Thomas Jefferson and slavery

Thomas Jefferson
Portrait of Thomas Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale, 1800
3rd President of the United States
In office March 4, 1801 – March 4, 1809
Preceded by	John Adams
Succeeded by	James Madison
Personal details
Born	April 13 [O.S. April 2] 1743 Shadwell, Virginia
Died	July 4, 1826(1826-07-04) (aged 83) Charlottesville, Virginia
Political party	Democratic-Republican
Spouse(s)	Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson
Children	Martha Washington Jefferson, Jane Randolph Jefferson, stillborn son, Mary Wayles Jefferson, Lucy Elizabeth Jefferson I, Lucy Elizabeth Jefferson II.
Alma mater	The College of William & Mary
Occupation	Governor of Virginia, Statesman, planter, lawyer, philosopher, inventor, architect, teacher

Thomas Jefferson, a world-famous advocate of liberty and equality among men, lived in a slave society; he owned plantations totaling thousands of acres and hundreds of slaves during his lifetime. He relied on slavery to support his family's lifestyle.

"Of all the Founding Fathers, it was Thomas Jefferson for whom the issue of race loomed largest. In the roles of slaveholder, public official and family man, the relationship between blacks and whites was something he thought about, wrote about and grappled with from his cradle to his grave."

Notable for his idealistic words on the rights of man in the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson shared contemporary racial views that Africans were inferior to whites and needed supervision. This became his rationale for justifying slavery, although he had condemned the institution under his Enlightenment ideals.

In the Virginia Assembly, in the 1780s Jefferson gained passage of a bill to prohibit the state from importing slaves. In 1804 as president, he refused to recognize Haiti, a new republic established by a slave rebellion, and in 1805 and 1806 enacted an arms and trade embargo against them. In 1807 he signed a bill prohibiting the US from participating in the international slave trade; it had been protected from federal regulation for 20 years under compromises of the United States Constitution. While Jefferson has been long admired for his ideals related to the rights of man, since the late twentieth century some historians have criticized him for failing to take actions after 1785 as a senior statesman to ameliorate or end slavery in the United States, and for not freeing his own slaves at his death.

As noted by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, most historians now believe that as a widower Jefferson had a "shadow family"; from about 1789, he had a liaison with his mixed-race slave Sally Hemings and four surviving children with her. She is believed to be a half-sister to Jefferson's late wife. Their children were seven-eighths European in ancestry and legally white under Virginia law of the time, although they were born into slavery.

During his life, Jefferson formally freed only two slaves, both older brothers of Sally Hemings, in 1793 and 1794. Jefferson let his oldest "natural" son and daughter, Beverly and Harriet Hemings, "walk away" in 1822 when they came of age. In 1826, by his will he freed five male slaves, including his remaining two "natural" sons, Madison and Eston Hemings. The Hemings family was the only one in which all the children were freed. The three other slaves freed were older male Hemings relatives, who had each served him for decades. His daughter gave Sally Hemings "her time." In 1827 the remaining 130 slaves at Monticello were sold to pay the debts of Jefferson's estate.

Early years (1744-1774)

Thomas Jefferson was born into the planter class of a slave society, the son of Peter Jefferson, a prominent slaveholder and land speculator in Virginia, and Jane Randolph, granddaughter of English and Scots gentry. Peter Jefferson died suddenly in 1757, leaving the eleven-year-old Thomas a large estate. When Jefferson turned 21, he inherited 5,000 acres (20 km²) of land, 52 slaves, livestock, his father's notable library, and a gristmill. In 1768, Thomas Jefferson began to use his slaves to construct a neoclassical mansion known as Monticello, which overlooked the hamlet of his former home of Shadwell. Both were in Albemarle County in the Piedmont area.

Starting in 1769, Jefferson served in the Virginia House of Burgesses for six years. He proposed laws that severely restricted free blacks from entering or living in Virginia. Jefferson authored legislation that would have banished children whose father was of African origin and exiled any white woman who had a child with a black man. Jefferson suggested that any free black found in violation of the laws would be in jeopardy of the lynch mob. According to the historian John Ferling, the Burgesses did not pass the laws "because they were excessively restrictive even for Jefferson's times."

Jefferson represented people of color as well as whites in court. In 1770, he defended a young mulatto male slave in a freedom suit, on the grounds that his mother was white and freeborn. By the colony's adoption of partus sequitur ventrum, that the child took the status of the mother, the man should never have been enslaved. He lost the suit. In a case in 1772, Jefferson represented George Manly, the son of a free woman of color, suing to secure his freedom after having been held as an indentured servant three years past the expiration of his term. (The Virginia colony then bound illegitimate mixed-race children of free women as indentured servants: until age 31 for males, with a shorter term for females.) Once freed, Manly worked for Jefferson at Monticello for wages.

In 1773, the year after Jefferson married the young widow Martha Wayles Skelton, her father died. She and Jefferson inherited his estate, including 11,000 acres, 135 slaves, and £4,000 of debt. With this inheritance, Jefferson became deeply involved with interracial families and financial burden. As a widower, his father-in-law John Wayles had taken his mulatto slave Betty Hemings as a concubine and had six children with her during his last 12 years. The Wayles-Hemings children were three-quarters English in ancestry, and they were half-siblings to Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson and her sister. Betty Hemings and her 10 mixed-race children (as she had four children before being with Wayles), were among the slaves who were moved to Monticello. Betty's youngest child, Sally Hemings, was an infant in 1773. The Hemings descendants were trained and assigned to domestic service and highly skilled artisan positions at Monticello; none worked in the fields. Over the years, some served Jefferson directly for decades as personal valets and butlers.

