Slavery FAQs

We do not know. The names of men like Sanco, Mingo, and Quash in Jefferson's 1774 Farm Book lists are suggestive of an African origin. It is probable, however, that most, if not all, of the enslaved persons at Monticello were a number of generations removed from Africa. Jefferson's father, Peter Jefferson, had acquired his enslaved laborers in the mid-eighteenth century from other Virginia planters in small lots of one or several. His father-in-law, John Wayles, while not directly engaged in the transatlantic slave trade, was commercially connected to it. It is possible that, among the 135 enslaved individuals Jefferson inherited from Wayles in 1774, there may have been native-born Africans.

Based on what is known of the eighteenth-century slave trade to Virginia ports, the forebears of those enslaved at Monticello were most likely brought from western Africa, especially the land of the Igbo in present Nigeria. Signs of African spiritual and cultural traditions persisted at Monticello into the nineteenth century. Archaeological excavations have unearthed artifacts like a cowrie shell, jewelry items, and a possible playing piece from a West African game, mankala.

Several Monticello slaves could definitely read and write. Although there is no record that Jefferson provided instruction for his slaves or encouraged them to learn their letters, several enslaved men at Monticello could read and write. There are surviving letters and documents in the hands of woodworker John Hemmings, blacksmith Joseph Fossett, and James Hemings the cook. Although severe legal restrictions on slave education were not enacted in Virginia in Jefferson's lifetime, many plantation owners tried to prevent their slaves from learning their letters. Educated slaves were considered potentially rebellious and those who could write could also forge passes. Nevertheless, some members of Jefferson's family took an interest in the education of enslaved children, and Joseph Fossett's son Peter remembered that Jefferson "allowed" those eager for learning to study with his grandchildren. Enslaved children also undoubtedly learned from literate members of their own community, as work schedules permitted. Peter Fossett, sold to another man after Jefferson's death, passed his reading and writing skills on to fellow slaves in secret after dark, by the light of pine knots.

Many members of the enslaved community at Monticello attended worship services. Fragmentary records indicate a rich spiritual life—incorporating both European and African traditions, including Christianity—in the Monticello slave quarters. We know that enslaved woodworker John Hemmings and his wife Priscilla held prayer meetings in their cabin, and there is at least one reference to a baptism. It is assumed that Jefferson, a fervent believer in freedom of conscience, adopted a laissez-faire attitude toward religion in the slave quarters. Once they gained their freedom, a number of former Monticello slaves became ministers and founded churches.

Many enslaved people at Monticello embraced Christianity.  Others held onto a variety of traditional beliefs from their homelands.  Most African Americans combined cultural elements of various origins in their spiritual beliefs. They turned to traditional healers and spiritual leaders to resolve problems and heal ailments, and to ward off evil forces or to cast spells. The reputation of one such practitioner of magic and herbal medicine was strong enough to draw at least four African Americans from Monticello twenty miles to the south. People knowing of this traditional healer from so far away demonstrates a thriving traditional culture among enslaved people in Virginia, and a persistence of tradition and culture that defied the dictates of chattel slavery.

Thomas Jefferson enslaved more than 610 human beings throughout the course of his life. 400 people were enslaved at Monticello; the other 200 people were held in bondage on Jefferson’s other properties. At any given time, around 130 people were enslaved at Monticello.

Though it surprises many, one of the most common questions guides are asked at Monticello is some form of: “was Jefferson a good slave owner?”  It seems many people asking this question are struggling to understand how Jefferson treated the people he held in bondage. Some are trying to understand how he could profess to love liberty and yet own human beings. The reality at Monticello is that treatment of the people Jefferson enslaved was typical for the time and region. Jefferson wrote that he wished to ameliorate the conditions of slavery and treat people less harshly than other violent slaveholders, but he still forced people to labor for the wealth and luxury of his white family. This force was upheld through violence, the threat of violence, family separation, and emotional, psychological, and sexual abuse. Even at the home of Thomas Jefferson, a man who professed to abhor slavery and love liberty, there is no such thing as a “good” slaveholder.

Yes. People at Monticello were physically beaten. Several overseers had a reputation for cruelty and violence: Gabriel Lilly, William Page, and William McGehee. 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.

Thomas Jefferson wrote that slavery was evil, yet never freed the vast majority of people he held in bondage. Jefferson wrote about the differences between groups of people based on emerging ideas about race in his Notes of the State of Virginia and in many personal letters. The racist ideas promoted by European Enlightenment philosophers strongly influenced Jefferson’s worldview, and his writings confirm he harbored the same racist beliefs as many of his peers. He knew slavery was wrong, yet rationalized his ownership of others through a sense of paternalistic racism, writing that freeing them was like “abandoning children.” It is impossible to understand the Trans-Atlantic slave trade or American chattel slavery without understanding the context of Enlightenment racism. Whereas slavery has been officially illegal in the United States for over 150 years, the racist ideas that undergirded the system remain.

