mr. jefferson slaves after jefferson's death. his father was joseph fawcett, the chief by smith here at monticello. his mother, edith, was mr. jefferson's cut. so this was a very high status family. and i had been spending a lot of time reading his memoirs and trying to glean as much information as i could from the. it was one hot afternoon, i decided to get out of this place and go over to the mountain and just sort of wander around, as i often did, looking at the house and mingling with the taurus, just trying to get a sense of the place all over again because place is very important to my riding. and as it turned out, the tour guide was just beginning to talk in mulberry row about peter faucet. and she began telling the story about how he was sold at auction at age 11 and was sold to someone who promised peter's father that he would release him in a few years if joseph raise enough money because joseph was one of the few slaves freed in jefferson's will. and just have worked very hard to raise the money to buy his son back from his master, but then the master broke the deal. he broke his promise. and peter was three condemned to slavery. by and the -- what a friend described as light would not sit night, he would sneak out and hide in a distant cabin and tied by the embers of the dying fire. and he taught himself to read and write, and in so doing he learned how to write fake the emancipation documents. and at that point in the story suddenly a thunderstorm blew into the monticello known top, and a guide looked around and said, well, if anybody is scared of the storm, you can leave and read to the old tunnel beneath the house. but having heard the beginning of peter faucet's narrative, no real left. and so she went on to say that he produced fake emancipation documents that allowed his sister and others to actually to escape virginia, and then he decided to write a fake emancipation paper and self. so he ran away but was caught, was brought back to charlottesville, and then he turned again. he said, was determined to get free or die in the attempt. and so he ran away again, was caught, and this time his owner decided to dispose of him, to turn him over to the richmond traders for he was brought in handcuffs, and then as he recounted for the second time in my life, was put on the auction block and sold like a horse. but when his friends in charlottesville found out about this they raise the money to buy him out of slavery. they sent into ohio as a free man where he became a minister, businessmen, and a smuggler of fugitives in the underground. and in his old age she had one wish left which was to come back to monticello which lived in his memory as an earthy paradise. so he came back here and walked up to the top of the mountain with a group of tourists were standing. and to me that story had always been one of triumph of the human spirit over difficulties. and -- i heard a different element to it that day, that afternoon. when the tour guide mentions that from the time he was sold at age 11, fawcett remain the same for another 24 years. and when the visitors heard that they gasped. there really could not get over it because they had just learned about the courage and the character and the achievements of this man in the could not believe that such a person would be held in slavery. it really tore at their sense of justice. and i had to wonder, and that was something i had never thought of before. i read the story, but i never heard it, and it was only when outsiders who were just so cannot monticello or herded that basic human element came out. i began to wonder, you know, why didn't jefferson see these people as fully human? and that was one of the major contradictions that propelled my research. and what i discovered is that jefferson appears to be a man of contradictions, but when you do something rather simple, which is to put him on a time line and examine all of his sayings and actions in an excellent chronological order, certain patterns emerge, and things simultaneously get a little bit more complicated, but a lot simpler. and we are actually dealing with to jefferson's. the young jefferson who was a fiery radical emancipationist, and there was the older jettison who really embraced slavery. the young jefferson and oddly enough, has really not been steady all that much. as a newly minted member of the house, he made a proposal to emancipate the slaves in virginia. he made it on the sly, shielding his identity using a relative to submit the bill which is a good thing because is relative was denounced as an enemy of this country, and the bill was summarily dismissed. but then later under his own name as the revolution approached jefferson floated a more explicit plan, one that actually might have changed the course of our history. if only the country would stop the slave trade, it could perceive to the enfranchisement of the slaves of we have, meaning that they would become citizens, and he wrote this in a document called the summary of the rights of british america, which he also submitted to the house of burgesses or to a committee thereof, and it was, again, summarily objective have rejected. that led to his being chosen to write the declaration of independence read announce the slave trade in no uncertain terms, another clause that was struck because south carolina and georgia would not abide any strictures on the slave trade. but after the war a strange thing began to happen to him. oddly enough, france is the key to understanding the transformation in jefferson. when we think of france we think of sally and james having. we think of french food. jefferson getting to know french architecture and line, but he went over there on very important national business. he was there as our trade representative. we were desperate for money, a total of money, the u.s. of enormous debts to britain. almost important export was a slave crop. it was tobacco, which brought in some $30 million per year. no, jefferson had one problem. the most important and influential friends that he had a court among the french aristocrats were all abolitionists, and they could not understand how we had fought a war for universal liberty without freeing the slaves. they put him under tremendous pressure, and they kept asking, what is america going to free the slaves. so he began making promises that emancipation was really just around the corner. it was imminent. we were waiting for a polyester ripen, for the right opinion to ripen. none of this was really true, but it was in our interest ramp to say that. oddly enough jefferson really did absorb some of this radical feeling over there in france. and before he left he said down a plan in tell people about it. he told thomas paine, william short, number of others over there that when he got back to america he