"That happened while Jefferson was on Monticello," said Bunch. The boys were routinely whipped to force them to be more productive. But by the time you're 12, 13, 14, your job is to make these nails," said Bunch. "As a young child, your job was to move the nails around. One example was what went on at Jefferson's extremely profitable nail-making workshop at Monticello. Which, at times, contradicts the popular image of Jefferson as a benevolent slave holder. "He would list the work that they did, so in some ways, it really gives us a full picture of the totality of Jefferson," said Bunch. The Continental Congress took the phrase out.Īlongside the rejected passage was the financial reality: Jefferson's farm book, where he would list the births and deaths of the slaves. The first of those drafts attacked Britain's slave trade, Jefferson writing that King George III "has waged cruel war against human nature itself." "And there are some that we just have as 'Unknown,' because we don't even know."īunch showed Teichner Jefferson's laptop desk, upon which he wrote early drafts of the Declaration of Independence. "What's powerful is, quite candidly, we only know the first names," said Bunch. "To be able to sort of have an image of Jefferson that we all know, and behind him the names of the 600 people that he owned in his lifetime, really means that we have to understand slavery in order to understand Jefferson," said Lonnie Bunch, who heads the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture - sponsor of a traveling exhibition about slavery at Monticello. John Hemings is remembered because of his craftsmanship, unlike so many other Jefferson slaves. "He was very highly skilled, and he was freed by Jefferson in his will and was given the tools of his trade," Chew said. Chew showed Teichner some of Hemings' beautifully crafted work. The joinery, or furniture-making woodshop at Monticello, was in Jefferson's later years run by a slave named John Hemings, who made many pieces of furniture that are in Monticello today. "There would have been an intimate relationship really, from birth to death," said Chew. Jefferson's butler, Burwell Colbert, was also a slave. "And we know that his last words were asking Burwell Colbert to adjust his pillow," she told Teichner. Web exclusive video: To watch an extended interview with author Jon Meacham click on the video player below.Įlizabeth Chew, curator at Monticello, said that Jefferson's earliest memory was of being handed up on a pillow as a toddler to a slave on a horse.
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