Thomas Jefferson And His Slaves

By Tony Lindsay

Master of the Mountain 

By Henry Wiencek

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2012, $17.95 (Clothe)

Master of the Mountain, Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves is more than a Jefferson biography. Henry Wiencek’s writing of the man and the people he enslaved offers a controversial portrayal of America’s third president. However, as the title indicates, the work is also concerned with Jefferson’s slaves. Wiencek discusses their acquisition and retention.

Jefferson acquired slaves through marriage, through purchase, and through birth. Those born into slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello Plantation is one of the focuses of Wiencek’s text, and a point of scholarship for other biographers and historians due to the miscegenation Jefferson wrote so adamantly against but participated in.

In Wiencek’s expository work, many contradictions in Jefferson’s public self and private self are explored. These contradictions work as a motif in Master of the Mountain.�

Jefferson wrote elegantly and quite convincingly for the emancipation of slaves in America. Wiencek notes that these manumission writings can be found in early drafts of the Declaration of Independence as well as in Jefferson’s papers and letters. But the writings only add to the contradictions of the man.

Few biographical tasks are more frustrating than trying to assemble a montage of quotations from Jefferson’s written work that make sense of his stance on slavery.

Among the completely contradictory points he advanced about slaves and slavery, we have: the institution was evil; Blacks had natural rights, and slavery abrogated those rights; emancipation was desirable; emancipation was imminent; emancipation was impossible because slaves were incompetent; emancipation was just over the horizon but could not take place until the minds of White people were “ripened” for it.

According to Wiencek, the French and many Americans of the era thought of Jefferson as an abolitionist due to his writings. But, how he lived his life at Monticello proved him pro-slavery.

Wiencek makes it clear that despite his early writings, Thomas Jefferson lived his life as a slaver. He may not have wailed the lash himself, but he ordered it wailed, and he profited from the buying and selling of human beings. As a slaver, “it was his fixed view that he and his heirs were entitled to the Black children.”

Slavery yielded a profit for Jefferson personally, and as a Founding Father, he felt the country would profit from it as well. If he did, as early writings suggest, view Blacks as people, the profit of slavery soon changed that idealistic and humanitarian view.

In a letter to Edward Coles, a man who was freeing his slaves, Jefferson wrote, “I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable then the best man of the farm. What she produces is an addition to the capital.”

Wiencek’s text plainly illustrates that Jefferson’s actions supported the beliefs he lived by; slavery for economical gain was not a dilemma for Thomas Jefferson.

Slaves were an asset to be used, not people to be treated fairly. In Jefferson’s work, Notes on the State of Virginia, he makes reference to the inferiority of Blacks, writing that African women mated with gorillas.

Jefferson so believed in the profit of slavery for the nation that when he secured the Louisiana Purchase from the French, he clandestinely included that the territory would allow slavery – against public opinion and the strong abolitionists’ desires.

To further solidify Jefferson as pro-slavery, Wiencek writes, “As U.S. minister to France in the 1780s, Jefferson had begun to see slave labor as the most powerful and most convenient engine of the American enterprise. With a class of slaves, the United States could produce the commodities (tobacco and rice) needed to pay down the country’s debt to Great Britain.

“And then in the next decade, on his home ground, Jefferson began to perceive the pure financial value of owning slaves. Farming would always be a species of ‘gambling,’ in his memorable image, but the ownership of slaves, and the existence of a robust secondary market for slaves, provided not only a safety net, but an investment opportunity.”

A reader leaves Henry Wiencek’s Master of the Mountain without the traditional view of an American Founding Father, but with a view altered by stated historical events.

The truth, Wiencek says, is that “for decades Jefferson skillfully played both sides of the slavery question, maintaining his reputation as a liberal while doing nothing.” The more startling truth is that, “at Jefferson’s core there lay a fundamental belief in the righteousness of his power. Jefferson wore racism like a suit of armor, knowing that it would always break the sharpest swords of the idealist.”

Master of the Mountain, Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves gives one a unique insight into a Founding Father of America – that Thomas Jefferson used slave laborers (a large number of which shared his DNA) for his personal profit and to aide in the nation’s wealth building.