was going to train slaves, settle them on land as sharecroppers in the certainty that they would become good citizens and free people in the united states. but when he got back to the united states things changed. he came back with his daughter, patsy, and it turned out she needed a dowry because she met her cousin, thomas mann randolph and they decided to get married in a hurry, and the only way the jefferson could set them up in a household was to give them land and, of course, a lot of slaves. he wrote them that he would give his daughter 25 negros, little and big. the other thing is that he began to think of rebuilding monticello. he needed money for this, and he also needed to rely on air retrains life force. and people that he had formally denounced as being childlike and incompetent possibly he called upon them to acquire a vast array of new skills, which they did very, very quickly. so when i was following jefferson through the documents along my own time light i came across the document that has disturbed many people since i put it print, but not as much as it disturbed me when i found it. and it details to a british agricultural expert, jefferson was counting of the profits and losses of virginia plantations when it suddenly occurred to him that there was a phenomenon which she had received a monticello but it never actually measured. he proceeded to calculate it in a scribbled note in the middle of the page in posted brackets. what jefferson and realized for the first time was that he was making a 4% profit every year of the birth the black children. enslave people were yielding him a bonanza, a perpetual human dividend that compound interest. jefferson wrote, i allowed nothing for losses by death, but on the contrary show pleasantly take credit for% per year for their increase over and above keeping up their own numbers. the plantation was producing inexhaustible human assets, the percentage was predictable. to me this was a stunning, even frightening discovery. no one, as far as i could tell, among the jefferson scholars, had ever mentioned it. i thought it might be in a liar, and isolated document, an isolated mathematical demonstration of the sort that jefferson often like to do. no. in a subsequent letter jefferson took the four per cent formula further and quite bluntly advanced the notion that slavery presented the investment strategy for the future. he wrote to an acquaintance who had suffered financial of firstly. he wrote back in a queens to that lost money. should have been invested in negros. he advises that if that family had any cash left, and every farthing of it should be laid out in land in the gross whisperings a silent profit of from five to 10% in this country by the increase in the value. now, we might not grasp the world where a man can on his own siblings as slaves, but investments, markets, silent profit, these we can recognize. from that moment in jefferson's life everything changed and the slaves were doomed. a startling statistic emerged in the 1970's when economists took a hard-headed look slavery. they found that on the eve of the civil war enslaved black people in aggregate form the second most valuable asset in the united states. there was more value than all of the railroads and banks and factories combined command the only thing that was more valuable was the land of the united states. in the 1790's we see the full emergence of jefferson as a politician, the architect, engineer, and the of japan your slavery. the diversified and industrialized slavery, watching in a factory, a textile factory, short-lived tense that the operation, and a grist mill. as our mission before, is readily adapted to learning. he had put all of this into operation by the mid 7090's when one of his old friends from france, and too, came by and was astonished at how well the monticello machine worked and how he said this lifts were well fed, well treated, and that jefferson was out supervising the harvest all by himself, all alone, and he seemed to be taking direct control of everything. and the duke could not restrain his admiration for what jefferson did, had done. and it was an amazing thing to have accomplished so fast because when jefferson was in france he said this place for their children and could never wear anything complex. well, now jefferson and the sleeves together an overturned that. slaves were clearly very competent, and so the question arises, is this the time to begin setting people free? well, apparently not because jefferson now raises the objection that we cannot freeze least because we are afraid of the mixing of blood. black blood will mix of light. and at that point everything seemed to be totally unreal to the duke because he could look around and see that racial mixing had already taken place. there were people on monticello mountain who had -- his skin was so light that you could not even tell that they were black people and the roster of skills that these people had acquired is truly extraordinary, ranging from plowman and women tend hoopers, dyers, weavers, roofers, launders, barbers, hair dressers, cabinetmakers and later on some french visitors were amazed at the carriage that there were riding in. a very elegant carriage. he asked where it came from. jefferson said, well, slaves made it. he did not get over the fact that this thing had been manufactured by slaves. and then ironically, the slaves had condemned themselves. the more skilled they became, the more valuable they became commend the more they tend the chains of their enslavement. with the machine functioning in an equilibrium, the owner would never dismantle. jefferson pioneered something else. he pioneered the modernization of slaves, the finalization of slavery. another document that i came across, which i have not seen, that upon before, was the fact that he finance the reconstruction of monticello in the 1790's, partly through what we might call the slate equity loan. he bundled together 150 slaves and offered them as collateral to a dutch banking house that he had done business with many was in france and said, you know, would you take them as the collateral for loans. they said yes. so they opened -- the bank opened a $2,000 line of credit for jefferson at a philadelphia merchant house. and that was the money he drew upon to by the construction materials that went into monticello. no, the surface of slavery that the duke had seen was on the surface of very genteel system, but that was only the top slice of monticello that he was seeing . the operation had a much harsher side to it, you know, farther down the mountain. jefferson had a conflict and disliked having to punish people. a fog of regret in denial hangs over the whole business, but throughout his plantation records their runs the threat of indications that the machine