Thomas Jefferson Claimed He Introduced Bill to Free Enslaved Blacks 100 Years Before Civil War. Was He Lying?

Imagine a world where the Civil War never happened. Slavery would have ended a century earlier than it did, sparing the country decades of division and a bloodbath that cost thousands of Americans their lives and created an ideological chasm that persists to this day.

Abraham Lincoln, the 16th U.S. president, might even have lived to a ripe old age instead of being assassinated by a Confederate apologist at the beginning of his second term.

The new six-episode documentary Thomas Jefferson, which premieres Feb. 17 on the History channel and airs over the next two nights, touches on a claim made by the third U.S. president himself that he concocted a plan to free enslaved Black Americans in the years before the American Revolution.

"In a part of Jefferson’s biography, he even mentions that when he was in the House of Burgesses he and another member wanted to have a plan of emancipation," historian Annette Gordon-Reed confirms in the first episode.

If Jefferson had had his way, according to his memoir, which he began writing in 1821 at age 77, slavery would have been phased out long before blood was shed to end it. His plan, he claimed, unfolded and ultimately failed when his was serving as a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses from 1769, when he was just 26 years old, to 1775.

The narrator of Thomas Jefferson briefly explains the plan, as laid out in Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson more than a half century after he supposedly presented it while in the House of Burgesses. "In his autobiography, which he wrote 52 years later, Jefferson states that in 1769 he and his cousin proposed a bill that would shift control of emancipation from the general court over to slave owners themselves. But he says the House of Burgesses kills the bill immediately."

"He says once he saw how people responded to plans for emancipation, basically shut them down, he left it alone," Gordon-Reed adds.

But should we take Jefferson's word for it? Did the man who owned hundreds of enslaved people that he never freed, the guy who immortalized the phrase "All men are created equal" yet wrote at length about the inferiority of the Black race in his 1785 book Notes on the State of Virginia, actually intend to practice what he would preach a few years later in the Declaration of Independence.

Paul Finkelman of Marquette Law School in Milwaukee, Wisc., has doubts. "The weird thing is there is no other evidence other than Jefferson saying this that such a bill was ever proposed," he says in the first episode.

Frank Cogliano, author of A Revolutionary Friendship: Washington, Jefferson, and the American Public, concurs. "The record of the House of Burgesses don’t reflect this," he says. "Now, it could be that the records are simply incomplete. Having said that, other historians have made a pretty strong case that this didn’t happen and that he’s making it up in his autobiography."

He continues: So then we have to ask ourselves, ‘Why is he saying this when he’s compiling his autobiography 50 years later?’ When we think about autobiographies, people are constructing a version of their past, and he wants to create a narrative to show that both he and the United States were troubled by slavery and sought to do something about slavery as a problem from the very beginning — true or not."

In 1807, during his second term as president, Jefferson signed an act passed by Congress that ended the importation of enslaved people from Africa. Still, he also made 1803's so-called Louisiana Purchase from France, an overreach of his presidential powers that doubled the size of the United States and led to the expansion of slavery, making civil war virtually inevitable.

“Thomas Jefferson’s aspirations and imperfections embody the promises and challenges of the American democratic experiment in self-government," Andrew Davenport, a historian and descendant of those enslaved at Jefferson's Monticello plantation who appears in the docuseries, tells PEOPLE. "Jefferson was highly educated, a brilliant writer and thinker, and a visionary nation-builder."

"But his ability to realize that vision was deeply constrained by the institution of slavery. Still, he gave humanity the immortal words ‘that all men are created equal,’ and generations of Americans have expanded his vision by struggling to realize its promise.”

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