New Light on Childhood at Monticello

The latest issue of Smithsonian magazine features Henry Wiencek’s article “The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson,” which can be read online here.

The article focuses on the management of the nail-making forge at Monticello, one of the new ways Jefferson sought to build his wealth through enslaved labor in the 1790s and afterward. Wiencek writes:

A letter has recently come to light describing how Monticello’s young black boys, “the small ones,” age 10, 11 or 12, were whipped to get them to work in Jefferson’s nail factory, whose profits paid the mansion’s grocery bills. This passage about children being lashed had been suppressed—deliberately deleted from the published record in the 1953 edition of Jefferson’s Farm Book, containing 500 pages of plantation papers. That edition of the Farm Book still serves as a standard reference for research into the way Monticello worked. . . .

It was during the 1950s, when historian Edwin Betts was editing one of Colonel [Thomas Mann] Randolph’s plantation reports for Jefferson’s Farm Book, that he confronted a taboo subject and made his fateful deletion. Randolph reported to Jefferson that the nailery was functioning very well because “the small ones” were being whipped. The youngsters did not take willingly to being forced to show up in the icy midwinter hour before dawn at the master’s nail forge. And so the overseer, Gabriel Lilly, was whipping them “for truancy.”

Betts decided that the image of children being beaten at Monticello had to be suppressed, omitting this document from his edition. He had an entirely different image in his head; the introduction to the book declared, “Jefferson came close to creating on his own plantations the ideal rural community.” Betts couldn’t do anything about the original letter, but no one would see it, tucked away in the archives of the Massachusetts Historical Society. The full text did not emerge in print until 2005.

This article is no doubt adapted from Wiencek’s new book, Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves. Wiencek is so far best known for An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America, which I’ve found useful.