With these additional slaves, Jefferson became the second largest slaveholder in Albermarle County; he held a total of nearly 16,000 acres of land in Virginia. He sold some slaves to pay off the debt of Wayles' estate. From this time, Jefferson took on the duties of owning and supervising his large chattel estate, primarily at Monticello, although he also developed other plantations in the colony. Slavery supported the life of the planter class in Virginia. The number of slaves from this time at Monticello would fluctuate under and over 200.

Revolutionary period (1775-1783)

Further information: American Revolutionary War and United States Declaration of Independence

In 1775, Thomas Jefferson joined the Continental Congress as a delegate from Virginia when he and others in Virginia began to rebel against the British governor Lord Dunmore. Trying to reassert British authority over the area, Dunmore issued a Proclamation in November 1775 that offered freedom to slaves who abandoned their rebel masters and joined the British army. Dunmore's action provoked the mass exodus of tens of thousands of slaves from plantations across the South during the war years; some of Jefferson's slaves also took off as runaways.

The colonials opposed Dunmore's action as an attempt to incite a massive slave rebellion. In 1776, when Jefferson co-authored the Declaration of Independence, he referred to the Lord Governor when he wrote, "He has excited domestic insurrections among us."

United States Declaration of Independence
1823 facsimile of the engrossed copy
Created	June–July 1776
Ratified	July 4, 1776
Author(s)	Thomas Jefferson et al.

Jefferson included in the declaration that King George III had forced the African slave trade on the Colonies, but the Continental Congress removed this. Jefferson did not condemn slavery in the Declaration, but he condemned the King for "inciting American Negroes to rise in arms against their masters." Some in Congress wanted to keep Jefferson's paragraph, but "some southern gentlemen" were in favor of the slave trade. According to Finkelman, most American colonists during the Revolution "had been willing and eager purchasers of slaves."

In 1778 with Jefferson's leadership and probably authorship, the Virginia General Assembly banned importing slaves into Virginia. It was one of the first jurisdictions in the world to ban the slave trade, and all other states except South Carolina eventually followed.

As governor of Virginia for two years during the Revolution, Jefferson signed a bill to promote military enlistment by giving white men land, "a healthy sound Negro...or £60 in gold or silver." As was customary, he brought some of his household slaves, including Mary Hemings, to serve in the Governor's mansion in Richmond. In January 1781 in the face of British invasion, Jefferson and the Assembly members fled the capital and moved the government to Charlottesville; he left his slaves behind. Hemings and other slaves were taken as British prisoners of war; they were later released in exchange for British soldiers. In 2009 the Daughters of the Revolution (DAR) honored Mary Hemings as a Patriot, making her descendants eligible for membership in the heritage society.

In June 1781, the British arrived at Monticello. Jefferson had escaped before their arrival and gone with his family to his plantation of Poplar Forest to the southwest in Bedford County; most of his slaves stayed at Monticello to help protect his valuables. The British did not loot or take prisoners there. By contrast, Lord Cornwallis and his troops occupied and destroyed another Jefferson property, Elkhill in Goochland County, Virginia, northwest of Richmond. Of 27 slaves they took as prisoners, Jefferson later noted that at least 24 had died of disease in the prison camp. Similarly, more troops died of disease than warfare in those years of poor sanitation.

While claiming since the 1770s to support gradual emancipation, while a member of the Assembly, Jefferson had declined to pass a law to achieve that, saying the people were not ready. After he left and the United States gained independence, in 1782 the Virginia General Assembly repealed the 1723 slave law to make it easier for slaveholders to manumit slaves. Unlike some of his planter contemporaries, such as Robert Carter, who freed nearly 500 slaves in his lifetime, or George Washington, who freed all his slaves in his will of 1799, Jefferson formally freed only two slaves during his life, in 1793 and 1794. Virginia did not then require freed slaves to leave the state. From 1782 to 1810, as numerous slaveholders moved by Revolutionary ideals freed their slaves, the proportion of free blacks in Virginia increased dramatically from less than 1 percent to 7.2 percent of blacks.

Following the Revolution (1784-1800)

Some historians have claimed that, as a Representative to the Continental Congress, Thomas Jefferson wrote an amendment or bill that would abolish slavery. But, "he never did propose this plan" and "Jefferson refused to propose either a gradual emancipation scheme or a bill to allow individual masters to free their slaves." He refused to add gradual emancipation as an amendment when others asked him to; he said, "better that this should be kept back."

On March 1, 1784 Jefferson submitted to Continental Congress the Report of a Plan of Government for the Western Territory. This proposed legislation gave instructions on how U.S. Territories could be accepted by Congress as new states. It prohibited slavery by 1800 in the Northwest Territory. On April 23, Congress accepted Jefferson's ordinance; however, it did not prohibit slavery in all the territories. Jefferson said that Southern representatives defeated his original proposal. The Library of Congress notes, "The Ordinance of 1784 marks the high point of Jefferson's opposition to slavery, which is more muted thereafter." The Northwest Ordinance as passed by Congress prohibited slavery in the territory north of the Ohio River, but it did not free those slaves held by settlers already in the territory. For some, it was years before they managed to become free. After 1785, Jefferson remained publicly silent on or did little to change slavery within the United States.

