Thomas Jefferson Owned Child Slaves
Wikimedia CommonsThomas Jefferson owned 600 slaves in his lifetime and raped 14-year-old Sally Hemings.
The founding father who coined the phrase “all men are created equal,” Thomas Jefferson, was horribly hypocritical.
Earlier in his career, the third president of the United States described the African slave trade as a “hideous blot on the country,” and a “moral depravity.” Jefferson was even one of the very few founders who consistently pushed back against the interest of Virginian slaveowners in the 1780s.
Unfortunately, he was swayed by how cost-effective and profitable the practice was. And Jefferson tragically had a knack for being a slaver, running a veritable kingdom of slaves.
The founding father’s Monticello estate, a private mountain-based plantation in Virginia, housed around 130 slaves at the height of its commercial success. He conveniently grew quiet about slavery during the 1790s, focusing his efforts on the estimated 600 slaves that would work for him in total, instead.
Four hundred of these men and women were born at Monticello and forced into a life of painstaking labor.
Monticello itself oddly resembled a small town and differed only in that it ran entirely on slave labor. Jefferson’s operations included blacksmithing, woodworking, textiles and farming, but he was particularly proud of his nail-making business.
Wikimedia CommonsPage 30 of Jefferson’s 1795 farm book lists 163 slaves at Monticello.
The nail factory was so profitable that Jefferson bragged about it in numerous letters. To put into context how well it did, the annual grocery bill for the entire plantation was around $500 — which the nail factory covered within two months.
But the factory was also a breeding ground for child slaves. Jefferson used it to weed out the weak children and promote the harder-working ones. He would reward those who could make 10,000 nails per day with privileges such as extra food and leisure time, and punished the rest with lower rations, brutal whippings, and rags for clothing.
Jefferson also had no intention of freeing his slaves once he realized how profitable the practice could be.
The wealthy Virginian also feared that freeing America’s slaves would lead to a revolt. He, at one point, even wanted to ban free Black people from entering Virginia so that their autonomy wouldn’t inspire enslaved people to rebel.
“But as it is, we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is tin one scale and self preservation in the other,” he wrote.
Based on his writings, it is perhaps safe to assume that the founding father was simply racist. He believed Black people were intellectually inferior while condemning white slavery.
“But the slaves of which Homer speaks were whites. Notwithstanding these considerations which must weaken their respect for the laws of property, we find among them numerous instances of the most rigid integrity, and as many as among their better instructed masters, of benevolence, gratitude, and unshaken fidelity… the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.”
Remarkably, Jefferson’s transgressions didn’t end with enslavement.
