The collection at the Newberry includes a bound copy of “The Federalist” once owned by Thomas Jefferson. Besides penciling his initials in the book, Jefferson wrote those of the founding fathers alongside their essays, which had originally been published anonymously.

hosting Jeffersonian dinners

Knowledge is the only resource that getsbetter and more valuable the more it multiplies.

At the University of Virginia — founded and designed by Thomas Jefferson — slaves cooked and cleaned for the sons of the Southern gentry.

Slave labour cannot be obtained without somebody being enslaved. At his estate at Monticello, Jefferson invented many ingenious gadgets - including a 'dumb waiter' to mediate contact with his slaves. In the late twentieth century, it is not surprising that this liberal slave-owner is the hero of those who proclaim freedom while denying their brown-skinned fellow citizens those democratic rights said to be inalienable.

In American folklore, the nation was built out of a wilderness by free-booting individuals - the trappers, cowboys, preachers, and settlers of the frontier. Yet this primary myth of the American republic ignores the contradiction at the heart of the American dream: that some individuals can prosper only through the suffering of others. The life of Thomas Jefferson - the man behind the ideal of `Jeffersonian democracy' - clearly demonstrates the double nature of liberal individualism. The man who wrote the inspiring call for democracy and liberty in the American declaration of independence was at the same time one of the largest slave-owners in the country.

people as property and he was about $100,000 in debt ( about $2 mil-lion in 2014), an amount s o staggering that he knew that once he died, everything—and everyone—would be sold.

One histo-rian estimated that J efferson had owned more than six hundred slaves over t he course of his l ifetime. I n 1826, he held around two hundred

“ I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable t han the best man on the f arm,” J efferson once explained to a friend.

eer. Some of Jefferson’s defend-ers during the campaign were jailed by the Adams administration under t he 1798 Sedition Act—namely, J ames Callender. Pardoned by Jefferson when he won the presidency in 1800, Callender apparently requested patronage as r etribution for his s ervices. President J efferson refused. I ncensed, Callender exposed Jefferson’s s ecret.18On September 1, 1 802, Richmond’s Recorder r eaders l earned about the relationship between President Thomas J efferson and Sally Hem-ings. “By this wench Sally, our president h as had s everal children,” Callender wrote.

J efferson agreed, after some waver-ing, t o become the first US secretary of s tate i n George Washington’s inaugural a dministration. Beginning his t enure on March 22, 1 79

Notes on the State o f Virginia would become t he most c onsumed American nonfiction book u ntil well i nto t he mid-nineteenth c entury

On August 6, 1 784, J efferson arrived in Paris

The ambitious politician, maybe fearful of a lienat-ing potential f riends, maybe torn between Enlightenment antislavery and American proslavery, maybe honestly unsure, did not pick sides between polygenesists and monogenesists, between segregationists and assimilationists, between slavery and freedom. But he did pick the side of r acism

Notes on the State of Virginia was replete with other contradictory ideas about Black people. “ They are at l east as brave, and more adven-turesome” than Whites, b ecause they lacked the forethought to s ee “danger t ill i t be present,” J efferson wrote. Africans f elt l ove more, but they felt pain less, he said, and “their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection.” That i s why they were disposed “to sleep when abstracted from their diversions, and unemployed in labour. An animal whose body is at rest, and who does not reflect, must be disposed to sleep of course.” But on the previous page, J ef-ferson cast Blacks as requiring “less sleep. A black, after hard labour through the day, will be induced by the slightest amusements to sit up till midnight.” I n Jefferson’s vivid imagination, l azy Blacks desiredto sleep more than Whites, but, as physical s avants, t hey required l ess sleep.

With no intention to publish, J efferson unabashedly expressed his views on Black people, and in particular on potentially freed Black people. “ Incorporating the [freed] blacks i nto the state” was out of the question, he declared. “ Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; t en thousand recollections, by the blacks, of t he injuries they have sustained; new provocations; t he real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us i nto parties, and produce convulsions, which will probably never end but in the extermination of t he one or t he other r ace

What did it mean for J efferson to call “ liberty” an “inalienable right” when he enslaved people?

Thomas Jefferson disagreed. At t he beginning of t he Declaration of Independence, he paraphrased the Virginia constitution, i ndelibly penning: “ all Men are created equal.”It is impossible to know for s ure whether J efferson meant t o include his enslaved laborers ( or women) in his “all Men.” Was he merely emphasizing the equality of White Americans and the English? Later i n the document, he did scold the British for “ exciting those very people to rise in arms among us”—those “people” being resisting Afri-cans. Did Jefferson insert “created equal” a s a nod to the swirling debate between monogenesis and polygenesis? Even if J efferson believed all groups to be “created equal,” he never believed the antiracist creed that all human groups are e qual. But his “ all Men are created equal” was revolutionary n onetheless; i t even propelled Vermont and Mas-sachusetts to abolish slavery.

What, but education, has advanced us beyond the condition of our indigenous neighbours? and what chains them to their present state of barbarism & wretchedness, but a besotted veneration for the supposed supe[r]lative wisdom of their fathers and the preposterous idea that they are to look backward for better things and not forward, longing, as it should seem, to return to the days of eating acorns and roots rather than indulge in the degeneracies of civilization.

Botany

governments are instituted among men

that all Men are created equal;