"Those Who Labor for My Happiness": Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello

"This book represents the consummation of Stanton’s career researching the history of plantation slavery. It traces the lives of the extended families of Monticello over generations. Annette Gordon-Reed’s work on the connection between Jefferson and the Hemings family won a Pulitzer. Stanton’s work, as a senior researcher at Monticello for decades, laid a foundation for what Annette wrote. Stanton pretty much started from scratch in reconstructing the world of the slaves and free laborers in Jefferson’s neighborhood. The only slaves freed in Jefferson’s will were part of the Hemings family. In 1997, DNA effectively proved they were his children. Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman who was the biological half-sister of Thomas Jefferson’s wife, gave birth to several of Jefferson’s children. Stanton traces the Hemings family from Jefferson’s plantation to their post-emancipation lives in Ohio. It’s a marvelously interesting story about the diaspora of Jefferson’s house servants, how they made lives for their descendants, their work and professional accomplishments. In this book, you meet people who worked in Jefferson’s house. The field laborers’ names were recorded but their lives went unrecorded. Jefferson spoke of his servants as his “family”. They learned marketable skills. Sally, for example, was a seamstress. One of Sally’s brothers was a chef, another a brewer. Jefferson’s white grandchildren taught members of the Hemings clan how to read and write. One of Jefferson’s granddaughters, Ellen, moved to Boston and became a critic of slavery and she wrote to Jefferson about her objections. She maintained correspondence with the Hemings family; one named a child after Ellen. So, there was clearly fondness felt, something more than a master-servant relationship. Stanton is so good at teasing all this out. Yes, it’s fair. But on the other hand, as I tried to explain before, we have to indict the whole generation for its collective failure, you can’t place the brunt of America’s responsibility on the shoulders of one individual. Are we going to celebrate only those very few people who took an economic hit by freeing their slaves when everyone knew that slavery was evil? That’s a rather narrow way to examine history. We cannot extract Jefferson from Virginia or the fact that he inherited 200 slaves and died a hundred thousand dollars in debt, which is in the neighborhood of $6 million today. Jefferson is always going to be a man of the 18th century and we can’t impose our moral expectations on men of the 18th century."