The percentage was predictable. In another communication from the early s, Jefferson takes the 4 percent formula further and quite bluntly advances the notion that slavery presented an investment strategy for the future. Yet Jefferson was right, prescient, about the investment value of slaves. A startling statistic emerged in the s, when economists taking a hardheaded look at slavery found that on the eve of the Civil War, enslaved black people, in the aggregate, formed the second most valuable capital asset in the United States.
The formula Jefferson had stumbled upon became the engine not only of Monticello but of the entire slaveholding South and the Northern industries, shippers, banks, insurers and investors who weighed risk against returns and bet on slavery.
And this world was crueler than we have been led to believe. That edition of the Farm Book still serves as a standard reference for research into the way Monticello worked. In a strangely modern twist, Jefferson had taken note of the measurable climate change in the region: The Chesapeake region was unmistakably cooling and becoming inhospitable to heat-loving tobacco that would soon, he thought, become the staple of South Carolina and Georgia.
He visited farms and inspected equipment, considering a new crop, wheat, and the exciting prospect it opened before him. Planters all over the Chesapeake region had been making the shift. Besides cloathing the earth with herbage, and preserving its fertility, it feeds the labourers plentifully, requires from them only a moderate toil, except in the season of harvest, raises great numbers of animals for food and service, and diffuses plenty and happiness among the whole.
Wheat farming forced changes in the relationship between planter and slave. Tobacco was raised by gangs of slaves all doing the same repetitive, backbreaking tasks under the direct, strict supervision of overseers. They were all slaves, but some slaves would be better than others. The majority remained laborers; above them were enslaved artisans both male and female ; above them were enslaved managers; above them was the household staff.
The higher you stood in the hierarchy, the better clothes and food you got; you also lived literally on a higher plane, closer to the mountaintop. Differences bred resentment, especially toward the elite household staff.
Planting wheat required fewer workers than tobacco, leaving a pool of field laborers available for specialized training. Jefferson embarked on a comprehensive program to modernize slavery, diversify it and industrialize it. Monticello would have a nail factory, a textile factory, a short-lived tinsmithing operation, coopering and charcoal burning. He had ambitious plans for a flour mill and a canal to provide water power for it.
Training for this new organization began in childhood. Tobacco required child labor the small stature of children made them ideal workers for the distasteful task of plucking and killing tobacco worms ; wheat did not, so Jefferson transferred his surplus of young workers to his nail factory boys and spinning and weaving operations girls.
He launched the nailery in and supervised it personally for three years. In the morning he weighed and distributed nail rod to each nailer; at the end of the day he weighed the finished product and noted how much rod had been wasted. Some nail boys rose in the plantation hierarchy to become house servants, blacksmiths, carpenters or coopers.
Isaac Granger, the son of an enslaved Monticello foreman, Great George Granger, was the most productive nailer, with a profit averaging 80 cents a day over the first six months of , when he was 20; he fashioned half a ton of nails during those six months. The work was tedious in the extreme. The nailers received twice the food ration of a field worker but no wages.
Dollars a year, taken and paid for quarterly. In an s memoir, Isaac Granger, by then a freedman who had taken the surname Jefferson, recalled circumstances at the nailery.
Give them that wukked the best a suit of red or blue; encouraged them mightily. Without molasses and suits to offer, he had to rely on persuasion, in all its forms. But in the winter of the system ground to a halt when Granger, perhaps for the first time, refused to whip people. George was not procrastinating; he was struggling against a workforce that resisted him. But he would not beat them, and they knew it. At length, Randolph had to admit the truth to Jefferson.
Some slaves would never readily submit to bondage. He hated conflict, disliked having to punish people and found ways to distance himself from the violence his system required. He hired them, issuing orders to impose a vigor of discipline. Betts decided that the image of children being beaten at Monticello had to be suppressed, omitting this document from his edition. The full text did not emerge in print until By all accounts he was a kind and generous master.
