Exhibition explores paradox of slavery at Monticello

In 1796 Thomas Jefferson made George Granger Sr., Monticello's overseer. He was the only enslaved man to rise to that position and to receive an annual wage.

Monticello Foundation shows the home of Thomas Jefferson in Charlottesville, Va. Several new projects launching this winter will shed light on the slaves who lived and worked at Monticello.

WASHINGTON -- America's founders sought the sweetness of freedom, but among the nation's first 18 presidents, a dozen of them held human beings in the bitter bonds of slavery.

Among them was Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence. While drafting the phrase "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" he kept 130 slaves at his Virginia plantation. In his will, he ordered that "130 valuable Negroes" be sold to pay his debts of $107,000, which, in today's dollars, would be more than $1 million.

An exhibition at the National Museum of American History examines daily life for slaves at Monticello, Jefferson's 5,000-acre Virginia plantation. Decades of research reveal the third president's complicated, patriarchal relationship with his slaves plus inspiring accounts of how African-Americans survived, prospered, and assumed positions of leadership after gaining their freedom.

"Slavery at Jefferson's Monticello: Paradox of Liberty" runs through Oct. 14. This show represents a collaboration between the National Museum of African American History and Culture, slated to open here in 2015, and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which operates Monticello in Charlottesville, Va.

"We wanted to use the 50 years of research done on slavery at Monticello to enable people to see this system that denied people their basic humanity so that slavery would become less of an abstraction and more about real people who lived real lives," said Elizabeth Chew, curator at Monticello.

A life-size statue of Jefferson greets visitors at the museum; behind him, on a large red panel, are the names of slaves who worked from dawn to dusk six days a week. This strong visual presentation underscores a contradiction in Jefferson's character. A man of the Enlightenment who valued books, reason, and scientific research, he called slavery an "abominable crime." But he also controlled the fate of an entire village of people, including what they ate, whether they got cloth for new clothes, and how many blankets they had to keep warm.

In 1796 Thomas Jefferson made George Granger Sr., Monticello's overseer. He was the only enslaved man to rise to that position and to receive an annual wage.

Clearly, Jefferson stood on the sturdy shoulders of slaves who cooked meals, built his stunning mansion, tilled the soil, tended his crops, manufactured nails, and made furniture that remains in place today. Fragments of household goods unearthed at Monticello show the contrast between stylish living for the master versus simplicity for the slave. Jefferson's table included salt-glazed stoneware and Chinese export porcelain; his slaves ate from primitive bowls they fashioned out of clay.

Jefferson encouraged familial bonds among slaves and many African-American families at Monticello remained intact. Although marriage between slaves was illegal in Virginia, lasting unions between husband and wife were the norm on the plantation. But freedom was a long time coming for the blacksmiths, spinners, weavers, tinsmiths, sawyers, carpenters, charcoal burners, and stablemen.

The exhibition briefly addresses Sally Hemings, who was 14 when she traveled to Paris as a lady's maid in 1787. Word of Jefferson's longstanding relationship with Hemings was first published in a newspaper in 1802. After reviewing historical records, oral histories, and DNA tests, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation issued a report in 2000 saying that Jefferson was the likely father of six of Hemings' children, two of whom did not live to adulthood.

The Hemings family played a major role at Monticello, but of equal interest is a project called "Getting Word," an initiative begun in 1993 by Lucia "Cinder" Stanton to find and interview 200 descendants of the plantation's slaves.

Among the descendants was the Rev. Peter Fossett, whose father, Joseph, was a Monticello blacksmith and father of 10 children. Peter Fossett became a caterer, founded the First Baptist Church in Cumminsville, Ohio, in 1870, and led many slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad.

In 1898, while Fossett recalled his life at Monticello, he said, "I resolved to get free or die in the attempt." It took 20 years but ultimately, free members of the Fossett family bought Peter's freedom.

Another Fossett family descendant was the Boston newspaper editor and civil rights activist William Monroe Trotter, who, with W.E.B. DuBois, founded the Niagara Movement, which became the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909.

If you go

Slavery at Jefferson's Monticello

Where: Smithsonian National Museum of American History, 1400 Constitution Ave., NW, Washington, 20560 (on the National Mall).

When: Through Oct. 14. Extended summer hours are 10 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. daily.

Admission: Free.

Information: 1-202-633-1000 or www.americanhistory.si.edu.

The Block News Alliance consists of The Blade and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Marylynne Pitz is a staff writer for the Post-Gazette.

Contact her at mpitz@post-gazette.com.