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Thomas Jefferson and slavery
Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, owned more than 700 African-American slaves throughout his adult life. Jefferson freed two slaves while he lived, and seven more after his death. Jefferson consistently spoke out against the international slave trade, outlawed while he was President, while he advocated gradual emancipation and colonization of domestic slaves. Jefferson believed black people were inherently inferior to white people and thought it was best the two races remained segregated.
In 1767 at age 24, Jefferson inherited 5,000 acres of land and the legal ownership of 52 people by his father's will. In 1768, Jefferson began construction of his Monticello plantation. Through his marriage to Martha Wayles in 1772 and inheritance from his father-in-law John Wayles, in 1773 Jefferson inherited two plantations and the legal ownership of 135 men, women and children who were to be kept as slaves. By 1776, Jefferson was one of the largest planters in Virginia. However, the value of his property (land and slaves) was increasingly offset by his growing debts, which made it very difficult to free the people he kept forced into slavery, hence according to the operant financial laws of the time, lose them as "property" and hence financial assets.
In his writings on American grievances justifying the Revolution, he attacked the British for sponsoring human trafficking to the colonies. In 1778, with Jefferson's leadership, slave importation was banned in Virginia, one of the first jurisdictions worldwide to do so. Jefferson was a lifelong advocate of ending the trade and as president led the effort to criminalize the international slave trade that passed Congress and he signed in 1807, shortly before Britain passed a similar law.
In 1779, as a practical solution to end the legal enslavement of humans, Jefferson supported gradual emancipation, training, and colonization of African-American slaves rather than unconditional manumission, believing that releasing unprepared people with no place to go and no means to support themselves would only bring them misfortune. In 1784, Jefferson proposed federal legislation banning slavery in the New Territories of the North and South after 1800, which failed to pass Congress by one vote. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, published in 1785, Jefferson expressed the beliefs that slavery corrupted both masters and slaves alike, supported colonization of freed slaves, promoted the idea that African-Americans were inferior in intelligence, and that emancipating large numbers of slaves made slave uprisings more likely. In 1794 and 1796, Jefferson manumitted by deed two males he had kept as slaves; they had been trained and were qualified to hold employment.
Most historians believe that after the death of his wife Martha, Jefferson had a long-term relationship with her half-sister, Sally Hemings, a slave at Monticello. Jefferson allowed two of Sally Hemings's surviving four children to "escape"; the other two he freed through his will after his death. The children were the only family to gain freedom from Monticello.[11] In 1824, Jefferson proposed a national plan to end slavery by the federal government purchasing African-American slave children for $12.50, raising and training them in occupations of freemen, and sending them to the country of Santo Domingo. In his will, Jefferson freed three older men who had been forced to work for him for decades. In 1827, the remaining 130 people who had been kept as slaves at Monticello were sold to pay the debts of Jefferson's estate.
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