What you don’t know about Thomas Jefferson may shock you

Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Constitution that “All men are created equal”. For hundreds of years, we in the United States have placed this man on a pedestal. Perhaps it is time to reconsider how we should view him.

It is not widely known, but when he was drafting the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson included a passage attacking slavery and the King of England.  Ultimately, this passage was removed from the final draft due to pressure from South Carolina, Georgia and merchants making money off the slave trade.   

An excerpt from Jefferson’s original draft regarding slavery appears below.

“He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.  This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain.  Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce . . .”

Jefferson himself owned over 600 slaves throughout the course of his life.  Most worked at his primary plantation, Monticello, Virginia.  

After his wife died, Jefferson fathered six children with a slave woman named Sally Hemings. Four survived to adulthood. Decades later, Jefferson freed all of Sally Hemings’ children. He did not grant freedom to any other slave family. He freed only two slaves during his lifetime. He allowed three to leave the plantation, and freed five upon his death.

What happened to this man that he went from challenging the King of England and advocating against slavery to enslaving his own children?

Jefferson shared the world view of his day; that slaves were less than human.  He knew it was wrong, but was able to justify it through a sense of paternalistic racism.  He wrote that freeing them would be like abandoning children. 

After his initial attack on the King and slavery, history records only his strange silence on this issue.  There is no record of further emancipation efforts.   Slavery in the United States would continue for another ninety years before the Civil War ended with the deaths of over 600,000 white Americans and literally millions of blacks who died in slave ships and in chains on American soil.

If only he’d stood his ground and that passage had been included in the Declaration of Independence.  As historian John Chester Miller put it, “The inclusion of Jefferson’s strictures on slavery and the slave trade would have committed the United States to the abolition of slavery.”

The next time you think about Thomas Jefferson, just remember that six of his children were slaves on his plantation! This from the man who wrote “All men are created equal.”