His conviction of the injustice of the institution strengthened his sense of obligation toward its victims. As a rule, the slaves who lived at the mountaintop, including the Hemings family and the Grangers, were treated better than slaves who worked the fields farther down the mountain. But the machine was hard to restrain. After the violent tenures of earlier overseers, Gabriel Lilly seemed to portend a gentler reign when he arrived at Monticello in Once Lilly established himself, his good temper evidently evaporated, because Jefferson began to worry about what Lilly would do to the nailers, the promising adolescents whom Jefferson managed personally, intending to move them up the plantation ladder.
I had given a charge of lenity respecting all: Burwell absolutely excepted from the whip alltogether before you wrote: none have incurred it but the small ones for truancy. Jefferson replaced him with William Stewart but kept Lilly in charge of the adult crews building his mill and canal. The nail boys, favored or not, had to be brought to heel.
In a very unusual letter, Jefferson told his Irish master joiner, James Dinsmore, that he was bringing Lilly back to the nailery. The incident of horrible violence in the nailery—the attack by one nail boy against another—may shed some light on the fear Lilly instilled in the nail boys. In a nailer named Cary smashed his hammer into the skull of a fellow nailer, Brown Colbert. Seized with convulsions, Colbert went into a coma and would certainly have died had Colonel Randolph not immediately summoned a physician, who performed brain surgery.
Amazingly, the young man survived. With the U. I view the Declaration as a point of departure and a promise, and the Constitution as a set of commitments that had lasting consequences — some troubling, others transformative. The Declaration, in its remarkable concision, gives us self-evident truths that form the premises of the right to revolution and the capacity to create new governments resting on popular consent.
But the Reconstruction amendments of marked a second constitutional founding that rested on other premises. Together they made a broader definition of equality part of the constitutional order, and they gave the national government an effective basis for challenging racial inequalities within the states. It sadly took far too long for the Second Reconstruction of the s to implement that commitment, but when it did, it was a fulfillment of the original vision of the s.
Two things. When we discuss the Constitutional Convention, we often praise the compromise giving each state an equal vote in the Senate and condemn the Three Fifths Clause allowing the southern states to count their slaves for purposes of political representation.
But where the quarrel between large and small states had nothing to do with the lasting interests of citizens — you never vote on the basis of the size of the state in which you live — slavery was a real and persisting interest that one had to accommodate for the Union to survive. Second, the greatest tragedy of American constitutional history was not the failure of the framers to eliminate slavery in That option was simply not available to them.
The real tragedy was the failure of Reconstruction and the ensuing emergence of Jim Crow segregation in the late 19th century that took many decades to overturn. That was the great constitutional opportunity that Americans failed to grasp, perhaps because four years of Civil War and a decade of the military occupation of the South simply exhausted Northern public opinion.
Even now, if you look at issues of voter suppression, we are still wrestling with its consequences. How did the founding fathers view equality? And how did these diverging interpretations emerge? But after the Revolution succeeded, Americans began reading that famous phrase another way.
It now became a statement of individual equality that everyone and every member of a deprived group could claim for himself or herself. The reality at Monticello is that treatment of the people Jefferson enslaved was typical for the time and region. Jefferson wrote that he wished to ameliorate the conditions of slavery and treat people less harshly than other violent slaveholders, but he still forced people to labor for the wealth and luxury of his white family.
This force was upheld through violence, the threat of violence, family separation, and emotional, psychological, and sexual abuse. People at Monticello were physically beaten. There are no documents of Thomas Jefferson personally beating a slave, but such actions were uncommon for slaveholders.
Most slaveholders would consider such physical labor beneath them, and hired overseers to perform the actual administration of violence. Thomas Jefferson did order physical punishment. Overseers and Violence at Monticello. Thomas Jefferson wrote that slavery was evil, yet never freed the vast majority of people he held in bondage. Jefferson wrote about the differences between groups of people based on emerging ideas about race in his Notes of the State of Virginia and in many personal letters.
Whereas slavery has been officially illegal in the United States for over years, the racist ideas that undergirded the system remain. Jefferson acquired most of the over six hundred people he owned during his life through the natural increase of enslaved families.
He acquired approximately enslaved people through inheritance: about 40 from the estate of his father, Peter Jefferson , in , and from his father-in-law, John Wayles , in Jefferson purchased fewer than twenty slaves in his lifetime.
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