From mid-1784 through 1789, Jefferson lived in Paris as the US envoy and minister to France. He took with him his oldest daughter Martha (Patsy) and some household slaves, including James Hemings, who trained as a chef in French cuisine. In 1787 he sent for his surviving daughter Polly, and by chance, she was accompanied on the voyage by Sally Hemings, James' younger sister. (Both the Hemings were among the six mixed-race children fathered by Jefferson's father-in-law, the widower John Wayles, with his slave Betty Hemings. They were three-quarters white in ancestry and half-siblings to Jefferson's late wife.)

Since about 2000, it is widely believed that the widower Jefferson started a sexual relationship with Sally Hemings while in Paris and she became pregnant. She agreed to return with him to the US after he promised to free her children. After their return to the US, her first child died, but she had six more children with him. Four survived to adulthood, and he freed them, informally and formally, as they came of age at 21.

From the 1770s, Jefferson wrote of supporting gradual emancipation, based on slaves being educated, freed after 18 for women and 21 for men (Later he changed this to age 45, when their masters had a return on investment), and transported for resettlement to Africa. For all of his life, he supported the concept of colonization of Africa by American freedmen. The historian Peter S. Onuf suggested that, after having children with his slave Sally Hemings, Jefferson may especially have supported colonization because of concerns for his unacknowledged "shadow family."

Similarly, the historian David Brion Davis notes that in the years after 1785 and Jefferson's return from Paris, the most notable thing about his position on slavery was his "immense silence." Davis and other historians believe that, in addition to having internal conflicts about slavery, Jefferson wanted to keep his personal situation private; for this reason, he chose to back away from working to end or ameliorate slavery. Whether by decision or reluctant indeterminance, Jefferson's failure to bring the weight of his leadership to end slavery affected the millions of African Americans who suffered in slavery until after the end of the American Civil War.

With President Washington's authorization, as U.S. Secretary of State, Jefferson in 1795 issued $40,000 in emergency relief and 1,000 weapons to colonial French slave owners in Saint Domingue (Haiti) in order to suppress a slave rebellion. President Washington gave the slave owners in Saint Domingue (Haiti) $400,000 as repayment for loans they had granted to the Americans during the American Revolutionary War.

In 1796, according to the Constitution at the time, Jefferson became Vice President after John Adams won slightly more electoral votes in their competition for the presidency. (Later this was amended so that politicians for the two positions would represent the same political party.) In 1800, Jefferson was elected as President of the United States over Adams. He won more electoral votes than Adams; he was aided by the Constitutional provision that counted slaves in states' total populations as 3/5ths persons, thus giving more representation by electoral votes to states with large slave populations. Jefferson became president because of this advantage, and would have lost without it.

As President (1801-1809)

Moved slaves to White House

Like other slave-owning presidents, Jefferson brought trusted members of his household to work in the White House. He offered James Hemings, his former slave whom he had freed in 1796, the position of White House chef. Hemings refused, choosing to stay away from Jefferson although his kin were still held at Monticello. (Unable to afford travel to Spain, Hemings apparently became depressed and turned to drinking. He later committed suicide at age 36.) Jefferson's slaves worked and lived in the White House, and at least one would eventually be born there.

Callender accusations

Main article: Jefferson-Hemings controversy

In September 1802, James Callender, Jefferson's former ally against the Federalist Party, published an account in the Richmond Recorder, that Jefferson had a slave-concubine named Sally Hemings by whom he had several children. Callender was believed to be disgruntled after Jefferson denied him the appointment of postmaster of Richmond, Virginia by President Jefferson. The Federalist Party soon picked up the account and published it in their respective papers, as it was an election year. Jefferson did not respond to the accusations. His grandson and granddaughter later claimed to historians that his Carr nephews had fathered Sally Hemings' children (to explain their strong resemblance to Jefferson). (By 1802, Sally Hemings was recorded in Thomas Jefferson's Farm Book as having had four children; two were surviving.

What became known as the Jefferson-Hemings controversy is commonly dated from this time. For most historians, it was not resolved until a new consensus in favor of Jefferson's paternity emerged in the early 21st century. This followed analysis of the historiography by Annette Gordon-Reed, a Y-DNA study that showed a match between a descendant of Eston Hemings, Sally's last son, and the Jefferson male line, and more review of historical evidence. Some historians continue to reject the conclusions of Jefferson's paternity and offer alternative explanations.

Haiti

After Toussaint Louverture had become governor general of Saint-Domingue after a slave revolt, in 1801 Jefferson supported French plans to take back the island. He agreed to loan France $300,000 "for relief of whites on the island." Jefferson wanted to alleviate the fears of Southern slave owners, who feared a similar rebellion. Prior to his election, Jefferson wrote of the revolution, "If something is not done and soon, we shall be the murderers of our own children."

By 1802, when Jefferson learned that France was planning to re-establish its empire in the western hemisphere, including taking Louisiana territory and New Orleans from the Spanish, he declared the neutrality of the US. While refusing credit or other assistance to the French, he allowed contraband goods and arms to reach Haiti, and thus indirectly supported the Haitian Revolution. This was to further U.S. interests in Louisiana. Defeated in Haiti, the French withdrew from their imperial ambitions in the western hemisphere. In 1803, Jefferson made the Louisiana Purchase.

