Slavery at Monticello

We took another tour, Slavery at Monticello. Many people have pointed out the contradictory ideas that Thomas Jefferson wrote about freedom in his documents like the Declaration of Independence, yet he was the owner of many enslaved people. In the South, people relied on slave labor, yet many of the slave traders were wealthy northerners. 

There were many slave families here on Monticello, but most of the people Jefferson inherited from his father or from his father-in-law. Over the course of his life, Jefferson owned about 600 enslaved people. At any one time, there were between 100-200 people working on his estate.

Slavery was different in the 1600s and 1700s than it was in the 1800s. Many white people and some black people were indentured servants in the early part of Colonial America. An indentured servant is a person who agrees to work for someone for free if that person pays their passage on a ship to come to the Americas. Usually a person would work for someone for about 7 years as part of this agreement, and then that person could go on their way to gain employment elsewhere or transition to being a paid worker. Who might want to sign up for this and why? 

For more information about early slave laws in the colonies check out this site: 

http://www.history.org/history/teaching/slavelaw.cfm

Another Tid Bit from our tour guide: The Industrial Revolution in the north could not have happened without the products from these plantations in the South. 

We sat on benches on Mulberry Row, the street where the enslaved people lived, which was overlooking Thomas Jefferson's large terranced vegetable garden.