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Ep. 121 Thomas Jefferson: How America's Golden Boy Refused to Practice What He Preached

• Shea LaFountaine • Episode 121

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Thomas Jefferson was America's golden boy. Author of the Declaration of Independence, secretary of state under George Washington, vice president to John Adams, and 3rd president of the United States, he penned famous words like "all men are created equal," and "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." For this, he's often remembered as a moral champion who fought for equality and liberty for all. But there was another side to Thomas Jefferson, a darker side, one he kept well hidden. Despite his passionate prose, Jefferson enslaved some 600 people in his lifetime. Despite calling slavery "moral depravity" and a "hideous blot," he himself knowingly traded in human lives, authorized the beatings of children, intentionally sold them away from their families, all while benefiting immensely financially. So who was Thomas Jefferson really? America's golden boy or... something else? Tune in to find out! 

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Thomas Jefferson is America’s golden boy. I mean along with George Washington I guess but he already has his own episode, episode 69. In the eyes of many Americans, these guys, these founding fathers could do no wrong. They built our country on the ideals of liberty and freedom for all. And it was Thomas Jefferson of course who wrote those fateful words down for the very first time. Thomas Jefferson who drafted the Declaration of Independence and wrote quote “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” end quote. This was not just a revolutionary act, breaking with an oppressive form of government, it was revolutionary thinking. In writing this, in writing that all men are created equal, Jefferson, for the first time in over 2,000 years, broke away from the ideas put forth by ancient Athenians like Plato and Aristotle, ideas that still guided us after all this time, and unfortunately continue to do so. And for this, Thomas Jefferson is remembered as a champion of ethics, a man of the greatest moral integrity, America’s golden boy. Except, as you will see over the next 40 odd minutes, almost nothing about Thomas Jefferson is as it seems. Jefferson was a facade. He showed us the parts of him he wanted us to see, the admirable parts, the golden parts, and he hid reality, the cogs that turned beneath it all that reveal the true nature of this man. In the words of Virginia abolitionist Moncure Conway quote, “Never did a man achieve more fame for what he did not do.” Let’s fix that. 


Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I discuss lesser known true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. Remember if you’d like to watch the video version of this episode, me talking with images that go along with the story, you can find that on YouTube or patreon.com/historyfixpodcast. I have not done much to conceal my true feelings for Thomas Jefferson. So if you’ve been listening to History Fix for a while then you probably already know my thoughts on him. I want to preface all this by saying that I certainly did not grow up disliking the man. Thomas Jefferson was a hero, a founding father, he built our country, he was a champion for equality and freedom, of course I didn’t dislike him. I was taught to respect and honor Jefferson just like all the other American schoolchildren. It really wasn’t until I started diving into fairly thorough historical research about various topics that I began to see the man Jefferson truly was. Because, just like Christopher Columbus and Henry VIII, Thomas Jefferson keeps popping up in all kinds of stories. He keeps showing up in everyone else’s stories. And I’m beginning to realize that that’s not a good thing. The men who left their marks in this way, by intruding on the legacies of others, didn’t tend to leave very great marks. So, in honor of American Independence Day, the 4th of July, which was a couple days ago, I bring to you the real story of founding father Thomas Jefferson. It’s time to pull down the facade.  


Super quick bio because honestly who cares but Thomas Jefferson was born in Albemarle County, Virginia in 1743 at the foothills of the Blueridge Mountains. His father was a Virginia planter, surveyor, and enslaver. He enslaved around 60 people to work on his plantation. And so Jefferson was born into this life of owning other human beings for profit. That was just the way things were. That was his reality. It’s important to maintain that context. When he was 14 years old, his father died and he inherited 30 of those enslaved people. So at just 14, Jefferson already enslaved 30 people. Can you imagine a 14 year old boy thinking he owns you? 14 year old boys are the literal worst category of humans. Sorry that was harsh, I know there are some good ones but like overall, not the group I’d choose to hang out with. Anyway, Jefferson grows up, he attends the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia and studies law. Predictable. And then in 1768, when he was only 25 years old, he did two really significant things, significant to this story at least. He decided to build a house on top of a little mountain near Charlottesville, Virginia. He eventually named this house Monticello and we’re going to talk about it in great detail soon. But the other thing he did in 1768 was join the Virginia House of Burgesses, which was the first elected group of legislators in the American colonies. The colonies are ruled by the King of England, which at this time was King George III. And the House of Burgesses wasn’t like a revolutionary group or anything like that, it’s a little too early for that. It was sanctioned by the king. It was the Virginia Colony’s little governing body authorized by the king. Encyclopedia Britannica says of these two 1768 moves quote “These decisions nicely embodied the two competing impulses that would persist throughout his life—namely, to combine an active career in politics with periodic seclusion in his own private haven. His political timing was also impeccable, for he entered the Virginia legislature just as opposition to the taxation policies of the British Parliament was congealing,” end quote. 


So yeah, just as things are heating up between the British government and the colonies, Jefferson enters into Virginia politics. He also gets married right after this to a very wealthy widow named Martha Wayles Skelton whose dowry more than doubled his holdings in both land and enslaved humans. So things are looking pretty awesome for Jefferson. He has this new found wealth, he’s building this castle on the hill, and he’s quickly climbing the political ladder of the Virginia colony in a way only a white planter’s son could truly do at that time, and questionably still at this time as well. Let’s focus on the politics first, get that out of the way, cause boring, right? In 1776, he was elected to the Continental Congress. This was the famed group that wrote the Declaration of Independence and governed early America and it selected Thomas Jefferson to write it. He authored the Declaration of Independence. They edited it afterwards and changed some stuff but Jefferson wrote it. He wrote the first draft. He wrote all that stuff about life liberty and the pursuit of happiness, about all men created equal, which actually made the final cut. Various state governments would later go on to alter these words slightly when writing their own state constitutions. The six southern states, specifically, changed “all men” to “all freemen” are equal. Because, I mean late 1700s America is very very tied to slavery especially in the south where agriculture is their whole economy. And Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence heavily challenged that lifestyle. 


They let that stay, “all men are created equal.” But they did take out a lot of other things he said about slavery in that first draft because of the ways it challenged acceptance of slavery in America. Historian John Chester Miller wrote in his book “The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery,” quote “"The inclusion of Jefferson's strictures on slavery and the slave trade would have committed the United States to the abolition of slavery,” end quote. And they did not want it at that time. I mean some did. Massachusetts basically abolished slavery in 1780 based on this notion that all men are created equal. But most of the newborn country did not want to go anywhere near abolishing slavery and we know in hindsight that it took a bloody civil war in the next century to accomplish that. So what did Jefferson say about slavery in that first draft that was so controversial they had to take it out? Well, in a section about American grievances towards King George III, laying out their grievances, why they felt he was ruling them unjustly, he wrote a whole part blaming King George for slavery in America. He said it was the British monarchy’s fault that the slave trade was a thing and that it was all for their profit yada yada, and in making this claim, he called the slave trade specifically quote “execrable commerce,” an “assemblage of horrors,” and a “cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberties,” end quote. So yeah they took that part out, because, like Miller said, you can’t say those things in a founding document of your country and then continue to do it, continue to enslave people, and trade and profit off human beings, continue this quote “cruel war against human nature itself.” But Jefferson obviously didn’t see the hypocrisy as a problem. Because that’s exactly what he continued to do personally. 


Remember the “two competing impulses” Encyclopedia Britannica talked about? There was this political side to Jefferson and then there was this personal reclusive side. And they were like two completely different people. Because while he wasn’t in Philadelphia calling the slave trade an assemblage of horrors and pointing fingers of blame at the King of England, he was at home, at Monticello, his mansion on the mountain, perpetuating the very horrors he so publicly spoke out against. In his lifetime, Thomas Jefferson enslaved around 600 people. They built Monticello, they worked the surrounding fields and factories that funded it, they kept it running, attended to its every need, to the needs of the Jefferson family and their many guests, as many as 40 guests at one time, more a hotel than a home. It was an army of enslaved people who did all of this. But Thomas Jefferson wasn’t stupid. He knew enough to know he couldn’t outwardly bash slavery and then go home and flaunt hundreds of slaves to his esteemed guests. And so he did his best to keep that side of things hidden. The cogs in a machine are not often visible. There’s a shiny sheet of metal slapped on top and that is what Jefferson did with Monticello. 


In a Smithsonian Magazine article, historian and author of the biography “Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves” Henry Wiencek writes quote “Thomas Jefferson’s mansion stands atop his mountain like the Platonic ideal of a house: a perfect creation existing in an ethereal realm, literally above the clouds. To reach Monticello, you must ascend what a visitor called “this steep, savage hill,” through a thick forest and swirls of mist that recede at the summit, as if by command of the master of the mountain. “If it had not been called Monticello,” said one visitor, “I would call it Olympus, and Jove its occupant.” The house that presents itself at the summit seems to contain some kind of secret wisdom encoded in its form. Seeing Monticello is like reading an old American Revolutionary manifesto—the emotions still rise. This is the architecture of the New World, brought forth by its guiding spirit. In designing the mansion, Jefferson followed a precept laid down two centuries earlier by Palladio: “We must contrive a building in such a manner that the finest and most noble parts of it be the most exposed to public view, and the less agreeable disposed in by places, and removed from sight as much as possible,” end quote. Now you may take that to mean, like, hey let’s not put the toilet in the living room, right? Let’s make the parts that people see the more appealing parts and hide the stuff that’s more private or less tasteful or whatever. What that meant at Monticello was that the inner workings of the house and the enslaved labor that supported it were hidden from view and so it appeared that Jefferson was just sort of doing all this himself. He built the house, he funded the house, he maintained the house and he ran the household, when in reality he didn’t do any of those things, not really, not without a ton of unseen help. “Never did a man achieve more fame for what he did not do.” 


Wiencek goes on quote “The mansion sits atop a long tunnel through which slaves, unseen, hurried back and forth carrying platters of food, fresh tableware, ice, beer, wine and linens, while above them 20, 30 or 40 guests sat listening to Jefferson’s dinner-table conversation. At one end of the tunnel lay the icehouse, at the other the kitchen, a hive of ceaseless activity where the enslaved cooks and their helpers produced one course after another. During dinner Jefferson would open a panel in the side of the fireplace, insert an empty wine bottle and seconds later pull out a full bottle. We can imagine that he would delay explaining how this magic took place until an astonished guest put the question to him. The panel concealed a narrow dumbwaiter that descended to the basement. When Jefferson put an empty bottle in the compartment, a slave waiting in the basement pulled the dumbwaiter down, removed the empty, inserted a fresh bottle and sent it up to the master in a matter of seconds. Similarly, platters of hot food magically appeared on a revolving door fitted with shelves, and the used plates disappeared from sight on the same contrivance. Guests could not see or hear any of the activity, nor the links between the visible world and the invisible that magically produced Jefferson’s abundance,” end quote. 


I like that description because it really demonstrates this sort of vanishing act, this magic trick, this wool Jefferson was pulling over people’s eyes that he was this valiant righteous man who had accomplished so much with his own two hands. In reality, he didn’t do any of that, he forced others to do it for him and he hid them from sight so he could claim the credit. Many of the people he enslaved who kept Monticello running lived in cabins on Mulberry Row near the mansion. You have to understand, this was really more of a small town than a house or a plantation. It had fields with crops and stuff and then the mansion of course but it also had industry, there were cabinet makers, a dairy, stables, a small textile factory, blacksmiths, brewers, cooks trained in French cuisine, painters, millers, weavers, a nail factory run by enslaved boys ages 10 to 12. He was trying to make it this self sufficient thing. The people he enslaved didn’t just tend to the house and the crops like on a normal plantation, they were tradesmen and they created all these things, these goods that they sold for money that went straight to Jefferson, of course, because they were enslaved and the vast majority of the people doing this work were unpaid. Wiencek writes quote “It seems puzzling that Jefferson placed Mulberry Row, with its slave cabins and work buildings, so close to the mansion, but we are projecting the present onto the past. Today, tourists can walk freely up and down the old slave quarter. But in Jefferson’s time, guests didn’t go there, nor could they see it from the mansion or the lawn. Only one visitor left a description of Mulberry Row, and she got a glimpse of it only because she was a close friend of Jefferson’s, someone who could be counted upon to look with the right attitude. When she published her account in the Richmond Enquirer, she wrote that the cabins would appear quote “poor and uncomfortable” only to people of quote “northern feelings,” end quote. 


Wiencek talks in detail about the nail factory. Jefferson was particularly proud of this nail factory where he forced little boys to hammer anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 nails all day long because it was super profitable. Of the nailery Jefferson wrote quote “My new trade of nail-making is to me in this country what an additional title of nobility or the ensigns of a new order are in Europe,” end quote. He also wrote quote “a nailery which I have established with my own negro boys now provides completely for the maintenance of my family” end quote. And in a letter to a Richmond merchant quote, “My groceries come to between 4. and 500. Dollars a year, taken and paid for quarterly. The best resource of quarterly paiment in my power is Nails, of which I make enough every fortnight to pay a quarter’s bill,” end quote. So cool, he’s bragging about how much money he’s making from forcing little boys to forge nails all day long. Meanwhile, his biggest competition as far as selling nails? The state penitentiary where they forced prisoners to make nails and sell them. And somehow he’s not seeing the connection that he’s essentially treating children as prisoners. Clearly not seeing it because he’s literally bragging about it in his letters. 


And so what’s the counter argument going to be even, shockingly, in modern times? Well I’ll tell you because I hear it again and again in response to anything I put out about slavery. “Well, he treated them really well though. Jefferson treated his slaves really well. Those boys were happy to work in that nail factory. They were learning a trade and they were well fed and had clean clothes and a place to sleep. They were lucky.” I hear it all the time, he treated them well. And, not that it matters, because they were enslaved and so that injustice neutralizes any kind of good treatment he showed them. But also, no he did not treat them well. People think he treated them well because we were straight up lied to that he treated them well. I have two examples specifically about the nail factory child labor situation. First, Wiencek writes quote “A letter has recently come to light describing how Monticello’s young black boys, “the small ones,” age 10, 11 or 12, were whipped to get them to work in Jefferson’s nail factory, whose profits paid the mansion’s grocery bills. This passage about children being lashed had been suppressed—deliberately deleted from the published record in the 1953 edition of Jefferson’s Farm Book, containing 500 pages of plantation papers. That edition of the Farm Book still serves as a standard reference for research into the way Monticello worked,” end quote. Deliberately deleted, omitted from a collection of other papers because it talked about beating children which they obviously knew was wrong in 1953 but kept quiet in order to preserve Jefferson’s reputation and it’s still the standard reference. Omission is as good as lying. In 1941 a biography about Jefferson written for young adults ages 12 to 16 came out that mentioned the nailery in the most toxically positive way ever. It said quote “In this beehive of industry no discord or revilings found entrance: there were no signs of discontent on the black shining faces as they worked under the direction of their master....The women sang at their tasks and the children old enough to work made nails leisurely, not too overworked for a prank now and then,” end quote. The prank that is lightheartedly mentioned there is referring to the time a child had his head beaten in, his skull crushed by the hammer of another child over an argument and then the offender was sold south, separated from his family in order to terrify the other children and make them behave. “En terrorem,” Jefferson’s words. He also said that the boy was sold quote “as if he were put out of the way by death,” end quote. Which like, yeah he shouldn’t have hit the other kid in the head with a hammer, he survived by the way in case you were wondering, but also, maybe that’s just what happens when you give 10 year old boys hammers and force them to do hard labor over a hot fire all day long and also beat them and also not pay them and also threaten to sell them away from their families. Whose fault was that really? 


So what happened here? How can we explain this discrepancy between what Jefferson wrote about slavery and about all men being created equal in the Declaration of Independence and what he was actually doing at Monticello? He also wrote in some personal letters in the 1780s and 90s that slavery was “moral depravity” and a “hideous blot.” How can he say one thing and act so differently? Well he was benefiting from it immensely which is probably the best and the simplest explanation. Jefferson researchers describe a notable shift in him in the early 1790s. He tones down his championing against slavery in a big way. A lot of this was probably political. He didn’t want to lose the support of the southern slave states and all that as far as his future political career was involved. He was from Virginia after all. But also, according to Wiencek at least, he seems to have come to a revelation of sorts around that time. And he actually writes about this revelation in a letter to none other than George Washington, our other golden boy, a bit of financial advice you might call it. Wiencek explains quote “The critical turning point in Jefferson’s thinking may well have come in 1792. As Jefferson was counting up the agricultural profits and losses of his plantation in a letter to President Washington that year, it occurred to him that there was a phenomenon he had perceived at Monticello but never actually measured. He proceeded to calculate it in a barely legible, scribbled note in the middle of a page, enclosed in brackets. What Jefferson set out clearly for the first time was that he was making a 4 percent profit every year on the birth of black children. The enslaved were yielding him a bonanza, a perpetual human dividend at compound interest. Jefferson wrote [quote], “I allow nothing for losses by death, but, on the contrary, shall presently take credit four per cent. per annum, for their increase over and above keeping up their own numbers.” His plantation was producing inexhaustible human assets. The percentage was predictable. In another communication from the early 1790s, Jefferson takes the 4 percent formula further and quite bluntly advances the notion that slavery presented an investment strategy for the future. He writes that an acquaintance who had suffered financial reverses [quote] “should have been invested in negroes.” He advises that if the friend’s family had any cash left, [quote] “every farthing of it [should be] laid out in land and negroes, which besides a present support bring a silent profit of from 5. to 10. per cent in this country by the increase in their value,” end quote. Quite a turnaround from his earlier expressed feelings about slavery. He had now figured out that he was profiting 4 percent every year on the birth of every black child he enslaved. He had a number. 4 percent. Wiencek believes this quantification, this realization of the financial value of slavery, is what caused him to tone down his anti-slavery opinions considerably in later years. He was like “oh 4 percent? Okay I’ll shut up now.” But, Professor Annette Gordon-Reed disagrees with Wiencek in an article she wrote for Slate Magazine. She believes he’s reading too much into Jefferson’s scribblings in that letter and that Jefferson was actually referring to the profits of Virginia plantations in general and not the profit of each Black child born at Monticello.  


But when we dug into it in later years, this 4% theory, there is truth to it. He wasn’t wrong, if that’s what he was referring to to begin with. Economists in the 1970s took a hard look at slavery in the southern states leading up to the Civil War and the statistics they came up with backed Jefferson’s mid letter number crunching. At that time, just like Jefferson said, enslaved Black people were the second most valuable asset in the US, just under land. If Wiencek’s account is to be believed, Jefferson intentionally put his stock in owning human beings because they brought him the second greatest return on investment and he knew it. Further backing that theory is this little ditty he wrote to one of his plantation managers quote “A child raised every 2. years is of more profit then the crop of the best laboring man. in this, as in all other cases, providence has made our duties and our interests coincide perfectly.... [W]ith respect therefore to our women & their children I must pray you to inculcate upon the overseers that it is not their labor, but their increase which is the first consideration with us,” end quote. Not their labor, but their increase. Because an enslaved human being was worth a whole lot more than the cotton or tobacco or nails or whatever they produced, Jefferson seems to have realized. And this is significant. Because remember I told you we have to keep it all in context right? And we do. Jefferson was born into a planter family in Virginia. Slavery was a part of life then and there. You could use that to explain away his guilt. He didn’t know any better. Except we know he did. He put it in writing multiple times y’all: “moral depravity,” a “hideous blot,” “execrable commerce,” an “assemblage of horrors,” a “cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberties,” “all men created equal.” We know he knew better. And so then some might argue that he was just trapped. Trapped in this lifestyle where slavery was a requirement of life. Wiencek attempts to destroy that argument when he writes quote “Jefferson’s 4 percent theorem threatens the comforting notion that he had no real awareness of what he was doing, that he was “stuck” with or “trapped” in slavery, an obsolete, unprofitable, burdensome legacy. The date of Jefferson’s calculation aligns with the waning of his emancipationist fervor. Jefferson began to back away from antislavery just around the time he computed the silent profit of the “peculiar institution,” end quote. And you know, whether he’s talking about the birth of Black babies specifically as Wiencek claims, or the profits of Virginia plantations in general according to Gordon-Reed, he’s not trapped. He’s not a victim of the age. He’s just not going to leave money sitting on the table. Four percent profit every year to be exact. 

 

As you probably already know, Jefferson went on to serve in various important political roles in the early government. He became governor of Virginia in 1779. He was Secretary of State under George Washington when the capital was still in Philadelphia. Then he was Vice President under John Adams after the move to Washington DC. And in 1801, he was elected as the third president of the United States. That’s a lot of political movement, that’s a lot of critical elections and so I think he also toned down his anti slavery sentiments to appeal to more voters at that time. But he’s sort of always walking this tightrope of trying to show people what they want to see, the facade. He’s not calling slavery a hideous blot while he’s running for president and trying to secure the votes of the slave states in the south. But he’s also not going to move the hundreds of people he enslaves into the White House and reveal how much of a hypocrite he actually is to the north either. In fact, Jefferson employed white people to work in the White House during his time as president. He paid them. He paid white people to work for him. Because that was the image he wanted people to see. Forget Monticello, don’t look over there, where hundreds of enslaved Black people are still working away making me that 4% profit boost a year. Look right here. I paid this white French guy to cook for me. Jefferson only ever brought 3 of the people he enslaved at Monticello to the White House, 3 teenaged girls to train under the French chef so that they could cook French food for him when he went back to Virginia. He also hired out a few Black people who were enslaved by others nearby. But for the most part he didn’t bring his own enslaved people to Washington. And there’s a reason for that. It was strategic. It was important to his image, of course, but also he didn’t want the people he enslaved getting the wrong idea in Washington. Washington DC even at that time, early 1800s, had a thriving free Black population. He didn’t want the people he enslaved at Monticello to come to Washington and realize that they could be getting more out of life than they were getting and to start making demands. Because this had happened to him before.  


