An Independence Day Look at Jefferson’s “Brutal” Hypocrisy
Jefferson didn’t beat his slaves. He hired men to do that..
HOBOKEN, JULY 4, 2025. Below is an updated version of a column I wrote about Thomas Jefferson after visiting Monticello, his Virginia plantation, nine years ago. This piece seems even more relevant today. – John Horgan
To celebrate July 4th, I’d like to offer a few comments on Thomas Jefferson.
No one is more closely associated with Independence Day than Jefferson. He was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, which the American Congress formally adopted on July 4, 1776. Jefferson, judged by his rhetoric, was a true man of the Enlightenment, who embraced reason, science and democracy and rejected superstition, tradition and tyranny.
I once admired Jefferson, seeing him as a great man with a tragic flaw: The person who declared “all men are created equal” owned slaves. Now, I see Jefferson as an egregious hypocrite, who willfully betrayed the ideals he espoused.
I reached this conclusion after visiting Monticello, Jefferson’s Virginia estate. Previously, I didn't realize the extent of Jefferson’s slave ownership, and I lazily—and ignorantly--excused it as a common ethical blind spot of his time.
At Monticello, I took a tour called “Slavery at Monticello.” Below are facts I learned from our eloquent, well-informed guide, from the Monticello website and from other readings.
*Jefferson often denounced slavery. He wrote in 1774: "The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state.” Yet over the course of his life Jefferson owned a total of 600 slaves, who worked on his Monticello farm and other holdings.
*Jefferson was a “brutal hypocrite” even when judged by the standards of his time, according to historian Paul Finkelman. He notes that “while many of his contemporaries, including George Washington, freed their slaves during and after the revolution--inspired, perhaps, by the words of the Declaration--Jefferson did not.”
Jefferson also “dodged opportunities to undermine slavery or promote racial equality,” Finkelman writes. As a Virginia state legislator Jefferson “blocked consideration of a law that might have eventually ended slavery in the state.” As President he purchased the Louisiana Territory but “did nothing to stop the spread of slavery into that vast ‘empire of liberty.’” Finkelman accuses Jefferson of being “deeply racist,” noting that he called blacks “inferior to the whites in the endowments of body and mind.”
*Jefferson was not a kind slave-owner, our Monticello guide said, because that is a contradiction in terms. The Monticello website states: “There are no documents of Thomas Jefferson personally beating a slave, but such actions were uncommon for slaveholders. Most slaveholders would consider such physical labor beneath them and hired overseers to perform the actual administration of violence. Thomas Jefferson did order physical punishment.”
*DNA testing and other evidence have convinced most historians that Jefferson fathered “at least” six children with a slave, Sally Hemings. Hemings is believed to have been the daughter of Jefferson’s father-in-law, John Wayles, and one of Wayles’s slaves. That means Jefferson was having sex with the enslaved half-sister of his wife, Martha, who died in 1782.
*Some writers have romanticized the relationship between Jefferson and Hemings. But a relationship between master and slave cannot be consensual, our Monticello guide pointed out, let alone romantic. The relationship might have begun as early as 1787, when Jefferson took Hemings to Paris for two years. He was 43, she 14. She gave birth to the first of their six children in 1795. Jefferson never freed Hemings. Only after his death in 1826 did Jefferson’s daughter Martha allow Hemings to leave Monticello and live out her days in nearby Charlottesville.
*Jefferson may have viewed Sally Hemings merely as valuable livestock, or "capital." He wrote this about female slaves in 1820: “I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man of the farm… What she produces is an addition to the capital, while his labors disappear in mere consumption."
*Jefferson freed only two slaves in his lifetime and another five in his will, all members of the Hemings family. According to our guide, Jefferson posthumously freed one man, but the man’s wife and eight children remained enslaved and were sold to four different owners. Jefferson didn’t think blacks would suffer from such forced separations. He once wrote of black men that “love seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation. Their griefs are transient.”
*Jefferson, who harped on the importance of education, never encouraged his slaves to become literate. As historian Gordon Wood puts it, Jefferson “made no effort to prepare his enslaved offspring, whom he had promised to free, for their financial futures, and he apparently did not even teach them to read.” Wood adds that Jefferson, far from agonizing over his hypocrisy, was convinced of his own moral superiority to his peers.
*The Marquis de Lafayette, who helped the U.S. achieve its independence from England and later fought in the French revolution, urged his old friend Jefferson to free his slaves in 1824. The Monticello website has an eye-witness account of a conversation between the two men:
Lafayette remarked that he thought that the slaves ought to be free; that no man could rightly hold ownership in his brother man; that he gave his best services to and spent his money in behalf of the Americans freely because he felt that they were fighting for a great and noble principle--the freedom of mankind; that instead of all being free a portion were held in bondage (which seemed to grieve his noble heart); that it would be mutually beneficial to masters and slaves if the latter were educated, and so on. Mr. Jefferson replied that he thought the time would come when the slaves would be free, but did not indicate when or in what manner they would get their freedom. He seemed to think that the time had not then arrived.
The United States has come a long way since Jefferson’s era. Americans elected a black man President. Twice. But now we’re backsliding toward brutal hypocrisy. “Forced closures of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs and threats to defund universities that embrace racial equity are a blatant attack on racial justice,” Amnesty Internation declares.
If Jefferson had set a better ethical example, perhaps this country wouldn’t fall so appallingly short of its professed ideals.
Further Reading: