EXTERMINATING THUNDER

Thomas Jefferson, 200 Years Later

“Happiness is not being pained in body or troubled in mind.” — Thomas Jefferson, 1786

“If Jefferson was wrong, America is wrong.” — James Parton, 1874

On a sunny Monday morning in May 2013, a young woman began screaming for help from inside a locked screen door in West Cleveland, OH. Neighbors quickly ripped the mesh to let her and a child crawl through, then heard a harrowing tale: she had been held captive for a decade inside the house; two other women were still inside; they had each been beaten and raped for years; the beatings had caused forced miscarriages and facial disfigurement; the six-year-old daughter she clutched in her arms was the product of this captivity. The police caught the home’s owner, Ariel Castro, several hours later. Castro was eventually convicted on 977 charges, including 512 counts of kidnapping and 446 counts of rape.

Thomas Jefferson—who died two centuries ago on this day—did something far worse, on an industrial scale. Over the course of his adult life, he owned more than 600 people, roughly averaging 200 at any one time. Jefferson valued every child born into slavery, having calculated the increase of his human properties as a higher value than the output of their labors. Unlike Ariel Castro’s prisoners, there was no chance of friendly neighbors aiding an escape. Canada was 500 miles away by foot. Where Castro knew his days as an enslaver were numbered (he’d prepped a suicide note long before capture), Jefferson knew precisely the opposite, that the institution of legal slavery would almost certainly never end in his lifetime. And while Jefferson never personally beat his captives, he robbed them of something far more valuable than even bodily autonomy or personal safety: he took the entirety of their lives.

Throughout adulthood, Thomas Jefferson posed as an enemy of slavery with such ferocity that he altered history’s judgment of his actual conduct. Sometimes this pose had tangible results. As a Virginia legislator, he enacted a statewide ban on importation of human beings. Twenty years later, as president, he outlawed international slave trading in the United States. This posing often took such violently fanciful flights of rhetoric that it would be easy to mistake which side of the issue he truly fell on. In 1786, as minister to France, he predicted that a benevolent God would eventually take note of the groans and tears of the enslaved and unleash his “exterminating thunder” upon the oppressors of human liberty.

What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment, & death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment be deaf to all those motives whose power supported him through his trial, and inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose.

Conveniently enough for him, Jefferson was never quite able to secure abolition. In a lifetime of hard-fought political battles, this was the one issue he punted on, mouthing platitudes all the while. Up to a year before his death, he still wrote favorably of abolition. But he was also certain that emancipation would require mass deportation. As president, Jefferson ordered so-called uncooperative Native American tribes removed across the Mississippi river; Black people would need to be removed by an ocean. “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free,” he wrote five years before his death. “Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government.”

This was odd, as he lived a fully integrated life at Monticello, his 5,000-acre plantation. Under his meticulous guidance, the estate grew into a functional micro-society, one in which the master provided the basics and tempered harsh punishment, even as he chided his captives for wanting any more than allotted (after begrudgingly purchasing the wife of his blacksmith Joe Fossett in 1807, the president chided them for getting “imprudently married out of their respective families.”). Post-retirement from public service, he hosted some of the most famous visitors in the world at Monticello, charming dignitaries with his immaculate dinner table, complete with world-class French cuisine and exceptional wine. Jefferson took great pride in Monticello’s self-sufficiency.

This self-sufficiency only functioned with massive infusions of forced labor. Jefferson’s human possessions felled the trees, hauled the logs, planed the planks, and built the meager cabins they called home. They milked the cows, churned the butter, tended and butchered the animals, cut, salted, cured, and flavored the meat. They grew and harvested and milled the wheat. They built the barrels in which they shipped surplus wheat to market. They sheared and spun the wool to make the coarse clothing they wore for life. They fed and groomed the horses, cleaned the stalls, polished the saddles, and cleaned the equipage. They soaked, soaped, boiled, starched, wringed, and ironed the linens. They manufactured the parts for Jefferson’s carts, wagons, and carriages. They forged the chains, cookware, hoes, horseshoes, locks, plows, and pots needed to keep the plantation running. They cooked the food over charcoal they made in kilns. Inside Jefferson’s manor, they made and installed the doors, windows, bookshelves, chairs, tables, and desks. They finished the decorative cornices, mantels, balustrades, trellises, and railings. From remote fields plowed year-round, to the parquet parlor floor that greeted foreign dignitaries, all of Monticello was one vast landscape of stolen sweat equity.

And in their aggregate human mass, the enslaved fueled his political ascendance. In the close election of 1800, Jefferson had the advantage; The Constitutional Convention’s ‘three-fifths compromise’—counting enslaved people as 3/5ths of a human being—gave slave states extra representation, and extra weight in the Electoral College. Federalists mocked Jefferson as “the negro president” because of his dependence on this clause. ‘Slave power’ would dominate American politics for another half-century.

Thomas Jefferson raped his ‘servant’ Sally Hemings when she was 15. By 26, she was the most famous enslaved person in the world; Black Sal, the president’s ‘concubine.’ She bore six children total, four surviving to adulthood. Jefferson dispassionately recorded each birth in a ledger, alongside the births of farm animals. Fifty years after his death, Hemings’ third son Madison publicly confirmed his paternity (DNA bolstered his claim in 1998). The only times anyone in Jefferson’s family addressed Sally Hemings was to call any mention of her in the press ‘reprehensible.’ Jefferson never addressed her at all.