After Jefferson’s wife Martha died in childbirth back in 1782, he took a couple of his daughters and a couple of the people he enslaved, a brother and sister named James and Sally Hemings with him to France. He went to Paris with Benjamin Franklin and John Adams to serve as US minister to France. You know France was a big part of the Revolutionary War, they came to America’s aid in a big way and so it makes sense. They have this sort of alliance. He brought James Hemings along to train in the art of French cooking while he was there. Jefferson was really into French food if that isn’t obvious yet. And he brought Sally Hemings along as a nurse to his two daughters, like a nanny, essentially, except it will come out later that there was a whole lot more to that relationship. We’ll circle back to that. Mainland France didn’t have slavery in the 1780s. It was still a thing in their overseas colonies but not in the country itself. And, while there, James and Sally saw the way Black people lived as free people in France. The stark contrast to their own realities was eye opening and they actually began to try to negotiate with Jefferson after this to improve their standing back in Virginia. They came back with him, they didn’t try to run off and stay in France or anything like that, but they did kind of stick it to him after that like “you know, look at these free Black people in France, we could really have it better back at Monticello.” And James was actually able to negotiate his own freedom after this. Jefferson agreed to free him after he trained someone else to do the French cooking stuff that he had learned about. James was only one of two people out of 600 that Jefferson freed during his lifetime. And so this is likely another reason he didn’t bring the people he enslaved at Monticello to DC. He didn’t want them to get any wild ideas and start trying to negotiate as James had done. 


Now, Jefferson never freed Sally which is kind of crazy considering the evidence that came out then and since that he had a pretty serious ongoing physical relationship with her. Lina Mann writes for the White House Historical Association quote “It was particularly important that Sally Hemings not be seen at the White House. On September 1, 1802, a journalist named James Callender published a bombshell revelation in the Richmond Recorder, [quote] “It is well known that the man, whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps, and for many years has kept, as his concubine, one of his slaves. Her name is SALLY.” The article exposed Jefferson’s relationship with Sally, and subsequent media coverage speculated over the paternity of Hemings’ children. Jefferson was keen to avoid further discussion on this subject, and therefore as far as we know, Sally Hemings and other members of the Hemings family stayed at Monticello during his entire presidency,” end quote. Although he denied it, or just sort of avoided it really, at the time, DNA testing done in 1998 revealed a match between the Y chromosome of Eston Hemings, one of Sally’s sons, and a male line descendent of Thomas Jefferson’s family. His nephews were also ruled out. So was Jefferson definitely the father? Not technically, just a Jefferson male, but not his nephews. But was Jefferson probably the father. Um yes, especially considering contemporary claims that he had a sexual relationship with Sally at the time her six children were born and there is a DNA link to one of them. It is believed that Thomas Jefferson may have fathered all of them and a plethora of other evidence backs this up. The guy kept crazily detailed records of literally everything he did. And records of his travels prove that he was at Monticello during the estimated dates of conception of all of Sally’s six children. Four of those children survived to adulthood and two of them were officially freed by Jefferson in his will only after his death in 1826. But, he never freed Sally. She was unofficially freed after his death by his daughter Martha Jefferson Randolph who I assume was like “OMG this is ridiculous, you’re dead dad, free this poor woman, the mother of your children you freaking psychopath.” I mean, I don’t know. I’m putting words in Martha’s mouth here but that’s how I would have felt about that. 


So when you think about that, you think about the man enslaving 6 of his own children, only emancipating them after he was dead, and then you think about those numbers he crunched in that letter to George Washington, that realization he had that he earned a 4% profit each year for the birth of every Black child or just like as a Virginia enslaver in general, whatever, whichever it was, and then he himself is producing Black children that he is knowingly profiting off of, 4% a year. This is one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever heard. America’s golden boy? Thomas Jefferson was a straight up psychopath who intentionally and methodically hid the horrific truth of who he really was from the public eye then and even now in a way that only a true psychopath would ever dare attempt. Just as Monticello was a facade, a majestic mansion on a mini mountain with underground tunnels and concealed doorways that hid the unpleasantness of what was really happening, the true cost of living in such luxury, so was the man himself. Jefferson said one thing and did another. He hid his true depravity, a man who would put a number, a percentage yearly profit on the births of children, even his own children, who would order that children be beaten, authorize the separation of children from their parents, the selling of human lives to instill fear, to teach a lesson. He hid that under flowery words and passionate prose. “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness;” these are the words upon which we built our country, the words that solidified Jefferson as the moral champion of America. What an absolute sham. 


