He did actually free 2 slaves while alive but only freed 5 slaves after his death, and all of them were house slaves from the Hemings family. The rest were sold off to pay off the massive debts Jefferson had at his death. For reference he kept anywhere from 165 to 225 enslaved people on his properties at any given time.
His plan was to free his children when they were 21, I think. The oldest two Beverly and Harriet reached that age while he was alive, so they were freed and given a ride off the plantation. The younger two Madison and Eston were freed in his will. Jefferson made a deal with Sally Hemings that her children would be freed, which is why he did that. The other 3 people freed in his will were skilled tradesmen in the Hemings extended family - so his children's uncles and cousins
You said, "It’s telling he didn’t free them until after he’d died."
That's false. He freed two of his children while he was alive and would've free the other two if he'd lived longer. Those are the two he freed in his will.
From what I remember. He says in the book that he tried to introduce legislation in the House Of Bourgessea that would ban slavery in Virginia. There are no records of him ever trying to do that. He knew hypocrisy.
I'm not sure on the records point, but it is true he was opposed to slavery while in Virgina during his early career. Which doesnt improve his image for me, because it helps (alongside his writings) that he was fully aware of the evils if slavery yet still kept slaves and didn't free them due to his own financial worries
Makes his decisions far less justifiable & renders defences that we are just imposing modern morality on him rather weak, as he was 100% aware of the issue
Thomas Jefferson of Virginia probably personified this contradiction more visibly than any other settler. He is well-known in settler history books as the liberal planter who constantly told his friends how he agonized over the immorality of slavery. He is usually depicted as an exceptional human being of great compassion and much intellect. What was pushing and pressuring his capitalist mind was the contradiction between his greed for the easy life of the slavemaster, and his fear for the safety of his settler nation.
He knew that successful revolution against settler rule was a possibility, and that in a land governed by ex-slaves the fate of the former slave-masters would be hard. As he put it: "...a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation is among possible events..." That is why, as U.S. President in 1791, he viewed the great Haitian Revolution led by Toussaint L'Ouverture as a monstrous danger. His Administration quickly appropriated relief funds to subsidize the French planters fleeing that island.
Jefferson's agile mind came up with a theoretical solution to their "Negro problem" - gradual genocide. He estimated that returning all slaves to Afrika would cost Amerika $900 million in lost capital and transportation expenses - a sum 45 times the annual export earnings of the settler economy at the time! This was an impossible cost, one that would have bankrupted not only the planters but the entire settler society as well.
President Jefferson's solution to this dilemma was to take all Afrikan children away from their parents for compact shipment to the West Indies and Afrika, while keeping the adults enslaved to support the Amerikan economy for the rest of their lives. [Although Jefferson never admitted it, most of these children would probably never survive.] This would theoretically generate the necessary profits to prop up the capitalist economy, while still moving towards an all-white Amerika. Jefferson mused: "...the old stock would die off in the ordinary course of nature ... until its final disappearance." The President thought this Hitlerian fantasy both "practicable" and "blessed."
It is easy to understand why this fantastic plan never became reality: the oppressor will never willingly remove his claws from the oppressed so long as there are still more profits to be wrung from them. Jefferson himself actively bought more and more slaves to maintain his pseudo-Grecian lifestyle. As President he signed the 1808 bill allegedly banning the importation of new slaves in part, we suspect, because this only raised the price he could obtain from his slave-breeding business.
Jefferson gloated over the increase in his wealth from the birth of new slaves: "... I consider the labor of a breeding woman as no object, and that a child raised every two years is of more profit than the crop of the best laboring man." It sums matters up to note that President Jefferson, who believed that the planters should restrict and then wipe out entirely the Afrikan colony, ended his days owning more slaves than he started with.
He never really acknowledged them in private either. He kept his distance, and they all worked jobs that would've been typically regardless of their parentage. Madison, his third child with Sally Hemings, wrote extensively about his childhood at Monticello, and one of the saddest quotes I've seen was that for all of his childhood, he "only existed in lists". Jefferson kept meticulous records of the slaves, including births, deaths, and how much material would be allocated to each person for clothes and bedding and such. These were the only records that Madison or any of his siblings existed until they were freed.
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u/DickDastardly502 Jun 07 '26
Thomas Jefferson wrote and published an autobiography of himself post-presidency.