function on carefully calibrated violence. i mean, jefferson said to my first wish is that the labors may be well treated, but what at first glance appears to be an ironclad promise turns out to be just what jefferson says it is, which. in the as a qualifier. the second wish is that they may enable me to have that treatment continued by making as much as well admit it, meaning that i will treat you well, but if you do not produce enough it will be harsh measures. jefferson's overseer, william page, it develops discussed. his methods of control at jefferson's farms under the county. in the judgment of white citizens, page was a terror. but the colonel who was running the operation in port jefferson that the slaves for discontented , that his free use of the lash. jefferson retained this man for another two years. jefferson's other son-in-law, john wales alluded to the public sentiment against. when he thought tire slaves and other planters nobody would do business with them. he wrote, the terror of his name prevented the possibility of hiring and. no, in this regard in the 1950's a tiny fragment of affirmation about the monticello's system so shocked one of jefferson's editors that he suppressed for the record. until recently the standard source for our understanding of life of monticello has been the addition of jefferson's farm book ended in 1956 by edwin bats. when bats edited one of the plantation reports he confronted a taboo. randolph reported to jefferson that the miller was functioning well because the small ones were being whipped. they did not take well only to being forced to show up in the icy midwinter hour before dawn at jefferson's male forged, and so the overseer was whipping them for truancy. no, he decided that the image of children being beaten at to be suppressed. the full text did not emerge until 2005. and his deletion play an important role in shaping the consensus that jefferson managed his plantations with a lenient and. the management of plantations also had a psychological element we often -- we often hear that jefferson had encouraged his slaves with rewards, incentives, and that he wanted them to have to display character. what character meant was not to have self-esteem which was dangerous, but it meant that you were done so. you did what you were told. and there was a wrenching story that colonel randall said down about a slave just down the road from here who is a slave who was said to have possessed a great deal of character. the one who was trusted by the master whenever anything important had to be done. trusted to handle money and go on important errands. he was highly regarded, but randolph got to know him and found out that the secret behind his character was that he was terrified. he was terrified of being whipped. he had formed our revolution never to do anything but cause him to incur what he calls stripes. one day he apparently left some tools and in the field. to make an example of him, a new overseer had it stripped of his shirt and whipped him. the man was so humiliated that he went in himself right in front of the master's house. this was the occasion for a long and detailed and wrenching letter that carol randolph wrote describing this man in growing terms as a man of great courage and character. and it is in this letter randolph denounces what he calls the whole system as a hideous monster. he describes something that is based totally on terror and not at all on this notion of character. he had nothing bad to say about the slaves but described them as showing great courage in going off to death instead of trying to run away. to go back for a moment to the timeline, there are two basic benchmarks, events in jefferson's public life that i've looked at as displaying really his shift from one type of politician and planter to another. jefferson, the younger radical had written the terms of the ordinance of 1784 that would ban slavery in any new territory of the united states. this is what jefferson wrote. after the year 1800-beater slavery nor involuntary servitude. now, such a law would happen slavery and the timetable. those who helped -- had slaves would have had 16 years to figure a way out. the ordinance which would have included mississippi and alabama and think of those two places being without slaves failed to pass in the continental congress when just one delegate from new jersey miss the vote to tell this. now, jefferson himself wrote that the fate of millions unborn had been determined by the absence of this one man. and joyce, the great historian, commented on this saying that after the 1784 limitation on slavery had failed jefferson backed away from attacking the institution as his power to do something about it increased. .. don't allow slavery or appreciate in value 50%. all of was going on, it was a fresh moment of decision. congress had the will to restrict slavery there. jefferson sent a message to his manager in the senate saying slaves to be admitted to the territory. then he wept on to aid in the creation in the legal system and the bureaucracy that managed slavery in the new territory. to the point where the historian -- referred to him as the father of slavery in louisiana. it was only twenty years later from the man who tried to stop slavery from getting to the west to the man who helps to extend the reach in to the new territory. i don't much like counter factual, i'm going end with one anyway because i think this one really could have happened. there was an history that was recorded in the 1940s by a woman who was trying to find information about sally hemmings. he went to find as many dissent ends of slaves as she could. she recorded a number of interview. in one of them a person said something that was striking. she said -- no he he say. mr. jefferson misused large sums of money that been given to him benefit of the newing grow it didn't make any sense at all when i first read it. i didn't know what he could be talking about. i thought it was something madeup by people who were angry at slavery and thed to get back at mr. jefferson. i found it was true. visiting philadelphia one time, i was wandering with my family through society hill, and we came to a house with plaque that said that was the townhouse the great polish patriot and hero of the american revolution had lived. it was open as a museum. so we went in there, at the front there was a bro brochure. i didn't know they had a relationship. i find to my surprise, that he written a will in which he left jefferson $20,000 to free as many slaves as that money would buy. and to give them land and to give them livestock, and pay for the transportation and education transportation especially to some place they could live undisturbed as free people. it's interesting when t
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