In the time of Thomas Jefferson, slavery was the institutional backbone of society and economics in the Southern colonies.Jefferson was born into a wealthy planter family in the hilly Piedmont region of Virginia and inculcated from an early age with theories of … Henry Wiencek’s book Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves will be published in October. According to family lore, Jefferson’s earliest memory was as a three-year-old boy “being carried on a pillow by a mounted slave” when the family moved from Shadwell to Tuckahoe. His Monticello estate, a private mountain-based Virginia plantation, housed around 130 slaves at its peak. Henry Wiencek's eloquent, persuasive Master of the Mountain―based on new information coming from archival research, archaeological work at Monticello, and hitherto overlooked or disregarded evidence in Thomas Jefferson's own papers―opens up a huge, poorly understood dimension of Jefferson's faraway world.We must, Wiencek suggests, follow the money. When Thomas Jefferson included a passage attacking slavery in his draft of the Declaration of Independence it initiated the most intense debate among the delegates gathered at Philadelphia in the spring and early summer of 1776. As mentioned in the CBC News video, Jefferson’s virtues were enormous while his vices were equally as enormous. MAPPING ADDRESS: On the other hand, Jefferson was a man who owned many slaves. The public assertion of this relationship was originally made in 1802 by a disreputable journalist interested in injuring Jefferson’s political career. House servants cooked meals and washed clothes. Jefferson grew quiet about the immorality of slavery in the 1790s, and in total, forced an estimated 600 people to work for him. His mounting indebtedness rendered all such thoughts superfluous toward the end, because his slaves, like all his possessions, were mortgaged to his creditors and therefore not really his to free. Aired on June 17, 2020. Finally, in 1998, DNA samples were gathered from living descendants of Jefferson and Hemings. When Thomas Jefferson was born in 1743, slavery had existed in Virginia for nearly 75 years. These words, penned by Thomas Jefferson more than 240 years ago, continue to inspire many Americans. Called his “mistress,” but how can you be a mistress when you were a slave, a child, and could not consent? 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