Jefferson’s geopolitical and diplomatic gestures, alongside his formal and personal correspondence, allow us to understand his essay on Cervantes. I refer to “Query VI” of Notes on the State of Virginia (1785). The meaning of this text remains invisible to those unfamiliar with the protocols of Don Quijote de la Mancha (DQ). Most readers expect Montesquieu’s structural positivism, not Montaigne’s unsettling symbolism. But Jefferson deploys negative and creative swerves in lieu of formal codes or affirmations. He refuses to impose principles. The effect should be to encourage us to find our own way out of a dilemma.
That dilemma, slavery—as Martha Jefferson’s letter of May 3, 1787 reveals—is as personal as it is national. How could the “Architect of Democracy” defend that nefarious institution? He could not. But neither could he declare his opinion too loudly. Jefferson inherited some 40 slaves from his father and 135 from his father-in-law. Virginia code, however, made manumission nearly impossible. Also, his political coalition depended on other agricultural states like South Carolina and Georgia. Indeed, the survival of the young American republic hinged on the union of slave and free states. Jefferson wanted the new nation to perfect itself over time, and he wanted to be president himself. So, eliminating slavery would have to wait. Conscious of this fundamental contradiction—this stain (“mancha” in Spanish) on his legacy—he left an epistolary, literary, and architectural record of his actual views.
Complementing these national, personal, and aesthetic frames is the fact that Jefferson wrote Notes on the State of Virginia in response to queries put to him by French diplomat Jean François Boisselat, Marquis of Barbé-Marbois. In a letter dated December 5, 1783, the Founder thanked Marbois for suggesting books for the education of Martha, among them Don Quijote. Two years later, in “Query VI” of the Notes, Jefferson displayed his understanding of Cervantes’s novel as a complex critique of race-based slavery.
Jacobo Cosmedi, “Mosaic for the Trinitarian Order” (1210), San Tommaso in Formis, Rome — Wikipedia
When considering slavery in the first modern novel, we must keep in mind Cervantes’s curriculum. He fought to defend Christendom against the Turk at the Battle of Lepanto (1571). Before the battle, the leader of the Holy League, Don Juan of Austria, said he’d free the Morisco slaves who manned the oars if the Christian galleys were victorious. But he could not do so because he lacked authority over the property of his fellow captains. Later, Cervantes, during his return trip to Spain, was captured by corsairs and enslaved at Algiers (1575–80). The same year Trinitarians paid his ransom, the Spanish Crown annexed Portugal, turning the African slave trade into a core aspect of its global empire. Cervantes criticized nearly every aspect of Spanish society, but the African slave trade was a particular anxiety. The former slave at Algiers saw a moral contradiction. Was this what he had in mind when he risked life and limb at Lepanto?
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Before turning to Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, let us review the moments in Don Quijote when Cervantes advocates for miscegenation and abolition. The narrator of the first prologue attributes its first Latin quotation to the Roman poet Horace, but it is really from a translation of the Greek fabulist—and slave—Aesop: “Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro.” In English: “Liberty is not to be sold for all the world’s gold.” Both the message and the mistake signal the rubric of the work as a whole. Don Quijote later echoes this idea in his famous speech to Sancho about liberty in DQ 2.58: “Freedom, Sancho, is one of the most precious gifts that the heavens have bestowed upon men.”
Another echo appears in the novel’s preliminary verses. A fictional poetess, “Urganda the Unknown,” alludes to Juan Latino. The first black man to study at a European university, Latino accompanied his master, the young Duke of Sessa, during his liberal arts education at Granada. But Latino was barred from the university’s classrooms, so he listened from outside. Manumitted in 1538, Latino eventually married Ana de Carleval, a white noblewoman with whom he had four children. He also taught Latin at Granada, the same university that had shunned him when he was a slave. Latino’s most famous composition was his epic poem the Austriadis Carmen (1572), in which he underscored the role played by the Morisco slaves at the oars of the Christian galleys at Lepanto.
Cervantes, too, was proud of his role at Lepanto. A character in “The Captive’s Tale” (DQ 1.39–41), Ruy Pérez de Viedma, is an autobiographical projection that again signals the theme of slavery. It is, therefore, difficult to overstate the importance of the opening references to Aesop and Latino. It is also hard to imagine Jefferson and his daughter Martha not taking note.
At the center of the first part of Don Quijote, the miscegenation theme signals the hidalgo’s insanity and its cure. When Sancho realizes in DQ 1.25 that Dulcinea del Toboso is really Aldonza Lorenzo, we learn that Don Quijote is in love with a Morisca. The hidalgo admits he knows who she is, but he asserts that she is “the supreme princess of the world.” Here, miscegenation is the essence of his amorous project. However, after Sancho departs to deliver a letter to Dulcinea, Cervantes unveils the hidalgo’s racism. Early in DQ 1.26, Don Quijote wavers regarding which chivalric knight to imitate for acts of penance in the Sierra Morena (“Brown Mountains” in English). He focuses on the legendary Battle of Roncesvalles, where a coalition of Basques, Leonese, Catalans, and Moors, led by Bernardo del Carpio, defeated Roland’s vanguard of the Carolingian Empire. Don Quijote refuses to imitate Roland because his beloved Angelica had sex with Medoro, “a curly-haired Moor”—this according to Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto. Contradicting DQ 1.25, the hidalgo now claims that Dulcinea has never seen a Moor in her life.
