Thomas Jefferson and Slavery Jefferson, the Man & the Icon Thomas Jefferson was a founding father, farmer, architect, inventor, slaveholder, book collector, scholar, diplomat, and the third president of the United States. Besides his accomplishments (which are impressive) Jefferson left behind an estate and a large collection of writings, papers and other artifacts from his life and times. Despite all that we know about Thomas Jefferson, there are still contradictions and unanswered questions about him. In this article, we'll touch on his views of slavery, and give a little insight into Jefferson's life. Jefferson‘s Life He was born in 1743 in Albermarle County, Virginia, inheriting from his father, a planter and surveyor, some 5,000 acres of land, and from his mother, a Randolph, high social standing. He studied at the College of William and Mary. In 1772 he married Martha Wayles Skelton, a widow, and took her to live in his partly constructed mountaintop home, Monticello. The birth of their daughter Martha in September increased their happiness. Within ten years the family gained five more children. Of them all, only two lived to grow up: Martha, called Patsy, and Mary, called Maria or Polly. The physical strain of frequent pregnancies weakened Martha Jefferson so gravely that her husband curtailed his political activities to stay near her. As the "silent member" of the Congress, Jefferson, at 33, drafted the Declaration of Independence. In years following he labored to make its words a reality in Virginia. Most notably, he wrote a bill establishing religious freedom, enacted in 1786. Jefferson succeeded Benjamin Franklin as minister to France in 1785. His sympathy for the French Revolution led him into conflict with Alexander Hamilton when Jefferson was Secretary of State in President Washington's Cabinet. He resigned in 1793. Monticello Throughout his life at Monticello and Poplar Forest, his country retreat, Thomas Jefferson sought to create a classic example of the country gentleman's estate, based on his personal experiences, his reading, and a broad network of correspondence. Thomas Jefferson's world of books provided him with opportunities throughout his life to experience other aspects of the world and learn selectively from them to create an idealized realm, sometimes untempered by the reality of life experiences. Who was Mrs. Jefferson? Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson 1748-1782 When Thomas Jefferson came courting, Martha Wayles Skelton at 22 was already a widow, an heiress, and a mother whose firstborn son would die in early childhood. Family tradition says that she was accomplished and beautiful--with slender figure, hazel eyes, and auburn hair--and wooed by many. Perhaps a mutual love of music cemented the romance; Jefferson played the violin, and one of the furnishings he ordered for the home he was building at Monticello was a "forte-piano" for his bride. They were married on New Year's Day, 1772, at the bride's plantation home "The Forest," near Williamsburg. When they finally reached Monticello in a late January snowstorm to find no fire, no food, and the servants asleep, they toasted their new home with a leftover half-bottle of wine and "song and merriment and laughter." That night, on their own mountaintop, the love of Thomas Jefferson and his bride seemed strong enough to endure any adversity. Just after New Year's Day, 1781, a British invasion forced Martha to flee the capital in Richmond with a baby girl a few weeks old--who died in April. In June the family barely escaped an enemy raid on Monticello. She bore another daughter the following May, and never regained a fair measure of strength. Jefferson wrote on May 20 that her condition was dangerous. Jefferson wrote little about his wife's death, making this entry into his account book on September 6, 1782: "My dear wife died this day at 11:45' A.M." More than two months later he haltingly wrote to a French officer and friend, Marquis de Chastellux (1734-1788),that he was. . . "emerging from the stupor of mind which had rendered me as dead to the world as [she] was whose . . . loss occasioned it." Close friends also wrote that Thomas Jefferson was devastated by the death of his wife. Half a century later his daughter Martha remembered his sorrow: "the violence of his emotion...to this day I not describe to myself." For three weeks he had shut himself in his room, pacing back and forth until exhausted. Slowly that first anguish spent itself. In November 1782 he agreed to serve as commissioner to France. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings There are only two known descriptions of Sally Hemings. The slave Isaac Jefferson remembered that she was "mighty near white. . . very handsome, long straight hair down her back." Jefferson biographer Henry S. Randall recalled Jefferson's grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph describing her as "light colored and decidedly good looking." According to Jefferson's records, Sally Hemings had four surviving children. Beverly (b. 1798), a carpenter and fiddler, was allowed to leave the plantation in late 1821 or early 1822 and, according to his brother, passed into white society in Washington, D.C. Harriet (b. 1801), a spinner in Jefferson's textile shop, also left Monticello in 1821 or 1822, probably with her brother, and passed for white. Madison Hemings (1805-1878), a carpenter and joiner, was given his freedom in Jefferson's will; he resettled in southern Ohio in 1836, where he worked at his trade and had a farm. Eston Hemings (1808-c1853), also a carpenter, moved to Chillicothe, Ohio, in the 1830s; there he was a well-known professional musician before moving about 1852 to Wisconsin, changing his name and his racial identity. Both Madison and Eston Hemings made known their belief that they were sons of Thomas Jefferson. In 1873, the Pike County Republican ran a series entitled, "Life Among the Lowly," which included a memoir by Madison Hemings, a resident of Ross County, Ohio. Hemings stated that his mother Sally, who was the half-sister of Jefferson's wife, Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson and a slave of Thomas Jefferson, gave birth to five children "and Jefferson was the father of them all." Madison Hemings's statement has been contested for well over a century. In January 2000, however, after completion of a year's work by a research committee assessing the most recent evidence including a 1998 DNA study, the Monticello/ Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, Inc, issued a statement stating that "the best evidence available suggests the strong likelihood that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings had a relationship over time that led to the birth of one, and perhaps all, of the known children of Sally Hemings." Promise of freedom for James Hemings On September 15, 1793, while residing as Secretary of State in Pennsylvania, which had abolished slavery in 1780, Thomas Jefferson promised to free his slave James Hemings, after James had trained a replacement French chef. On February 5, 1796, Jefferson freed James and provided money for his return to Philadelphia. Jefferson manumitted or allowed to escape from bondage only ten slaves, all members of the Hemings family, out of over six hundred he owned over the course of his life. Five of those gained freedom in his lifetime, five under the terms of his will. When Jefferson became President in 1801, he had been a widower for 19 years. He had become as capable of handling social affairs as political matters. Jefferson slashed Army and Navy expenditures, cut the budget, eliminated the tax on whiskey so unpopular in the West and reduced the national debt by a third. Further, although the Constitution made no provision for the acquisition of new land, Jefferson suppressed his qualms over constitutionality when he had the opportunity to acquire the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon in 1803. During Jefferson's second term, he was increasingly preoccupied with keeping the Nation from involvement in the Napoleonic wars, though both England and France interfered with the neutral rights of American merchantmen. Jefferson's attempted solution, an embargo upon American shipping, worked badly and was unpopular. Jefferson retired to Monticello to ponder such projects as his grand designs for the University of Virginia. Jefferson's twilight years were spent, in part, defining and defending his legacy. During his final decade, Jefferson drafted an autobiography, created political memorandum books, became increasingly concerned about the preservation of historical documents, and staunchly defended his role as author of the Declaration of Independence. At key points in his life Jefferson had drawn up lists of his achievements, and on the verge of death he designed his own gravestone and epitaph: "Author of the Declaration of Independence [and] of the Statute of Virginia for religious toleration & Father of the University of Virginia." Though critics questioned his role in writing the Declaration of Independence and objected to his emerging role as a symbol of individual freedom, Jefferson insisted upon his authorship of the Declaration and reasserted his moral opposition to slavery. Nevertheless, Jefferson undoubtedly knew at his death on July 4, 1826, that the vagaries of life had left a vulnerable legacy. His slaves, land, and library would have to be sold to satisfy his creditors. Fear for his reputation and public legacy led him to beg his closest friend, James Madison, to "take care of me when dead." In his final letter to Roger Weightman, Jefferson eloquently espoused the central role of the United States and the Declaration of Independence as signals of the blessings of self-government to the world. Thomas Jefferson died on July 4, 1826. Selected Quotations from Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson was a prolific writer. His papers at the Library of Congress are a rich storehouse of his thoughts and ideas expressed both in official correspondence and in private letters. This brief selection suggests something of the writings of the man who was the third president of the United States, the founder of the University of Virginia, and author of the Declaration of Independence. "Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. Education & free discussion are the antidotes of both." Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, August 1, 1816. "What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment & death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment . . . inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose." Thomas Jefferson to Jean Nicholas Demeunier, January 24, 1786. ..."yet the hour of emancipation is advancing . . . this enterprise is for the young; for those who can follow it up, and bear it through to it's consummation. it shall have all my prayers, and these are the only weapons of an old man." Thomas Jefferson to Edward Coles, August 25, 1814. "The two principles on which our conduct towards the Indians should be founded, are justice & fear. After the injuries we have done them, they cannot love us . . . ." Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Hawkins, August 13, 1786 "Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights." Thomas Jefferson to Richard Price, January 8, 1789. Thomas Jefferson Writes About Slavery Below are several exerpts from a longer essay on comparative ethnic observations and slavery that Jefferson wrote. We have tried to put together his comments that pertain specifically to slavery here: " .... It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expense of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions, which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race. - To these objections, which are political, may be added others, which are physical and moral. The first difference which strikes us is that of colour. . . And is this difference of no importance? Is it not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty in the two races? It will be right to make great allowances for the difference of condition, of education, of conversation, of the sphere in which they move. Many millions of them have been brought to, and born in America. Most of them indeed have been confined to tillage, to their own homes, and their own society: yet many have been so situated, that they might have availed themselves of the conversation of their masters; many have been brought up to the handicraft arts, and from that circumstance have always been associated with the whites. Some have been liberally educated, and all have lived in countries where the arts and sciences are cultivated to a considerable degree, and have had before their eyes samples of the best works from abroad. The Indians, with no advantages of this kind, will often carve figures on their pipes not destitute of design and merit. They will crayon out an animal, a plant, or a country, so as to prove the existence of a germ in their minds which only wants cultivation. They astonish you with strokes of the most sublime oratory; such as prove their reason and sentiment strong, their imagination glowing and elevated. . . There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do. If a parent could find no motive either in his philanthropy or his self love, for restraining the intemperance of passion towards his slave, it should always be a sufficient one that his child is present. But generally it is not sufficient. The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to the worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances. And with what execration should the statesman be loaded, who, permitting one half the citizens thus to trample on the rights of the other, transforms those into despots, and these into enemies, destroys the morals of the one part, and the amor patriae of the other. For in a warm climate, no man will labour for himself who can make another labour for him. This is so true, that of the proprietors of slaves a very small proportion indeed are ever seen to labour. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest. - But it is impossible to be temperate and to pursue this subject through the various considerations of policy, of morals, of history natural and civil. We must be contented to hope they will force their way into every one's mind. I think a change already perceptible, since the origin of the present revolution. The spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust, his condition mollifying, the way I hope preparing, under the auspices of heaven, for a total emancipation, and that this is disposed, in the order of events, to be with the consent of the masters, rather than by their extirpation." Jefferson was a man of his times. His writings reveal that he felt that slavery was wrong, but at the same time he owned (and sold) slaves on his estate. He believed in freedom & equality but had (what are now) anacronistic ideas about the abilities of different races. He grieved for his wife's death, but DNA evidence points to the fact that had a long term relationship with one of his slaves. Did he love her and treat her as a "wife" or was their relationship strictly one of "master" & "slave"? Did Jefferson abuse Sally Hemings or make her life better? Some of these questions will never be fully answered, and will have to be taken into account when viewing the whole of Jefferson. For without him, the very modern-day concept of democracy and citizen-run government might not even exist. JEFFERSON‘S SLAVES Monticello's Lucy Lucy (1811-?) daughter of Lilly and Barnaby, was born on Monticello and was one of Thomas Jefferson's slaves sold at public auction at Monticello in January 1827. Lucy and her parents were among the slaves whom Jefferson leased to his grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph (1792-1875).

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