That year and once the Haiti achieved independence in 1804, President Jefferson had to deal with strong hostility to the new nation by his southern-dominated Congress. He shared planters' fears that the success of Haiti would encourage similar slave rebellions and widespread violence in the South. The historian Tim Matthewson noted that Jefferson faced a Congress "hostile to Haiti", and that he "acquiesced in southern policy, the embargo of trade and nonrecognition, the defense of slavery internally and the denigration of Haiti abroad." Jefferson also discouraged emigration by American free blacks to the new nation. European nations also refused to recognize Haiti when the new nation declared independence in 1804.

Virginia emancipation law modified

In 1806, with concern developing over the rise in the number of free blacks, the Virginia General Assembly modified the 1782 slave law to discourage free blacks from living in the state. It permitted re-enslavement of freedmen who remained in the state for more than 12 months. This forced newly freed blacks to leave enslaved kin behind. As slaveholders had to petition the legislature directly to gain permission for manumitted freedmen to stay in the state, there was a decline in manumissions after this date.

Ended U.S. slave trade

In March 1807, Jefferson signed a bill ending the importation of slaves into the United States. By 1808, every state but South Carolina had followed Virginia's lead from the 1780s in banning importation of slaves. By 1808, with the growth of the domestic slave population contributing to the development of a large internal slave trade, slaveholders did not mount much resistance to the new law. Jefferson did not lead the campaign to prohibit the importation of slaves.

The value of slaves in the US increased as demand rose, and slaveholders such as Jefferson benefited from rising prices. Concern over preventing slave rebellions had been a factor in ending the slave trade, as slaveholders found newly imported African slaves were more openly rebellious than those born into the caste. During the next decades, as vast new lands in the southwest were developed for short-staple cotton, a commodity made viable by invention of the cotton gin, more than one million African-American slaves would be sold and transported from the Upper South and coastal areas to the Deep South; the forced migrations frequently broke families apart.

Retirement (1810–1826)

In August 1814, Jefferson told his protege Edward Coles that he thought Coles was wrong to propose transporting his slaves to the Northwest Territories (present-day Ohio and nearby states) in order to emancipate them. By 1820, Jefferson denounced Northern meddling with Southern slavery policy. On April 22, Jefferson criticized the Missouri Compromise passed by the U.S. Congress. The Missouri Compromise banned slavery "in the Louisiana Territory north of the 36° 30´ latitude line". Missouri permitted slavery while Maine banned slavery when the two states were admitted by Congress. In a letter to John Holmes, Jefferson claimed slavery was a complex issue and needed to be solved by the next generation. Jefferson wrote that the Missouri Compromise was a "fire bell in the night" and "the knell of the Union". On April 13, Jefferson wrote to William Short that he feared the Union would dissolve, stating that the "Missouri question aroused and filled me with alarm." In regards to whether the Union would remain for a long period of time Jefferson wrote, "I now doubt it much."

Jefferson continued to struggle with debt after serving as President. He used his hundreds of slaves as collateral to his creditors. This debt was due to his lavish lifestyle, long construction and changes to Monticello, imported goods, art, etc. He frequently entertained guests for extended periods at Monticello, and served them expensive wines and food. He also incurred debt in helping support his only surviving daughter, Martha Jefferson Randolph, and her large family. She had separated from her husband, who had become abusive from alcoholism and mental illness (according to different sources), and brought her family to live at Monticello.

Despite his debt, Jefferson carried out his promise to Sally Hemings about freeing their children: in 1822, he allowed Beverly and Harriet Hemings to "walk away", to leave Monticello and go north, a few months apart. He authorized Edmund Bacon, the overseer, to give Harriet $50 and to ensure that she was put on a stagecoach to go north. She was the only female slave he freed.

In addition, Jefferson provided in his 1826 will for the manumission of his and Sally Hemings' two remaining sons: Madison and Eston Hemings. He also provided for manumission of three older men; each had served him for decades, and each was from the larger Hemings family. Jefferson included a petition to the legislature to allow the five men to stay in Virginia, where their families were. This had been required since the legislature tried to force free blacks out of the state within 12 months of manumission. Sally Hemings had succeeded in "bringing her children out of Egypt" (out of slavery).

Posthumous (1827-1830)

At his death, Jefferson was greatly in debt, in part due to his continued construction program. The debts encumbered his estate, and his family had to sell 130 slaves from Monticello to pay his creditors. Jefferson freed five slaves in his will, all males of the Hemings family. In addition to his two natural sons, he freed Sally's younger half-brother John Hemings, and her nephews Joseph (Joe) Fossett and Burwell Colbert. He gave Burwell Colbert, who had served as his butler and valet, $300 for purchasing supplies used in the trade of "painter and glazier". He gave John Hemings and Joe Fossett each an acre on his lands so they could build homes for their families. His will included a petition to the state legislature to allow the freedmen to remain in Virginia to be with their families, who remained enslaved under Jefferson's heirs.

Because Jefferson did not free Fossett's wife or their eight children, in the ensuing sale of slaves, they were sold to four different men. Fossett worked for years to buy his family members in order to provide for their freedom. While Jefferson made no provision for Sally Hemings, his daughter gave her "her time", enabling her to live freely with her sons in Charlottesville, where they bought a house. She lived to see a grandchild born free in the house her sons owned.