Jefferson acquired most of the over six hundred  people he owned during his life through the natural increase of enslaved families. He acquired approximately 175 enslaved people through inheritance: about 40 from the estate of his father, Peter Jefferson, in 1764, and 135 from his father-in-law, John Wayles, in 1774. Jefferson purchased fewer than twenty slaves in his lifetime.

Jefferson knew slavery was the primary economic engine for the South. Jefferson directly profited from the labor of enslaved people on his four quarter farms and at his retreat home, Poplar Forest. Tobacco was a labor-intensive crop that required a considerable enslaved labor force, and Jefferson was generally concerned about his profit. Additionally, the people themselves were profitable. In Virginia, unlike the Caribbean, enslaved women achieved fertility rates that allowed for a self-reproducing enslaved population. Planters could satisfy the demand for slave labor without having to import slaves from Africa. Many slaveowners, including Jefferson, understood that female slaves—and their future children—represented the best means to increase the value of his holdings, what he called “capital.” This would have been especially true after the abolishment of the slave trade in 1807 in America, which prohibited the importation of new enslaved people and thus increased the value of the people already living in bondage. "I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man of the farm," Jefferson remarked in 1820.  "What she produces is an addition to the capital, while his labors disappear in mere consumption." An enslaved couple, Minerva and Bagwell Granger, came close to fulfilling Jefferson's disturbing calculation; they had nine children between 1787 and 1810.

Jefferson did buy and sell human beings. He purchased slaves occasionally, because of labor needs or to unite spouses. Despite his expressed "scruples" against selling slaves except "for delinquency, or on their own request," he sold more than 110 in his lifetime, mainly for financial reasons. Seventy-one people were sold from his Goochland and Bedford county plantations in three sales in the 1780s and 1790s. Chronic runaways and resisters like Sandy, James Hubbard, and Billy were almost invariably sold. At least three individuals (Mary Hemings Bell, Robert Hemmings, and Brown Colbert) were sold at their own request.  Jefferson also “gifted” eighty-five people to family members and to provide dowries for his sister and daughters. His record of slaves "alienated" from his ownership—whether by sale or gift—in the ten-year period from 1784 to 1794 listed 160 men, women, and children.

Yes. There were over twenty known escapees from Monticello from 1769 to 1819.

Yes. Thomas Jefferson freed two people during his life. He freed five people in his will. He allowed two or three people to escape without pursuit, and recommended informal freedom for two others. In total, of the more than six hundred people Jefferson enslaved, he freed only ten people – all members of the same family.

• For more information about the people Jefferson freed, see People Enslaved at Monticello Who Gained Freedom.

Many enslaved people at Monticello married. Although slaves in Virginia could not marry legally, the institution of marriage was taken very seriously by enslaved men and women at Monticello and elsewhere across the state. Enduring unions seem to have been the rule at Monticello. Records reveal only one marriage that involved separation and taking of new partners. Jefferson recognized the marriages of his slaves, regularly referring to an individual's "husband" or "wife," and he wrote that he preferred to  not separate spouses through sale or gift (although couples were sometimes temporarily separated because of their occupations and children were sometimes sold or gifted away from their families).

Over the sixty years of Jefferson's residence at Monticello, what was called "abroad" marriage (marrying outside the boundaries of the plantation) became more and more common. The expanding web of kinship made it increasingly difficult to find an unrelated spouse and young men often outnumbered young women. From the 1780s to the 1820s, adults under 45 who appear without spouses in Jefferson's slave rolls rose from one-third of the adult population to almost two-thirds. We assume that most of the women with children but without husbands and many of the apparently "single" men had "abroad" spouses.

Resistance appears in almost every single case of coerced labor, and resistance in many forms took place at Monticello. Resistance, to both abuses and the whole system of slavery, was often a cooperative activity. One of the most common types of resistance, and one which often involved networks of slaves and free blacks, was theft. This included one instance in which a man named York, broke into Jefferson’s private suite and stole some trinkets, clothing, a book and a gun. As Jefferson himself recognized, a slave "who is permitted by law to have no property of his own, can with difficulty conceive that property is founded in anything but force."

A number of references suggest that feigning illness was a fairly common practice among Jefferson's slaves. Other mild forms of day-to-day resistance—like losing tools, pretending ignorance, and working slowly—are less documented, but were also probably prevalent. There were reported attacks on overseers, at least at Poplar Forest, and one hired slave at Monticello in 1804 was said to be "encouraging the hands to rebellion and idleness" and tormenting the overseer by destroying his garden and possessions. None of the more violent acts of resistance, like arson, poisoning, or murder, are known to have occurred at Monticello. 

