Nice Catch

Lindsay Beyerstein has a very interesting analysis of Henry Wiencek's essay The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson in Smithsonian magazine.

Some of the facts I knew, like the fact that George Washington made far more diligent efforts to free his slaves after his death than Thomas Jefferson ever did.

What I didn't know, and now do know, is that he kept detailed records of slave beatings, and that Monticello's primary cash crop was slaves:

The most disturbing revelation in this story is that Jefferson didn't just keep slaves to work on his farm. He wrote that his real business model was "the increase" of his female slaves. He was raising human beings to be auctioned off like livestock. Jefferson calculated that the children of his slaves brought in a reliable 4% return per annum. It was a great business, he recommended it to everyone.

In the movies, we know someone's a benevolent slave-holder if they "don't break up families." Well, those are the movies.

The revisionist fiction is that slavery was an unprofitable institution by Jefferson's time. Wiencek explains how Jefferson breathed new economic life into bonded servitude by devising profitable models for slave labor in factories and wheat fields as tobacco farming was being phased out.

Jefferson spurned a golden opportunity to walk away from the slave trade. An old revolutionary comrade willed Jefferson a small fortune to pay for his slaves' release and education, but Jefferson refused, even though he was the executor of the will.

George Washington freed his slaves upon his death, but Jefferson didn't even go that far.

Some defenders will say that it's unfair to judge Jefferson by the standards of our day, but the fact is, Jefferson fell short of the standards of his own time. He knew it was wrong to own slaves. In fact, his writings helped to set the standards of his day.

This explains much about the political culture of Virginia.

I had always wondered how the progressive (for his day) politics of Thomas Jefferson's Virginia became the reactionary bigotry one sees leading up to (and during, and a long time after) the Civil War.

It now appears that the Jefferson's progressive positions, at least insofar as slavery was concerned, was nothing more than a mirage, which means that the change in Virginia's political culture was far less extreme than one is commonly led to believe.