In 1827, an auction of 130 slaves took place at Monticello. The sale lasted for five days despite the cold weather. The slaves brought prices over 70% of their appraised value. Within three years, all of the black families at Monticello had been sold and dispersed. Some were purchased by free relatives, such as Mary Hemings Bell, who worked to try to reconstitute the families.

Sally Hemings

Main article: Sally Hemings

Sally Hemings
Born	circa 1773 Charles City County, Virginia
Died	1835 (aged 62) Charlottesville, Virginia
Nationality	American
Occupation	Domestic servant
Children	Harriet Hemings, Beverly Hemings, Eston Hemings, Madison Hemings
Parents	Betty Hemings, John Wayles
Relatives	John Wayles Jefferson, James Hemings, John Hemings, Mary Hemings, Frederick Madison Roberts

Sally Hemings (c. 1773-1835) was a mixed-race slave who was of three-quarters European ancestry, the youngest of six children of the mulatto slave Betty Hemings and the widower John Wayles, Jefferson's father-in-law. They were half-siblings of Jefferson's wife.

Following her father's death in 1773 a year after her marriage, Martha Jefferson and her husband inherited Betty Hemings and her 10 children as among the numerous slaves comprising some of her father's property; they also inherited 11,000 acres from him. Sally was then an infant; as she and other Hemings children grew up at Monticello, they were trained and assigned to domestic duties. Hemings was described as a "light colored and decidedly good looking" mulatto. By Virginia law, as children of slave mothers, they were all born into slavery, regardless of their father's race or status, by the principle of partus sequitur ventrum, established in Virginia law in 1662.

By chance, in 1787 Sally Hemings at the age of 14 was chosen to accompany Mary (Polly), the youngest daughter of Jefferson, to Paris to rejoin her father; the widower was serving as the US Minister to France. She and Jefferson are widely believed to have begun a sexual relationship there that resulted in her pregnancy in 1789. Given his promise to free her children, she returned with him that year to the United States. Her first child died young. She had a total of six additional children, who were noted for their resemblance to Jefferson.

The historic question of whether Jefferson was the father of her children has been known as the Jefferson-Hemings controversy (see below and main article). Historians widely believe that the widower Jefferson fathered her son Eston Hemings and all her children, four of whom survived to adulthood. Their births were recorded in his Farm Book, and their liaison lasted 38 years until his death. Some historians disagree.

Jefferson freed all of Sally Hemings' children: Beverly, Harriet, Madison and Eston, as they came of age. Three of the four entered white society as adults; they were seven-eighths European in ancestry. Hemings had succeeded in "bringing her children out of Egypt," or out of slavery. Following Jefferson's death, his daughter gave Sally Hemings "her time", by which she lived freely with her two younger sons in Charlottesville for her last nine years. Sally Hemings lived to see a grandchild born in the house her sons owned.

Jefferson-Hemings controversy

Main article: Jefferson-Hemings controversy

This term applies to the question of whether Thomas Jefferson had an intimate relationship with his mixed-race slave, Sally Hemings, that resulted in his fathering her six children of record. The question has been of interest because of his stature, primarily, but also because of his writings against slavery and against miscegenation. The controversy started as early as the 1790s. Jefferson's descendants told historians in the mid-nineteenth century that one of his late Carr nephews had fathered Hemings' children. Historians generally asserted this denial for nearly 180 years. While some historians of the late twentieth century started reanalyzing the body of evidence, for many a new consensus did not emerge until after reporting of the results of a DNA analysis in 1998. They showed a match between the Jefferson male line and a descendant of Eston Hemings (the last son), and no match between the Carr line and the Hemings descendant. Many historians considered this finding to overturn the claims of Jefferson descendants.

In the 21st century, historians have generally accepted the conclusion about Jefferson's paternity. On a popular level, no major historian argued against the television mini-series Sally Hemings: An American Scandal (2000), based on a relationship between Jefferson and Hemings; by contrast, twenty years earlier, a Jefferson biographer and a historian who was a direct descendant went to the president of CBS to convince him to drop a similar project. Exhibits at Monticello, as well as its recent publications about Jefferson and his times, and other new works published by a variety of scholars, use the recent consensus as a base for giving new insight into Jefferson and the Hemings family. It also has inspired new works on the interracial society of the times and since. The National Park Service online biography of Jefferson notes the consensus about his paternity. But, some historians continue to publish works arguing that other candidates were more likely fathers of Hemings' children, although none had been claimed before the results of the DNA study.

Monticello slave life

Slaves on a Virginia plantation (The Old Plantation, c. 1790)

Jefferson ran every facet of the four Monticello farms and left specific instructions to his overseers when away or traveling. Slaves in the mansion, mill, and nailery reported to one general overseer appointed by Jefferson, and he hired many overseers, some of whom were considered cruel at the time. Jefferson made meticulous periodical records on his slaves, plants and animals, and weather. Jefferson, in his Farm Book journal, visually described in detail both the quality and quantity of purchased slave clothing and the name of each slave who received the clothing. In a letter written in 1811, Jefferson described his stress and apprehension in regard to difficulties in what he felt was his "duty" to procure specific desirable blankets for "those poor creatures" - his slaves. Some historians have pointed out that Jefferson maintained many slave families together on his plantations; the historian Bruce Fehn says this was consistent with other slave owners at the time. Like them, Jefferson shifted the "cost of reproducing the workforce to the workers' themselves." He could increase the value of his property without having to buy additional slaves. He tried to reduce infant mortality, and wrote, "[A] woman who brings a child every two years is more profitable than the best man on the farm." The stability of the families can also be seen as showing the African Americans' preferences. They had some agency in how they lived.

