Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, owned more than 620 slaves during his adult life. Jefferson freed two while he lived, and five others were freed after his death, including two of his children from his relationship with his sister-in-law Sally Hemings, who was also his slave. His other two children with Hemings were allowed to escape without pursuit. After his death, the rest of his slaves were sold to pay off his estate's debts.
Privately, one of Jefferson's reasons for not freeing more of his slaves was his considerable debt,Sloan offset (1995), Principle and Interest: Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Debt, p. 14 while his more public justification, expressed in his book Notes on the State of Virginia, was his fear that their release into American society would cause civil unrest between white people and those whom they had once enslaved.
Jefferson consistently spoke out against the international slave trade and was president when it was outlawed. He advocated for a gradual emancipation of all enslaved Americans and the colonization of Africa by free African Americans.Howe, Daniel W. (1997), Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln, p. 74 However, he opposed some other measures to restrict slavery within the United States, and also was against voluntary manumission.John B. Boles, "Thomas Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty," pp. 117, 2017
Early years (1743–1774)
Thomas Jefferson was born into the planter class of a "slave society", as defined by the historian Ira Berlin, in which slavery was the main form of labor in production.Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998, pp. 7–13 He was the son of Peter Jefferson, a prominent slaveholder and land speculator in Virginia, and Jane Randolph, granddaughter of English and Scots gentry. In 1757, when Jefferson was 14, his father died. He inherited of land, 52 slaves, livestock, his father's notable library, and a gristmill.Malone, TJ, 1:114, 437–39McLoughlin, Jefferson and Monticello, 34. This property was initially under control of his guardian, John Harvie Sr. He assumed full control over these properties at age 21.Malone, 1948, pp. 437–40. In 1768, Jefferson began construction of a neoclassical mansion known as Monticello, which overlooked the hamlet of his former home in Shadwell. As an attorney, Jefferson represented people of color as well as whites. In 1770, he defended a young mixed-race male slave in a freedom suit, on the grounds that his mother was white and freeborn. By the colony's law of partus sequitur ventrem, that the child took the status of the mother, the man should never have been enslaved. He lost the suit.Halliday (2001), Understanding Thomas Jefferson, pp. 141–42 In 1772, Jefferson represented George Manly, the son of a free woman of color, who sued for freedom after having been held as an indentured servant three years past the expiration of his term. (The Virginia colony at the time 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 Jefferson, her father died. She and Jefferson inherited his estate, including , 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 mixed-race slave Betty Hemings as a concubine and had six children with her during his last 12 years.
These additional forced laborers made Jefferson the second-largest slaveholder in Albemarle County. In addition, he held nearly of land in Virginia. He sold some people to pay off the debt of Wayles's estate. From this time on, Jefferson owned and supervised 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.Halliday (2001), Understanding Thomas Jefferson, p. 143
In collaboration with Monticello, now the major public history site on Jefferson, the Smithsonian opened on the National Mall an exhibit, Slavery at Jefferson's Monticello: The Paradox of Liberty, (January – October 2012) at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. It covered Jefferson as a slaveholder and the roughly 600 enslaved people who lived at Monticello over the decades, with a focus on six enslaved families and their descendants. It was the first national exhibit on the Mall to address these issues. In February 2012, Monticello opened a related new outdoor exhibition, Landscape of Slavery: Mulberry Row at Monticello, which "brings to life the stories of the scores of people—enslaved and free—who lived and worked on Jefferson's plantation."
Shortly after ending his law practice in 1774, Jefferson wrote A Summary View of the Rights of British America, which was submitted to the First Continental Congress. In it, he argued Americans were entitled to all the rights of British citizens, and denounced King George for wrongfully usurping local authority in the colonies. In regard to slavery, Jefferson wrote "The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies, where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state. But previous to the enfranchisement of the slaves we have, it is necessary to exclude all further importations from Africa; yet our repeated attempts to effect this by prohibitions, and by imposing duties which might amount to a prohibition, have been hitherto defeated by his majesty's negative: Thus preferring the immediate advantages of a few African corsairs to the lasting interests of the American states, and to the rights of human nature, deeply wounded by this infamous practice."