Yes, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington are both America’s golden boys and yes both of them fell short when it came to dealing with slavery in early America. But what I find strange is that Jefferson emerged as the one who was anti-slavery, the one willing to call it out as wrong with words like cruel, depraved, and hideous. Jefferson is the one remembered for this. And yet he’s the one writing to Washington with this 4% revelation, Washington, who freed all of the people he enslaved, albeit after his death, because he was disgusted that slavery had made human beings into money like quote “cattle in the market.” Washington freed all the people he enslaved in his will after the death of his wife Martha who chose to free them even earlier, while she was still alive. And this was mostly because Washington’s stupid decision to do that had put a huge bounty on her head. He was basically like “OK, you guys can be free after my wife dies. But also, please don’t kill my wife because that wouldn’t be very nice.” Okay? Martha was like, yeah I’m good on that, and she emancipated them. I’m not 100% happy with how that went down. I think Washington could have done better as someone who admittedly realized the horrors of slavery, but it’s a whole lot better than what happened to the people Jefferson enslaved. Wiencek comments on this quote “It is curious that we accept Jefferson as the moral standard of the founders’ era, not Washington. Perhaps it is because the Father of his Country [Washington] left a somewhat troubling legacy: His emancipation of his slaves stands as not a tribute but a rebuke to his era, and to the prevaricators and profiteers of the future, and declares that if you claim to have principles, you must live by them,” end quote. That’s not exactly a message the powers that be today want to accept. They don’t live by their own principles and so to see a man like Thomas Jefferson pull this off and get away with it in a big way, somehow come off as some kind of moral hero, I mean it just makes sense when you look at who is benefiting from that precedent now. 


Unlike Washington, Jefferson continued to enslave people even after his death. He made no plans for emancipation in his will as Washington had done, except for 5 people, two of his sons with Sally Hemings, Sally’s half brother, a blacksmith, and a carpenter. The rest of them weren’t even free after his death. So what happened to them? I’ll let Henry Wiencek explain. He writes quote “After Jefferson’s death in 1826, the families of Jefferson’s most devoted servants were split apart. Onto the auction block went Caroline Hughes, the 9-year-old daughter of Jefferson’s gardener Wormley Hughes. One family was divided up among eight different buyers, another family among seven buyers. Joseph Fossett, a Monticello blacksmith, was among the handful of slaves freed in Jefferson’s will, but Jefferson left Fossett’s family enslaved. In the six months between Jefferson’s death and the auction of his property, Fossett tried to strike bargains with families in Charlottesville to purchase his wife and six of his seven children. His oldest child (born, ironically, in the White House itself) had already been given to Jefferson’s grandson. Fossett found sympathetic buyers for his wife, his son Peter and two other children, but he watched the auction of three young daughters to different buyers. One of them, 17-year-old Patsy, immediately escaped from her new master, a University of Virginia official. Joseph Fossett spent ten years at his anvil and forge earning the money to buy back his wife and children. By the late 1830s he had cash in hand to reclaim Peter, then about 21, but the owner reneged on the deal. Compelled to leave Peter in slavery and having lost three daughters, Joseph and Edith Fossett departed Charlottesville for Ohio around 1840. Years later, speaking as a free man in Ohio in 1898, Peter, who was 83, would recount that he had never forgotten the moment when he was [quote] “put up on the auction block and sold like a horse.” How’s that for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? 


Thank you all so very much for listening to History Fix, I hope you found this story interesting and maybe you even learned something new. Be sure to follow my instagram @historyfixpodcast to see some images that go along with this episode and to stay on top of new episodes as they drop. I’d also really appreciate it if you’d rate and follow History Fix on whatever app you’re using to listen, and help me spread the word by telling a few friends about it. That’ll make it much easier to get your next fix. 


Information used in this episode was sourced from Smithsonian Magazine, the White House Historical Association, Encyclopedia Britannica, and Monticello.org. As always, links to these sources can be found in the show notes.