Most schoolchildren are taught the Declaration of Independence’s most famous lines: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” But relatively few children or adults today are as familiar with the right o revolt that follows: “Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it....When a long train of abuse and usurpations, pursuing invariable the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

 When Thomas Jefferson penned those words, he owned hundreds of enslaved people. Yet he was acutely aware that Black people yearned for freedom no less than the white colonists who had waged the American Revolution and that no principle of justice could defend slavery. Even God, he later claimed, would likely side with enslaved people if they organized a successful revolt against their enslavers. In Notes on the State of Virginia, published in 1785, Jefferson admitted that rebellions were a legitimate, rational response to an immoral and inhumane system: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God isjust that his justice cannot sleep forever; that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, and exchange of situation, is among possible events; that it may become probable by supernatural interference!” 

       Jefferson’s anxious reflections were a kind of inheritance, something passed down from generation to generation among uneasy white enslavers. At the heart of slavery lay a terrifying conundrum---an epic struggle between the enslavers who sought to extract labor, loyalty, and submission from their human property and the enslaved people who longed for freedom and were willing to obtain their liberation by any means necessary. Jefferson, whose ancestors had been enslaving Africans on large Virginia plantations since the seventeenth century, understood this dilemma well. Slavery, he once quipped, was akin to having a “wolf by the ear”---white people could not release their grip on it, but they also knew that beneath the surface boiled a formidable Black rage that could not be fully contained. 

       From the founding of the original thirteen colonies, white people in the North and South lived in constant fear that the men and women they whipped, raped, and forced to work without pay would, if given the chance, rise up and take revenge on their white enslavers. This is why governmental surveillance and severe punishment of black people began almost concurrently with the introduction ofslavery itself. In 1669, the Carolina colony granted every free white man “absolute Power and Authority over his Negro Slaves.” Within decades, Carolina law drastically bolstered white authority, mandating that a// white people ought to be responsible for policing all Black people’s activities. Any white person who failed to properly monitor suspicious Black activity would be fined forty shillings. This notion---that Black people were inherently devious and criminal, and that white people were required to monitor and police them---ultimately defined the nature of race relations in the United States.