Revolutionary period (1775–1783)
In 1775, Thomas Jefferson joined the Continental Congress as a delegate from Virginia when he and others in Virginia began to rebel against the Royal Governor of Virginia, 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 Patriot masters and joined the British. Dunmore's action led to a mass exodus of tens of thousands of forced laborers from plantations across the South during the war years; some of the people Jefferson held as slaves also fled.John Hope Franklin, "Rebels, Runaways and Heroes: The Bitter Years of Slavery", Life, November 22, 1968
The colonists 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", though the institution of slavery itself was never mentioned by name at any point in the document.Becker (1922), Declaration of Independence, p. 5.The Spirit of the Revolution, John Fitzpatrick, 1924, p. 6 In the original draft of the Declaration, Jefferson inserted a clause condemning King George III for forcing the slave trade onto the American colonies and inciting enslaved African Americans to "rise in arms" against their masters:
The Continental Congress, however, due to Southern opposition, forced Jefferson to delete the clause in the final draft of the Declaration.4 December 1818 letter to Robert Walsh, in Saul K. Padover, ed., A Jefferson Profile: As Revealed in His Letters. (New York, 1956) 300John Chester Miller, The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery, (New York: Free Press, 1977), 8 Jefferson did manage to make a general criticism against slavery by maintaining "all men are created equal." Jefferson did not directly condemn domestic slavery as such in the Declaration, as Jefferson himself was a slaveowner. According to Finkelman, "The colonists, for the most part, had been willing and eager purchasers of slaves."Finkleman (2008), 379+ Researcher William D. Richardson proposed that Thomas Jefferson's use of "MEN" in capital letters would be a repudiation of those who may believe that the Declaration was not including slaves with the word "Mankind".
That same year, Jefferson submitted a draft for the new Virginia Constitution containing the phrase "No person hereafter coming into this country shall be held within the same in slavery under any pretext whatever." His proposal was not adopted.
In 1778 with Jefferson's leadership and probably authorship, the Virginia General Assembly banned importing people to be used as slaves into Virginia. It was one of the first jurisdictions in the world to ban the international slave trade, and all other states except South Carolina eventually followed prior to the Congress banning the trade in 1807.Dubois, 14
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."John Chester Miller, The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery, New York: Free Press, 1977, p. 24 As was customary, he brought some of the household workers he held in slavery, including Mary Hemings, to serve in the governor's mansion in Richmond. Facing a British invasion in January 1781, Jefferson and the Assembly members fled the capital and moved the government to Charlottesville, leaving Jefferson's slaves behind. Hemings and other enslaved people were taken by the British as prisoners of war; they were later released in exchange for captured British soldiers. In 2009, the Daughters of the Revolution (DAR) honored Mary Hemings as a Patriot, making her female descendants eligible for membership in the heritage society.American Spirit Magazine, Daughters of the American Revolution, January–February 2009, p. 4
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 those he held as 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 looted another plantation owned by Jefferson, Elkhill in Goochland County, Virginia, northwest of Richmond. Of the 30 enslaved people they took as prisoners, Jefferson later claimed that at least 27 had died of disease in their camp.
While claiming since the 1770s to support gradual emancipation, as a member of the Virginia General Assembly Jefferson declined to support a law to ask that, saying the people were not ready. After the United States gained independence, in 1782 the Virginia General Assembly repealed the slave law of 1723 and made it easier for slaveholders to manumit slaves. Unlike some of his planter contemporaries, such as Robert Carter III, who freed nearly 500 people held slaves in his lifetime, or George Washington, who freed all the enslaved people he legally owned in his will of 1799, Jefferson formally freed only two people during his life, in 1793 and 1794. Virginia did not require freed people to leave the state until 1806."An ACT to amend the several laws concerning slaves" (1806), Virginia General Assembly. From 1782 to 1810, as numerous slaveholders freed enslaved people, the proportion of free blacks in Virginia increased dramatically from less than 1% to 7.2% of blacks.Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619–1865, New York: Hill and Wang, pp. 73, 77, 81
Following the Revolution (1784–1800)