There were many other types of day to day behaviors that some historians categorize as resistance. The system of slavery sought to deny human beings their agency, but enslaved people negotiated this system in a variety of ways that demonstrated the reassertion of their humanity in spite of bondage. Illicit education, religious traditions, family connections, and traditions all can be seen as forms of resistance. Sally Hemings negotiated for the freedom of her children, becoming the only enslaved mother at Monticello to see all her children live in freedom. Jupiter Evans held onto traditional beliefs of healing from Africa, despite being born in Virginia. Peter Fossett taught others to read. William and Thruston Hern, James Hubbard, they physically escaped by running away.

• More on the topic of Resistance at Monticello »

There were over twenty known runaways from Monticello, from 1769 to 1819. Almost half of them were enslaved men hired from other owners who probably tried to get back to family members. Slaves often ran away for reasons other than a desire for permanent freedom. In 1806 blacksmith Joseph Fossett departed on foot for Washington, DC, from an urgent desire to see his wife, Edith, an apprentice cook at the President's House. Cases of truancy rather than determined running away were extremely common on Virginia plantations, and few of these cases were recorded.

But those who sought freedom were rarely successful. Four young men from Monticello ran to join the British army in 1781. One died of camp fever, two were brought back home after Yorktown and sold, and one was never heard of again (nineteen men, women, and children from Jefferson's Elk Hill and Willis Creek plantations met a similar fate). Beverly Hemings and his sister Harriet left Monticello with Jefferson's knowledge and were not pursued. At least four runaways (Sandy, Kit, James Hubbard, and William "Billy" Hern) seem to have dedicated themselves to lives of resistance. According to his usual policy, Jefferson had the runaways sold after they were recaptured. Hern, however, vanishes from the record while still at large.

See our article on Clothing for Monticello's Enslaved Community.

Length of work days and holidays varied for enslaved people at Monticello. There are no direct references to the work day for enslaved farm laborers at Monticello. As was true throughout the south, they probably worked from dawn to dusk, with shorter or longer days according to the season. The work day of enslaved house servants was unpredictable, as they were "on call." Certain tradesmen doing work that could be measured were "tasked." Each day a nailer might have to make ten pounds of tenpenny nails.  A cooper had to finish four flour barrels. Wagoners had to transport a certain number of logs. Weavers had to produce seven and a half yards of linen shirting in summer. There is evidence that Jefferson designed tasks to fill the daylight hours. In his chart of work for the spinners and weavers, their task grows with the light from January to June so that their winter work day was nine hours long, while in high summer it lasted fourteen hours.

Enslaved workers at Monticello could pursue their own activities in the evenings, on Sundays, and on some holidays. The usual holidays on slave plantations in Virginia were Christmas, Easter, and Whitsun. There are numerous references to the Christmas holiday (usually several days long) in Jefferson's records.

Yes, enslaved children were forced to labor on this plantation. Boys and girls under ten assisted in the care of the very young enslaved children or worked in and around the main house. From the age of ten, they were assigned to tasks—in the fields, in the Nailery and Textile Workshop, or in the house. In 1796, for instance, eight of the fourteen nailmakers were aged ten to twelve. At the age of sixteen, enslaved boys and girls were considered full-fledged workers, tasked as farm laborers or forced into trades.

Some enslaved people received small amounts of money, but that was the exception not the rule. The vast majority of labor was unpaid.

The only enslaved person at Monticello who received something approximating a wage was George Granger, Sr., who was paid $65 a year (about half the wage of a white overseer) when he served as Monticello overseer. Jefferson paid enslaved persons for work outside their normal work day ("in their own time") and for performing unusually difficult or unpleasant tasks like cleaning the chimneys or the privies. Enslaved people working in important positions—such as butler Burwell Colbert and woodworker John Hemmings—received annual "gratuities" of $15 or $20. Jefferson gave men in management positions—George Granger, Jr., in the nailery and Joseph Fossett in the blacksmith shop—a percentage of the profits of their operations.

While in France, New York, and Philadelphia, Jefferson paid James Hemings a wage for being a chef ,valet, and butler for his household. Although Hemings was enslaved by Jefferson at the time, slavery was illegal in France and Jefferson was required to pay Hemings.    

The amount of money was drastically less than what a white worker would have received for the same labor, but Jefferson paid some skilled workmen (coopers and charcoalburners) special premiums for productivity and efficiency. Young workers, like the boys in the Nailery, were encouraged to be more industrious by non-financial incentives, such as special clothing and meat rations.

Some enslaved people at Monticello, primarily members of the Hemings family, were given permission to hire themselves out and keep their wages.

See our article on Jefferson's Attitudes Toward Slavery.