Jefferson encouraged slaves to marry at Monticello, and would occasionally buy and sell slaves to keep families together. In 1815, he said that his slaves were "worth a great deal more" due to their marriages. Married slaves, however, had no legal protection or recognition by the law; masters could separate slave husbands and wives any time desired.

Jefferson sometimes gave incentives in money or clothes to slaves in important positions for work. Jefferson’s slaves probably worked from dawn to dusk. Although no record exists that Jefferson had slaves taught, several enslaved men at Monticello could read and write.^{[citation needed]}

Isaac Jefferson, ca. 1847, an enslaved blacksmith who worked on Jefferson's plantation. His Memoirs of a Monticello Slave (1843) provided a description of life at Monticello.

Jefferson worked slave boys ages ten to 16 in his nail factory on Mulberry Row. After it opened in 1794, for the first three years, Jefferson recorded the productivity of each child. He selected those who were most productive to be trained as artisans: blacksmiths, carpenters, and coopers. Those who performed the worst were assigned as field laborers.

According to some sources, Jefferson authorized his overseers to use physical violence against the slaves, though probably not as much as some of his neighbors. Jame Hubbard was a slave in the nailery who ran away on two occasions. The first time Jefferson did not have him whipped, but on the second Jefferson reportedly ordered him to be severely flogged. Hubbard was likely sold after spending time in jail. Stanton says children suffered physical violence. When a 17-year-old James was sick, one overseer reportedly whipped him "three times in one day." Violence was commonplace on plantations, including Jefferson’s. According to Marguerite Hughes, Jefferson used "a severe punishment" like whippings when runaways were captured, and he sometimes sold them to "discourage other men and women from attempting to gain their freedom."

However, other sources state that Jefferson instructed his overseers not to whip his slaves, but the overseers often ignored his wishes during his frequent absences from home. According to Stanton, no reliable document portrays Jefferson in the act of applying physical correction. During Jefferson's time, some other slaveholders also disagreed with the practices of flogging and jailing slaves.

Slaves had a variety of tasks: Davy Bowles was the carriage driver, including trips to take Jefferson to and from Washington D.C. or the Virginia capital. Betty Hemings, a mixed-race slave inherited from his father-in-law with her family, was the head of the house slaves at Monticello, who were allowed limited freedom when Jefferson was away. Four of her daughters served as house slaves: Betty Brown; Nance, Critta and Sally Hemings. The latter two were half-sisters to Jefferson's wife. Another house slave was Ursula, whom he had purchased separately. The general maintenance of the mansion was under the care of Hemings family members as well: the master carpenter was Betty's son John Hemings. His nephews Joe Fossett, as blacksmith, and Burwell Colbert, as Jefferson's butler and painter, also had important roles.

Notes on the State of Virginia

Main article: Notes on the State of Virginia

In 1780, Jefferson began answering questions on the colonies asked by French minister François de Marboias. He worked on what became a book for five years, having it printed in France while he was there as US minister in 1785. The book covered subjects such as mountains, religion, climate, slavery, and race. Jefferson discussed his idea of emancipation and blacks. Jefferson wanted a gradual emancipation of freed blacks and deportation to Africa, followed by replacement with white settlers. He wrote:

“

The blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distant by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind.

”

He claimed that "the black of the negro" was "fixed in nature," and perhaps due to "the skin" or "the color of the bile, or from that of some other secretion." This was Jefferson's rationalized justification for the racial caste of slavery.

Front page of his 1808 book on Negro literature.

The historian Paul Finkelman argues that Jefferson's concern was for the damage slavery did to whites and white society, not the damage it did to blacks. As he feared slaves might successfully rebel as they had in Haiti, he thought free blacks should be deported to prevent whites from losing control of their slaves.

Further information: Henri Grégoire

Abbé Henri-Baptiste Grégoire.

In 1808, the French abolitionist and priest Henri-Baptiste Grégoire, or Abbé Grégoire, sent President Jefferson a copy of his book, An Enquiry Concerning the Intellectual and Moral Faculties and Literature of Negroes. In his text, he responded to and refuted Jefferson's arguments of African inferiority in Notes on Virgina, citing the advanced civilizations Africans had developed as evidence of their intellectual competence.

Jefferson wrote back, saying the rights of African Americans should not be dependent on intelligence and that Africans had "respectable intelligence." Jefferson wrote of the black race, "but whatever be their degree of talent it is not measure of their rights." Jefferson thanked Grégoire for the book, but "had not modified his beliefs on the innate incompetence of Blacks."

Views on slavery and race

Evaluations by historians

Some important 20th-century Jefferson biographers such as Merrill Peterson support the view of Jefferson as a man strongly opposed to slavery; Peterson said that Jefferson's ownership of slaves "all his adult life has placed him at odds with his moral and political principles. Yet there can be no question of his genuine hatred of slavery or, indeed, of the efforts he made to curb and eliminate it." Peter Onuf stated Jefferson was well-known for his "opposition to slavery, most famously expressed in his ... Notes on the State of Virginia." The biographer John Ferling said that Thomas Jefferson was "zealously committed to slavery's abolition."

