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The Problematic Mr Jefferson

4 July 1826 was the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and it was also the day Thomas Jefferson breathed his last. To the besotted nation, he bequeathed soaring rhetoric on libertarian rights that would be treasured above all other words, while to his family he bequeathed an immense mountain of debt and heart-wrenching tragedy. Six months later, nearly all of Jefferson’s enslaved ‘family’ were individually sold off at auction, a scene of anguish that forever tainted the memory of his executor and grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph. On that day, Peter Fossett was an 11-yearold child who had never understood he was a slave, and for him the trauma of being suddenly hoist upon the auction block and sold away to strangers remained a vividly painful memory many years later. That doleful event was just as traumatising for his father, the Monticello blacksmith Joseph Fossett. He was one of the three people made free by Jefferson’s will, yet he had to endure the sight his wife and children mount the auction block one after the other on that bitter winter day. The contrast between the superb symbolic timing of Jefferson’s death and the unspeakably cruel consequence goes to the heart of the puzzle America’s third president poses for historians. Thomas Jefferson was a major slaveholder. Over the course of his adult life, the number of people he held in enforced bondage, and denied the most basic of their human rights, fluctuated just above or just below 200. He spoke of these people as his black family and himself as the benevolent patriarch who understood his moral obligations to ‘watch for the happiness of those who labour for mine’ as he told Amelia Church on 27 November 1793. Slavery & Abolition, 2014 Vol. 35, No. 2, 366–371, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2014.908568