In an impressive commitment to a bit, this code of denial lasted his entire life. After retirement, he tested it every night. Visitors to post-presidency Monticello expressed shock at finding a doppelganger of Thomas Jefferson waiting the dinner table. This would have been either Madison or Eston Hemings, sons of Sally Hemings and the father no one could openly address. Most guests knew enough of the protocols of the ‘peculiar institution’ to hide their surprise at the open displays of miscegenation, but the moment stayed with them, the soft gothic horror of American democracy’s father refusing to acknowledge the children forced into servitude. “Mr. Jefferson is a man of great sensibility and parental affection,” wrote the daughter of President John Adams, Jefferson’s friend and rival. But this affection only extended to his white children. “He was not in the habit of showing partiality or fatherly affection to us children,” said Madison.

The master of Monticello always referred to his captives as ‘servants,’ and often used the word ‘family’ to describe everyone living under his jurisdiction. Sometimes the people he enslaved were his ‘outdoor family.’ Over the course of his life, he disposed of 185 human beings—almost 1/3 of this family—as direct sales, or wedding gifts, or debt repayment, or as collateral for loans. ‘Worthless’ slaves were tax write-offs. Jefferson exerted full control over the sprawling estate. While his outdoor family labored—nine hours a day in winter, 14 in the summer—he watched by telescope. From the vantage point of the main house, the slope of the mountain made the entire estate one vast panopticon (his views on managing human property had been influenced by penal reform in Philadelphia in the 1790s). Workers never knew when they were being observed. In ledgers, he kept data on his laborers and their output, using detailed statistical analysis to track productivity, just as Amazon does now with its workforce.

Unlike Amazon, Jefferson failed to make the system profitable. “Never spend your money before you have earned it,” he mused in his “Ten Rules for Life.” But the master died owing more than a million dollars in today’s money. His lifestyle, the dinners and wines and furniture and carriages; all of it was directly subsidized through the equity of his human possessions. Generous gifts to the University of Charlottesville & UVA deepened a lifelong debt, a dark cloud fully visible to Monticello’s underclass. In the blacksmith’s shop, Joe Fossett would sometimes gather others of the outdoor family to quietly gauge the state of Jefferson’s finances, upon which all of their fates rested.

After his death, the creditors descended. Jefferson kept his promise to Sally Hemings and freed ‘her’ four surviving children (although not Sally herself). He freed three others, including his butler Burwell Colbert —who’d saved his life a year earlier in a bizarre plaster-casting accident—and Joe Fossett. The rest of the estate was liquidated to pay the bills. Colonial lieutenant governor Francis Fauquier had once famously given his twelve adults the allowance that they could choose their own next master after his death. Even this morsel of grace was more than Jefferson could muster at the end. Fossett’s 11-year-old son Peter later remembered, “I knew nothing of the horrors of slavery till our good master died, on July 4, 1826.” Jefferson’s white grandson, Thomas Randolph, later recounted the gloomy day of the auction, comparing it to “a captured village in ancient times when all were sold as slaves.” The 130 unloaded people fetched 70% above their appraisal value. Joe Fossett spent a decade buying back his wife and kids.

Five words in Jefferson’s preamble to the Declaration of Independence—all men are created equal—still reverberate throughout the world. In the 18^th century, they inspired the French and Haitian Revolutions. The words inspired revolutions in India, Pakistan, Tunisia, and Vietnam. They inspired the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Martin Luther King, and Harvey Milk. Confederates and suffragettes mocked the five words. One hundred years ago, 25,000 people invoked the five words in a petition to President Calvin Coolidge to end segregation on the sesquicentennial.

There is another phrase for these five words: trolling. Two centuries before Donald Trump rode trolling to ultimate power, Thomas Jefferson embedded trolling in the nation’s source code. He perfected the art. He once sent an enslaved man to deliver his anti-slavery message to the 1774 Virginia convention. After his writing contributed to the Haitian War of Independence—the only successful slave rebellion in human history—he used the revolution as ‘proof’ that blacks and whites would never be able to coexist. Jefferson’s invisible asterisk was never meant to be ignored. His words were engineered to hide deeds.

The schizophrenia of those five worlds shapes our world today. Six weeks ago, the Democratic National Committee released a 192-page autopsy on the 2024 US presidential election. The phrase ‘white supremacy’ appeared nowhere in the report. There is no way white supremacy could be acknowledged as a factor in a presidential election, no way to acknowledge that the worst, most unfit man was chosen by voters not as repudiation of his opponents, but explicitly because he was the ultimate caricature of a white man, the ultimate expression of the same white supremacy praised and practiced by America’s Founding Fathers. Two years ago, the film Civil War presented an American collapse that never once mentioned white supremacy.

Thomas Jefferson loved harmony, hated conflict and rudeness. He was adept at maintaining a placid exterior, able to glide over ‘the disagreeables’ of life. “I find the pain of a little censure,” he once wrote, “even when it is unfounded, is more acute than the pleasure of much praise.” And yet everything unique about him—his brilliance as an architect, historian, politician, philosopher, and scientist—all of it was possible only through the suffering of “those who labor for my happiness.” He would have been nothing without a 24/7 support staff of captive humans with thoughts and emotions and equally vast interiors. This support was, quite literally, cradle to grave. His first memory was of being lifted up, at age two, to be received by black hands and placed on a pillow atop a horse. His last words, whispered eight decades later, were directions for black hands to adjust the pillow under his head.