lay not just in sex but in sex plus race. They proclaimed that Master Jefferson "had" the black and trusted that the public would not "Huzza for massa Jefferson" at the next election.