Starting in the early 1960s, some academics began to challenge the position that Jefferson strongly opposed slavery as they assessed his actions rather than his words. More recently, Paul Finkelman has said that earlier scholars, particularly Merrill Peterson, Dumas Malone, and Willard Randall, engaged in "exaggeration or misrepresentation" to advance their argument of Jefferson's anti-slavery position, saying "they ignore contrary evidence" and "paint a false picture" to protect Jefferson's image on slavery. Academics including William Freehling, Winthrop Jordan and David Brion Davis have criticized Jefferson for his lack of action in trying to end slavery in the United States, including not freeing his own slaves, rather than for the nature of his views. Davis noted that although Jefferson was a proponent of equality in earlier years, after 1789 and his return to the US from France (when he had apparently started a relationship with his slave Sally Hemings), he was notable for his "immense silence" on the topic of slavery. He did support prohibition of the importing of slaves into the United States, but no actions related to the domestic institution, at a time when the internal slave trade was growing dramatically and would move one million people in a forced migration.

For much of his life, Jefferson supported the concept of gradual emancipation if based on deportation of freed blacks, as he feared their presence in the slave society would contribute to a slave revolt.

“

there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would, to relieve us from this heavy reproach [slavery]... we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.

”

As he owned a copy of Suetonius, a Roman biographer, Jefferson may have borrowed from him the phrase "wolf by the ears", a saying the former attributed to Tiberius. Jefferson characterized slavery as a dangerous animal (the wolf) that could not be contained or freed. He believed that attempts to end slavery would lead to violence.

According to Greg Warnusz, Jefferson held contemporary 19th-century beliefs that blacks were inferior to whites in terms of "potential for citizenship," and he wanted them deported. His views of a democratic society were based on homogeneity of men. He claimed to be interested in helping both races in his proposal, which was based on gradually freeing slaves after the age of 45 (when they would have repaid their owner's investment) and resettling them in Africa. (This proposal did not seem to acknowledge how difficult it would be for freedment to be settled in another country and environment after age 45.) Jefferson's plan envisioned a whites-only society without any blacks. While privately proposing an end of slavery, Jefferson was a slaveholder and officially advocated slavery's expansion. According to James W. Loewen, Jefferson's character "wrestled with slavery, even though in the end he lost." Loewen says that understanding Jefferson's role with slavery is significant in understanding current American social problems.

In an 1814 letter to Edmund Cole titled "Slavery and the Younger Generation", Jefferson put forth some of his views on slaves and the institution of slavery. Discussing gradual emancipation with forced deportation he said:

"...the hour of emancipation is advancing, in the march of time. It will come; and whether brought on by the generous energy of our own minds; or by the bloody process of St Domingo, excited and conducted by the power of our present enemy, if once stationed permanently within our Country, and offering asylum & arms to the oppressed, is a leaf of our history not yet turned over."

He stated his views of African Americans:

"For men probably of any color, but of this color we know, brought from their infancy without necessity for thought or forecast, are by their habits rendered as incapable as children of taking care of themselves, and are extinguished promptly wherever industry is necessary for raising young. In the mean time they are pests in society by their idleness, and the depredations to which this leads them."

Jefferson put forth his views on mixed-race marriages (miscenegation) between whites and blacks: "Their amalgamation with the other color produces a degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence in the human character can innocently consent." His last page, acknowledging his advancing age, states that younger people will have to work to abolish slavery:

"I have overlived the generation with which mutual labors & perils begat mutual confidence and influence. This enterprise is for the young; for those who can follow it up, and bear it through to its consummation. It shall have all my prayers, & these are the only weapons of an old man."

Dumas Malone explained Jefferson's racism expressed in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) as the "tentative judgements of a kindly and scientifically minded man". Malone lightly covered Jefferson's view that African Americans were inferior to whites. Merrill Peterson claimed that Jefferson's racial bias towards African Americans was "a product of frivolous and tortuous reasoning...and bewildering confusion of principles." Peterson called Jefferson's derogatory racial views on African Americans "folk belief". Peterson did not apply the same scrutiny to Jefferson's miscegenation beliefs.

Challenges to Jefferson as anti-slavery advocate

Jefferson was a slave owner, owning at times hundreds of slaves. He only freed a handful of slaves. Although Jefferson's name had been associated with the anti-slavery cause during the early 1770s in the Virginia legislature, Jefferson viewed slavery as a "Southern way of life", similar to mainstream Greek and antiquity societies. In agreement with Southern slave aristocratic society, Jefferson believed that slavery served to protect blacks, whom he viewed as inferior or incapable of taking care of themselves.

Jefferson claimed in 1777 and 1778 to have authored bills that would have emancipated slaves, liberated the children of slaves, and deported them from the colonies. Jefferson claimed to have withdrawn the legislation and said the "public mind" would not be able to accept emancipation at this time. But, there is no evidence from Jefferson's collective writings that he authored such legislation.

Jefferson had opportunities to disassociate himself from slavery. In 1782 after the American Revolution, Virginia passed a law making manumission legal by the slave owner. The abolition of slavery was becoming more widespread, as northern states passed various emancipation plans. Yet, Jefferson's actions did not keep up with those of the antislavery advocates. On September 15, 1793, Thomas Jefferson agreed in writing to free James Hemings, his mixed-race slave who had served him as chef since their time in Paris, after the slave had trained his younger brother Peter as a replacement chef to Jefferson's satisfaction. Jefferson finally freed James Hemings in February 1796. According to one historian, Jefferson's manumission was not generous; he said the document "undermines any notion of benevolence." With freedom, Hemings worked in Philadelphia and traveled to France. About the same time, in 1794 Jefferson allowed James' older brother Robert Hemings to buy his freedom. These were the only two slaves Jefferson freed by manumission in his lifetime. (They were both brothers of Sally Hemings], believed to be Jefferson's concubine.)