For over four hundred years, some very sophisticated readers have speculated about Don Quijote’s psychology. Here is the sociological crux of the matter. At the frontier between Europe and Africa, the hidalgo struggles against his misplaced desire for racial purity. Spanish novelists María de Zayas and Juan de Palafox y Mendoza understood this. Defoe and Jefferson did, too. Then came Poe and Tocqueville.
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In DQ 1.50–52, Cervantes reprises the miscegenation theme in the tale of the “Knight of the Lake,” Eugenio’s search for his lost “cabra manchada” (“spotted she-goat”), and the arrival of a statue of the Virgin dressed in black. These symbols again unravel the idea of racial purity. A knight takes a sexualized leap of faith into a lake of tar. Opposite a mixed-race she-goat, Eugenio’s name signals an obsession with being “well-born.” Finally, a white Virgin dressed in mourning recalls the uncertain status of Zoraida from Algiers, precisely the woman who rescues Viedma from slavery. Thus, the novel’s denouement insinuates miscegenation as the moral way around the tyranny and absurdity of race-based slavery.
Other important textual nodes in Don Quijote expand the themes of abolition and miscegenation by hitching them to the issues of constitutional governance and monetary policy.
In DQ 1.29, Sancho overcomes sadness at the loss of his ass by dreaming about getting rich as the future tyrant of the Kingdom of Micomicón. He had also been upset at the thought of ruling an African country mired in poverty and ignorance, but now he imagines selling the citizens of Micomicón into slavery: “As black as they might be, I’ll turn them into white or yellow!” Circa 1605, the growing copper content of Spanish coins became visible as they turned black through oxidation. Sancho’s quip figures race-based slavery as a reversal of monetary adulteration. By implication, inflation is a type of slavery to the degree that it exploits citizens by reducing the purchasing power of their earnings. And all this political and economic insight comes in conjunction with the animal metamorphosis at the core of the picaresque (see Apuleius’s The Golden Ass). The same thematic nexus appears in Cervantes’s Colloquy of the Dogs, published later among his Exemplary Novels (1613) but likely written around 1605, that is, concurrent with the first part of Don Quijote. By the way, Jefferson also owned a copy of the Exemplary Novels.
DQ 2.8–10 contemplates the site of constitutional restraint on political tyranny in defense of individual rights. Cervantes then proceeds to reflect on Spanish national identity by way of the picaresque racial metamorphosis of Sancho’s donkey. In DQ 2.8, the hidalgo recalls an Italian noble who confesses his unfulfilled desire to assassinate Charles V by grabbing the emperor and pulling him through the oculus of Vitruvius’s Pantheon in Rome. This is an artful vision of the political theory of Juan de Mariana, who advocated for tyrannicide and limits on monarchical power. By the way, a few months after he published Notes on the State of Virginia, and a year and half before the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, Jefferson sent Mariana’s General History of Spain (Latin 1592; Spanish 1601) to James Madison.
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Having articulated constitutional restraint in DQ 2.8, Cervantes cites in DQ 2.9 the same Battle of Roncesvalles previously at issue during the hidalgo’s racial musings in DQ 1.26. Next, in DQ 2.10, our novelist resurrects the symbolism of Sancho’s ass as a series of animals that populate the squire’s meeting with Dulcinea: war horses, palfreys, donkeys, mules, asses, even a camel and a zebra. This ties thoughts on tyranny to the compounded issues of race-based slavery and monetary manipulation by way of an intra-textual reference to the Micomicón subplot in DQ 1.29. Constitutional restraint, captivity, and monetary manipulation surface again a few chapters later in DQ 2.17. After Don Quijote’s forces a royal lion back into its cage, he gives a gold coin to the lion tamer and asks him to relate his victory at court.
A similar sequence is DQ 1.21–22. Mambrino’s legendary helmet—which Don Quijote acquires by force from a barber and which he also claims is made of gold—signals another critique of monetary policy. The same episode alludes to racial instability when Sancho seems to switch his donkey for that of the barber. Then, in the very the next chapter, Sancho observes a group of galley slaves being escorted to their doom:
‘Here comes a chain of galley slaves, men forced by the King, on their way to row his warships.’ ‘Forced, how so?’ asked Don Quijote. ‘How’s it possible for the King to force someone?’
In sum, Cervantes repeatedly connects the theme of race—symbolized by such animals as Sancho’s ass in DQ 1.21 and 1.29, Eugenio’s she-goat in DQ 1.50, and Dulcinea’s multiple mounts in DQ 2.10—to the idea of maintaining constitutional bulwarks against the tyranny of monarchs. And among the novel’s most prominent examples of that tyranny are inflation and the African slave trade, themes often in proximity to odd animals and allusions to the misguided thinking about race that underwrites the new mode of slavery. The Habsburgs profited from both policies, of course, which made them vulnerable to the criticisms of jurists and novelists like Mariana and Cervantes.
In my next two essays, I’ll demonstrate how, nearly two centuries later, Jefferson’s art asserted something similar—i.e., that constitutional governance designed to sustain personal liberty delegitimizes both race-based slavery and monetary manipulation.
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