Join us for a lecture by Dr. Cara Rogers, Assistant Professor of History at Ashland University, hosted by the Tocqueville Forum and co-sponsored by the Political Science Department, the History Department and Markets and Morality.

While Thomas Jefferson’s shortcomings on the slavery issue are well-known, other ideas he expressed related to slavery present a far more complicated picture emerging from his endlessly complex mind.  This lecture will examine Jefferson’s comprehensive plan to eliminate slavery and argue that Jefferson’s experience in Europe from 1784 until 1789 allowed him to think more openly about race and slavery than he ever could again in his life in America. Free from the constraints of Virginia’s plantation society, surrounded by liberal European philosophers, and hopeful that he would soon be out of debt and therefore able to begin emancipating his own slaves, Jefferson imagined a Virginia without slavery.