By contrast, so many other slaveholders in Virginia freed slaves in the first two decades after the Revolution that the proportion of free blacks in Virginia rose from less than one percent in 1790 to 7.2 percent in 1810. By then three-quarters of the slaves in Delaware had been freed.

Historians use Jefferson's correspondence with Edward Coles as an example of his anti-slavery views. Coles believed Jefferson would help him with his plan to free his slaves, and wrote to Jefferson about it in 1814. In Jefferson's response, the first part of the letter seemed to support Coles' plan and the anti-slavery movement, but further on, the former president discouraged Coles from emancipating his slaves. He wrote:

“

The laws do not permit us to turn them loose, if that were for their good: and to commute them for other property is to commit them to those whose usage of them we cannot control. I hope then, my dear sir, you will reconcile yourself to your country and its unfortunate condition; that you will not lessen its stock of sound disposition by withdrawing your portion from the mass.

”

Jefferson claimed to want to protect slaves from ill usage and to employ them in reasonable labor, though at the same time he insisted that Coles should not free his slaves.

“

But in the mean time are you right in abandoning this property, and your country with it? I think not. My opinion has ever been that, until more can be done for them, we should endeavor, with those whom fortune has thrown on our hands, to feed and clothe them well, protect them from all ill usage, require such reasonable labor only as is performed voluntarily by freemen, & be led by no repugnancies to abdicate them, and our duties to them.

”

(Note: Coles took his slaves to present-day Illinois, a free territory, where he freed them and gave them land purchased for their use, 160 acres to each head of household. He also helped provide employment for them to get started.)

See also

• Abraham Lincoln and slavery
• George Washington and slavery

References

Books

• Appleby, Joyce. Thomas Jefferson (2003)
• Bernstein, R. B. Thomas Jefferson. (2003)
• Burstein, Andrew. Jefferson's Secrets: Death and Desire at Monticello. (2005).
• Cunningham, Noble E. In Pursuit of Reason (1988)
• Crawford, Alan Pell, Twilight at Monticello,[1], Random House, New York, (2008).
• Ellis, Joseph Ellis. "American Sphinx: The Contradictions of Thomas Jefferson". http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/jefferson_papers/mtjessay1.html. 
• Ellis, Joseph J. American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (1996).
• Finkelman, Paul. Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson (2001), esp ch 6–7
• Gordon-Reed, Annette (1997). Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. ISBN 0813916984. 
• Gordon-Reed, Annette. The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, New York: W.W. Norton, 2007
• Halliday, E. M. (2001, 2002). Understanding Thomas Jefferson. New York, NY: Perennial HarperCollins. ISBN 0-06-019793-5. 
• Hitchens, C. E.Thomas Jefferson: Author of America (2005)
• Malone, Dumas. Jefferson and His Time, 6 vols. (1948–82). Multi-volume biography of TJ by leading expert; A short version is online.
• Malone, Dumas. Thomas Jefferson: A Reference Biography (1986/2002) Peterson, Merrill D. (ed.)
• Onuf, Peter S., ed. (1993). Jeffersonian Legacies. The University Press of Virginia. ISBN 0813914620. http://books.google.com/books?id=K1m1tRlh7xQC. 
• Peterson, Merrill D. (1975). Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation. ISBN 0195019091. 
• Stanton, Lucia (1993). ""Those Who Labor for My Happiness": Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves". In Onuf, Peter S.. Jeffersonian Legacies. The University Press of Virginia. pp. 147-180. ISBN 0813914620. http://books.google.com/books?id=K1m1tRlh7xQC&pg=PA147#v=onepage&q&f=false. 
• Stanton, Lucia (1996). Slavery at Monticello. ISBN 188288602X. 

Academic journals

• Finkelman, Paul. "Regulating the African slave trade," Civil War History 54.4 (2008): 379+. Web View 1 Jan. 2012.
• Matthewson, Tim. "Jefferson and Haiti", The Journal of Southern History, 61 (1995)
• Matthewson, Tim. "Jefferson and the Non-recognition of Haiti", American Philosophical Society, 140 (1996)
• Pasley, Jeffrey L. "Politics and the Misadventures of Thomas Jefferson's Modern Reputation: a Review Essay," Journal of Southern History 2006 72(4): 871–908. Issn: 0022-4642 Fulltext in Ebsco.
• Scherr, Arthur. "Jefferson's 'Cannibals' Revisited: A Closer Look at His Notorious Phrase," Journal of Southern History 77.2 (2011): 251+, Web View 1 Jan. 2012.
• Tewell, Jeremy J. "A difference of complexion: George Fitzhugh and the birth of the Republican Party," The Historian 73.2 (Summer 2011): 235+. Web View 23 Dec. 2011.

Online resources

• Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Monticello website
• Thomas Jefferson Digital Archives
• Thomas Jefferson on Politics & Government
• National Museum of African American History and Culture in Partnership with the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello (January 27-October 14, 2012). "Slavery at Jefferson's Monticello: Paradox of Liberty". Exhibition. Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. http://www.slaveryatmonticello.org/.